Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
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The average American does not give a single shit about protecting minority or women’s rights, from my lived experience. Not unless it affects them directly.
Both can be true. This probably makes more sense in your head.
Fuck ALL advertisements. Yes, even “unobtrusive” ones, especially yours. If I want your shit, I will find you. If I appreciate your shit, I’ll pay you for your time. If you want to connect, I’m all ears. Otherwise, fuck off capitalists, fuck off advertisers, and fuck off useful idiots who want to waste my finite lifespan in this miserable universe showing me ads.
An accurate and informative presentation of a product someone might be interested in could be considered an ad. For example, Coca-Cola written in drones across the sky isn’t an ad. It’s actually a target for a drone jammer.
I literally just came from another post that was talking about this.
Basically what happened to the Internet as a whole.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of products that most people don’t even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I’ve been doing things the hard way for so long.
OTOH, fuck all the advertisers who use shady tactics to make sales, and especially fuck all the people who pray on the naivety of others to steal their money. I was just showing a customer an email I got the other day stating her domain hosting was past due and required immediate payment, and she asked how I knew it was a scam. Uh, hello, because —I— am hosting your domain and website (and this is exactly why I share this kind of stuff with people, to make them think before they blindly write a check).
Unfortunately there’s a lot of products that most people don’t even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I’ve been doing things the hard way for so long.
For sure. I’m not against promotion in the large, but the constant and intrusive advertisements within other tasks, such as web ads that take up valuable screen real estate, or TV/YouTube commercials that keep me from the programs I want to watch.
Like my username is literally PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S. I have no problem getting PM’ed or emailed stuff. For example, I’m subscribed to a number of mailing lists from sites I ordered from. Guitar Center can send me all the emails they want [1], sell me all the crap they want, because I can opt out at any time, and I have a work email so I can put them aside for later.
[1] To the specific email I gave them, which I do check.
I would argue that if there’s a product that nobody knows exist that’s not necessarily because we need to allow constant intrusive ads, and more indicative that people don’t actually need the product.
I want to say that in any given day, 60% of the ads I see are from big, well known companies who don’t need me to see them to know they exist. Shit like Liberty Mutual (I swear I see more of their ads than anyone else and THEY ARE ALREADY MY INSURANCE PROVIDER), Coke, Pepsi, etc. 39.9% of the remaining 40% are advertisements for shit that I just don’t care about. I don’t care about the newest tech toys. I don’t care about the newest car mods, or random shit I can put on my desk, or stupid extra kitchen gadgets. Fully 40% of the ads I see are trying to convince me that I should buy a product that I straight up don’t need because the ad looked cool. Why should those ads be allowed to exist? Why should I be constantly bombarded with ads for services that I either already know plenty about or for things that are trying to manufacture a reason for their existence?
Only about 0.5% of the ads I see are actually for things I did know know about and that seem useful to me, or like something I would like. Probably even less than that, I’m drunk rn and estimating.
I keep throwing away ads from Comcast trying to sell me on the virtues of their business internet packages. Guys, I left you because your lame-ass shit was expensive as hell, slow as hell, and you couldn’t even be counted on to meet a single appointment in 6 months to bury your damn line you left laying across my yard.
I agree with you, there’s a lot of companies that just need to be silenced. You’re allowed to send me ONE ad, and you better make it good because I don’t ever want to hear from you again.
Marketing is only manipulation. It wants to manipulate me into doing something I otherwise wouldn’t have.
Since I don’t know how well their manipulation works, my only option is to only buy things that I have never seen an ad for.
To make sure I can still buy anything at all, I block/avoid ads where I can.
You’re insane but I respect it
I’m down voting you because I agree lol
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but without ads get ready to start paying for things. You go to a news website, sorry you need to login and hand over your credit card to access anything. Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can’t sell you data to advertisers anymore.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.
And who is to be blamed for setting up this system ?
I brought this up the last time I talked about this, but to be clear, if we must choose between advertisements and paywall, then we should choose advertisements as the lesser evil. However, we must never accept the fallacy that advertising or paywalls are the only possible choices! More generally, we must never accept the fallacy that a market is the only acceptable way to distribute goods, a corollary of which is the idea that any acceptable solution needs to compete on equal terms with existing products in a market.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.
