I feel like a similar thing happens in "real life" sometimes, not just on websites. Back in high school, I used to volunteer at an animal shelter, and we had an area out back where we'd walk the dogs or let them run around in one of a few fenced in areas throughout the day so they could go to the bathroom and get some exercise. The door leading out here was located in one of the rooms with dog kennels, so people coming to potentially adopt a dog would walk through this room a lot, and often they'd try to walk out back and watch or participate with the volunteers and staff taking some of the dogs out. We'd ask them politely to go back inside because they aren't allowed out there and point out the very large sign in large font on the door saying this, and every time they'd always act very surprised because they claimed not to have seen it. I'm sure some people were just feigning ignorance because it seemed easier, but the sheer number of people claiming it makes it believable that at least _some_ of them genuinely didn't notice; they saw a door, they wanted to go through, and they opened it without processing the words right in front of their face.
There are situations where its hard to understand how even the non-verbal warnings didn't latch though.
There's "no unauthorized personnel", and then there's "Fire door, alarm will sound".
In college, i worked at a university recreation center, and the desk I worked at was about 15 feet from a fire door. It sat somewhat between the weight room and the men's locker room, so virtually all male customers walked past this specific, well marked, fire door during their visit. And about 2-3 times a week, while I was working, somebody would finish up their workout and just push that door open and walk out. And every time, they'd look thunderstruck that the alarm did in fact sound.
I eventually dropped all pretense of understanding that they were on autopilot, and began commenting as I deactivated and reactivated the alarm AGAIN "I thought universities required students be able to read". Only one person ever got short with me over that, and all I had to do was point at the letters that were bigger than their head, directly at eye level, 18 inches from their face, while they pushed the door open.
IMO those doors shouldn't just have a sign-sticker slapped on them, there ought to be something visually (and tactilely) different about the push-bar itself.
P S.: For example, a wavy bar, or a bunch of distinctly raised bumps on the surface in strong contrasting color like high-vis yellow with reflectivity.
Since this is for an indoor surface nobody should be touching, that means durability isn't a big issue: Just stick some adhesive blister-chunks onto whichever push-bar happens to need the warning, and then scrape them off if the situation changes.
The whole reason that I had keys to enable/disable the alarm was specifically because the Outdoor Program that I worked at needed to load in/out large equipment (think canoes, bikes, sleds, etc) that was ungainly to move through the locker room. This was also the primary avenue for moving e.g. weight room equipment in and out of the facility. So while it didn't get used a lot for non-emergency use, it got used often enough that non-durable controls would degrade much too quickly.
Break glass works if sign discovery was the only issue.
Many times (especially students), they simply don’t care. Replace the glass and the next day it’s broken anyway. The only solution I’ve seen that works against that is covering the door handle in super sticky ball bearing grease.
Another option in use around here require the user to break glass before being able to use the door; as with fire alarms, having to break something has been proven extremely effective in deterring misuse, accidental or unintentional use of things like fire exits.
Often emergency doors need to open in situations like dim lighting and a crush/stampede of people behind you, which makes it hard to create a safe implementation for whoever happens to be at the front.
In the safest implementations, the person doesn't even need to know they are about to break something by pushing the bar... But puts us back at square one except with more maintenance headaches.
But what if an actual emergency occurs? People still need to be able to reliably grip and manipulate the door bar/plates/handles, you can't just make them super slippery all the time.
The ones in the US are simply a crash bar. I suppose you could argue that someone might choose to burn instead of getting grease on their hands, but that sounds unlikely.
> "I thought universities required students be able to read"
Clearly there was a UX/Design issue with the door. A person approaching a door is already thinking about what's on the other side. Maybe the warning needs to be before the door. Or maybe there needs to be a different design to the door. I'd guess that the door looks like every other door they encounter on campus.
>I eventually dropped all pretense of understanding that they were on autopilot, and began commenting as I deactivated and reactivated the alarm AGAIN "I thought universities required students be able to read".
this is an odd sentiment. so what, you were originally pretending to give them the benefit of the doubt, but then you just gave up? so your original thought was that they were doing it on purpose for some reason? why on earth would they do that?
