I actively/mentally block products I see in ads now. For example, when I use Amazon's terrible search feature, I'll make a mental note of which listings are "sponsored" and make sure NOT to buy them. Ever, if possible.

When I see ads for things on YouTube, I automatically assume it's a scam... Because it almost always is!

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Vaushite 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The YouTube sponsor situation is actually crazy, I think 100% of them have turned out to be either scams or just very overpriced. Even ones that sounded reasonable, like Ground News, and VPNs.

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Guid_NewGuid 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's why I don't get viewers getting angry with a creator for taking a specific sponsor. YouTube sponsorships are basically an advisory not to buy a product. It's like an anti-advert in a sense. Something appears in a sponsorship, that thing is definitely bad even if we don't know why yet.

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busymom0 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What happened with ground news?

	▲	Vaushite 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Ground News presents you a "balanced" news diet by presenting you with two sides that are implied to be equally valid. Except one of the sides is just (relatively accurate) plain old news and the other side largely consists of institutions who publish a lot of nonsense and paid Ground News to be there, or have ownership in common with Ground News. Their target audience is people who were mostly consuming the first group before (not a single Ground News ad was ever run to an audience aligned with the second group) and the purpose is to make them gradually accept the second group as equals to the first group. Also it doesn't actually show you the news. It just shows you links to news sites that you need to be separately subscribed to if you want to read them, so in that sense you're just not getting the product you probably thought you were getting (access to balanced news), so it's a double scam. There's video essays about this on YouTube of course since that's where Ground News was mainly advertised.
	▲	mrguyorama 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What could possibly go wrong with a (I think) VC funded news aggregator that becomes your authority on what "Right" vs "Left" thought is and how to interpret a bunch of news without actually reading any of it? Where could that possibly end up causing problems?