By this point in humanity's development, their brains had developed the ability to automatically block the parts of reality screaming for their attention, results of an economic system based on coercive consumption. Attention grabbers bifurcated into subtle, nefarious actors intent on slipping past in-brain ad-blocking and the shouters, turning up the volume and animations to make ads impossible to not see. People were subtly crippled, partially blind, now. Yet it was, after all, the mind's defense mechanism against an increasingly hostile environment trying to rob it of its most precise resource: attention.
That was, of course, until they banned psychic violence in the "Goddamn, get out of my brain" amendment in the late 21st century.
Most of the middle ages probably wasn't that bad, but the civilization-destroying plague destroyed civilization, and Renaissance-era propagandists exploited the living memory of the plague to make themselves look better.
I'd rather be middle class in a developed country now than any king 200 years ago. No amount of wealth could have gotten me modern medicine, especially anesthesia(!). Even stuff that's now trivial like pretty fresh tropical fruit or good food from other countries in general would have been very hard to come by. I have way more knowledge and entertainment at my finger tips than any medieval king could have ever dreamed of.
To each his own. But look at all the wonderful things that medieval kings commissioned to keep themselves occupied. Art, music, cathedrals, palaces, sports, plays, libraries, etc. The impact of a (generous) medieval king in terms of things others could eventually enjoy far outpaces this age's netflix consumption.
That the same Henry VIII who shut down all the monasteries, which for most of the population were the only source of anything resembling medical and social care? Karma's a bitch.
IMO it's an interesting topic if the kings were in fact "generous" when they commissioned these things. I think there is an argument that these investments were mostly for their own legacy and that the resources could have been spent more efficiently to raise everyone's standard of living or reduce poverty. IMO just spending every cent possible on research to get non-terrible medicine would be far and away the highest priority. But of course I only say that because I know from today's perspective what is possible.
In fairness, in those cases, when they romanticize the thieves, they usually try to make clear that they're only taking the bank/casino's owners and are careful not to hurt anyone.
This started becoming common in shopping malls at some point during the aughts or 2010s.
Usually accompanied by large in-corridor vendor displays which further obstructed already-crowded walkways.
I stopped going to malls.
High-street shopping districts still don't affect me to the same viscerally-negative degree. Even those which seem to be fairly consciously emulating and attempting to create a mall-like atmosphere. There's something about the open-air nature, and the fact that sounds attenuate rather than echoing off hard surfaces from all sides.
In NYC you're mostly trained just to ignore people trying to get your attention. Or at least I was. I assume ignoring banner ads is a similar phenomenon.
Yeah, if you live in a city, you're conditioned to ignore people trying to get your attention. Nothing is free. Don't believe it. I remember one time my little brother from my tiny hometown was visiting me in LA and I warned him to ignore the guy with the CDs. Don't let him put it in your hand and avoid eye contact. Told my sister the same thing but she didn't believe me and lost 20$ to a shitty mixtape in a millisecond. Those guys are slick. haha
You can't say the same thing about the Bazaar because that's why you went to the Bazaar. The shouts are what's going to be directing your entire journey. That's why ads aren't annoying in a trade magazine, because the ads are probably the reason you bought the trade magazine; the articles are commentary on the ads.
Accurate. And in a trade magazine, most the ads are making a value proposition of some sort; the ones that are purely based on emotional appeals tend to end up as industry memes, synonymous with vacuity.
I fed that comment to Sudowrite and here is where the AI went with it:
----------
As the struggle for survival had escalated over the past few millennia, the human brain had developed a miraculous defense mechanism: the psychic immune system. Simply said, the psychic immune system regulated the production of thoughts and emotions to a sustainable level. But with the new law came a new synthetic freedom to attack the underlying problem of an economy based on coercive consumption. Marketers and advertisers, wielding their mental weaponry, had been on the offensive, attacking minds of the world's citizens unabated. Psychic immune systems, no matter how strong, were helpless against the onslaught.
