Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vietnam bans unskippable ads

saigoneer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 835 posts

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#631

Post by yibg »

wolvoleo wrote: post #595
tpmoney wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without being paid, unless someone is advertising the product somewhere the reviewer won't know it exists to review. And if the reviewer is being sent free product or solicited directly by the producer, that's still advertising. It may be more trustworthy if the reviewer is strict about not letting the producer have editorial control, but you better believe that the company is sending out free products to review…

It does also happen that people get stuff to review and have to send it back of course.

So the company that can afford to send the most stuff to the most reviewers win?

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#632

Post by yibg »

cramsession wrote: post #144
charlieyu1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I hate ads, if you don’t make yourself known to potential customers you’re very screwed

That’s not a problem for the customers though. Capitalism twists our incentives toward prioritizing return on investment over quality of life. Especially now with the internet, I literally never need ads. I just search for the solution to the problem I’m having. No push needed (or wanted).

How do you search? Google? That's typically part of marketing spend. It may not be pure ads as in I pay google, they display my ad. But it's still a company spending money to get their result to the top so you are more likely to see it.

Ads solve the discovery problem. Without ads, people still try to solve the discovery problem and try to get your attention. Are those methods still ads?

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#633

Post by yibg »

iuu666 wrote: post #395
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takes like this amaze me. It's like they've suddenly forgotten what the entire advertisement industry is like. Ads are designed to take advantage, manipulate, and even trick. Then this person comes along and suggests the industry should do the right thing. In what world would that ever be a possibility? It's like asking a dictator nicely that they relinquish some of their power!

Regulation is only a policeman. It doesn’t innovate. Competitive markets do innovate. I watch YouTube live instead of Twitch (many streamers double stream) precisely because the former has skippable ads. I’m guessing you haven’t taken even one semester of the relevant economics. Isn’t it great to be an internet commenter?

> Isn’t it great to be an internet commenter?

Said completely unironically...

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#634

Post by thaumasiotes »

climb_stealth wrote: post #444
x187463 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fantastic video from Matt, as usual. Yet another data point on why nobody should be wasting a second watching Mr Beast content. Complete algorithmically optimized garbage. I recall Mr Beast showing up in a Colin Furze video for a few minutes and Mr Beast was very clearly incapable of being a normal person. He was obviously out of place, being in full makeup and styled, and couldn't seem to be bothered to actually e…

Luckily the recommendation system does work to some extent. I'm glad I don't get to see any of that stuff on my youtube. Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place of hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking. It's scary imagining people getting sucked into that :/

> Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place of hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking.

Huh? Opening the front page of youtube in a private view (with no existing youtube history) shows you a completely blank page.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#635

Post by thaumasiotes »

Groxx wrote: post #185
DrewADesign wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite most annoying ad tactic is the trick slowing down progress bar. It starts off fast making it seem like it’s going to be, say, a ten-second ad so you decide to suffer through it… but progressively slows so you notice at like the 20 second mark you’re only 2/3 of the way through the progress bar, so probably less than halfway done. Murderous rage.

I'm fond of the ones with a fake close button, so tapping it just launches the ad's site. Instant uninstall and 1-star. (Yes, I know it's mostly the ad's fault, but there's no practical way to punish them directly. So force apps to pick better-behaving networks.)

I'm not sure that is mostly the ad's fault. Hitting a target on a touchscreen is hard to do. This seems like it's the phone's fault first to me.

(If you're using a mouse, forget what I said. But I haven't run into an ad where the close button didn't close it... if you were able to click the close button.)

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#636

Post by jdwithit »

rkomorn wrote: post #480
josephg wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way about newsletters. “Hey you bought socks that one time! Want more socks??” -> Unsubscribe. “Hey it’s your weekly sock news! What’s new in socks!” -> But I unsubscribed! Haha no, you only unsubscribed from the “product releases” list. Not the “weekly news” list or our 10 other fabulous mailing lists! -> Report all emails from this domain as spam. May god have mercy on your soul, cute socks.

This is exactly something I hate about the current state of things. Interacting with a company/organization immediately turns into a lifelong "legitimate relationship" that supposedly entitles them to contact you forever and ever.

I "love" the ones that randomly decide to reactivate literally years after unsubscribing and never interacting with the business again. The other day I randomly got an email from a yoga studio I once bought my wife a gift card from. We moved and neither of us has been there since 2021. Why on earth am I suddenly getting spam 5 years later. I get similar messages from hotels many years later too. Sometimes ones I didn't even end up staying at, just browsed. You can sense the desperation through the monitor.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#637

Post by somenameforme »

abenga wrote: post #211
somenameforme wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already numerous competitors to YouTube. Of course they have collectively like 1% marketshare, but that's because it's basically impossible to compete against YouTube right now. But if YouTube died, these sites would rapidly become fully competent replacements - all they're missing is the users.

How would they pay for the infrastructure required to support all those users? I can't stand ads, but when I was younger, no way would I have paid for YT Premium (though to be fair, ads are much, much worse now).

Bandwidth transit prices, peering, and other data for for ISPs and the like tend to be highly classified (lol), but it's very close to $0. Take Steam for instance. They are responsible for a significant chunk of all internet traffic and transfer data in the exabytes. Recently their revenue/profit data was leaked from a court filing and their total annual costs, including labor/infrastructure/assets/etc, was something like $800 million. [1]

Enabling on site money transfers (as YouTube does) and taking a small cut from each transfer (far less than YouTube's lol level 30% cut) would probably be getting close to enough to cover your costs, especially if you made it a more ingrained/gamey aspect of the system - e.g. give big tippers some sort of swag in comments or whatever, stuff like that. It's not going to be enough to buy too many [more] islands for Sergey and Larry, but such is the price we must all pay.

[1] - https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof...

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#638

Post by [deleted] »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #635
Groxx wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fond of the ones with a fake close button, so tapping it just launches the ad's site. Instant uninstall and 1-star. (Yes, I know it's mostly the ad's fault, but there's no practical way to punish them directly. So force apps to pick better-behaving networks.)

I'm not sure that is mostly the ad's fault. Hitting a target on a touchscreen is hard to do. This seems like it's the phone's fault first to me. (If you're using a mouse, forget what I said. But I haven't run into an ad where the close button didn't close it... if you were able to click the close button.)

[deleted]

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#639

Post by catlifeonmars »

iammjm wrote: post #24
_jab wrote: post #13

I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present. Don't…

The world would definitely be better without ads. All ads are poisonous. All of them first convince you that you and your life as it is is not good enough, and that in order to be happy again you need to spend money to buy a $product.

> All ads are poisonous.

Yeah but the lethal dose is pretty high. 1 ad won’t kill you.

Unfortunately there can never be just 1 ad without regulation.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#640

Post by wsc981 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #635
Groxx wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fond of the ones with a fake close button, so tapping it just launches the ad's site. Instant uninstall and 1-star. (Yes, I know it's mostly the ad's fault, but there's no practical way to punish them directly. So force apps to pick better-behaving networks.)

I'm not sure that is mostly the ad's fault. Hitting a target on a touchscreen is hard to do. This seems like it's the phone's fault first to me. (If you're using a mouse, forget what I said. But I haven't run into an ad where the close button didn't close it... if you were able to click the close button.)

On iOS I have seen ads with very small close buttons, so clearly intended to cause people to miss-click. Buttons should be 44x44 pixels, it’s recommended in the human interface guidelines [0].

——

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Post reply on HN