What's your pet peeve in RL?

[cidbahamut]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

Welcome to the club house. There's milk and cookies in the kitchen, feel free to help yourself.

[Ketaru]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

What? You mean this isn't a wagon? Pulled by sassy rainbow unicorns or chocobos?

[Yygdrasil]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

For clarity: Why sassy?

[Ketaru]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

Why not?!

[Taskmage]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

When was the last time you met a demure rainbow unicorn?

[Raydeus]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

Unicorns? Freaking war Chocobos in full armor or don't bother.

[Armando]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

When was the last time you met a demure rainbow unicorn?

Do Rainicorns count?

[DakAttack]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

The pic in your signature answers all the questions you ask.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

Political attack ads where they don't seem terribly appropriate. Actually, we should just ban them from the internet and keep that stupid shit to TV.

I was looking up the meaning of a particular name, which tends to land you on one of those baby-naming sites. First ad to come up was "Mitt Romney wants to overturn Roe Vs. Wade: Click here to learn more." Given the nature of the site in question - you're really throwing the highly-cliched Roe v. Wade on it? An expecting mother goes to the site looking for ideas to name her child and ABORTION is now thrown her face. Yeah, totally appropriate.

What other extremely divisive issues can would juxtaposition onto a site of more casual interest?

It actually reminds me of the time my mother once told me she had considered abortion while carrying me, but she was glad she didn't. Gee, Mom, thanks of not keeping that one to yourself. I mean, sure, this was a personal experience and she was trying to communicate her stance on an issue... but no, its just something you don't stay to your kid. its like your boss saying, "I was actually thinking of you for lay-offs, but I'm glad I kept you around!"

[Feba]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

And collectively, the forum muttered "dammit".

Also, you do realize that context based ads are context based, right? That means it sees "baby baby baby", and a computer thinks "you know, someone thinking about a new baby this much might be thinking about how not to have a new baby". Based in context, not appropriate for context-- there are very seldom human reviews of things like this. The proper course of action is to report it to the website, so they can discuss with their ad provider which ads they wish to block or remove from rotation.

[cidbahamut]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

I thought the proper course of action was to just use adblock.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

Also, you do realize that context based ads are context based, right? That means it sees "baby baby baby", and a computer thinks "you know, someone thinking about a new baby this much might be thinking about how not to have a new baby". Based in context, not appropriate for context-- there are very seldom human reviews of things like this. The proper course of action is to report it to the website, so they can discuss with their ad provider which ads they wish to block or remove from rotation.

I'm well aware of adsense and things of that nature. Funny how if I don't clear my cookies ads from sites I recently visited start popping up on sites I commonly visit!

I think the real issue here would be the context for political attack ads is just a touch too wide. They cast a really wide net on keywords and domain names wheras even the biggest corporations have a sense of dignity in that regard. I could be here all day tweaking adsense settings or telling web sites to fix their own sense, but its really like pulling weeds.

So, I'm going to complain about the pet peeve and you're going to...



I could install adblockers, but then I'm just punishing the sites I like. Again, if I just spent time blocking ads, they'd find new ones with new domains, associations and keywords. It has become an even bigger thing since the last election.

[Armando]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

I could install adblockers, but then I'm just punishing the sites I like.

You can whitelist them quite easily. Some are even smart enough to replace a blocked ad with a polite request that you stop blocking them.

[Taskmage]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

I could install adblockers, but then I'm just punishing the sites I like.

Adblock Plus can be disabled on a per-site basis, if you feel the advertising is appropriate and done tastefully, if skipping ads is interfering with the content, or if you just support a site enough that you're willing to be inconvenienced to rack up impressions for them.

Personally I think of advertising as a pollution, and I don't accept it as a necessary evil of doing business in media, so I subvert it everywhere I can, even on sites I otherwise support. If enough people refuse to let the advertising engine work, sites will be incentivised to find other, less odious ways to monetize, like Penny Arcade's Kickstarter project. Yes, I realize that specific model wouldn't work for most businesses, but it's the kind of innovation more people should be doing.

[Armando]

Re: What's your pet peeve in RL?

Coding Horror has a great article on the subject of responsible advertising: Coding Horror: How To Advertise on Your Blog Without (Completely) Selling Out

But Stuart Brown's piece on balancing AdSense with user experience offers the best advice I've seen so far:
1. Use the AdSense heat map to judiciously select one or two places for ads, rather than blasting them across your page.
2. As a courtesy, turn off ads for Digg, Reddit, and other popular referring URLs. This audience doesn't appreciate ads, and they're the least likely to click them anyway.
3. Reward frequent readers by keeping your new content free of ads. Use time-delayed ads that only display on articles after they've aged for a week.
4. Always offer full content in your RSS feed. Don't force people to click through to your site and see your advertisements.

He's also donating a large chunk of his ad revenue to open source projects. Incidentally, #4 is one of the reasons Penny Arcade is doing the Kickstarter.