Now that the psychic immune system had been weakened, everyone was a potential target for propaganda and mind control.
In the following chaos, advertising mutated into a new form. The ban on psychic violence was not comprehensive, and included exemptions for images used in the furtherance of scientific, educational and artistic works. To survive, the advertisers had to learn to speak the language of art. They were the only ones left with the knowledge to speak it.
> The ban on psychic violence was not comprehensive, and included exemptions for images used in the furtherance of scientific, educational and artistic works. To survive, the advertisers had to learn to speak the language of art.
I'm impressed by the AI. It's actually what would happen if this law was introduced. There would be exceptions, and the advertisers would find ways to exploit them.
Heh, there’s a part of Better Call Saul where an attorney is trying to get an artistic exemption to apply so a bank’s gaudy logo/statue can be bigger than normally allowed.
Existence by David Brin carried similar concepts. Augmented Reality infested with ads, where the kids in the know all ran blockers and basically opted out of a varying levels of consensus reality.
I won't lie, the fact that my brain seamlessly adblocks pages at no cost to myself mostly strikes me as cool. Like ideally you wouldn't have to, but God knows I'm half blind with everything I ignore regardless (including headers which seem irrelevant, most introductions, every third word, etc), so like who cares.
Yup; same here. It started with the earliest intrusive ads. At this point you could display a big purple banner on my screen and then 60 seconds later break into my office, put $60million on the desk, a gun to my head, and ask the content of the banner to keep the money and not get shot, and you'd likely have to shoot me.
I'd like to have an eye tracking study done on my viewing because the brain has a separate center that controls direction of gaze that is not part of the visual cortex that processes sight. With a normal human subject looking at a normal scene, an eye-tracking study will reveal in a few seconds the outlines of everything in the scene, trees, doors, windows, people, etc. because the eye tracks the interesting parts and edges.
Also relevant is the fact that only a tiny section at the center of the field of vision is actually in any kind of focus - you cannot read anything resembling normal sized type with your peripheral vision.
There's also the phenomenon of 'blind sight' where with people who are cortically blind, i.e., their eyes and optic nerves work, but their visual cortex doesn't (e.g., due to head injury to that part of the brain) When shows a panel of vertical or horizontal stripes in a forced choice test (i.e., they can answer "vertical" or "horizontal" but not "I don't know"), they answer correctly at rates much higher than chance (iirc from courses a decades ago, ~70%). It was thought that they might be unconsciously extracting the H/V information from the area that still controlled the gaze direction.
I'm wondering how many of us have 'ad-blindness' that isn't just filtering our visual input, but is actually guiding our gaze away from intrusive content so we literally never see it because the focal area never rests on it.
Anyone more up to date on neuroscience have any info?
Yes. Eyetracking is rather useless as what we see depends on the task we have to perform. We filter out what we don't need and don't even register it consciously. As such, general eye tracking studies can only tell you so much... Case in point: dancing gorilla awareness test, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.
Yes, filtering inputs is important and happens at every level of the sensory, nervous, and brain systems. I'm describing two substantially different levels of filtering and the dancing gorilla test isn't the one I'm focused on here, as it's the high-level attention filtering, as the gorilla is surely not filtered out by the subconscious eye motions (i.e., never seen), but filtered out by the higher-level attention mechanisms. I expect that much ad-blindness is indeed these high-level mechanisms.
What I'm wondering is if after decades of avoidance training, the separate gaze-orientation center (I forget it's proper name right now) which is subconscious and separate from the visual cortex, is trained enough to minimize the eye's gaze in the annoying areas such that the focus point never lands on them and they never get the opportunity to be read (and ignored by the higher level mechanisms). Eye tracking studies using actual eye tracks and not merely heatmaps would tell us the difference - if the tracks still follow the edges, bright spots, etc. into the adverts, then all the 'blindness' is cortical, but if the eye tracks avoid the ad zones, it's been trained down to a lower level.