I started out giving people (the perps were uniformly male) the benefit of the doubt, but my patience wore thin with how frequently it happened, and finally I started explicitly calling people out.
I suppose, I should've phrased it as
"I eventually dropped even the pretense of understanding..."
>why on earth would they do that?
Why on earth would a 19 year old male, who has never been away from home before, has likely never seen any real consequences for their behavior before, read a sign that warns them of said consequences, and still decide that those consequences are less bad than walking an extra 100 feet through a locker room?
I assume the same reason that similarly aged college males removed all of the fluorescent light tubes from the hallways of their own dorm. Or the same reason at least one of the shower drains in the dorm's men's communal bathroom was plugged with paper towels every month.
They were obviously on autopilot. People are sometimes tired, may be going through a lot, think about something else at the moment, and just don't read every sign on every doors they find. You sound a bit bitter here. I know I am friendly distracted and made many similar mistakes in my life - but never intentionally.
Autopilot makes sense when that door is usually open, usually available, but today for some reason its closed, and that's unusual. This door was closed and alarmed year-round, for decades, until the building was renovated and that particular exit was removed entirely.
If its a new student, I get it, and I was rarely salty about people making that mistake early in a semester (It happened so frequently in September that my boss would occasionally leave the alarm off until the end of his workday for the whole month). If this was still happening in April (and it did), when that student has realistically been going past that door and through the locker room since at least January, and more likely since August, its not "autopilot".
> Autopilot makes sense when that door is usually open, usually available, but today for some reason its closed, and that's unusual. This door was closed and alarmed year-round, for decades, until the building was renovated and that particular exit was removed entirely.
A door in a position that invites to be opened, that makes it convenient for egress, is a door that almost always can be used for that purpose. That it's closed is irrelevant - almost all doors are almost always closed all the time; it's very unusual these days to spot doors that are even ajar, much less fully opened.
This is the default mode; for doors that beg to be used for exit to be unusuable for it, armed with alarm and/or annoyed staff member, that is unusual.
It does look like that, and certainly, that may have been an additional factor, but the main issue is that this exit was the one closest to student housing (dorms and fraternity/sororities) and also to the men's locker room. It was very rare that folks would go out the fire door by the women's locker room, but it wasn't really adjacent to where the newest students would be.
To be clear, I identify as male, and have done so my whole life. So this wasn't like "young college male sees a woman to antagonize" or "college female sees sexism everywhere", so much as "young college male somehow believes that 'alarm will sound' is just a bluff".
Whether or not that's biological in nature, or just the way 19 year old men circa 2006 were socialized, I won't speculate. But I never saw a woman open that door.
there's a gulf between "there are no differences between genders" and mass generalisation based on emotional reaction, and for me this flies a lot closer to the second one
I'm not gonna speculate about whether its biological or something to do with how 19 year old men ca 2006 had been socialized up to that point. All I'm saying is that it happened dozens of times, and it was never a woman who pushed that door open.
You already gave an explanation before that had nothing to do with any difference in gendered behavior (it was next to the men's locker room), which makes it even more baffling that you're now suggesting that no, it really was because men were less capable of not opening the door.
Are you kidding me? 18 and 19 year old males are like the highest risk taking, complete fuckery, "hold my beer bro", push the limits demographic by a long shit.
Honestly it's a little ambiguous and confusing. When will the alarm sound? "When there's a fire" is the immediate answer that comes to my mind. Doors don't generally trip loud alarms when you open them. Not once in my life have I ever come across such a door. The idea is pretty foreign to me. Wouldn't be surprised if others were equally confused. You were familiar with that particular door and its alarm-tripping nature, others probably weren't.
"Alarm will sound if opened" might have reduced such incidents.
Is there even a reason for an emergency exit to not be treated as a regular, auxiliary exit? I.e. not labeled as regular, but also not an issue if people use it.