Well the first part at least would be a welcome change. The issue in my view is the very fact that poor people are treated as second-class citizens in information access or any other field of endeavor.
Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can’t sell you data to advertisers anymore.
I very genuinely want those sites to fucking die so I don’t have to coexist in a world where they dominate the internet. I would be literally thrilled to join a group of like-minded people who have to reimplement the conveniences of the modern web from scratch for free.
Why on earth is a paywall an evil and worse than ads? This idea that everything on the Internet needs to be free-as-in-beer is the toxicity that has resulted in our entire world corrupted with ads. A News organization needs money to pay journalists and to send them to where news is happening. A video service like YouTube needs to pay for massive amounts of storage and servers. If you want quality professional content, and not just fake blogging thinly disguising advertising, you need to pay writers.
The alternative is that is it all corrupted with ads, or by the “rich uncle” of the day like a musk or a zuckerberg or whatever with an ulterior motive.
If you want the provider of a service or product to be beholden and at all responsive to you, as a user, rather than someone else, you need to be a customer, a paying customer. That’s your only real leverage. If someone else is the real source of their revenue stream then their every act is geared to please them and not you. That’s what we have now.
If you want to socialize it all instead, like a PBS, I’m fine with that, but good luck.
Still end of the day the server bill has got to be paid.
YES this. We should start a community. I hate advertising, absolutely hate it, and do everything I can to avoid it. Pihole ✅, YouTube premium ✅, sponsorblock ✅, Firefox ✅, ublock origin ✅.
What else am I missing, I want it all blocked!
I’m pretty sure ads don’t work on me. People tell me ‘ackshually they do, you just don’t notice.’ Nah, mate. They don’t. They just annoy me.
If I want your shit, I will find you. If I appreciate your shit, I’ll pay you for your time.
This literally won’t happen because you will never find my content without ads.
… what’s your content? If you’re not comfortable posting it, them what type of media is it? Not to rub it in, but getting your content from you, your fans, or someone who contacts me currently is the only way I will ever get your content, as I ruthlessly block advertising in every aspect of my life.
To be clear, I’m not against self promotion. For example, if you went into a video game forum and posted links to your game, that’s not advertising in my view. More importantly, I would probably actually be interested in a new video game by you if I were browsing a video game forum. Hell, if you randomly PM’ed it to me or emailed it, that would be fine too.
Independent repair/handyman business pays google to place ads in their results when you search for relevant terms. In the past this was done through flyers & newspapers & billboards and such. If the business made absolutely no effort to advertise their service, then you would never be able to find them when you’re looking for that service, except for through word of mouth (which is arguably a form of advertising in itself.)
Don’t get me wrong, I hate ads too, and they’ve become far too prevalent in popular media. But they exist for a reason.
Edit: we also should have the right to block and deny ads as we wish. And at the same time, advertisers should have the right to exist. Google’s recent DRM and crackdown on adblockers should be met with forceful government intervention, in an ideal world, due to their debatable monopoly over their sector.
I make games and stuff. Let me tell you, it’s pretty hard to get noticed on the internet. There comes a point where whatever you’re selling will be popular enough in a closed circle that it spreads through word of mouth but before that you need to get an audience. That means some shameless advertising in social media and maybe buying some ad spaces. If you don’t get that momentum whatever content you’re making might be dead on arrival. A lot of people and companies making ads don’t actually like annoying others with them, but it’s really hard to get anyone’s attention now that there’s like a billion new things releasing every day.
That means some shameless advertising in social media and maybe buying some ad spaces.
I’d have no problem if you just spammed my inbox or all of my communities. I’m all for self-promotion or even just promoting stuff you like. I don’t get adverts anymore, but there have been so many times where I got a negative impression of something I later found out was cool because it was advertised to me first.
I have no problem with people being annoying in my inbox or trying to promote themselves. What I do have a problem with is the constant stream of undiluted, intrusive bullshit being sold to me since the day I was born. If I saw your game in a web ad that’s keeping me from the content I actually wanted to see, I would absolutely not be interested in it; if you or a fan blindly spammed it into my inbox 69 times in a row, I would definitely check it out.