Ah, I see. I think you are correct on that one. One could even say 'banner blindness' was was caused google to be successful in the beginning. Then, after a decade or so, people also became google ads blind. As a result the google ads became increasingly more like organic search results, until now, where you almost an't see the difference.
Which is 100% an intentional dark pattern designed to maximize profits for the ad economy by tricking you into looking at something you don't want to look at. If users liked ads and found them useful, their brains wouldn't automatically learn to tune them out. On the contrary, if ads were so valuable to users, it would be a plus to make it easier to see them!
I mean, search engines throw an absolutely enormous amount of computational power at "organically" discovering, classifying, indexing, and searching the entire internet for the most relevant and useful results, and then the dollar machine instantly demotes them below paid placement. The cognitive dissonance is astounding.
> the fact that my brain seamlessly adblocks pages at no cost to myself
I wouldn’t be so sure it’s at no cost, it seems possible that parsing/blocking a lot of that stuff causes some kind of mental/sensory strain or fatigue.
I recently emailed a museum to ask about tours since they didn't have any information on their website. They replied with links to all the information on their website, that was in literal plain sight, but that I totally and completely missed because my brain just straight adblocked them. I almost had to force myself to "see" them. They just so closely matched that ad spam you see at the bottom of news sites and blogs that I'd just keep skimming past them.
Actually I have ADHD and I suspect I mentally ad block even more than most people. They are given 0 attention and focus because they are a dumb boring thing
I have difficulty blocking out the sound from ads which have audio, and they seem to bother me noticeably more than they bother most people, but visual ads I just tune out altogether.
I doubt it's as cost-free as you imagine. Rather than regale you with an ADHD perspective, I'll just say you're probably still reading it but just not thinking about it consciously. I would make a small bet that it's easier to prime a person with targeted advertising if they generally don't pay attention.
It's somewhat automatic, but definitely not cost-free. Spend awhile with uBlock Origin and optionally something like PiHole, and you'll be amazed at how much less exhausting reading online is.
I read web content via all sorts of apps that aren’t web browsers (mail, rss reader, various electron junk, not to mention mobile apps that are simply skins over web pages). A browser plug-in doesn’t help for those cases.
uBlock Origin catches almost all of it, but PiHole catches the rest. Also great for devices which cannot run an ad-blocker. (Mobile apps, smart TVs, etc)
My experience using tools to remove unnecessary / intrusive webpage elements (directly through the Element Inspector, via CSS managers such as Stylus, or the uBlock Origin element-blocking tool.
Even non-advertising elements such as social-media icons, related articles lists, sidebars, and the like. The more the display is limited to simply the text I intend to read, the less stress and distraction I feel.
Virtually all studies of multitasking show that multitaskers both overestimate their abilities and their performance is negatively affected by the attempt.
When you try to add something to your amazon shopping cart, you frequently get an "extended warranty" popup. If you just close the window/tab, the item silently doesn't make it to your shopping cart.
I don't know how many things go unpurchased because of this.
Ironically, worse than the deluge of advertising described in this comment is the attempted redefinition of language for political agendas as exemplified in this comment.
Both are a form of psychic warfare - except that while I have seen non-intrusive and useful forms of advertising (i.e. product discovery, not trying to brainwash me into believing that Coca-Cola isn't unhealthy), I have never seen a non-malicious instance of this kind of hostile language redefinition.
par for the course, and embedded in all political discourse.
Recently we started calling anyone proposing higher taxes a socialist, which indicates total illiteracy, as it has no bearing on centrally planned economy
Laws that stop business defrauding customers are called 'consumer protection' and 'red tape', but when we protect business from individuals it's called being tought on crime.
When you make an extra copy of a song, you commit intellectual property theft, and the state can prosecute you for free and put you in jail, and you are a criminal.
When a company does not provide warranty you paid for, its called a business dispute and you have to hire your own lawyer.
