Neither "anuncios" (adverts) nor "marketing" (yeah, we use the English word) are the same as "propaganda" (its spelled the same as in English but said slightly differently)
Is what you describe a Brasilian Portuguese thing?
Probably is a Brazilian thing, but we have words for publicity(publicidade), advertising(anúncios), marketing(same english words because we are a bunch of removed). Propaganda is all this things, I don't know if is just colloquialism but people uses more the term propaganda than the specifics.
It's funny how you can tell when a concept is extremely modern because in languages other than English they tend to just use the English term or a localized variation of the English term
In Portugal in general use "propaganda" is definitelly just the political stuff whilst "publicidade" is definitelly just the commercial stuff.
Mind you, maybe before those two concepts were more merged: I know that in legal terms the political stuff is explicitly called "Propaganda Política" since I've done paphlet distribution for a political party here during election campaigns and the rules for putting "political propaganda" in people's mailboxes are different than for "publicidade".
It is uncommon to call propaganda (in the political sense) publicidade, so maybe in popular conversations this makes publicidade a kind of propaganda, and not the other way around.
yeah but it's not made by the people the propaganda works for. they're just cogs. normal propaganda is made by the people championing the cause in question.
If you work for an advertising agency, you know that your job is to separate people from their money. They celebrate this. They have awards for this. It’s the whole purpose of their job.
Ad-blocking is a property right. I have every right to control what my device does or does not display, by definition of ownership. Conversely, advertisers or other parties attempting to colonize my device by forcing it to display something against my (the owner's) will is a hostile act that violates my rights.
Except we are beginning to not own what we own. The computer is yours, the software is just licensed, and they are trying to take everything away from us, from ovens to washing machines, they want to make it all subscription, spying on us, and serving us ads. We don't have the right to repair the products when we break, and it's a federal felony to "break" any sort of digital lock on a device, and I think to change it's programming too.
That said, it's a moot point as of yet, because while websites forced me to whitelist their sites to use them when I had adblock, I was told about ublockorigin, and I see no ads, and the sites can't tell I am using it.
That is a GODDAMN LIE perpetrated by copyright cartel shysters to swindle all of us. The entire legal theory that assertion rests on is absolute nonsense: they want to pretend that you "need" to accept an "EULA" to use the software because otherwise copying it from the installation media onto your hard drive and/or into RAM would be a violation, but that is wrong because 17 U.S. Code § 117 (a) (1) carves out an explicit exception that allows it. EULAs are bunk and do not constitute a valid contact, as they not only lack 'acceptance' because they attempt to work on adhesion (trying to impose new terms after-the-fact when the transaction to obtain the copy has already occurred and concluded), but fail to provide any meaningful 'consideration' to begin with!
They can pry my hardware and software that I own from my cold, dead hands.
Need free food, rent, healthcare, education, and housing first. As long as we still need money to pay for those things then there'll always be too few experts with skills willing to work for free.
Sadly, and I am not a lawyer so this is not even close to legal advice(!!), "beginning" is potentially the wrong word when talking about licenses due to copyright. Because even a single flipped bit in RAM on your computer could be constructed as a copyright infringement if pushed in a legal battle and decided in a court. (This all sounds squishy because, again, I am not a lawyer and as far as I know nothing of this sort has had clear ground setting or breaking rulings yet...)
Why am I of this opinion despite also usually loving to take the "my device my rules stance"? Because I got to proof read some final exams for legal professionals-to-be for their technical accuracy and let me tell you: the most likely legal outcome they saw was not good for most of us. (So now I really really hope that some high up court rules on a case like this and sides with "common sense" about what is and is not allowed with our owned hardware!)
The web browser and the website are two different piecee of software. Running a web browser doesnt entitle you to access a web server.
You are asking the web server for the page and its giving it to you with ads. If you then decide you dont want the ads the webserver has every right to not serve you the page.
It would be different if it was a local application. Web servers have a material cost for processing a request it costs money to serve you that page. Its completely fair for you to decide that your browser isnt going to display ads but its also just as fair for the website to turn around and reject your request or choose to serve you something else.
If you want to actively shit on them, there is AdNauseam, which is a fork of uBlock Origin but in addition to blocking the ads, it clicks on absolutely everything, sending fake signals. Polluting their database is costing them money and they have to deal with all the noise.
Not for everyone, but definitely an active hostility towards these fucks.
The multiple layers of redundancy would likely clash with Adnauseum, yeah. Although that probably is just wasted compute - you may only need one or two of those solutions to have effective adblocking (uBlock for supported browsers, pi.hole for devices unable to have uBlock installed) rather than all 3 at once.
Well I’m not gonna bother turning off any of the layers when I’m out and about. Like, my laptop still needs ublock when I’m not at home. And the vpn is just for certain use cases.
I have tailscale set up. I’m not gonna have my wife be using tailscale. And I’m also not going to be using tailscale all the time. I even have an exit node on my server.
As someone who works in marketing - they will tote these clicks as a great success and continue to do what they are doing, maybe even more so, but will be distraught by the lack of follow through when it comes to sales. I guess if it happened long enough, And on a big enough scale, they might eventually give up but it would take years
Didn't Louis Rossmann say that the conversion rate when they briefly ran repair shop ads was less than 2% or something similar? I think he referred to it when talking about using adblock and donating/buying merch for your favorite creators instead.
Its purely out of spite, plus, im not clicking anything.
I run the full ad blocking suite anyway and see more ads watching a sportsball game with the family than I do on my home network over the course of months.
I dont see the ads
The data they generate is wrong and random, if that is used to train AI it runs the risk of poisioning the model.
The site Im on gets paid by the ad vendor, even though the interaction is fraudulent.
The worse the product is, the more desperate they get to shove it in your face. Good products don't need to pay others to pretend it's good, you just find out via word-of-mouth or free trials
I was thinking about this just the other day. There's a popular market in my home state, one I've been going to since childhood. It's a single store, not a chain, and it's almost always packed. I've never seen nor heard a single ad for it in my life. Naturally, that makes me like the place even more.
Seriously going through an insurance broker is awesome. Best dang way to deal with insurance because I can just call up the broker and have them do it all for me, plus they get paid on commission by the insurance companies (which are mostly smaller B2B companies that don't spend millions on advertising) so it's not even like you pay more for your insurnace
People say this but, if advertising didn't work, companies would have stopped paying for ads long time ago. It works for them, we view ads and then we are willing to pay more for a product that is worth less; it's this simple.
The only solution for us is to avoid ads at all cost.
Yeah - ads do work. The whole point of the surveillance ad system is to track how effective ads are. Companies can measure how many sales they get from their ads and calculate if they are still making a profit. And all those influencers peddling scam products with their special discount codes? People are buying those products.
my kids have grown up with my adblocked version of the internet, when they connect to other internet thats not a filtered feed they get annoyed by ads in their games and on their videos
My wife initially hated my piholes, because they broke some of her phone’s stuff. She runs stock Samsung Android, so lots of the built in Google stuff got broken. She was constantly complaining about it. We eventually spent an evening hunt-and-peck’ing the various blocked DNS requests, to see which ones were required for her phone to work properly, and which ones were just Google Adsense BS. Got her set up with a WireGuard VPN connection that automatically activates when she’s disconnected from the home WiFi, so she’s always protected.