Are there people who genuinely enjoy ads?
Are there a nontrivial number of people who genuinely enjoy ads?
Maybe? My parents are boomers and they watch cable TV with ads. I’ve told them a few dozen times that they don’t need to watch them, that they could mute them or watch elsewhere, but they don’t care. My grandmother also watches the ads when she watches TV. Oh well…
My girlfriend does enjoy some ads. And she is very susceptible to them as well.
I went to Cuba and i leaned that not all advertisements are capitalist.
not unpopular!
You really should be directing your angst at the bastards who respond to advertising. If it weren’t for them, there would be no advertising at all because it would be completely unfeasible. Nobody would be willing to pay for something that has no return on investment.
Disagree. Ad campaigns are made the way they are because marketing people are abusing how our brain works naturally. Some people have managed to build defenses for it, but most people simply lack the ability. That’s like blaming people on wheelchair that they can’t walk.
Exactly! I can’t even stand physical ads like billboards because the concept of reserving land for manipulating every passing person into buying something they don’t need is ridiculously perverse to me. Ads are an attack against my psyche and I will do everything I can to avoid them.
When I want to invest in a better product or look for something that solves my wants or needs, I research my options. I will never make my decision based on an obvious ad because they are intrinsically deceitful.
The average person shouldn’t be allowed to drive. It’s extremely dangerous and most people are desensitized to it and absolutely don’t take the natural responsibility towards others that comes with having the ability to kill someone with a finger twitch (or a slight lapse in attention) seriously enough. I don’t think it would be allowed if it was just invented this year.
Too many places let you drive if you do the happy path stuff right: stopping at a stop sign, changing lanes safely, etc. But the most important time of your driving is when you’re about to hit a semitruck and you need to get your car out of the way, and there is no training material for this at all. People often panic and slam the brakes and aggressively turn the wheel, which is a perfect setup for understeer and losing control of your car. They are literally getting in a situation where they are about to die and they choose to greatly increase their risk due to negligence.
It’s cheaper to run simulators than purchase cars and hire trainers. Get em in nasty situations and teach them how to get out of it. For real, if mom and dad can’t evade sinking their freeway missile into a van full of kids, they shouldn’t be able to get behind the wheel and be presented with opportunities where this might happen any time they drive.
…in this essay I will explain how my 500 hours in Burnout: Paradise makes me a superior driver…
Maybe doing this will also make people more hesitant to get behind the wheel. If more people are aware of the risks of driving, maybe they’ll start to demand alternatives
If you can’t avoid an Infrared Homing AGM-65 Maverick Missile should you really be on the road?
This is why I personally am looking forward to fully self-driving cars. We’re a long way off, but when self-driving cars can completely replace the human element, I think the world will be a much safer place.
Or just a good public transportation system, really. I would never drive if I could take a bus to every place I need to go.
This is short-sighted. We need to entirely divert away from using cars as our primary mode of transportation.
Naa, I think self driving cars will fix most of the negatives of cars.
How about spacial inefficiency? A car only carries 1-6 people compared to a train which carries dozens or even hundreds. Or a bus which carries dozens.
Explain to me how self-driving cars will fix that
Traffic and parking are the biggest issue i see with cars and space efficiency. Both can be significantly improved on with self driving. Especially if most people opt for public ownership of cars and not private. Something think will become more popular as self driving takes over and lowers the cost of taking the self driving equivalent of a taxi or Uber.
By the way i think self driving cars will make trains more popular. As trains suck at first and last mile transportation. Self driving solves the first and last mile issues.
If we’re going to opt for public ownership then why would you choose the less efficient single passenger method over already-established public infrastructure like trains and trams and buses which have been proven to work well in other countries?
Also please elaborate on how self driving cars will improve parking issues. And as for traffic, while self-driving cars will be less likely to cause accidents and jams, hundreds of independent low-capacity vehicles are in no way more effective than a single locomotive carrying those hundreds of people in a smaller space.
You’re allowed to like self-driving cars, but buses and trains are objectively more efficient in the large scale and all you have to do is acknowledge that. The more people realize this, the more room there is for us to make progress
If we’re going to opt for public ownership then why would you choose the less efficient single passenger method over already-established public infrastructure like trains and trams and buses which have been proven to work well in other countries?