> When you make an extra copy of a song, you commit intellectual property theft
Don't forget "piracy"--associating copying information with looting a ship and killing everyone on board. I'd love to see an end to this ridiculous modern usage of this word.
> Recently we started calling anyone proposing higher taxes a socialist, which indicates total illiteracy, as it has no bearing on centrally planned economy
This too is ironically it's own redefinition because originally (and still to many socialists today) socialism means workers' ownership of the means of the production, which undemocratic centrally planning states never were and never could be.
The reason people associate socialism with taxes and a centrally planned economy is because that's the only popular socialism.
Anarcho-socialism rejects statism (totally agreeable) but doesn't offer a credible alternative. That's why common people don't even think about anarchy when you talk about socialism.
In a centrally planned socialist economy, the people in power can steal resources from the workers (like all the governments of the world do nowadays) and exercise power.
In anarcho socialism the power would be decentralised and distributed among democratic groups of workers. Why would the workers even bother to take all these decisions? They're not gaining power (or very little, due to the rightful decentralised nature of power in anarchy) nor currency.
The assumption is that workers are perfect human beings and don't need incentives do to the right thing, which is a pipe dream.
> socialism with taxes and a centrally planned economy
Taxes have nothing to do with socialism and have existed in Feudalism, in ancient Egypt and in every 'capitalist' state. Just because you collected money, does not mean you need to centrally plan how to spend it - carbon dividend would tax things that produce CO2, and distribute it equally to all citizen. Someone who produces no CO2 would get paid, and someone who produces the average amount would see no change.
I have no problem with central planning being associated, it was a key feature of socialist states. But Central planning means government sets prices on Salami, like USSR did, and I never came across anyone in the West proposing that.
At most someone advocates for some infrastructure, and they get called a socialist. But then, why does no capitalism society privatise the police, the army, the navy, the judges that sit in court, the federal reserve, the public library and the patent office?
If the accuser does advocates for privatising them, the rest of society will call him a nutcase and move on with their lives.
So he must instead make up excuses, of various levels of absurdity, for why free market can't be trusted with managing elementary building blocks of society here, but it's socialist to suggest government should step in over there.
The only solution is to Stop accusing everyone of being a socialist in disguise and learn from history and other countries: we have tried societies without government-managed police and courtsm, the results were terrible. We have tried private prisons, and government-managed consumer goods, also terrible.
The poster was clearly writing a jocular, one-sentence sci-fi story to express how they felt violated by the constant vieing for their attention. That's why it's _set in the future_ and regarding a _fictional constitutional amendment_. Making up words is a genre trope of sci-fi.
The second is that languages just change and people make up words. This isn't unique to the political arena and isn't necessarily malicious. Every term you have ever used exists because someone needed it, didn't have it, and so they made it up. You'll need to actually argue that introducing a term is harmful or deceptive in the particular instance that it happens.
This is pearl-clutching to portray people you disagree with as being shrill and ridiculous and not worth listening to. It's a bad faith tactic which you should desist from.
ETA: Because I seem to be earlier in the sort order, I want to point out that there is a much more important third reason is a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016181
I was shocked that there were five comments saying something other than this before yours.
It's like how the people who talked about safe spaces and triggering being dumb were triggered by every single commercial, tv show, movie, news report, and passing conversation and begging for the stuff that triggered them to be removed.
"Go woke, go broke" is something said by people who are threatening to boycott businesses because of their triggering content.
It looks like a title header or something, I probably wouldn’t read it either. Too high up and to the right. Needs to be centered and closer to the reading material.
Put the information you want people to read in the body of the information that they are already reading. No one looks all that gubbins that surrounds the meat of a web page any more than people look at or care about street furniture.
And, anyway what is the real distinction between official and homebrew? Is that like Organic and Homemade in a supermarket? A distinction that is often without a meaningful difference.
Canon vs. custom, I think. The point being that you don't want a random person complaining to their DM that they're not using the rule about magical trousers, when it was actually written by some random on the internet and added to a Wiki.
