Nootropics Are Bullshit

Eurogamer’s Chris Bratt has a great investigative article and video on the bullshit around supplements. Specifically one that targets people playing games. It’s called GodMode and it is a “nootropic” from Scott Miller, yes the one that used to work for Apogee and 3D Realms.

Here’s part of Chris’ interview with Scott, where Scott goes off the deep end:

“If you read the books that doctors have to read,” said Miller, “they are so anti-supplement, because they’re funded by the pharmaceutical industry. And the pharmaceutical industry tells you things like avoid fish oil, avoid all this stuff. They don’t want you doctors to believe in any of that stuff. I hate to say it, but doctors are brainwashed from day one when they enter medical school that drugs work and anything outside of drugs isn’t going to work.”

In the article, Chris also tries the supplement for two weeks to no effect, because it doesn’t do anything.

Miller’s business model isn’t entirely original, there are similar products that share the same ingredients but target other people.

Alex Jones sells a few varieties of nootropics to his dumbass followers that he calls Brain Force Plus. Gwyneth Paltrow has similar crap in her GOOP store. There are ads on some gaming podcasts for other brands of nootropic garbage supplements. I unsubscribed from one podcast as soon as I heard that ad. These supplements have always been bullshit, don’t trust anyone that sells them.

Death to Bullshit

Brad Frost’s list of bullshit:

Popups, jargon, junk mail, anti-patterns, sensationalism, begging for likes, tracking scripts, marketing spam, dark patterns, unskippable ads, clickbait, linkbait, listicles, seizure-inducing banners, captchas, QR codes, barely-visible unsubscribe buttons, 24-hour news networks, carousels, auto-playing audio, bloatware, sudden redirects to the App Store, telemarketing, ticked-by-default subscribe buttons, “your call is important to us”, pageview-gaming galleries, native advertising, the list of bullshit goes on and on and on.

I’d like to nominate the hidden/tiny source link at the end of a news item. Sites that do this and hijack the entirety of the interesting content in an article that they’re linking to are pretty much the worst kind of sites.