Now that she’s used to it, it’s like a wake up slap whenever she encounters ads. We moved a while ago, and all of my more advanced networking stuff (including the pihole) was sitting in a box until I had time to set it all up. She suddenly started seeing ads again, and was absolutely gobsmacked at how pervasive they are. What really sent her over the edge was when our Roku TV was paused, and went to its idle screen. The idle screen is an auto-scrolling image, and it had an ad plastered across the scrolling image. She was like “what the fuck we’re not even watching anything right now! It’s just idle! Why the hell are they advertising to us on the damned idle screen??” That was what finally pushed her to give me an evening to set all of the networking stuff back up.
Do you have links to any knowledge base docs or guides? I tried setting this up a few years back and couldn't really nail it down and just kinda gave up because it broke too many websites and my smarttv apps wouldn't work either.
Our smart TV doesn't allow an ad blocker on YouTube, but my kids have developed a way to skip ads anyway. They don't tolerate ads more than I do, and I couldn't be prouder.
Jailbreak your TV and install a third party launcher and SmartTube. It gave my Sony TV a new lease on life after it was almost smothered to death by ads, even on the home screen.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
There's a giant, glowing, animated LED billboard along a main road near my house that had a PSA about distracted driving on it the other day. It made me angry.
Nice point if view. Ironically we live in times when minding others boundaries is almost common sense. Abusive behavior gets public contempt. But everyone is just accepting manipulative, malicious and intrusive ads.
Goddamn we need so much high speed rail, and yesterday
And so much more standard speed rail too! There's tons of railroad lines all over the country, and even many old stations still standing. Let's start building RDCs again (or better, a modern equivalent) and start running passenger services on all of those lines
The challenges are several fold. For one, there's basically no manufacturers of passenger railcars left in the country. Occasionally a network upgrade will lead to one being spun up for a few years then it'll shut down once the order is fulfilled because there's no consistent market for passenger railcars in North America.
I'd propose using a mix of historic British Rail procurement practices and current military contract practices where you put up a pot of money for up for say 3 companies to develop a prototype railcar meeting a specific spec. Make the spec for a fairly basic car and be ready to update station platforms for ADA compliance rather than forcing the cars to be compatible with 20 different platform heights and designs. Then test those 3 prototypes and the winner receives a bonus as the design is purchased by the federal government, and next you license that design out for all manufacturers in the country to produce, followed by an ongoing order of say 48 railcars per year from 5 different manufacturers and you have 248 railcars per year (enough to replace Amtrak's entire current fleet within 10 years) from 5 different companies (reducing risk of one company mucking it all up) all manufactured with local labor and you have a standard design that is already in active production for other operators to order as well. Repeat this process for more equipment and designs as needed, and suddenly you have a bunch of known standard designs that your network can be built to and you have health competition between manufacturers which will be big enough (because each will have around 50-100 million dollars a year in revenue from that one ongoing federal contract alone) to start performing their own independent R&D to make their own unique stock to try to attract more orders from rail operators
This is what the federal government exists for, making ambitious infrastructure projects like this possible. Policians just aren't interested in thinking big enough
If you don't think you can do away with billboards I don't see how you'd think you could get people to stop using cars. Especially with how many things get delievered door to door these days. You could put every commuter on trains and the roads would still have traffic. I don't see changing that being any easier than getting rid of billboards and other highly intrusive ads.
I understand that cars serve a purpose. But trains and buses move orders of magnitude more people than cars could ever dream. With a properly functioning transit system (including the aforementioned high speed rails) traffic would clear up (because traffic didn't happen to you, you are traffic), and fewer distracted operators would be on the road.
And in removing those people from operating vehicles, the distraction of a billboard, and the subsequent potential accidents, are mitigated.
The thing with adding lanes is induced demand. By nature of there being more space for cars on that road more drivers will choose take that road over other roads. Cars don't magically come into existence, people drive them, and people drive them for a reason, most commonly to go to/from somewhere
Trains (and bikes and buses) take cars off the road. Every person riding on a transit solution that isn't a car is a individual vehicle trip saved. When every vehicle contains an average of 1.2 people in it, you've got very close to 1:1 vehicle reduction for every trip that's not taken by car
So to your point, are some number of non-drivers choosing not to drive because of traffic? Probably a small number of them. But a complete transit system that has the real world effect of fewer cars on the road will mean few people owning cars. Why would a family own 2 cars when one is parked most of the time? Why spend $20k on a new (to you) car if you're barely using the one you have/had? Fewer cars means less cars on the road which means less traffic. This is the dream.
I moved to Linux, use Freetube, LineageOS on the phone, listen all day to internet radios from the command line, browser with uBlock add on and it's been years since I saw or listened an ad.
Another word for "marketing" or "advertisement" is Manipulation. Shady, manipulative, tactics.
Fuck them. I love Lemmy because it seems like the ratio of like-minded people is much larger here. Nothing better than seeing other principled people that would rather give up some comforts than deal with ads and bend the knee to the pieces of shit that try to push them.
Even products in the supermarket (such as bread!!) come with ads in the fucking plastic wrapper. I have changed my bread brand due to this. I will absolutely give up any comfort to avoid your manipulation. I will fucking shower in cold water if it means I don't bend the knee to pieces of shit.
It’s been a minute so I could be misremembering, but you’re not far off. Another word for public relations (the shaping of public opinion) is propaganda.
Edward Bearnays wrote a book titled Propaganda, where he talks about the need to rebrand the work of Propagandist after it became associated with negative influence during WW2. From what I recall he used the term public relations, but seemed to prefer the term propaganda.
He’s also the person infamous for convincing Americans that we should eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. Another interesting story is about how he advertised to make music rooms in homes trendy, so he could help sell more pianos.
He talks about some of the early manipulation tactics advertisers use. Such as trying to sell you an experience instead of a product. Think of how modern car commercials show a lifestyle more than they show you the car.
It’s an enlightening book that shows that before the war, calling an advertiser a propagandist wouldn’t be out of place. Those propagandist manipulated us into calling the PR now.
Oh, and if I recall correctly propaganda comes from Latin and means “to propagate.”
Well said. It disgusts me a lot, and it also dismays me to see a lot of people don't care at all about ads. I even rememeber people in my old job talking about ads on tv. Boggles my mind.
If I am forced to see or interact with an ad I will do absolutely everything in my power to excise that ad source from my life.
You're not wrong. But as you said yourself, this only applies to your own hardware. Some of us do engage in this weird thing called "going outside", with some taking it as far as not only going there to touch grass, but also meet other people (gross, I know).
In these situations, even I, an individual who has
a private e-mail that is exactly that: private (through aliases and strict protocols as to who gets the root address)
a physical mailbox mostly clean of ads because advertisers either do not get my address in the first place, or they get a friendly letter telling them where to shove their catalogues
adblocker plugins in every browser
hosts-based blocking on top of that and
a network-wide DNS-based adblocker just for good measure,
even I, builder, king and prisoner of this privacy fortress, am exposed to ads when I occasionally leave it.
I see ads when my kid asks me to read out to him the contents of that colourful banner above the parking lot.
I see ads when I watch cable TV with my parents and they just let the ad break wash over them like a jovial stream of diarrhea.
I see ads when I go shopping and I cannot focus on my own thoughts because only a few metres away there's an ad screen loudly announcing the technological marvels of Buddy's Fully-automatic Butt Crack Scratcher to the world.
In these situations, I really feel the contents of that OP. I feel the brazen attempt to steal my attention when all I want is to be present. I feel the insult to my intelligence because some twat in marketing decided I'm unable to or unworthy of making my own decisions. And I feel the need to quell this frivolous invasion of my time and headspace.
And that's why, in these situations, I take the liberty to turn off the shop's TV while I'm there. I take my parent's remote, mute the ad diarrhea and strike up a conversation. And I promise the kiddo to read him something proper once we get home, but not one of those stupid ads.
