this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
-30 points (17.4% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35715 readers
2626 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Wherever I go, I often see the sentiment "This website has ads, so it's trash" pop up in conversations. And honestly I don't quite get why. 90% of the internet has always had ads, you just scroll past them and mind your business. At least they're personalized now so you can pick a topic you like instead of diapers and miscellanous spammy trash as there once were.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ProtonBadger@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Indeed and people often say "if an ad is annoying I'll never buy that product, so ads don't work on me, also they've never made me click on or run out and buy something" !

However advertising is accompanied with thorough independent market research and sales numbers and companies can directly see the impact of their ad campaigns. It's indisputable.

In the long term it's also about brand recognition, we see a "stupid ad" today and in a year when we're looking for that kind of thing we are more likely to choose that brand over another and we don't know why but "this jams seems better". The effect is proven, scary and it's something we're relatively helpless against. It doesn't help that our brains sometimes register things running in the background on the TV while we're petting the dog. Product placement in movies works like that too, if we notice it we think it's obvious and stupid, but we still notice it and even when we don't notice it our helpful subconscious is right there helping us remember.

Moving into even worse territory, on social media like Facebook they can profile us enough to know where we're leaning politically and if we're not entirely confident in our political stance they can show us ads that looks like product ads but are designed to nudge our political stance a bit to the side in the desired direction.

The effect of ads on the subconscious is scary. It's not complete mind control but it can influence us without us noticing.

Not on social media ? No problem, they still build up shadow profiles. A Google executive once bragged at a conference that they know everything we've done since the first day we got on the Internet. Hyperbolic maybe but that confidence comes from somewhere.