> Is there even a reason for an emergency exit to not be treated as a regular, auxiliary exit?
Absolutely, ex:
1. When that exit may be used as an entrance to a prohibited or fee-only area. Someone inside opens the latch for people waiting outside, either intentionally or accidentally, allowing them to enter without being noticed.
2. To supplement other things which may trigger an alarm, or for situations that can't be detected in a simple standard automated way. (E.g. violence, unusual chemical spill, wild animal.) It also means you don't need to plant as many alarm-panels around the place which panicked people are unlikely to use on their way out anyway.
The reason is often the opposite: you don't want people coming in that door (maybe it's a limited-access building and you don't want to staff security/ID checker at more locations). Sure, you can lock it from the outside, but if people are regularly leaving from that door, randos outside are going to sneak in before the door shuts.
If the facility has any need to control access, they need to be more aggressive than just one way doors, since fire-code compliant one-way doors are trivially defeated with a doorstop.
If you're an employee, and a member of the public is in your workplace, then you have a reasonable expectation that they will behave according to the rules of that workplace. Often these rules are for safety, and for sure it is absolutely reasonable to scold strangers if they have zero situational awareness.
I work in a medical practice. We have an expectation that people will obey rules for their and our protection. For example: we had a sign that, at our reception desk, that people should stay behind a line and not approach too close.
There was a thick, clearly visible tape line on the floor.
There was a two large signs on reception desk asking patients to stay behind the line.
This is during the heightened awareness of the pandemic. People were asked to change their behavior in many ways.
Patients would just come up to the reception desk and lean over the desk.
Damn right I "scolded" them for it. I mean, I didn't roast them, but I used a tone of voice, and asked them to step away from the desk, and pointed out the signs. Some of them were cranky about doing so ... when SARS was rampant!
So if one of your peers pulls a fire alarm or blasts an air horn in your work place, while you're on a call or engaged in some other highly focused task, the appropriate response is to just shrug and think "I need to be such a highly emotionally controlled person that I can only passively deactivate the alarm, contact an authority who won't even be here before the culprit leaves and just move on with my day"?
Fine, I didn't "scold" this person, I called out a peer for their shitty, antisocial behavior. Or is holding someone accountable even in words for the painful consequences of their decisions unacceptable too?
>So if one of your peers pulls a fire alarm or blasts an air horn in your work place, while you're on a call or engaged in some other highly focused task, the appropriate response is to just shrug and think "I need to be such a highly emotionally controlled person that I can only passively deactivate the alarm, contact an authority who won't even be here before the culprit leaves and just move on with my day"?
why are the two options angrily telling someone off or silently and submissively accepting the situation?
the way mature adults react to interpersonal trouble is by quelling instinctive emotions and calmly communicating
I didn't light into him like a drill sergeant. And I didn't go off on every person who walked through that door. I just turned off my customer-service obsequiousness for once and directly stated (without yelling) what I thought: that his only mitigation, that it was an innocent mistake, reveals that he has absolutely no business attending a university.
But apparently, my comment (just checked, I never even used the word "scold") suggests to you that I must have been shouting him down, calling him a lazy, stupid asshole, for not walking the extra 100 feet through the correct exit, like everyone else had been doing, for months. Lord knows a part of me wanted to, but I am not the unhinged psychopath you clearly think I am.
the definition of scolding is "angrily rebuking or reprimanding someone". in my understanding of human psychology, that is something people do not do to people they see as equals. more specifically it's a behaviour a person is extremely unlikely to participate in if they feel the other person has enough social, physical or economic capital to punish them for it.
I see your point and you're definitely right about that. If you're going to publicly scold someone in front of their peers, you better be ready because it's going to personally insult them in very deep ways, to say nothing of their social standing.