Homebrew content in D&D can be ridiculously poorly-balanced compared to officially-published content, which is required to go through at least some internal testing by the game's managers and designers.
> And, anyway what is the real distinction between official and homebrew?
Well, official is the material written by the creator of the game (here WotC), which is supposed to be tested, properly edited and more or less balanced; homebrew is written by anyone: that doesn't mean it's lower quality or unbalanced, but there's less of a guarantee; so most GM will usually allow official content and forbid homebrew
I used to be a part of that site before splitting off to create another dungeons and dragons wiki. The owner of it doesn't want to change anything, hence why we split off.
I have enjoyed D&D wiki before, and I admit that I have also missed the huge banner. Usually, I will read a page, get halfway down to the place where the rules get crazy, and then scroll up to the top to check if it's a homebrew. The banner is completely invisible!
Italics is a poor choice for the text, feels like it takes more mental energy to read so it's easier to gloss over.
The color scheme doesn't seem to match the rest of the website, so it's easier to write off as an ad or to just ignore it out of disgust.
The main text on the left, "Homebrew Page", doesn't necessarily register as synonymous with "Unofficial" to me, so even if someone gives it a passing glance they might just assume it's a specific version of D&D and therefore official. I'm not deep in the community though, so most players may already understand what it means.
Yeah “homebrew” is a pretty well-known term within the community to mean non-official.
Interestingly, DandDWiki is somewhat notorious for being less than accurate in many articles, I wonder how much of that reputation is potentially attributable to this phenomenon of mixing up homebrew and official content.
I deal with something similar in a bit of software I use. If I click on an appointment, I can then click on the patient name to see the patient record or the client name to see the client info. At some point someone thought they should make the patient name more prominent, so they put it in a larger font, bold, all caps with extra spacing between the characters, and now I never see it and end up accidentally clicking the client's name.
"If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else’s Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there." - the incomparable Douglas Adams
Should have done a clear banner, with maybe a red or yellow border, and an icon. Preferably inside the content area, just like Wikipedia does on disputed articles or current events.
His banner has stylized fonts, a photo as a background, and as such looks like an ad or something decorative.
Exactly this, the infobox is common to effectively every wiki for purposes exactly like this one. They’re using mediawiki as their engine so they already have the support baked in.
They used to have one on every page, but the creator of the website (for some reason I was never able to figure out) hated how it contained authorship information so he removed it from every page.
My own wiki puts the "this is homebrew" information in said infobox, and has never received a single complaint about people mixing up homebrew and official content.
Reading the first parts, I thought "oh, he's just pissed that he has to do something actually smart to get people to notice" like a childish refusal to ignore the obvious.. Nobody has looked at a banner since the late 90s.
It's surprising and interesting that he didn't understand it himself, after reading his own post, it should have clicked.
The first thing I saw when I visited the stackexchange link in this post, was a huge banner at the top of the page, which really confused me as it led me to think that this post was a clever and sarcastic meta-joke of some kind.
Because the color contrast of the site makes that banner shrink into the softer background. The sharp color scheme of black with bright pink combined with the font is so garish my eyes divert from it. I also think putting that text off to the far upper right on a page designed for left to right, top to bottom English readers means that text is in no mans land. On a wide screen readers eyes will move to the left and down to navigate.
It feels that your attempt to make the banner "pop" had an opposite effect. You need to completely rethink the design of the banner in terms of color, placement, and text.
One of the comments on an answer complete with a nice redesigned mock goes: This is really good, but I'd drop the word "PAGE" that isn't adding anything and have it just say "HOMEBREW" to focus on the detail that matters.
I think it is because it looks too much like an Ad. It is so different than the surrounding content that I assume it is not part of the pages design and thus ignore it.
This is a variant of an XY Problem. The original question was, to paraphrase, why the website sucks. One answer given was that the site (a game wiki) had too much unofficial content compared to official content. Now the question becomes why an official/unofficial annotation on each page isn't working.