(We recently pulled up in front of another giant ad banner, and the little guy went: "Dad, that's just another one of those stupid ads, right?" Imagine how proud dad was, seeing that another system-wide adblocker had been installed...)
I used to think anti-consumerism was a lot more popular. It's a significant disconnect from how I thought people are. Apparently I took more media related courses in high school and university than most people do.
One thing that continued to confuse me is how tech cultures are unrepentantly consumer capitalists. The earlier times of the world wide web was very counter-culture. So it's been an unending source of befuddlement how tech nerds have been deep-throating the adtech boot.
Not just personal mind poison, but societal poison too. Most of our media companies are just ad businesses with whatever they portray as their main products as window dressing. Meta, Google, NYT, all TV networks, even NPR is increasingly funded by ads. I was hopeful in the shift to paid streaming services this might change, and it did sort of, for a while, but increasingly they too are turning to ads.
Not just personal mind poison, but societal poison too.
i came to realize this when when my home built router died a few months ago.
it was based on pfsense and i had setup publicly shared advertisement blocking; so i hadn't see any ad at all for years.
i became annoyed when i started seeing them after the router died and then i actively became angry when i was bombarded by them while watching tv as i was visiting family, yet they didn't think anything was wrong with watching the same mcdonalds advertisement 500x in a single hour.
that shit has an impact on your psyche whether you know right away or not.
Yup. For me it was when I went on vacation with my family. Tried to enjoy a movie in the evening after a day out and my god. Ads every literal 7 minutes of movie. How the fuck anyone can deal with that is beyond me.
I grew up with every internet ad being likely hostile, you didn’t click any of them. It kinda stuck with me.
But also they went way overboard. If it’s a site funded by advertising and there was just a simple banner at the top or something then fine, I’d just ignore it still but whatever. But everything is so obnoxious now, so fuck ‘em.
Its crazy how much people put up with it every time I see someone elses browser I ask them why they dont use an ad blocker and I always gets some nothing reply.
I remember pushing my mom to install one that had a black and white cat wander around the desktop and on top of windows one time when she had to take me to work.
I found a video of a newer version (with bonus Bonzi Buddy), but it doesn't appear to do the walking along the tops of your windows that I remember.
Appropriately for the topic of this thread, it was all an advertisement for Purina Pet Food
Yep. One must move beyond an "I hate you and I hope you die" relationship with ads, to a "I don't think about you at all" relationship with ads. Regardless of how many fits Google throws about ublock, one can always do VPN/DNS type filtering. I've honestly almost forgotten ads exist.
There's some tech blog/news site (can't recall the name right now) that tries to shame me into turning off my ad blocker and viewing their ads with an extra pop up
"Hey! We noticed your browser isn't displaying ads. Can you..."
I had to download it off the internet and not the play store on both my phone and computer, but it worked, still works great, I see about zero ads and it blocks a lot of pages entirely.
I mean, it blows my mind that people were excited to watch the Super Bowl at all. The advertisements are often the best part, given that the game itself is so mired in interruptions - often to deliberately increase the amount of air time for ads.
I think there is an American ritual aspect to it. I hate football and never watch it other than the super bowl. I've always just watched it for the funny ads, halftime show, and social gathering aspect. There is nostalgia for the 90s-00s where funny Superbowl ads became cultural touchstones, and early "memes" that people would quote and talk about the rest of the year if not more. Though honestly, it feels like the mojo is gone. The ads rarely seem as funny as they used to be. Or maybe we are just so inundated with internet ads and the lightspeed meme cycle that they simply can't draw the same level of cultural relevance they once did.
Fun and Interesting ads are actually the worst ones, because they get you to associate pleasant feelings with their product/service/brand, which dilutes your ability to make rational, objective choices about them. That's one of the ways that they are manipulating you.
This may be a hot take here but I do not actually hate the concept of "paying money to promote a product or service". However, in practice I can hardly think of an advertising method that I find tolerable in the slightest due to the manipulation tactics. When you look at vintage photos advertising is usually some hand painted sign on the side of a bus stop that says "Try Zuckerman's Flour!" I don't hate that, but we also don't have that.
Back in the good-ish days of reddit, they had ads that I actually appreciated. They were clearly labeled as ads and had a different color, were at the top of the feed only, so once you scrolled past the first one you were done, and we're essentially just sticky promoted posts, so they had comment sections.
You could find honest reviews of the products in the ads. Shills we're identified and down voted into oblivion, so the real shit tended to land on top. It encouraged advertisers who actually had quality products on offer and who understood their audience. They were the only online ads that ever led directly to me buying a product.
For me the problem use to be it having gone from "Our product is great and here's why" style of adverts to the psychological manipulation shit (image of beautiful woman seducing handsome man, queue name of perfume).
I'm fine with people trying to convince me but detest when they try to manipulate me.
However the recent tendency to relentlessly shove it in front of me ALL THE TIME does get on my nerves - it's like getting constantly harassed by a shameless salesman with no respect for other people.
Ads have changed, but those ads telling you that your body is ugly and that you need $product to change it are old and have been around since the 19th century and the beginnings of modern advertisements. It is also quite interesting how old some of the usual scams are. There are currently people on TikTok scamming people with some method invented in the 1800s
Yeah good points there, and I certainly didn't mean to imply ads were historically better on the whole. Ads from a a century ago also featured a significantly greater amount of flat out lying about their products, especially when it came to medicines and "tonics".
But even if we accept that their honesty has improved (dubious) I do think advertising today has become more intrusive, and the function of advertising is today is more about disrupting our focus than it ever has been.
No kidding, if I happen to hear an ad on a tv or radio I'm passing by I plug my ears and go lalalalala until I or it are gone. I truly can't stand them that much, it's a psychotic invention meant to constantly brainwash you into becoming a mindless consumption robot and I refuse to partake.
So when you're in a store or a restaurant that is playing the radio and an ad comes on you'll walk around the entire commercial break with your fingers in your ears going, "lalalalala?"
The funny thing is that I’m actively making Spotify lose money for me, I use ad blockers on desktop which entirely bypass the ads and I close the iOS app when I hear an ad (they won’t count it as an ad watched until you see the whole thing, which I never)
Some people like to say that nobody's immune to advertising. Maybe so, but there are definitely some of us who aren't as affected by it. When most ads you see are for things you'd never buy anyway, all the crap kind of blends together.
For me, no amount of fast food ads, car ads, vacation ads, etc. are going to have any meaningful effect. I already don't buy fast food, don't purchase new cars (and if I'm shopping used, there are certain criteria that matter far more than a brand or dealership), and am way too poor to take a vacation. Yet, the ads persist.
Even if I weren't muting and skipping them at every chance, you can't get blood from a stone. End stage capitalism, man. Can't spend money I don't have!
I do exactly the same. Ads were tolerable when they were just a few tv commercials, but nowadays we are flooded with them everywhere, and for me they manage to do the opposite of what they are made for, the more I see a brand advertised the more I despise the brand.
True. I remember two ads specifically in my country that pissed me off so much I vowed to never purchase anything from their company. Both were phone service providers.
One was an ad where the guy gets the message of the ad out in 5 seconds and then the rest of the ad is him sitting in silence for 25 additional seconds, eating some food. That ad pissed me off enough to contact the company and let them know what I thought.
The second was this stupid bint sitting in a pink room, smugly wringing her hands and going: Oooh, you really want to get to your video, don't you? Here it comes! 🤪
I was like: I don't give a fuck if your phone service provider is the best in the galaxy. I will never use it ever.