If you're scolding someone you should probably be a badass drill sergeant, literally made of muscle, many times their superior in rank and with enough balls and testosterone to unblinkingly look them in the eye while heaping abuse right at their faces without one shred of hesitation, so that the sheer audacity of it all shocks and intimidates them into total submission. And you would also do well to remember that at least one movie depicts exactly one such drill sergeant getting shot in the chest when a certain scoldee went postal over it.
it's going to personally insult them in very deep ways,
That's exactly the point of scolding. To help people calibrate social behavior outside of the judicial system. We do 10,000 things per day that are now necessarily laws but are carefully tuned social behaviors.
I didn't really understand this until I had a 2 yr old and had to explain all of them.
Sure, there are more tactful ways to scold but sometimes when people are too far gone you just have to publicly shame. They've already missed a few dozen subtle cues before making it to this point
I dunno how much time you've spent around fire alarms, but they're required to be painfully loud. Not "permanent damage" loud, but loud enough to trigger e.g. migraines in people who suffer from them. This door had a fire alarm on it.
The university needed to control access to the facility through one secure checkpoint (that I had worked at in the past, but at this time no longer did so). They didn't want (for instance) random townies to be able to come and go via the side doors without filling out the relevant liability waivers, because it turns out screwing around in a weight room carries some risk. To say nothing of the consequences of some rando wandering in off the street and posting up in the locker room.
I was answering phone calls, helping people rent outdoor equipment. My job was not at all watching the door. But I had to deal with 19 year olds who (and I did watch this a couple times) would look directly at the sign, pause to read it, push the door open, then have an utterly shocked expression that the PAINFULLY LOUD alarm was going off. And I'd have to drop whatever I was doing, go turn off the alarm, then recompose and return to the customer that I was helping.
Please explain to me what is so objectionable about a school controlling access to its facilities.
All of us act, much of the time, on varying degrees of autopilot. It's unlikely that the automatic parts of the brain can read, although presumably they are quite capable of pattern-recognizing and processing learned symbolic language like traffic signs (and even that's by no means guaranteed – so many humans merrily ignore or miss changes in signage in traffic, having traveled the same route a thousand times before).
The strength and type of stimulus required to "wake us up" – for the brain to realize there's something novel or unexpected that requires the activation of higher-level, analytic parts of the brain – probably varies a lot from person to person, but just a bunch of text is not always enough to do that unless accompanied by familiar semiotic language, which is of course the reason we use symbols and colors to make important messages more likely to be perceived and understood. The best wake-up signals are, of course, those that physically prevent you from doing something you intended to do – a locked door, for example.
Unfortunately with up to a few dozen dogs needing to go outside multiple times a day and a half dozen volunteers that are only on shifts for a few hours at a time, there were just too many different people needing to go through that door too often for it to be worth locking it and distributing keys to everyone. Maybe having the door locked and the key hanging right next to it would be enough for people to disengage autopilot, but I'm not convinced that non-volunteers wouldn't just grab the key and open the door sometimes as well. Plus, some of the dogs could be quite strong, and the volunteers ranged from teenagers to retirees, so having both hands on the leash and being able to just push the door open was preferable in a lot of circumstances.
This is the problem with advertisements. The vie so hard for your attention they really are hard to ignore. But after they catch your attention you've realized that your attention has just been wasted. Soon you catch yourself just filtering out anything that could potentially be an ad.
I once visited a sword shop, and only noticed the signs tiled every metre horizontally and vertically across the walls saying "do not touch" when the person I was with told me about them as my fingers hovered mere centimetres from one of the wall-mounted blades.
I also didn't notice the moonwalking gorilla in the famous video clip despite being aware in advance that there would be one.
In the early days of the pandemic, the retail chain I worked for had a curbside delivery only policy. No customers in the store period, you had to call us and we'd bring your whatever out to you.
No amount of signage on the door would stop people walking in. I stacked a bunch of boxes physically blocking the door and people still forced their way in.
The only thing that worked was putting a strip of blue painter's tape across the doorway directly at eye level.
I have long since stopped trying to make sense of other people's behavior.