Simple we have already chosen cars in the US. It is far easier to use the existing roads to our advantage then try and redesign the entire country to fit a train and tram and bus model.
Also please elaborate on how self driving cars will improve parking issues.
In a public car the car will drop people off and drive away to pick up other people. There would be no need parking at all. Just a small drop off and pickup location.
Now this won’t work as well if we are talking about private ownership cars, but it would be better as the car can drop you off and then drive to a centralized parking location. This would remove the need for street parking or parking lots next to restaurants and stores. Or if your planning to stay a long time for exmaple if your going to work for 8 hours. I think many people might want rent out their car during the day. Car drops me off at work and I tell the car to join the “public car” network for 8 hours and it can go find some people to transport.
And as for traffic, while self-driving cars will be less likely to cause accidents and jams, hundreds of independent low-capacity vehicles are in no way more effective than a single locomotive carrying those hundreds of people in a smaller space.
Oh sure it won’t be as effective but it will be much better then what we have now. And there are benefits cars have over trains. For example after a the world pandemic scare I find traveling in my own space a much more pleasant experience then sharing with many other people. Also I really like listening to music in a car as full volume very enjoyable experience that you just can’t do on a public train :). A car will be a single vehicle to my destination, I can get in a fall asleep if I want. Buses and trains are usually multiple vehicles and you need to be some what alert to know when your stop is.
Germany’s driving test (and school) is fairly strict and will fail you for small mistakes which is good for beginners but after all, there is no test or reinsurance after some years of driving. After some time, people will see driving as a right not a privilege. This is the case for the vast majority of counties. This is the problem.
There’s a few places that didn’t get cars until later and “no thank you” was a very common reaction. We really ought to just ban private ownership.
Problem is that there’s no other alternative for most people. Unless you live in a city, public transportation isn’t a valid option. Most people living in most locations (at least in the US) have to have personal vehicles to attend school/work, shop, and socialize.
Once self driving cars become commonly available, driving will no longer be a requirement and I think that driving licenses should be stricter on who’s allowed to drive.
If cars became restricted, other options would come up. Better public transport would become available.
You would need an exception though for rural areas
The way I see it is fuck em, if you can’t safely drive and follow the rules to mimimize risk for everyone around you then pay for a taxi or take the bus. No public transport? Get your ass on a bike. Everytime I go out, even for a short 10 minute drive to the grocery store, 90% of the time I see someone doing something insanely stupid and dangerous but because nothing bad comes of it they don’t learn not to do that.
Driving a vehicle should be considered a huge privilege considering how easy it is to kill not just yourself, but others simply by being a dumbass and not taking it seriously enough. People back up without looking, make turns without looking, tons of dumb shit constantly, shit I had someone merge into my lane without even looking when I was right beside them, I had to slam on my brakes to get out of the way and I was only able to do that because there was no one behind me. I honked at them and they just flipped me off. There should also be a forced age limit for being able to drive cause old people are fucking terrible drivers, or at the very least they should have yearly tests past a certain age to ensure they’re still capable of driving.
Drive properly and safely or deal with the massive consequences of not being able to get around quickly. Need a license to get to/do your job? Drive safely or get fucked. Absolutely zero sympathy for shitty drivers.
Being fat is a choice the vast majority of the time, and I have a huge bias against big people.
I used to be fat (250ish lbs (110ish kg) at 5’8"ish (172ish cm)), and as much as I would like to blame my shit on anything else, the person feeding me, the person sitting at the computer for hours, the person actively avoiding all physical activity was me and no one else. After I got diagnosed with some weight related shit, I turned my entire life upside down, am at a much healthier 150 lbs (68ish kg), and feel so much better, both physically and mentally.
I’m aware of my bias, and I make every active effort to counter it in my actual dealings with bigger people. Especially because there are certain circumstances, however rarely, where it may not actually be their fault. But I’d be lying if I said my initial impression was anything except “God, what a lazy, fat fuck.”
Edit: Added metric units
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We don’t need more pronouns. We need less of them.