Technically I have a third ad that made me despise charity for life, but that was before the time where ads online were what they are today and this ad did not show up online. I'll tell the story anyways because this is the type of ad that every charity should avoid if they want people to donate:
Rewind to 2012. My boyfriend and I were dirt poor. Literally had to borrow money from our parents to have enough for food. He was a full time student and I was sick with a mean depression at the time.
We get some birthday money. I forget who it was from and who it was for. Normally, we would spend birthday money to pay bills but this time there was a tiny bit left over and we decided to go to the cinema for once. Have a date night. We only had enough for tickets. No snacks. No drinks. Just the tickets, but we didn't care because the fact that we got to go to the movies felt like a massive luxury.
Ads pop up on the big screen. One of them is this close up of an African child with flies on his face, looking real sad. Across his face a text appears: "How much was your movie ticket?"
That singlehandedly made me boycott that specific charity for life. Fuck them forever. Worst part is that i used to actually volunteer for that charity and help them collect money by going door to door once a year with a friend. We collected so much money for those assholes. Haven't bothered with volunteering since. It wasn't solely that ad that turned me off charity, but a series of gross experiences that just made me fucking hate charity and the vultures who use it to scrape money from normal everyday people who think they are helping little impoverished children in third world countries.
I have seen similar charity ads on social media after the terminally online realized that there is a neverending war in Gaza. So many ads with obvious scammers prematurely blaming you for skipping their ad and leaving them to suffer. My reaction? 🖕👁👅👁🖕
There for sure are good and honorable charities out there and I have no ill will towards them, but I see the vast majority of charities as guilt tripping scams where they try their best to make people feel ashamed for being born in a privileged country and wringing money out of them while exploiting children in poor countries who will never see a dime.
In short: I hate ads too and the more they annoy me, the more their company or charity ends on my permanent shit list.
This 100%. I have so many brands in my black list to never consider after happening to get interrupted by their ad, not even neccessarily a dumb ad. Reoccurring ones do that quite effectively too: Seeing an ad once is maybe no biggie (unless it’s long/dumb), twice starts to annoy, three times and you’re out.
Even if you adblock and sponsorblock. Advertisement is everywhere. It's on tv series and films as product placements. It's on every bus stop, metro station, in the form of billboards, every casually on TV even muted still showing ads on the corner of your eye, or just company logos, even every single product you buy comes with a damn logo on it.
Bought a new pair of shoes, new headphones, new pair of fucking glasses? Which you need to wear everyday and can't see without them? Enjoy being a walking billboard for everyone who looks at you.
This drives me crazy and yes, I do hide most logos I can with a permanent marker, and even then it's not enough.
Describes defensive relationship with advertising.
Smh. Actively hostile relationship is like throwing bricks at their offices, or, at the very least, calling their support and bogging them down with stupid questions with no intention to buy their services. Or... spreading information on why you shouldn't use their services.
I'll start: Ground News is a site based on the stupidest idea ever and it's use is actively dangerous for the society. It steals traffic from real news sources doing actual grunt work, and then has the gall to ask you to pay them for it. It teaches you to turn off your critical thinking and to just trust them on rating news sources biases which they pull from... where, exactly? Ah yeah, straight out of their arses. But worst of all, they put left and right outlets on equal pedestals as if both have the same merit, promoting this weird centrist position of half left ideas and half literal fascism. American fascism, to be precise, because those ratings don't even make sense outside of USA. For example, they've rated Al Jazeera, the news agency wholly owned by an authoritarian monarchy state, as "left leaning". Like, what?
The Super Bowl commercial with the Backstreet Boys and MGK was nostalgic and funny. Generally I find most ads annoying and block them or avoid the sites/channels where they show up.
I literally dropped my Internet Provider which had a Net+TV+phone packet when their TV box got enshittified with Ads.
Got me a different, Internet Only, provider and made my own TV box from a Mini-PC with Linux and a wireless remote control.
Interestingly, I ended up paying 1/3 the price and getting 5x faster internet relative to the previous provider, so thanks for trying to shove adds on my face Vodaphone!
I go around installing solutions on my friends and family's phones and TVs (ad-free YouTube clients, stremio, etc) and I fucking hate it when they use the official ones out of habit. Like I didn't just do this for your convenience, this is mainly anti-advertisement activism. I fucking hate ads
Invidious is an alternative front end for youtube that allows you to watch videos without ads or other tracking. And it's self hostable. But the public instances work just fine - I actually have issues with YouTube stalling constantly, I assume because of my ad/script blockers. But going to yewtu.be/watch?v=(youtube video code) allows me to watch in HD with zero ads or interruptions.
Youtube does try to fight it, so it occasionally will break, but just like Ublock, Invidious has talented people on the team fighting back.
There have (especially lately) been a lot of times when it goes down.
My understanding is that Youtube has been changing the way they present or stream videos. I'm not familiar with the technical aspects, really, but Invidious is actively working on the issues.
For me, when I try to use it, it's down maybe 10-20% if the time, but occasionally for longer stretches at once. Not a perfect solution, but another tool you can use to avoid Youtube directly
I use Firefox with Ublock Origin on Android, and if I watch youtube in the browser, it filters pretty much all ads. Sometimes I get one at the start of a video, but closing the tab and starting again has got rid of them so far 👍
One day I need to share a screenshot of how youtube looks on Firefox after a few tweeks. I've used Ublock Origin to block everything I didn't like. It's literally just the player, description, the comments and a link to the settings and my subscriptions.
It's actually shocking when I see unfiltered youtube on someone's stream.
God I do have a weird relationship with it. I have adguard set up to block ads at the DNS level, I have adblockers on everything, and yet I spent the other night binge watching "Will it Blend?"
How long did it take to un-break basically every website? I tried doing this and it made pretty much every site that had this problem unusable. I could never find a sweetspot that only blocks ads and let's legitimate traffic through; and it caused issues with my partner's work portals.
Start with the default block list. That shouldn't break everything, if it does give examples of the problems and the sites and I'm sure we can find a solution.
It weirdly didn't break every website? It said it might, but it ended up not. No idea how, or what I did. The only issue has been my room mate plays mobile games and some of those give ads for a benefit, so they can't watch those.
I'm using HaGeZi's block list (https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists). Not saying it'll work for everyone, but it doesn't cause me any issues, even on the strictest one.
...' Saved me anyway. One less advertiser in the world. One more anti-advertising advocate in the world. :) A +2 gain, at no expense of arranging a wall and firing squad. ;)
After setting up my devices and everything i noticed i get really really mad when i encounter (especially intrusive) ads nonetheless. It usually makes me stop whatever i was doing and consider if whatever i want to accomplish is worth more than watching a 10 second ad. - Usually it´s not.
Got a samsung smart TV that had ads in the menu bar. I bought the thing, why ads. Learn pihole and reuse of old galaxy s7. block Samsung. then firestick. then buy server space to download movies and TV shows.
I got so upset at ads native in TV 6 years ago I hoist the flag.
Almost drove off with the gas cap and door open on my car cause I was doing my best to ignore the pump blasting some shit advertisement about some shit product I don't want and wouldn't buy. Wife caught it before I could drive off, but still, I will never voluntarily watch any form of ad. I loathe this world.
Almost drove off with the gas cap and door open on my car
I made it a habit to always glance in my side mirrors to confirm there's nothing unexpected around me (including open doors or connected gas nozzles) before shifting out of park every time. Granted best practice is to walk around the car once as an inspection before even starting it every time, but that's more than I often can be bothered to do
Advertisers have made their bed too. I almost fell for some scam/phishing ads myself and that's it for me - no ad is ever showing up on any machine under my control. If you can't maintain your side of a social contract then you lost it.
