111–120 of 217 posts
I find it hugely ironic that the author hosts the site's blog on tumblr, the king of user-signup-driving no-we're-not-going-to-give-you-an-rss-feed-we-want-you-to-join-our-service-to-subscribe.
Advertising in the US doesn't create demand. It just moves it around. America is spent out. The US personal savings rate is under 5%. Everything else gets spent, and the saved money gets spent later. There's no "pent-up demand" waiting to be unlocked by advertising. Advertising is thus a net lose for Americans. All that effort adds to cost. For some products, including movies, long distance phone service, and many pr…
> Advertising expenses should not be deductible business expenses at all. Wait, WHAT!? Advertising is a tax-deductible business expense? Why on earth?
But ultimately it's about concentration. I believe, for the most part, that multitasking is a myth. When I am reading something difficult, or that I would like to remember in detail later, I need to focus on it exclusively and read it without interruption. That means ad blockers, print view, etc.
> As the landslide of bullshit surges down the mountain, people will increasingly gravitate toward genuinely useful, well-crafted products, services, and experiences that respect them and their time
This sounds like wishful thinking to me. Marketing and design are surely down to a psychological science by now.
It's funny. This page strikes me as the height of bullshit. It's basically a manifesto written by an individual interested in being another absolute arbiter of taste. It completely ignores the nuances, relativism and circumstance of how people internalize ideas, make decisions and generally connect. It even go as far as to say that it is the reason why being a great engineer or creator of things is am anti-pattern fo…
You use a lot of big words without actually saying anything.
Their problem with the article is that it makes the wrong assumption that everyone should be able agree on what does / does not count as bullshit. Including, recursively, the article itself.
In the past and in places many of us prefer not to go now, there were "arbiters of taste" who were able to influence many people's thinking by representing themselves as "the truth" (you know - the one without the bullshit).
We now live in a more open marketplace of ideas which, most likely, your parent is happy about. He / she would not like the article's author, nor anyone else, to resume such authority. They likely believe that though bullshit-everywhere might be true, it is still a price worth paying for diversity of ideas.
As much as I dislike some of the current trends (and I do digital media for a living mind you), I do have to point out that this stuff wouldn't be done if it didn't work. Ultimately this implies that there are enough people out there who engage with or...dare I say...want...the bullshit, that their collective voice outweighs those that do not simply by the fact that those are often the users who click ads, share thin…
The problem is that bullshit is a negative externality. It's cognitive pollution. Those who clutter the world with bullshit reap the rewards of nabbing the suckers who respond to it, but don't pay the costs of imposing those cognitive loads on everyone else. That leads to more bullshit than would be economically efficient. Take a simple example like billboards. If billboard advertisers had to pay every person whose l…
I've never found my life "degraded" by a billboard, even if it was for a product I'd never buy. In fact, some of them are still useful, especially when driving long distances on the Interstate. They're something to break the monotony and give you something to think about, if only for a minute or two. Some are downright funny/amusing, and others at least provoke a "I wonder what that's supposed to mean" reaction.
"cognitive pollution"? That smells suspiciously like bullshit to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Advertising expenses should not be deductible business expenses at all. Wait, WHAT!? Advertising is a tax-deductible business expense? Why on earth?
Sure. Businesses (in the US, anyway) pay tax on their profits, not their revenue. Profit is revenue minus expenses. Advertising is an expense, just like all of the other expenses that go into successfully bringing a product to market (research and development, transportation, etc.).
(Capital gains tax kinda does, at least in the jurisdictions I know about; you can offset losses against gains. But earned income seems just as much like business revenue as capital gains...)
This isn't just about advertising. It's equally about bad or distracting design. But ultimately it's about concentration. I believe, for the most part, that multitasking is a myth. When I am reading something difficult, or that I would like to remember in detail later, I need to focus on it exclusively and read it without interruption. That means ad blockers, print view, etc. > As the landslide of bullshit surges dow…
https://blog.applovin.com/data-desk-6-whatever-it-would-cost...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simply put, we live in a world of bullshit. People are - by and large - bullshitters, or at least they don't care enough to figure out and implement non-bullshit solutions, because bullshit gets the job done so they can go do other things. I think one would be better served learning how to coexist with the bullshit than trying to put a stop to it, and I'm usually pretty idealistic. It's just too uphill of a battle to…
Except the call to arms is two pronged: call out bullshit, but also don't create bullshit. Don't do it is always achievable, even if it might take some time to extricate yourself from a situation that demands it, and still take care of your family.
Never gonna happen. Human beings are born to bullshit. The fact that we compete for mates and the way the different genders have differing optimal mating strategies pretty much ensures that. We are always going to bullshit each other to a certain degree, as we try to achieve the ends we are innately wired to pursue.
That doesn't mean we can't fight back against bullshit of the nature described in TFA, but we won't ever live in a world with no bullshit. Or if we do, it won't be recognizable as anything like human society as we know it. If anything, it'd probably look like the worst dystopian nightmare scenario we can think of.
This isn't just about advertising. It's equally about bad or distracting design. But ultimately it's about concentration. I believe, for the most part, that multitasking is a myth. When I am reading something difficult, or that I would like to remember in detail later, I need to focus on it exclusively and read it without interruption. That means ad blockers, print view, etc. > As the landslide of bullshit surges dow…
Really? I just read an article about how Apple is intentionally avoiding a traditional social media presence as a part of its marketing strategy. So does the science work like, "if you are rich enough to buy out several independent nations, do not use social media for marketing?" Or what?
And as a designer myself, I have to say "science" applied to design has a bad reputation among designers [1]. I put the word in quotes because true science is an interest of mine. And if one day in the future the application of science to design is solidified, hopefully this means fractal design software will rise from its current "American Idol without Simon Cowell" state of chaos to become part of the Adobe Creative Nebula, or whatever it's called by then. Because right now, the golden mean and fractals are just a couple of the millions of tools in a very intuitive toolbox, and they seem most likely to underwhelm when used alone as part of some grand demonstration of science meeting design.
So: If there's a science to all of this, by all means elucidate.
[1] http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html