There hasn’t been an insignificant number of times I’ve found out about a new product or event I’m interested in, a sale for something I already want, or something like that through advertising.

It’s rare as a proportion, but it definitely does happen.

I believe that ads are just yet another tragedy of the commons type of thing, where bad actors not only ruin it for everyone, but also convert good actors to being bad actors.

I’d say there’s three tiers:

• Ads showing you things you actually want or need, and providing you with new information.
  • These are going to have high CPMs, so you don’t need many per page, and having more per page will decrease their value, but kind of require tracking to ensure their relevance.
• Ads showing you things you might not want or need, but might cobsider buying, or information that isn’t immediately relevant.
  • This is the baseline for reasonable quality, untargeted ads, and CPMs for these are going to be fairly low, but much higher if you click on them
• Ads promoting scams, malware, and things you neither want nor need.
  • In this case, the CPMs will be virtually zero, so the site is forced to cram as many on the page as they can. They’re also encouraged to get you to click by mistake.
  • This makes people block ads or trackers, reducing the number of ads in the first category and forcing more sites to adopt these patterns.

It’s kind of sad that it’s going this way (and has been for a while) but I guess it’s going to end up with just a return to paying for media with money rather than ads.

I suspect it was intentional - afaik at least in English speaking countries, live event subtitles for a foreign language are either just in that language, or [speaks in ...]. It’s more for pre-recorded shows, and even then baked into the video feed rather than the subtitle track, that you get subtitles.

I feel like this is a labels issue though… Lots of people don’t want to go “vegan” or “vegetarian” because of a small group of vegans, but if you were to give them a meal without announcing it was vegan they’d probably enjoy it.

Same to an extent for me: I could never give up dairy because I love milk, cheese and butter too much, but I do eat (asian style) vegetarian meals multiple times a week and have at most one meat meal per day, instead of at every meal, and I have a mindset that meat is nice but not that you can’t make other nice dishes with mushrooms, tofu, cheese, etc. - you just have to make different things.

Reframing it as “look at these nice things you can have” seems a lot more accessible than telling people they shouldn’t eat meat, or they should eat less meat, or that the other proteins are just a substitute for meat, which makes it seem like you’re missing out on something.