I don't play the game, and until today I have never visited the site. But I doubt that the solution being discussed will have any material effect on the original problem.
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[ 0.54 ms ] story [ 449 ms ] threadI think more than ignoring banners, we've become really good at just focusing at the content div. A bit like the Reader Mode in your browser.
I like the suggestions that recommend slightly modifying the rest of the pages theme and adding text to the page title.
That was, of course, until they banned psychic violence in the "Goddamn, get out of my brain" amendment in the late 21st century.
And traded notes with other sellers.
Most of the middle ages probably wasn't that bad, but the civilization-destroying plague destroyed civilization, and Renaissance-era propagandists exploited the living memory of the plague to make themselves look better.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6065434
Usually accompanied by large in-corridor vendor displays which further obstructed already-crowded walkways.
I stopped going to malls.
High-street shopping districts still don't affect me to the same viscerally-negative degree. Even those which seem to be fairly consciously emulating and attempting to create a mall-like atmosphere. There's something about the open-air nature, and the fact that sounds attenuate rather than echoing off hard surfaces from all sides.
----------
As the struggle for survival had escalated over the past few millennia, the human brain had developed a miraculous defense mechanism: the psychic immune system. Simply said, the psychic immune system regulated the production of thoughts and emotions to a sustainable level. But with the new law came a new synthetic freedom to attack the underlying problem of an economy based on coercive consumption. Marketers and advertisers, wielding their mental weaponry, had been on the offensive, attacking minds of the world's citizens unabated. Psychic immune systems, no matter how strong, were helpless against the onslaught. Now that the psychic immune system had been weakened, everyone was a potential target for propaganda and mind control. In the following chaos, advertising mutated into a new form. The ban on psychic violence was not comprehensive, and included exemptions for images used in the furtherance of scientific, educational and artistic works. To survive, the advertisers had to learn to speak the language of art. They were the only ones left with the knowledge to speak it.
I'm impressed by the AI. It's actually what would happen if this law was introduced. There would be exceptions, and the advertisers would find ways to exploit them.
"So that's what things would be like if I'd invented the fing-longer"
I hope we don't have to wait that long :/
I'd like to have an eye tracking study done on my viewing because the brain has a separate center that controls direction of gaze that is not part of the visual cortex that processes sight. With a normal human subject looking at a normal scene, an eye-tracking study will reveal in a few seconds the outlines of everything in the scene, trees, doors, windows, people, etc. because the eye tracks the interesting parts and edges.
Also relevant is the fact that only a tiny section at the center of the field of vision is actually in any kind of focus - you cannot read anything resembling normal sized type with your peripheral vision.
There's also the phenomenon of 'blind sight' where with people who are cortically blind, i.e., their eyes and optic nerves work, but their visual cortex doesn't (e.g., due to head injury to that part of the brain) When shows a panel of vertical or horizontal stripes in a forced choice test (i.e., they can answer "vertical" or "horizontal" but not "I don't know"), they answer correctly at rates much higher than chance (iirc from courses a decades ago, ~70%). It was thought that they might be unconsciously extracting the H/V information from the area that still controlled the gaze direction.
I'm wondering how many of us have 'ad-blindness' that isn't just filtering our visual input, but is actually guiding our gaze away from intrusive content so we literally never see it because the focal area never rests on it.
Anyone more up to date on neuroscience have any info?
Yes, filtering inputs is important and happens at every level of the sensory, nervous, and brain systems. I'm describing two substantially different levels of filtering and the dancing gorilla test isn't the one I'm focused on here, as it's the high-level attention filtering, as the gorilla is surely not filtered out by the subconscious eye motions (i.e., never seen), but filtered out by the higher-level attention mechanisms. I expect that much ad-blindness is indeed these high-level mechanisms.