I've spent a couple of years working in customer service. I was continually mystified by people's behavior. I would spend a large amount of time trying to comprehend why they did something and couldn't gain any purchase on a possible answer. Some people's behavior had an element of randomness in the sense of not adhering to a pattern.
No, that's not it at all. This was after multiple conversations with the same person explaining the situation. There was signs on the door, on the boxes, with giant type, highlighters, bright colors, the works.
This was people explicitly ignoring any and all signals contrary to their desires.
The confusing bit is that a strip of tape with no other context is what stopped them. Probably just that it was something so outside of the ordinary experience that it forced them to actually engage their brain for a moment.
We have our hourly rate printed on a sign in our conference room. The walls are very clean, with almost no other signage. Despite communicating my rate to a client (via email) and having two meetings in this room, this particular client was shocked when they received my final bill which (again) stated our rate. I believe in this case they were just unhappy and looking for an "emotional plea" way out of payment.
Sounds like a UIUX problem. Sign makers get about half a second to convince a rushed person to pause, between the moment the sign enters their field of view and the moment they're already through the door. If the sign is anything more than a large red STOP symbol and anything more than the words NOT AN EXIT and/or AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, then I bet most people don't read it. I probably wouldn't, unless I was incredibly bored. Most signs are irrelevant to most readers and we are constantly inundated with them on every door and every hallway wall we walk down. If it was important it would follow internally recognized danger signage UIUX standards. Which usually just means a big symbol. Everything else is just another blurry bakesale announcement that flashed past our face.
As an aside, I was intrigued by your use of quotes around "real life". I think we've collectively gone so far down the internet rabbit hole that real life, ie. not on the internet, is seen as the anomaly or unreal. Not the other way around.
> A higher than expected number of advertisements may cause a user to view the page as cluttered.[7] The number of adverts and annoyances on a webpage contribute to this perception of clutter.[6] As users can concentrate on only one stimulus at a time, having too many objects in their field of vision causes them to lose focus.[8] This contributes to behaviors such as ad avoidance or banner blindness.
I have done a pretty good job filtering out advertisements and other annoying web crap, and if anything ever sneaks through I notice it immediately. Whatever the opposite of banner blindness is, that's what I exhibit. Banner hypersensitivity?
The content is not the product just like how the chum a fisherman tosses is not the product. The product is the customer base and they make money selling access to it for advertising.
Then let's philosophize at length about it. I'm about to write a borderline religious text on the matter.
> who's only product is content
This is the reason why you could not understand.
The content is not the product. It's actually you personally. You are the product. Your attention, your memory, your cognitive functions, your behavior. They forcibly take those from you without your consent, without warning. Then they sell it off to the highest bidder. That is their product, their business model, the way they make money. Industrial scale violation of people's minds. Industrial scale mind rape.
Content? It's just bait designed to attract you. The content is completely irrelevant to them. Just a means to an end. Only reason there's any content at all is you wouldn't visit the website otherwise. To them content is nothing but a cost they'd very much enjoy not having to pay. A cost center that they're only too happily outsourcing to generative AI.
Even the word "content" is a problem. It's industry jargon but I view it as something of an euphemism. This so called "content" is nothing but a generic replaceable square around which the ads agglutinate like parasites. The web today is mostly garbage because of all this industrial scale "content" being produced. Nobody has anything real to say, it's just "content" they produce by the truckloads in order to attract people to sites so they can sell out their audience's minds to the corporations. There ought to be a better name for it. "Slop" comes to mind. Yeah, slop sounds good.
All this slop isn't real human creation, it's just an undesirable industrial byproduct of the modern web. People create slop in order to attract audiences so they can sell them out to the advertisers. When you see HN users complaining about how shitty the Google search results are, they're complaining about the ever increasing density of worthless slop they're running into when they search for literally anything. People are actually paying for search engines whose entire business model is filtering out the slop and presenting to their users the sites which are actually worth visiting.