Ublock has always just worked for me? I mean, a couple of times YouTube did a thing, but then a day, or an hour later, Ublock fixed it. I'm referring to YouTube only.
Also, I run NoScript and choose whether I'm willing to allow a site to show me an ad, and slurp my data, in exchange for whatever is on the site that I think I want. Often, I get tired of allowing scripts one at a time until the content appears, and just close the site. Rarely, I'll bite the bullet and allow all, then go and wash my hands afterward.
Fewer than ten sites make up more than 90% of my viewing.
I may be extreme, but on those rare occasions when an ad slips through my adblock wall, I actively wonder it there's a way I can avoid buying that specific product in the future.
A network "ad block" is just a DNS level block. If a Roku TV tries to reach ads.roku.net or whatever, the router can simply refuse to forward the request.
This is actually really useful beyond ad blocking. You can block known malicious sites as well.
The problem is the harm to small bloggers and creators that need ads to survive.
I recommend routing your browser around your router ad block by changing its DNS then using uBlock Origin to whitelist the sites you want to support. You can block third party cookies and fingerprinting to mitigate the tracking.
I would much rather do direct support. Conveniently, I also lose so much respect for people that run ads that I don't want to support them. OTOH, I spend way more on patreon and bandcamp than I would on subscription services.
We recently got a new cable service, and it's the best I've ever seen. Besides a bunch of other advantages, I can go back to any TV show from the past 4 days and watch them - and skip all the commercials. I almost never watch a show when it's first on, I'd rather watch it in an hour or so, or tomorrow, and skip the ads.
They all lulled us with meme culture. Instead what we needed was to create anti ads. Any time our podcast or content creators began showing ads, then we should have first been super pissed off. Pissed
Off because these people ruined television. We were in a time when companies were creating patents were you had to shout the brand name at your TV to turn off the commercial. The internet was content creation without those capitalist fucks. Second we should have made an effort to create as hostile and environment to them as possible. Sorry to the little guy, but go to cable access.
For every ad that sucked our free time, we could have produced at least 2 anti ads. Like when a podcast advertised for zockdoc or whatever, we all needed to leave comments like "pretty sure they told my aunt she had cancer even though it was just a cough" or if it's some drop shipper on reddit acting like they just found this cool temu star lamp then every comment should have been about how these lights burst into flames and killed your entire family.
We need to make the internet as hostile as possible to advertisers. They are the reason we are tracked and why have enshittification. They built the systems to track our profiles and market to us all under the guise of selling ads to random content creators. Why is pewdiepie and Jack Paul and Joe Rogan millionaires now meddling in our politics. Because we didn't defend this new frontier. We knew they'd create data scarcity, we knew we had to stop it, but they rat fucked us with cat videos and memes.
I find sponsor reads kinda funny. Its like we went back to dawn of tv. And speaking about statisfying, there is nothing more satisfying than a cool paul morrow cigarrete....
Yep. Browse he internet without adblock? Not even once. Sponsorskip you know I ain't never gonna stop. Annoying services I can't adblock, looking at you twitch, you're eight amazon I do need to do something else with my time.
Similarly with streaming subscriptions. Ahoy matey looks like the tried and true method of finding the files themselves is still the best way to enjoy that show or movie.
Advertising isn’t inherently negative, but people naturally push back when they feel their attention is being taken for granted. Respect for the audience makes all the difference.
Like most of my streamimg is the cheaper ad versions, regular commwrcuals, usually not meaningful, sometimes a bathroom break.
My daughter watches Youtube for music sometimes on the TV though. Good god those are the WORST "ads". So many try to be like 10 minutes long unless you skip. Many feel like some random peraon reading from a card, production quality all around is ass.
I can't change the DNS on the router or TV and keep meaning to set up a new router to block the TV ads through DNS.
Do everything you can to avoid letting the manipulation get even the tiniest toe-hold on your senses and mind and emotions.
I used to work in "advertising or marketing". I know from the inside, how dangerous it is. I was "just doing my job", seeking to do the best for my client, getting them as big a return for their money as I could. ... That means maximally psychologically manipulating any who encounter the advert (or logo or whatever).
Insidiously created associations, shifting perceptions, contorting preferences, coercing purchases, without you realising that's being done to you.
I'm glad I had the experience to know what it's like. I'm even more glad I got out of advertising as soon as I got up to the level of making TV adverts.
While animating my first TV advert, for the entire 3 months, as background, I would play a Bill Hicks VHS over and over, wearing it out to garbled snow. Meaning around 12 times a day I'd get a dose of "Anybody here work in advertising or marketing?".
Our little team of two (me, making the advert, and Timi, schmoozing the client), made a big impact with our effectively non-existent budget. Changed the culture. Imagine how much could be done by those with millions and billions to spend, on getting into your mind, to play you like their cash-cow puppet, without you realising.
YES! AVOID ADVERTS WITH EVERYTHING YOU'VE GOT! THIS IS SERIOUS! STOP LETTING ADVERTISERS DATA-MINE YOU AND COLD-READ YOU! AVOID ADVERTISERS WITH EVERYTHING YOU'VE GOT!
have an actively hostile relationship with advertising
Same here, here's q tip beside addblocks, if you're still watching yt content, use PipePipe for android based phone, and Smartube TV for android TV. There will be no adds, and the apps skip sponsored segment automatically.
I wonder though if pressing "skip" is a good idea in terms of privacy / not giving them what they want. I don't think this was implemented for our "convienience" and rather as yet another manipulation technique.
Just some ideas what I assume they achieve by this:
By pressing it you have to divert your attention towards the ad, even if it is just for a short time.
You might unintentionally signal your preferences which could be used for profile enrichment
You also provide information, that you are still actively at the device an watching (I assume ad providers have more interest on having more/longer ads on content that is actively watched)
Have you tried reaching out to YouTubers who review/play through similar games to yours? Can you buy an ad read from some youtubers as a less intrusive style of ad? Do you have a demo at all that you can point people to right now?
I'm working on the demo now and was thinking of a few channels that might synergise with it. Just need to get done ready before the cash runs out now.
Once the playable slice is out I was considering putting it straight on steam early access but it would be super early and I don't know if that is wasting the soft release impact. I know steam give you some free promo. Can always just host a download myself though.
Google play early access is extremely difficult to understand. Can't even get ap to appear for testers who have signed up and agreed to test, it's crazy.
I've heard advice to initially release a demo on Itch, encourage those who enjoy the demo to join your org's discord, then blast discord to go buy the game on steam on launch day to help boost your day 1 numbers on Steam.
I'd also check various gaming communities on as many social media platforms as possible to see if they allow indie devs to announce releases
Advertising can feel overwhelming when it stops being informative and starts feeling intrusive. The balance between visibility and respect for attention is important.
On youtube, if you get an ad that is related to either gambling or alcohol, you can block the ad and it will skip right to the video tou we're watching
The case with advertisers is that there used to be a covenant between the advertiser and the viewer where the advertiser gave the viewer a jingle or song or funny scenario and the viewer would be entertained to watch the advertisement. This covenant has been broken by the advertiser. They no longer think that they have to offer you anything for your time . A simple pop-up or banner or an obfuscated page is sufficient to divert you from your task in exchange for nothing but inconvenience. Instead of manipulating people with metrics, advertisers might want to get back to that covenant.