What I'm wondering is if after decades of avoidance training, the separate gaze-orientation center (I forget it's proper name right now) which is subconscious and separate from the visual cortex, is trained enough to minimize the eye's gaze in the annoying areas such that the focus point never lands on them and they never get the opportunity to be read (and ignored by the higher level mechanisms). Eye tracking studies using actual eye tracks and not merely heatmaps would tell us the difference - if the tracks still follow the edges, bright spots, etc. into the adverts, then all the 'blindness' is cortical, but if the eye tracks avoid the ad zones, it's been trained down to a lower level.
Which is 100% an intentional dark pattern designed to maximize profits for the ad economy by tricking you into looking at something you don't want to look at. If users liked ads and found them useful, their brains wouldn't automatically learn to tune them out. On the contrary, if ads were so valuable to users, it would be a plus to make it easier to see them!
I mean, search engines throw an absolutely enormous amount of computational power at "organically" discovering, classifying, indexing, and searching the entire internet for the most relevant and useful results, and then the dollar machine instantly demotes them below paid placement. The cognitive dissonance is astounding.
I wouldn’t be so sure it’s at no cost, it seems possible that parsing/blocking a lot of that stuff causes some kind of mental/sensory strain or fatigue.
(and the fact that I remember it was chrome... ugh)
I recently emailed a museum to ask about tours since they didn't have any information on their website. They replied with links to all the information on their website, that was in literal plain sight, but that I totally and completely missed because my brain just straight adblocked them. I almost had to force myself to "see" them. They just so closely matched that ad spam you see at the bottom of news sites and blogs that I'd just keep skimming past them.
Am I wrong on this? Honestly not so sure.
Even non-advertising elements such as social-media icons, related articles lists, sidebars, and the like. The more the display is limited to simply the text I intend to read, the less stress and distraction I feel.
Virtually all studies of multitasking show that multitaskers both overestimate their abilities and their performance is negatively affected by the attempt.
Ignoring intrusions is a task.
I don't know how many things go unpurchased because of this.
Ironically, worse than the deluge of advertising described in this comment is the attempted redefinition of language for political agendas as exemplified in this comment.
Both are a form of psychic warfare - except that while I have seen non-intrusive and useful forms of advertising (i.e. product discovery, not trying to brainwash me into believing that Coca-Cola isn't unhealthy), I have never seen a non-malicious instance of this kind of hostile language redefinition.
par for the course, and embedded in all political discourse.
Recently we started calling anyone proposing higher taxes a socialist, which indicates total illiteracy, as it has no bearing on centrally planned economy
Laws that stop business defrauding customers are called 'consumer protection' and 'red tape', but when we protect business from individuals it's called being tought on crime.
When you make an extra copy of a song, you commit intellectual property theft, and the state can prosecute you for free and put you in jail, and you are a criminal.
When a company does not provide warranty you paid for, its called a business dispute and you have to hire your own lawyer.
Feel free to wax florid and metaphorical.
Don't forget "piracy"--associating copying information with looting a ship and killing everyone on board. I'd love to see an end to this ridiculous modern usage of this word.
This too is ironically it's own redefinition because originally (and still to many socialists today) socialism means workers' ownership of the means of the production, which undemocratic centrally planning states never were and never could be.
Anarcho-socialism rejects statism (totally agreeable) but doesn't offer a credible alternative. That's why common people don't even think about anarchy when you talk about socialism.
In a centrally planned socialist economy, the people in power can steal resources from the workers (like all the governments of the world do nowadays) and exercise power.
In anarcho socialism the power would be decentralised and distributed among democratic groups of workers. Why would the workers even bother to take all these decisions? They're not gaining power (or very little, due to the rightful decentralised nature of power in anarchy) nor currency.
The assumption is that workers are perfect human beings and don't need incentives do to the right thing, which is a pipe dream.
Taxes have nothing to do with socialism and have existed in Feudalism, in ancient Egypt and in every 'capitalist' state. Just because you collected money, does not mean you need to centrally plan how to spend it - carbon dividend would tax things that produce CO2, and distribute it equally to all citizen. Someone who produces no CO2 would get paid, and someone who produces the average amount would see no change.