Hell, this is why people come to HN to begin with. There's a refreshingly small amount of slop on this site. On HN you find real people writing real thoughts. People who work at billion dollar companies, people who created programming languages and operating systems that others use, people who thought up the algorithms you learn about in books, a disproportionate number of them come here in order to comment on things. Sometimes they tell incredible stories. Those comments are more valuable than the articles being commented on. This is what slop isn't: real human culture. Maybe the advertisers just haven't found out about HN yet. Not too long ago, there was a story here about Google bumping HN up in search results. That bit of news actually made me scared for the future.
What's more sinister though is the fact advertisers have literal censorship power over the web. You'll never see a text such as this comment posted on an ad-supported website. The fact is if it offends the advertisers it doesn't get published at all. Because if you publish it, they cut you off from your advertising money. Therefore the advertisers own the creators and control their creative processes. I've seen such cutoffs happen, it's downright pathetic. Watching good people bend down to the likes of Google because someone with money was offended at their brand being associated with something they didn't like even though they literally paid for it. I watched people scramble to unpublish, to delete, to destroy their own creations just to appease the almighty advertisers. It seriously made me sick.
> distastefully full of ads
It's made to be that way. It's carefully tuned via unethical human experimentation ("A/B testing") to make it as profitable as possible but just tolerable enough that you won't leave or do something about it. They employ talented programmers to design algorithms to automatically figure out your limits and push you right up to those limits.
Use uBlock Origin. It's essentially legitimate self-defense at this point. Self-defense for our minds.
Don't try to pay them off, that just proves you have disposable income to spend on products you don't need, driving up the value of your attention even further. You're essentially paying for the privilege of segmenting yourself into the upper echelons of their markets. At some point, some shareholder value maximizing CEO will come along, notice the vast piles of money being left on the table and then promptly sell out the audience so as to avoid leaving money on the table. Betrayal is virtually guaranteed.
Don't empathize with them. Just laugh when they call you entitled, when they call you a thief. Nobody in this world is more entitled than an advertiser. They think they are entitled to your attention. They think they can sell your attention to corporations. The mere fact they even think your attention is theirs to sell to begin with just invalidates anything they could possibly say in their defense. You'll watch them defend nonsense such as "intellectual property" even though they constantly violate your right to privacy by collecting vast amounts of personal information about you, information that really ought to belong to you by all reasonable standards.
Just use uBlock Origin. Delete their noise without a second thought. On sight. Don't lose a second of sleep over it. Don't feel an ounce of guilt.
And lest we forget, the internet didn't invent this business model. Most of the literal newspapers that existed before operated the same way. Except they didn't have uBlock Origin. And if Google wins, ad blocking will again be removed from the only browser remaining, which will be Chrome.
There's the matter of degree though. Dose makes the poison, and so even the nastiest substances like botox can be used for good, if applied in minuscule amounts. This may be me looking at history through rose-colored glasses, but I feel that the degree of loathing and contempt that a typical business has towards its customers, justifying ever increasing abuse, is a recent phenomenon. Like, newspapers and magazines of yore at least tried - there were comptetent authors writing for quality, and all kinds of ads funding it. The past decade or two? The content is now of negative intellectual value to the reader, and nobody gives a fuck.
The internet acts as a booster in that it makes many things easier. Among others, peddling exploitation and abuse and still surviving economically. I marvel at the patience of people who put up with what you describe.
Ads aren't inherently the problem. This kind of ads are.
Let's say someone has a "history" website with a good domain reputation, and adds a link to a website that sells someone else's history ebook, for a fee. That's technically an ad and I wouldn't have a problem with it, in fact I could even welcome it.
I agree that powerful advertisers dictating what can or cannot be said in a platform is sinister though.
I don't consider it one. My definition of "ad" seems to be somewhat different.
If I go to someone's website, it's because I want to learn more about them and what they have created. So when I see information about the books they have written on their websites, I don't consider that to be advertising at all. When I go to someone's GitHub repository, I don't consider the sponsor button to be advertising. If I click it and their sponsor page opens, I don't consider it to be advertising. It's just information. I actively sought that information and I got exactly what I asked for.
