The Great Attention Heist
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The Great Attention Heist
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Re: The Great Attention Heist
#2this should be a mandatory read for everyone, like a warning label
Re: The Great Attention Heist
#3Strikes me that the ability to focus and direct ones own attention will (or already has) become a new form of class divide; those who can concentrate and those who can't. And it will likely have much different boundaries than earlier class divisions like wealth - in fact the wealthy are more likely to struggle given greater access to a wide range of digital products.
Re: The Great Attention Heist
#4Do people really click more ads the longer they spend on Facebook? It feels like an unreasonable assumption to me. Clicking on an advert takes you away from the app, so if you design an app that people never want to stop using then they're never going to click an ad. The 'ideal' (for Facebook, not for users of Facebook) is an app that people want to use enough to be aware of an ad that's displayed on the page, but that isn't compelling enough for them to want to stay on the page rather than click on the ad to go wherever it takes them.
Facebook would maximise their profit by tailoring the application to be something that people want to log in to as regularly as possible but not to stay on for very long so they're compelled to click away after a seeing an ad. Maybe that's what Facebook have done, but when you hear about users spending hours a day scrolling through their timeline on there it doesn't seem that way.
Re: The Great Attention Heist
#5Do people really click more ads the longer they spend on Facebook? It feels like an unreasonable assumption to me. Clicking on an advert takes you away from the app, so if you design an app that people never want to stop using then they're never going to click an ad. The 'ideal' (for Facebook, not for users of Facebook) is an app that people want to use enough to be aware of an ad that's displayed on the page, but th…
Ads aren't just about click-throughs though. If someone is scrolling endlessly and seeing adverts every few minutes, that's still influencing them. Possibly more so because they're in a comfortable cycle of absorbing snippets of information, and don't appraise it critically.
Re: The Great Attention Heist
#6When my friend on FB share various stupid chance-to-win contests they are selling my attention for their chance to win. I was looking for a decent way to tell them.
Re: The Great Attention Heist
#7It's ironic there is a popup advertising contests and giveaways upon page load.
Re: The Great Attention Heist
#8It's ironic there is a popup advertising contests and giveaways upon page load.
Relevant XKCD...
Re: The Great Attention Heist
#9Strikes me that the ability to focus and direct ones own attention will (or already has) become a new form of class divide; those who can concentrate and those who can't. And it will likely have much different boundaries than earlier class divisions like wealth - in fact the wealthy are more likely to struggle given greater access to a wide range of digital products.
It seems like a manifestation of the same divide to me: those who pay to direct (or misdirect) peoples attention, and those who consume the messages.
Re: The Great Attention Heist
#10It's ironic there is a popup advertising contests and giveaways upon page load.
Why don't you use an ad blocker?