I have no problem with central planning being associated, it was a key feature of socialist states. But Central planning means government sets prices on Salami, like USSR did, and I never came across anyone in the West proposing that.
At most someone advocates for some infrastructure, and they get called a socialist. But then, why does no capitalism society privatise the police, the army, the navy, the judges that sit in court, the federal reserve, the public library and the patent office?
If the accuser does advocates for privatising them, the rest of society will call him a nutcase and move on with their lives.
So he must instead make up excuses, of various levels of absurdity, for why free market can't be trusted with managing elementary building blocks of society here, but it's socialist to suggest government should step in over there.
The only solution is to Stop accusing everyone of being a socialist in disguise and learn from history and other countries: we have tried societies without government-managed police and courtsm, the results were terrible. We have tried private prisons, and government-managed consumer goods, also terrible.
But ya, "psychic violence" hits the nail on the head nicely.
The poster was clearly writing a jocular, one-sentence sci-fi story to express how they felt violated by the constant vieing for their attention. That's why it's _set in the future_ and regarding a _fictional constitutional amendment_. Making up words is a genre trope of sci-fi.
The second is that languages just change and people make up words. This isn't unique to the political arena and isn't necessarily malicious. Every term you have ever used exists because someone needed it, didn't have it, and so they made it up. You'll need to actually argue that introducing a term is harmful or deceptive in the particular instance that it happens.
This is pearl-clutching to portray people you disagree with as being shrill and ridiculous and not worth listening to. It's a bad faith tactic which you should desist from.
ETA: Because I seem to be earlier in the sort order, I want to point out that there is a much more important third reason is a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016181
It's like how the people who talked about safe spaces and triggering being dumb were triggered by every single commercial, tv show, movie, news report, and passing conversation and begging for the stuff that triggered them to be removed.
"Go woke, go broke" is something said by people who are threatening to boycott businesses because of their triggering content.
An example of a notification style that's more likely to be noticed: https://carbondesignsystem.com/components/notification/usage...
And, anyway what is the real distinction between official and homebrew? Is that like Organic and Homemade in a supermarket? A distinction that is often without a meaningful difference.
Well, official is the material written by the creator of the game (here WotC), which is supposed to be tested, properly edited and more or less balanced; homebrew is written by anyone: that doesn't mean it's lower quality or unbalanced, but there's less of a guarantee; so most GM will usually allow official content and forbid homebrew
I went to the site linked in the post, and that banner is still like that o_0
https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page
The color scheme doesn't seem to match the rest of the website, so it's easier to write off as an ad or to just ignore it out of disgust.
The main text on the left, "Homebrew Page", doesn't necessarily register as synonymous with "Unofficial" to me, so even if someone gives it a passing glance they might just assume it's a specific version of D&D and therefore official. I'm not deep in the community though, so most players may already understand what it means.
Interestingly, DandDWiki is somewhat notorious for being less than accurate in many articles, I wonder how much of that reputation is potentially attributable to this phenomenon of mixing up homebrew and official content.
His banner has stylized fonts, a photo as a background, and as such looks like an ad or something decorative.
My own wiki puts the "this is homebrew" information in said infobox, and has never received a single complaint about people mixing up homebrew and official content.
It's surprising and interesting that he didn't understand it himself, after reading his own post, it should have clicked.
It feels that your attempt to make the banner "pop" had an opposite effect. You need to completely rethink the design of the banner in terms of color, placement, and text.
One of the comments on an answer complete with a nice redesigned mock goes: This is really good, but I'd drop the word "PAGE" that isn't adding anything and have it just say "HOMEBREW" to focus on the detail that matters.
Reminded me of Just remove the duck (2013), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9137736
I don't play the game, and until today I have never visited the site. But I doubt that the solution being discussed will have any material effect on the original problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem