When discussing ad blockers, annoying pop ups, unwanted functions like shopping in a social app, I generally found my friends less annoyed than me. Indeed, I am sensitive against advertisments, but why?

Search engines played an important role since my childhood. I learned latest knowledge through it, and along with that, also learned to filter out unwanted advertisement when conducting search. Fool me once, shame on the ad; fool me twice, shame on me. This also extends to all internet applications like forums, shopping software, social software. Nearly all of the advertisemnet have negative consequences should one click into. The humiliation on misclicking an ad makes it a strong negative reward, and the rest is just reinforced learning working its magic.

Am I immune to advertisement though? No. I generally found myself into the style of Audi cars, and only recently when digging it really hard does I understand (at least I think I understand) the reason. You see, there was this really cool Audi RSQ driven by Will Smith, all futuristic and high-tech in the 2004 movie 'I, Robot'. Subtle advertisment, especially when combined with carefully articulated positive features like artism, can sometimes still penetrates the sensitive anti-ad mindset. Yeah also I was young in 2004.

Nearly all of the ads contains traces of manipulation, whether it injects an idea to buy a product, or an idea so you behave differently, maybe vote a different candidate, or practise enviromentalism. This is inevitable given the purpose of the advertisement. Not everyone would be able to detect to such manipulation, let alone to experience humiliation after the fact.

Some common ground needs to be hold, like the freedom of speech, which unfortnately inculdes ads. This makes the handling of ads generally a personal thing. Over sensitivity and defensive posture could have negative consequences. With ads becoming more socially acceptable and considered a norm, those who are easily annoyed might just feel more uncomfortable and outcasted, which helps little with the trend.

I can't help to detect the manipulation, but on second thought, the humiliation is what helped me learn. There is no such things as the burden of knowledge.