In my native language there is no even he/she pronouns. The word is “hän” and it’s gender neutral. You can be male, female, FTM, MTF, non-binary or what ever and you’re still called “hän”. You can identify as anything you like and “hän” already includes you.
Most people shouldn’t be parents.
That’s not an unpopular opinion.
Given the number of breeders, of course it is.
Pansexual, polysexual, and omnisexual are all microlabels and are all subsets of bisexual. You don’t need more labels than gay, straight, and bi.
Edit: I forgot about asexuals. But I specifically only care about bi subsets. They’re dumb, and you only need bi
Most conservatives, however deeply red, are not intentionally hateful and are usually open to rational discussion. People just don’t know how to have rational discussions nowadays and the few times they do, they don’t know how to think like somebody else and put things in a way they can understand.
People nowadays think because a point convinced them, it should convince everybody else and anybody who’s not convinced by it is just being willfully ignorant. The truth is we all process things differently and some people need to hear totally different arguments to understand, often put in ways that wouldn’t convince you if you heard it.
It’s hard to understand other people and I feel like the majority of people have given up trying in favor of assuming everybody who disagrees with you knows their wrong and refuses to admit it.
Religion is nothing more then social engineering on a grand scale.
Dogs were hardwired by selective breeding to worship their owners. Not long ago they at least were loyal companions. You got one off the streets, fed it leftovers, washed it with a hose, it lived in the yard, and it was VERY happy and proud of doing its job. Some breeds now were bred into painful disabling deformities just to look “cute”, and they became hysterical neurotic yapping fashion accessories. Useless high maintenance toys people store in small cages (“oh, but my child loves his cage”) when they don’t need hardwired unconditional lopsided “love” to feed their narcissism.
How is this unpopular?
Haha, I guess many dog owners just can’t see it how it is; probably an addiction to the lopsided unconditional “love”. I used to comment something similar back in Reddit, just to see the flood of downvotes and outraged dog owners.
Same reaction to supporting the idea that some breeds are generally more dangerous and/or more aggressive. “Oh, my MY pitbull is a sweetie!!” (adding this here just to test :D )
Lapdogs have been around for thousands of years. It’s only very recently that they’ve been bred so extremely that they can’t breathe.
Thousands of years ago they were dogs, not fashion accessories.
Yes, I’m pretty sure they were still dogs. No crippling deformities.
(edit: but if you need to filter “anecdotal” evidence, just add “in the western world, in modern history”?)
Modern dogs shouldn’t exist and all breeds sould be put down for the good of nature
All religions should be heavily taxed. NO EXCEPTIONS!!
Tax is not theft
It’s not theft, IF the government puts that money to good use e.g. health care, education, maintain roads, utilities, …
I assume this opinion is pretty popular among the left
People who are strongly against nuclear power are ignorant of the actual safety statistics and are harming our ability to sustainably transition off fossil fuels and into renewables.
Not all Nuclear Power is equal. RBMK reactors are dangerous as fuck. Others not so much.
If you take all operational nuclear reactors safety records into account from all countries in the world, including all meltdowns and near meltdown disasters, it’s still by far safer and has resulted in less deaths and long term illness than any fossil fuel, on every single metric.
True that newer style reactors are far safer, but that’s the point. If we had started to transition in the 70’s into nuclear power, we would have made a massive dent in climate change and set the stage to transition into full clean renewable energy sources and along the way improved regulations and engineering standards for existing nuclear plants.
Yes, BUT the risk isn’t distributed like the rest. One Reactor could displace tens of millions of people, disrupt infrastructure, and cause devastating impact to the US economy. That’s a lot of risk based on it’s proximity. If they could build them in the middle of nowhere out west that could all be mitigated.
Right. Most don’t understand that risk is not just measured by frequency alone, but also by severity.
Nuclear is off the charts once you consider the full magnitude of a failure.
I feel this would have been spot on, in the nineties.
Right now the problems plaguing nuclear are economic. There is no guarantee you can build and exploit a plant and get to break even before either it becomes irrelevant, or you fall victim to regulatory jostling.
Nuclear was a missed opportunity, but the window is closing fast and it will probably remain a missed opportunity forever.