As much as these ads suck, they were not the problem. The problem was Reddit charging for using their API (which was a big problem for third party readers) in order to force you to view said ads.
Capitalism's most basic promise was that businesses will create value and have positive influence on society because that will be the only way to generate revenue. Reality proves that it's somehow more profitable to enshittify things.
That's true I definitely oversimplified things. I had an issue where there were posts from supposed users trying to push a product. Felt deceptive compared to normal ad practices.
Reading other replies here, I realise, I miss policeman. It was the best web cruft blocker add-on. Really easy non-fiddly high-fidelity controls over what you allow from where. IIRC, last release was 2015, but I think more recently the developer [Edit:Link]asked somewhere if people were interested in it being revived[/E].
I try and block everything all the time. the fight is real. PipePipe for youtube , Firefox + Ublock for web . Exploited firestick with Wolf Launcher and SmartTube on TV , Linux on all PCs , DeGoogled phone (wip) and Adguard DNS on the router. Windows PC's at work with copilot, onedrive removed and ooshutup10 . Also use a few modded apps such as Tubi with no ads and my sleep music app with no ads. Probably more ive forgotten but always open to suggestions and the work is never done.
I've heard of it but never tried. I'll give it a go. can I get it on F-droid ?. I don't use Youtube alot on my phone, I listen to the Wan show and do yoga every night haha Thank you!
It might be an unpopular opinion, but I like the ads! They are very useful because they help me remember the brands not to buy. Edit: /s was not obvious it seems
True but at the same time entire businesses are built on advertising and wouldn't exist without it. All your favorite YouTubers, virtually all internet published media, etc.
I'm old enough to remember when network television didn't cut important scenes from shows in order to show me commercials.
If these businesses are getting so much efficiency from laying off their employees, why do they need increasingly more advertising?
I doubt there are enough of us who block (when it is even possible) to seriously affect revenue.
Also, if they can break their contract with me to pay for a service with no commercials and force me to watch them anyway, I have no compunctions with denying them the extra profit.
Such a small share of ad-revenue goes to creators it's not worth it. You lose in wasting time, getting your brain turned to mush and getting manipulated by the ads. It costs less to support the creators directly.
I just wish there were easier ways to do so. Something decentralised with all the creators where I could fix an amount per month to spend on content creation and getting it split between what I appreciated.
Don’t forget; sports events. Even the Olympics don’t exist without ads. Adds rule the world (unfortunately). It gets problematic when your privacy gets compromised.
Yeah.. The classical "it has always been like that" when "always" means "in the past 10y". What is 10y compared to the thousands of years we existed as a society?
My husband was watching old basketball games a few weeks back, even as late as 2004, and the differences in advertising is wild, as in, its not present in the older games we grew up with.
Hell, I tuned into the Rocket Leauge tournament recently, and shut if off as soon as I saw progressive insurance on the ball. You can't escape it.
And yet the (modern) Olympics existed for decades without ads. You’ve been tricked into thinking they’re necessary. They are not. Life would exist just fine without them.
advertising is just propaganda without a cause
idk about other languages, but in Portuguese it's literally the same word
Maybe because is the same fucking thing.
I'm surprised the corpos haven't pushed for a new word with less baggage. That's exactly the sort of thing they do when you don't reign them in
We don't have any advertisements on our platform but there are some occasional commercial breaks
You have it good my friend. Language is powerful.
Neither "anuncios" (adverts) nor "marketing" (yeah, we use the English word) are the same as "propaganda" (its spelled the same as in English but said slightly differently)
Is what you describe a Brasilian Portuguese thing?
Probably is a Brazilian thing, but we have words for publicity(publicidade), advertising(anúncios), marketing(same english words because we are a bunch of removed). Propaganda is all this things, I don't know if is just colloquialism but people uses more the term propaganda than the specifics.
It's funny how you can tell when a concept is extremely modern because in languages other than English they tend to just use the English term or a localized variation of the English term
Ah right.
In Portugal in general use "propaganda" is definitelly just the political stuff whilst "publicidade" is definitelly just the commercial stuff.
Mind you, maybe before those two concepts were more merged: I know that in legal terms the political stuff is explicitly called "Propaganda Política" since I've done paphlet distribution for a political party here during election campaigns and the rules for putting "political propaganda" in people's mailboxes are different than for "publicidade".
Maybe there's a technical difference, but at least in Brazil, publicidade and propaganda are widely used as synonyms
It is uncommon to call propaganda (in the political sense) publicidade, so maybe in popular conversations this makes publicidade a kind of propaganda, and not the other way around.
The cause is to separate you from your money and time. To reinforce and promote capital as the ultimate gatekeepers.
yeah but it's not made by the people the propaganda works for. they're just cogs. normal propaganda is made by the people championing the cause in question.
If you work for an advertising agency, you know that your job is to separate people from their money. They celebrate this. They have awards for this. It’s the whole purpose of their job.
Brain r ape. I do not consent.
Ad-blocking is a property right. I have every right to control what my device does or does not display, by definition of ownership. Conversely, advertisers or other parties attempting to colonize my device by forcing it to display something against my (the owner's) will is a hostile act that violates my rights.
Except we are beginning to not own what we own. The computer is yours, the software is just licensed, and they are trying to take everything away from us, from ovens to washing machines, they want to make it all subscription, spying on us, and serving us ads. We don't have the right to repair the products when we break, and it's a federal felony to "break" any sort of digital lock on a device, and I think to change it's programming too.
That said, it's a moot point as of yet, because while websites forced me to whitelist their sites to use them when I had adblock, I was told about ublockorigin, and I see no ads, and the sites can't tell I am using it.
That is a GODDAMN LIE perpetrated by copyright cartel shysters to swindle all of us. The entire legal theory that assertion rests on is absolute nonsense: they want to pretend that you "need" to accept an "EULA" to use the software because otherwise copying it from the installation media onto your hard drive and/or into RAM would be a violation, but that is wrong because 17 U.S. Code § 117 (a) (1) carves out an explicit exception that allows it. EULAs are bunk and do not constitute a valid contact, as they not only lack 'acceptance' because they attempt to work on adhesion (trying to impose new terms after-the-fact when the transaction to obtain the copy has already occurred and concluded), but fail to provide any meaningful 'consideration' to begin with!
They can pry my hardware and software that I own from my cold, dead hands.
Need free food, rent, healthcare, education, and housing first. As long as we still need money to pay for those things then there'll always be too few experts with skills willing to work for free.
Sadly, and I am not a lawyer so this is not even close to legal advice(!!), "beginning" is potentially the wrong word when talking about licenses due to copyright. Because even a single flipped bit in RAM on your computer could be constructed as a copyright infringement if pushed in a legal battle and decided in a court. (This all sounds squishy because, again, I am not a lawyer and as far as I know nothing of this sort has had clear ground setting or breaking rulings yet...)
Why am I of this opinion despite also usually loving to take the "my device my rules stance"? Because I got to proof read some final exams for legal professionals-to-be for their technical accuracy and let me tell you: the most likely legal outcome they saw was not good for most of us. (So now I really really hope that some high up court rules on a case like this and sides with "common sense" about what is and is not allowed with our owned hardware!)
I always and will also try to give websites 1 try.
If I like your content on your site you get 1 try to show ads and if they are not offensively placed and not playing audio.. you get to live
Thats fair if you also hold the stance that they can block you if you aren't paying to use the service. But i doubt you do.
What fucking "service?" Software running locally on my own computer isn't a goddamned "service" to begin with!
Also, fuck off with your bullshit assumption of bad faith.
The web browser and the website are two different piecee of software. Running a web browser doesnt entitle you to access a web server.
