Contrary to my distaste for them, but I wouldn’t mind advertisements now and then. By now and then, I mean, like once every other hour or if they’re displayed in a way that isn’t obstructing. Obviously that is not how they are these days.
I know companies need to still get out there and be known but I do not need to know that much and I don’t really care of your business if I have to hear, see and have spoken to me of it at every single turn. I would especially love it, if everything wasn’t a paywall to not see any.
Advertisements are just simply a disease.
Speaking on ads, they are definitely one of the leaders in this category.
I can honestly say that there have been maybe a half-dozen or so ads I’ve encountered in my entire life span that introduced a product into my awareness, that I later looked into and decided to purchase.
And for that microscopic amount of success for the advertisers, I have been exposed to tens of millions of ads over my life span (mid-40s now). All of those hammering on your mood and/or sanity, some worse than others, but every one a punch of annoyance.
Art.
Used to be that even avant-garde artists knew their shit and could create actual, beautiful pieces (Like Duchamp).
Now, people use an AI generator or duct-tape a banana to a wall.
The art world sucks.
Went with a girl to an art gallery.
An entire wing of sculpted busts of…random people, some carved from wood, others from what I’m sure I was supposed to think was marble. Not being a sculptor myself I have nothing but awe and wonder at the skill of carving such lifelike figures by hand and eye.
Another wing of landscape paintings. A relatively small piece caught my attention, the canvas was maybe 10 by 8 inches and captured a scene overlooking a jungle at sunset with a distant waterfall, yellow and green trees, a vivid orange sky, someone saw something beautiful and decided to write it down.
Another wing, this time of modern art. The piece that stood out to me was the featureless 4 by 6 foot panel of blue felt in a simple aluminum frame bolted to the wall, like a school bulletin board before the teacher put anything on it. The person whose fault that was definitely went to art school and has business cards that say “Artist” on them. I bet they even stood in front of it and talked about it to other people.
It’s gotten so dumb that people will accidentally leave a coke can on a bench in an art gallery and other people will take pictures of it as if it’s a display. I’d argue that the guy who intentionally left a shoe in an art gallery to demonstrate this effect was making more relevant art than the pieces actually displayed there, he at least had an idea in his head.
By that logic though, as long as the person who made the blue 6x4 had an idea in their head, it would count as art, no?
There’s validity to “found art”, I think. Like “death of the author” for text, sometimes what you pull out of viewing something is worthwhile even if the artist didn’t mean it (or didn’t exist)
I could sit down and explain transgender issues to a good faith person that is not up-to-date with the terminology or what is considered offensive, or intersex topics. But people being so sensitive to not being called bigoted when shouting their transphobia from the rooftops, it has pissed me off to the extent I can’t assume good faith anymore.
Humanity.
There are plenty of silver linings to point at, but ultimately we’re pretty fucking awful to each other.
Stupid human race. Every time I’m almost ready to give up on us completely, someone does something that blows the cynicism right out of me.
Large language models. I’m sure they’ll find their niche uses. But it’s not intelligent, and please stop adding it to every digital product.
I find AI is useful for doing piddly crap like writing cover letters and boiler-plate emails, the kind of stuff that requires zero brain-power but takes up time in your day. I see it as like having a secretary that’s not quite competent enough to trust with anything important lol. It can be disastrous or handy, depending on how it’s deployed.
Nail on the head. Its a bullshit solution for bullshit work at our bullshit jobs
I’m tired of hearing the advertisers’ opinion. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were remotely accurate.
How about lootboxes, battle passes and other predatory tactics used in many modern games? Sure, you can have those elements for those people who like them, but if your entire game is all about psychological manipulation tools, you’ve gone too far. Maybe some people like to roll the dice every now and then, but that shouldn’t be the main point of the game. You should also be given an option to enjoy the game without being exposed to extreme levels of of toxic design.
Yeah, games like DRG prove that season xp/unlocks can be fun and rewarding. But the key there is that:
- It’s completely free
- You can replay old seasons anytime, so there’s no cosmetics that you miss out on if you don’t finish by the end of the season
Done like that, it’s a fun system that gives you extra rewards for playing. But there’s never any punishment for not playing enough in a fixed period of time.
What drives me nuts is that they’ll charge ridiculous prices for that stuff, knowing some people will pay the big bucks, rather than offering them at a cheap price to sell more. It’s just more lucrative to make that higher grossing sale than it is to sell by volume. I actually would have spent money if it was a buck here or a few cents there. Instead they want 10, 30, 50 bucks for this stuff. No thanks.
Yep. I started playing Rocket League when it became free to play. After playing for a couple of years, I decided that I had easily gotten over $10 worth of fun out of it, and so I felt justified in spending that to get a new car body that I wanted. And because it’s closer to the shape of the actual hitbox of the car I was playing with, it actually made it easier for me to judge how I would hit things. I’ve never played a $60-70 game for 4 years, so $10 on this has been money well spent.
