I don't think "annoying" is quite the right word to summarize this blog post. Sure, ads are often annoying, but the point she was trying to make is that this pattern is somewhat harmful.
Displaying pictures of healthy, fit women in advertising is not harmful, nor does the author actually make that point. All she does is say that it's true, without any argument to back it up. We're simply supposed to accept that because she says it's harmful, it is. There's nothing degrading or overly sexualized about these ads. The fact that the models look good does not need to be a threat to anybody.
I was with the author as long as it was a complaint about how repetitive and uninspired the ads were, but when it morphed into "pictures of healthy people trigger me" is where she lost me. If you are so insecure you can't see an image of a person who is better looking than you are without freaking out, that is nobody's problem but your own. It's not instagram's fault.
There are many other potential body shapes that are healthy and fit. The point is that for most people, the idealized, photoshopped shapes in these ads are actually literally unobtainable. Only a very small percentage of the population can ever achieve these shapes, for a very few years of their lives, and under very specific conditions. And when your media is saturated with only those images of impossible bodies, and the implication that this is the ideal that everyone should meet, even though that’s impossible, then it becomes a problem.
Sure, but in the same breath I'm never going to meet the ideal set by the athletes in Gatorade commercials, the men in car, cologne and watch ads, and certainly the spokespeople in gym and fitness commercials.
I will only speak to my experience but I'm not bothered by it. I think because my self-worth doesn't hinge on feeling attractive -- I think I should consider myself extremely fortunate in that respect. But putting ugly people in ads seems to be nothing more a band-aid fix for the problem that a womans's worth is largely determined by her appearance.
None of the women I saw in those pictures seem to have particularly unattainable or exaggerated physiques. In fact, they look like average, healthy body types easily attainable by regular diet and exercise.
Claiming that "only a very small percentage of the population can ever achieve these shapes" smacks as totally false to me. Do you have any data or sources to back that up?
edit: Would the downvoters care to contribute? I asked for some data or, at the very least, some sound reasoning for the claim that it's literally impossible for the majority of people to have healthy physiques.
They are better than average. Unless the average is only considering the population of 20-30 years old women, in good shape, wearing tight clothes, posing for a photo in a nice scenery.
Ironically, Instagram has good filters and beautify mode to make good looking pictures like that.
It isn't. But what do you replace it with? Better solutions are likely to only cover a fraction of use cases, so they really need to be stellar to win over users.
It's about the data, and the better solution is to use a database. The problem is that retraining everyone from Excel to use some sort of SQL frontend is not a small problem, and neither is getting the company to commit to operating a data warehouse.
It's really about the data though, and if the database has access to more data, and requires less work from analysts, it becomes a replacement for some work that was previously done in Excel, even if the system still supports exporting to CSV, for importing into Excel for the parts that the system does not support.
The system I am familiar with is Redshift, and we are able to generate daily or hourly graphs for various parts of the business with it.
Bobby tables would be considered data. Or should be. And hopefully it would be obvious that it doesn't belong in the code section.
But like you I'm not totally convinced. I think this idea would make it easier for people trying to do the right thing to get it right; but for the blissfully ignorant? Might not help at all. Either way it needs a more flushed out spec.
A simple example could be the Twitter API's handling for references (URLs/hashtags/at-user mentions) in a tweet [0]. The tweet text is returned in one field, and all references are listed in a different field together with first/last character index within the tweet where that reference was found. You don't need to parse the tweet text yourself, just display it as plain text and insert links where the references say you should.
This isn't some theoretical design. Any native application that uses a binary protocol framework like protobufs over TCP to communicate with the backend will benefit from this approach.
In practice I bet a large portion of people set up their phones at cell phone stores. Do you really trust at&t/T-Mobile/sprint/etc to have properly secured WiFi? My bet is they don't.
Definitely this only applies to government (esp law enforcement) requests.
Re: does it just protect US citizens or everyone's emails: dunno. That's a great question. My guess is that it's aimed at US citizens but I imagine agreements like privacy shield may extend those rights to some non citizens. IANAL though and am mostly speculating.
If you see this happen, please write in to our support team; we take data integrity issues very seriously.
Also I should probably mention that we keep 1 month of version history for free users and even more history for paid users, so if the corruption is recent you should be able to undo it yourself. But please report either way.
I'm a huge fan of Dropbox and I pay a monthly fee. I probably don't need to as my data needs aren't huge, but you guys are frankly the first people I've used that did this sort of thing properly and I believe you are worth paying a subscription fee to.
I'll log a ticket :-) might need to reproduce the issue first. Pretty awesome that you have employees who respond to posts on HN incidentally, that automatically increases my loyalty to a company several notches!
Yes but at the time, there was only evidence of password reuse leading to some comprised email lists... Not that password hashes themselves had been stolen. Sigh.
