I specifically avoid products i see ads for, cause the product can't be that great if it needs obnoxious advertisements, so the effect is more than subconscious.
Now, i don't see many ads cause i block all of them where i can and roadside advertisements are not allowed here in Germany, but even if i was, i am of the opinion that the effect of this subliminal manipulation is severely overstated by the people selling ad space.
I think the idea that i would buy something just because a company writes their name everywhere is ridiculous and as far as i know studies show that the effect on buying decisions is basically not measurable. I think the entire value in advertisements is just more people in general knowing of a brand.
fwiw, while I can mention firestone, bf goodrich, more michelin, what I actually did on my last tires is drive to the tire shop and go whatever les schwab sells in-house. Promotion and distribution need not be confined to the internet. I saw the tire shop while driving, so I guess you could point out they have a business sign.
That's missing the point, or supporting it.
That is brand recognition/knowledge and not a factor in decision making. Knowing three tire brands doesn't tell you if i would buy any of them because of their ads. Personally i never bought tires, mine just are whatever "Mercedes Original" branded ones the car comes with. If i had the need to buy new ones i would get some recommendations. I would not go "I'll buy X because i saw the name a few times".
It's hard to think of any buying decisions i make where ads could matter. When i buy a phone i decide based on features with the highest priority being that it runs GrapheneOS. When i go shopping for clothes i don't look at the brands at all, and i avoid any pieces with visible branding on it. I can't think of a point in my live where i picked some product because i saw it or the brand in an ad. The subconscious part is so hard to measure and disprove but it is just as hard to prove it works as advertised.
Ads might make you remember a name, but i am questioning how much that affects my buying decisions, especially when it makes me trust the brand less when they have to fill every ad slot for people to even talk about them.
The gambling ads have a conscious effect for me: I think “what a terrible world this portrays, I’m glad I don’t gamble”. For me, being reminded of gambling is just a reminder of the fact that I don’t like gambling. The same is true of some other ads too, they mostly serve to remind me that I define my personality in opposition to these things.
However, I have to presume that the effect is different for at least some other people.
exactly. all of these people complaining are using it wrong. you cant just expect a layer of abstraction to perfectly fix all the layers below it! plus, open router does a great job of handling a lot of the provider problems, but it literally cannot fix the output of the provider
Isn't this a failure by the company to recognize free trial abuse sooner? and to not close the loophole immediately seems like even more of a weak behavior. Calling them out but not taking decisive action beyond claiming that they are acting immorally ultimately accomplishes nothing. Businesses are not beholden to your ideas about what is nice and fair, but whatever the rules and constraints are to your system. if you keep a practice like this that allows free trial abuse forever, why would they spend money?
You're absolutely right that businesses act within whatever constraints exist — and yes, we were a bit naive. We assumed that if someone had a fully functional, free, open source version available (well-documented and easy to install), nobody sane would go out of their way to abuse the trial system instead.
To be clear, it’s not just trial abuse — it’s actively ignoring the better, freer option in favor of repeatedly faking evaluations just to get the “easy mode.”
We’ll definitely tighten things up going forward. But in nearly a decade of doing this, they're the only ones to push it to this scale. So yeah, they've earned a spot in our open source hall of shame
Ignoring an OSS option is not the crux of the issue, it only adds more stupid to the cake. They don't deserve a place on the OSS hall of shame, but on the list of shysters and fraudsters.
A company is exploiting your free-trial offer, defrauding your project of resources even if it is only a buck and a half. Why are you sending them money? Just shut them down. Unless you have some really unfortunate wording in your TOS, there is nothing they can do. On Monday, send an e-mail to all accounts associated with $COMPANY and tell them in clear terms that you are going to terminate their free-trials COB EOW. Leave a special contact number to negotiate fees, wait for your phone to ring.
Yes. Your pain point is the level of support you are giving on good faith to these charlatans. Maybe add a clause to your license that you reserve the right to limit the amount of technical assistance on the free download. Outside of that, if I understand this matter correctly, most of your customers are honest and you’re willing to write off this one company in the interest of keeping your own corporate sanity.
Agreed. I would hellban their entire company permanently, and devote time and effort to write tooling to catch future signup attempts. This is utterly despicable.
Reading is an act of guessing. I guessed that if the moon had recently been impacted that hard we would be hearing about it from more than CNN, and likely would have known about it in advance. I don't feel as though I have been mislead.
Funnily enough I went to the article because I guessed that it would have literally formed overnight by some surface movement originating from within the moon not some external cause.
And I believe my guess is as good as yours except in hindsight of course.
I thought it was quite good, although maybe it should have been a series rather than a single book. That might have given Stephenson time to flesh out the end, which felt a bit rushed.
English needs a better term for this field. I understand that Astrology is already taken, but astro- (stars) geo- (earth) logy (study) is just wrong.
Maybe Exolithology? Or Lunology, if these processes are unique to smaller bodies. Actually, our moon does have a differentiated core (I think the only one in the solar system) so per that argument we're a double planet (also the fact that the moon never has retrograde motion relative to the sun, another unique feature of our moon in the solar system) and thus just Geology is a proper enough name.
No one said they were "tricked" by the article, only that the found the headline to be misleading which is entirely fair because it is a clear example of clickbait.
Misleading? Or just misintepretable? Misleading implies the author tries to lead you to a wrong conclusion. The article is very clear about what it really means.
I immediately read the headline as "it happened in a time span of 10 minutes probably a gazillion years ago". So in any case, it's not misleading to everyone, and therefore certainly not "extremely misleading".
> Misleading implies the author tries to lead you to a wrong conclusion.
Why on earth would anyone assume that this clickbait title wasn't intended to be clickbait? What history of non-clickbait headlines would make anyone assume good faith on the part of CNN here?
If you have a specification for a program saying "input: variables x and y, output: z holds x+y", you would probably be annoyed if someone coded "x=0; y=0; z=0", though.
Just playing devil's advocate, I think the headline is not bad (could be less ambiguous, but sacrificing brevity)
This "illogical" double negative shows how English is not at all like algebra. English is not a set of formal rules - there is no formal authority on the language. The rules that exist are derived from how English is commonly used - descriptive rather than prescriptive. This is why dictionaries are constantly adding new (sometimes annoying) words, and the Chicago Manual of Style is on its 18th version. For example, I was taught that "they" could never describe a singular person, and one should assume "he", "she" or "the suspect". Not so anymore [1]. The language, its constructs, and implicit rules are always changing, regardless (and irregardless[2]) of how you criticize those that speak it.
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