Advertising is when somebody pays money to put that information in front of your eyeballs. You didn't look for it, you didn't want it. You're busy, you're actively concentrating your mind on some other activity. They don't care, they don't respect you. They go to you and interrupt you with their irrelevant nonsense. That's advertising. Can't even cross the street without having your senses assaulted by strategically positioned billboards.
Last time I expressed this on HN, people tried to convince me that everything is marketing and advertising somehow. If you exchange business cards with someone, it's somehow advertising. I just don't see it that way. There's no way a pleasant social interaction will ever be in the same category of toxicity as advertising on the web.
I once was a product manager for an app which included an inbox (mostly for promotional stuff). That app also included banner ads here and there. Consistent feedback from our users was that they missed that there was a new unread item in said inbox.
About half a year after I started managing that product I decided to fix this, seemed like an easy win. The inbox was a bit hidden, so a red dot on its icon wasn’t going to cut it - so I sat down with one of the devs to brainstorm for a quick solution.
„What do you mean“, he said. „It’s already there!“
And he pointed at something at the front page of the app. And sure enough: it was an area highlighted in yellow, saying something along the lines of „you have x items in your inbox“.
I swear I have not seen it before. It didn’t even look like an ad, but it used similar attention-grabbing mechanisms as an ad, which was probably why everyone filtered it out.
Turned out it was a manager decision: partners had complained that people missed out on their valuable promos in the inbox, and the boss decided a big box right at the front and center of the app would fix it. He then sent screenshots to partners and their complaints stopped.
Ironically we never fully fixed this, as the boss thought that it was already prominent enough and feared that changing it would mean partners would complain again.
This can be a GOTCHA in docs site UX. A lot of docs sites use admonitions (e.g. [1]) to call special attention to a particular piece of info and, ironically, the admonition might make readers less likely to see the info.
I ran into this about 8 years ago. I was using a new dev tool, and the docs said there was a UI element to do something. I looked, and looked and just could find what they were talking about. So I contacted them to ask what the deal was, and they sent me a screen grab. Turns out what I was looking for was in a weird rectangle embedded halfway down the page and centered on the 3rd quartile of the width of the page.
Exactly where someone would stick an ad into an HTML page. They had put a box around it and styled it a little differently, so my brain tuned it right out.
This section cites a few sources from ~10 years ago, but we still see those annoying video ads pop up in random places in 2024. I wonder if those ads were actually bought by competing companies with the intent to bring negative attitudes toward whatever is being advertised.
As a personal anectote, I find anything that moves in my periferal vision to be distracting. Therefore, if there are any animations that occur without me initiating them on a second monitor, I find those distracting.
That includes animated gifs, videos, ads, etc. on pages I have open as reference material.
They need a way of pausing, stopping, or hiding the animation if it lasts more than 5 seconds to comply with accessibility guidelines [1].
I’m exactly like that, this is why I can browse the web with no ad-blocker installed with almost no issue, by default I just ignore all banners.
Curiously enough the same thing does not happen when watching regular TV programs. I’ve stopped watching regular TV almost 4 years ago, and that’s why when I happen to visit some of my friends who have the TV on I’m always surprised whenever ads interrupt whatever is being shown, I can’t understand how come people can put up with that. I guess they formed “TV ad blindness”
I think the difference is that you can't ignore an ad when it comes on, because the thing you were watching goes away. Whereas even on the worst websites you can just scroll or click the X and get back to what you were doing.
Reading the daily (paper!) newspaper as a kid, I trained my brain to skip large ads entirely. Only rarely did I have a double-take. The same skills have transfered to digital media. Banner ads and sidebar ads simply do not exist.
Wikipedia has had a banner for 20 of the last 20 years, claiming not to be able to pay hosting and management bills, while hosting and management represent about 1% of their global finances, while they have various endeavours like hiring paid rewriters to rewrite Wikipedia in various political ways.