You are asking the web server for the page and its giving it to you with ads. If you then decide you dont want the ads the webserver has every right to not serve you the page.
It would be different if it was a local application. Web servers have a material cost for processing a request it costs money to serve you that page. Its completely fair for you to decide that your browser isnt going to display ads but its also just as fair for the website to turn around and reject your request or choose to serve you something else.
Everything belongs to the working class brother
If you want to actively shit on them, there is AdNauseam, which is a fork of uBlock Origin but in addition to blocking the ads, it clicks on absolutely everything, sending fake signals. Polluting their database is costing them money and they have to deal with all the noise.
Not for everyone, but definitely an active hostility towards these fucks.
That seems like it opens the door to a lot of security issues. Part of the reason to use uBlock is that ads are a known threat vector.
All clicks are performed in an isolated sandbox separate from the user area (basically imagine the click register signal going out, but nothing more).
What if you have a multi layered ad blocking setup where you’re using ublock origin and pi.hole and a VPN with blocking?
The multiple layers of redundancy would likely clash with Adnauseum, yeah. Although that probably is just wasted compute - you may only need one or two of those solutions to have effective adblocking (uBlock for supported browsers, pi.hole for devices unable to have uBlock installed) rather than all 3 at once.
Well I’m not gonna bother turning off any of the layers when I’m out and about. Like, my laptop still needs ublock when I’m not at home. And the vpn is just for certain use cases.
If you set up tailscale, you can connect your laptop to your home network and have the pi-hole everywhere.
I have tailscale set up. I’m not gonna have my wife be using tailscale. And I’m also not going to be using tailscale all the time. I even have an exit node on my server.
Except it still rewards the site for hosting ads in the first place
As someone who works in marketing - they will tote these clicks as a great success and continue to do what they are doing, maybe even more so, but will be distraught by the lack of follow through when it comes to sales. I guess if it happened long enough, And on a big enough scale, they might eventually give up but it would take years
Didn't Louis Rossmann say that the conversion rate when they briefly ran repair shop ads was less than 2% or something similar? I think he referred to it when talking about using adblock and donating/buying merch for your favorite creators instead.
Or, more likely, they would not include the fake clicks in their metrics at all, and marketing would never see the inflated metrics.
Site gets paid and I get the content I want. Only one losing is the advertiser, which is a good thing in my book
It's a cute idea, but they would just incorporate some amount of false clicks into their metrics.
Yeah they can probably just ignore your entire profile because it's gives no useful insight, and that's the point.
Exactly, its data poisioning.
If someone is trying to build an ad profile on you (even if you personally dont see the ads) then it feeds them junk data instead of real date.
If you think clicking all the ads makes a meaningful difference, then all the power to you.
Its purely out of spite, plus, im not clicking anything.
I run the full ad blocking suite anyway and see more ads watching a sportsball game with the family than I do on my home network over the course of months.
I call it a win-win
Blocking ads definitely doesn't help the site get paid, that's what I was talking about above.
For the same reason, it's probably not doing any meaningful "poisoning" either.
Then go read what the AdNaseum plugin does and we will talk then.
https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/
Whatever table you imagine clicks to be stored in, add a column called "Using adblocker".
Filter out any rows where that column = true.
Do you know if AdNauseum actively merges in new uBlock Origin changes, or is it fully forked?
https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/ It's a direct fork that seems pretty up to date, only lagging 26 commits behind upstream
I've never had it actually collect an ad
I prefer using Pi-Hole (DNS based block) the ads don't even waste my bandwith.
Advertisement makes me want that product even less.
The worse the product is, the more desperate they get to shove it in your face. Good products don't need to pay others to pretend it's good, you just find out via word-of-mouth or free trials
I was thinking about this just the other day. There's a popular market in my home state, one I've been going to since childhood. It's a single store, not a chain, and it's almost always packed. I've never seen nor heard a single ad for it in my life. Naturally, that makes me like the place even more.
Yep I actively avoid companies that inundate me. I've switched insurance companies because of it (local agent got me much better rates too).
So you're telling me gaico doesn't save as much on car insurance?
Usually they "save you money" by giving you a shittier policy and relying on the buyer not understanding what coverage they need and why
Interesting, the more I know now! Thank you!
Seriously going through an insurance broker is awesome. Best dang way to deal with insurance because I can just call up the broker and have them do it all for me, plus they get paid on commission by the insurance companies (which are mostly smaller B2B companies that don't spend millions on advertising) so it's not even like you pay more for your insurnace
People say this but, if advertising didn't work, companies would have stopped paying for ads long time ago. It works for them, we view ads and then we are willing to pay more for a product that is worth less; it's this simple.
The only solution for us is to avoid ads at all cost.
Yeah - ads do work. The whole point of the surveillance ad system is to track how effective ads are. Companies can measure how many sales they get from their ads and calculate if they are still making a profit. And all those influencers peddling scam products with their special discount codes? People are buying those products.
I can't obviously speak for everyone, I can only speak for myself. And I hate products that advertise.
my kids have grown up with my adblocked version of the internet, when they connect to other internet thats not a filtered feed they get annoyed by ads in their games and on their videos
My wife initially hated my piholes, because they broke some of her phone’s stuff. She runs stock Samsung Android, so lots of the built in Google stuff got broken. She was constantly complaining about it. We eventually spent an evening hunt-and-peck’ing the various blocked DNS requests, to see which ones were required for her phone to work properly, and which ones were just Google Adsense BS. Got her set up with a WireGuard VPN connection that automatically activates when she’s disconnected from the home WiFi, so she’s always protected.
Now that she’s used to it, it’s like a wake up slap whenever she encounters ads. We moved a while ago, and all of my more advanced networking stuff (including the pihole) was sitting in a box until I had time to set it all up. She suddenly started seeing ads again, and was absolutely gobsmacked at how pervasive they are. What really sent her over the edge was when our Roku TV was paused, and went to its idle screen. The idle screen is an auto-scrolling image, and it had an ad plastered across the scrolling image. She was like “what the fuck we’re not even watching anything right now! It’s just idle! Why the hell are they advertising to us on the damned idle screen??” That was what finally pushed her to give me an evening to set all of the networking stuff back up.
Do you have links to any knowledge base docs or guides? I tried setting this up a few years back and couldn't really nail it down and just kinda gave up because it broke too many websites and my smarttv apps wouldn't work either.
Yeah. Had a guy¹ try to put me on his setup once. Let so much bullshit through. Turned out he was running it through windows.
¹roommate
Our smart TV doesn't allow an ad blocker on YouTube, but my kids have developed a way to skip ads anyway. They don't tolerate ads more than I do, and I couldn't be prouder.
Man you must be a good parent. I can only aspire that my future kids are this smart
Positive comments like yours are like jet fuel for new parents. :)
Jailbreak your TV and install a third party launcher and SmartTube. It gave my Sony TV a new lease on life after it was almost smothered to death by ads, even on the home screen.
Install downloader, then go get SmartTube TV.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
Banksy
Somewhat relevant are the Subvertisers for London (as well as similar groups all over the world):
haha that is great
All ads are non consensual and designed to get your attention. So we put them in places like on giant boards along highways. Very cool, very safe.
There's a giant, glowing, animated LED billboard along a main road near my house that had a PSA about distracted driving on it the other day. It made me angry.
Yeahhhh that kind of on the face irony would absolutely bug me too
Nice point if view. Ironically we live in times when minding others boundaries is almost common sense. Abusive behavior gets public contempt. But everyone is just accepting manipulative, malicious and intrusive ads.