That seems like a fair way to fund game development. I wish more companies chose this path.
Used to play blacklight retribution, a f2p shooter. After grinding most of the things i wanted, i ended up paying 10 bucks to unlock a cool helmet and some “shortcut credits” to unlock a few other cosmetics i didnt wanna grind for.
Game is dead nowadays sadly, but they had a great system (for the players)
Yes ads, specifically tv and radio ads. They are designed to be bad, because either a very bad or very good ad sticks in the mind. It sickens me that a noble art line psychology is misappropriated for commerce.
The thing that bothers me most is that it should be easy to get rid of, if we were more conscious of what us going on in front of our eyes and collectively say ‘no’.
The idea of having personalised ads, so you don’t get to see super bad ads or ads for stuff you don’t want or need ever, is kind of okay. You just really shouldn’t want that kind of data in the hands of commercial conglomerates.
The massive increase in ads on YouTube specifically pisses me off. I totally understand that ads are necessary to keep it free, but it’s just insane how bad the ad problem has gotten. I used to be fine with watching YouTube on my PS5 until like a year ago. It went from a 7 second skippable ad every 5 minutes or so to a 30-60 second ad break every 3 minutes or so. And at the same time, they started cracking down on ad blockers.
I would gladly sit through occasional, short ad breaks. They’ve altered that deal, and so I’ve changed habits, so now instead of living with some ads, I experience none. ReVanced or Firefox with ad blockers work great to achieve this.
Loosely related gripe: I just learned that with-ads tier of Max disables downloads and Netflix’s limits you to 15 downloads. Why in the fuck are you giving paying customers a worse experience than what pirates can get? I’m already paying and still sitting through ads, and you’re gonna restrict my ability to use your service away from Wi-Fi? Fuck all the way off with that shit.
The day my ad block stops working is the day I stop consuming YouTube.
Yep they noticed a while ago that they can up the price of the completely ad-free experience, call it super extra premium and create 15 tiers below it, gradually giving you more annoyances and pretending it’s necessary to keep their business afloat. These are multi million dollar profits they’re making, it is in no way necessary. This is just profit maximalisation over the back of ignorant people who will do anything to pay a little less without knowing they’re continuously paying more.
Subscriptions. Some of them aren’t all that bad. Nvidia GeForce Now for example, 100 bucks for 6 months, 16.67 per month, but if you were to play 100 hours per month and would otherwise burn .5kwh per hour running that locally, you’re ‘saving’ the cost of 50kwh of electricity per month going this route, so 16.67 per month compared to 5-10 bucks per month in electricity (plus the cost of a gaming rig).
Sometimes it’s easy to rationalize a certain subscription but they’re basically everywhere and shoved at the consumer
My HOA. Contrary to most experiences shared online, mine doesn’t do shit, and no amount of bitching seems to be enough to motivate them. Sure would be nice to have well-maintained common areas someday.
Run for president, oust anyone that’s lazy and not contributing, put in place movers and shakers who care about the community, be the change you want to see.
Generally speaking, one runs for a place on the Board and the Board chooses their President. Who then needs to continue working with the other Board members. Ousting is not an option.
Getting on the Board is still a good way to get your pet peeves changed, though. Often it’s just a matter of focusing attention on it.
Founder’s Day. That movie fucking sucks. To quote Community “if you conspire with everyone then there’s no conspiracy, you’re just helping people.” Everyone seems to be betraying everyone for no discernable gain, none of the actors seem to be aware that they’re in the same genre as their costars, and it’s never clear whose side your on. Finally the mastermind of this scheme has what I call “the Palpatine problem.” If you’re capable of manipulating every side of a conflict in such a way that they all die and you’re left in power… aren’t you already effectively in control of everything? And isn’t it smarter to rule behind the scenes where you don’t have a target on your back AND you aren’t responsible for a bunch of serious crimes AND is it really important to you to explain your grand plans to a teenager? What do you gain from setting these events in motion? It’s a stupid ass movie, and I watch a lot of movies
Ads are a good one. If i try to watch a stream and i get a “wach after 4 ads” counter, i simply close the tab
Facebook ads are possibly the only ones I don’t find overly annoying, but then I can just scroll past them quickly if they’re uninteresting.
A little bit of “I did something creative and profited” would probably be fine. The real life implementation as “I’m going to pay children pennies to sell adulterated bread for dollars” is really bad.
Even less hyperbolic versions tend to quickly become bad. CEOs and such that keep most of the value created by labor. Externalized costs suffered mostly by the poor and vulnerable. People being told to work or die. It’s not a good system to live in.