Yet another reason we need to move away from cars. Since the distraction is likely not going away, we need to minimize the safety/distraction issue.
(Goddamn we need so much high speed rail, and yesterday)
And so much more standard speed rail too! There's tons of railroad lines all over the country, and even many old stations still standing. Let's start building RDCs again (or better, a modern equivalent) and start running passenger services on all of those lines
The challenges are several fold. For one, there's basically no manufacturers of passenger railcars left in the country. Occasionally a network upgrade will lead to one being spun up for a few years then it'll shut down once the order is fulfilled because there's no consistent market for passenger railcars in North America.
I'd propose using a mix of historic British Rail procurement practices and current military contract practices where you put up a pot of money for up for say 3 companies to develop a prototype railcar meeting a specific spec. Make the spec for a fairly basic car and be ready to update station platforms for ADA compliance rather than forcing the cars to be compatible with 20 different platform heights and designs. Then test those 3 prototypes and the winner receives a bonus as the design is purchased by the federal government, and next you license that design out for all manufacturers in the country to produce, followed by an ongoing order of say 48 railcars per year from 5 different manufacturers and you have 248 railcars per year (enough to replace Amtrak's entire current fleet within 10 years) from 5 different companies (reducing risk of one company mucking it all up) all manufactured with local labor and you have a standard design that is already in active production for other operators to order as well. Repeat this process for more equipment and designs as needed, and suddenly you have a bunch of known standard designs that your network can be built to and you have health competition between manufacturers which will be big enough (because each will have around 50-100 million dollars a year in revenue from that one ongoing federal contract alone) to start performing their own independent R&D to make their own unique stock to try to attract more orders from rail operators
This is what the federal government exists for, making ambitious infrastructure projects like this possible. Policians just aren't interested in thinking big enough
Have you considered a conversation with someone like Lina Khan? Even if it's just to get you talking to the right people in government. I love this!
If you don't think you can do away with billboards I don't see how you'd think you could get people to stop using cars. Especially with how many things get delievered door to door these days. You could put every commuter on trains and the roads would still have traffic. I don't see changing that being any easier than getting rid of billboards and other highly intrusive ads.
I understand that cars serve a purpose. But trains and buses move orders of magnitude more people than cars could ever dream. With a properly functioning transit system (including the aforementioned high speed rails) traffic would clear up (because traffic didn't happen to you, you are traffic), and fewer distracted operators would be on the road.
And in removing those people from operating vehicles, the distraction of a billboard, and the subsequent potential accidents, are mitigated.
And yes we also need to get rid of billboards.
True, just one more lane, right?
The thing with adding lanes is induced demand. By nature of there being more space for cars on that road more drivers will choose take that road over other roads. Cars don't magically come into existence, people drive them, and people drive them for a reason, most commonly to go to/from somewhere
Trains (and bikes and buses) take cars off the road. Every person riding on a transit solution that isn't a car is a individual vehicle trip saved. When every vehicle contains an average of 1.2 people in it, you've got very close to 1:1 vehicle reduction for every trip that's not taken by car
So to your point, are some number of non-drivers choosing not to drive because of traffic? Probably a small number of them. But a complete transit system that has the real world effect of fewer cars on the road will mean few people owning cars. Why would a family own 2 cars when one is parked most of the time? Why spend $20k on a new (to you) car if you're barely using the one you have/had? Fewer cars means less cars on the road which means less traffic. This is the dream.
I moved to Linux, use Freetube, LineageOS on the phone, listen all day to internet radios from the command line, browser with uBlock add on and it's been years since I saw or listened an ad.
I would like to know more about this Internet radio command line thingy
Daaaaaamn, thanks for tv garden link
Ditto!
Yikes. I opened the web page and saw an ad. Started the radio, heard an ad.
I had a VPN working, but I think android auto made me turn it off. Might need a better ad blocking system
Until, you know, you went outside.
The eternal pestilence of physical advertising. Our world will not truly be clean until Linux purges the sins of marketing from this Earth.
Incidentally, you might be interested in Cidade Limpa
Would that be the law everywhere.
Same, glad to hear there are others who found the path free from these parasites :)
Another word for "marketing" or "advertisement" is Manipulation. Shady, manipulative, tactics.
Fuck them. I love Lemmy because it seems like the ratio of like-minded people is much larger here. Nothing better than seeing other principled people that would rather give up some comforts than deal with ads and bend the knee to the pieces of shit that try to push them.
Even products in the supermarket (such as bread!!) come with ads in the fucking plastic wrapper. I have changed my bread brand due to this. I will absolutely give up any comfort to avoid your manipulation. I will fucking shower in cold water if it means I don't bend the knee to pieces of shit.
Don't worry they've solved that, it's called 🩷 𝐼𝓃𝒻𝓁𝓊𝑒𝓃𝒸𝒾𝓃𝑔 😎. That's much less ominous! They just influence!
It’s been a minute so I could be misremembering, but you’re not far off. Another word for public relations (the shaping of public opinion) is propaganda.
Edward Bearnays wrote a book titled Propaganda, where he talks about the need to rebrand the work of Propagandist after it became associated with negative influence during WW2. From what I recall he used the term public relations, but seemed to prefer the term propaganda.
He’s also the person infamous for convincing Americans that we should eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. Another interesting story is about how he advertised to make music rooms in homes trendy, so he could help sell more pianos.
He talks about some of the early manipulation tactics advertisers use. Such as trying to sell you an experience instead of a product. Think of how modern car commercials show a lifestyle more than they show you the car.
It’s an enlightening book that shows that before the war, calling an advertiser a propagandist wouldn’t be out of place. Those propagandist manipulated us into calling the PR now.
Oh, and if I recall correctly propaganda comes from Latin and means “to propagate.”
Well said. It disgusts me a lot, and it also dismays me to see a lot of people don't care at all about ads. I even rememeber people in my old job talking about ads on tv. Boggles my mind.
If I am forced to see or interact with an ad I will do absolutely everything in my power to excise that ad source from my life.
If you have to react to advertising you're already doing it wrong. If it's able to reach you on your hardware in any form, you've already failed.
You're not wrong. But as you said yourself, this only applies to your own hardware. Some of us do engage in this weird thing called "going outside", with some taking it as far as not only going there to touch grass, but also meet other people (gross, I know).
In these situations, even I, an individual who has
even I, builder, king and prisoner of this privacy fortress, am exposed to ads when I occasionally leave it.
I see ads when my kid asks me to read out to him the contents of that colourful banner above the parking lot.
I see ads when I watch cable TV with my parents and they just let the ad break wash over them like a jovial stream of diarrhea.
I see ads when I go shopping and I cannot focus on my own thoughts because only a few metres away there's an ad screen loudly announcing the technological marvels of Buddy's Fully-automatic Butt Crack Scratcher to the world.
In these situations, I really feel the contents of that OP. I feel the brazen attempt to steal my attention when all I want is to be present. I feel the insult to my intelligence because some twat in marketing decided I'm unable to or unworthy of making my own decisions. And I feel the need to quell this frivolous invasion of my time and headspace.
And that's why, in these situations, I take the liberty to turn off the shop's TV while I'm there. I take my parent's remote, mute the ad diarrhea and strike up a conversation. And I promise the kiddo to read him something proper once we get home, but not one of those stupid ads.
(We recently pulled up in front of another giant ad banner, and the little guy went: "Dad, that's just another one of those stupid ads, right?" Imagine how proud dad was, seeing that another system-wide adblocker had been installed...)
Thanks for coming to my TED talk!
Well said all around. I've had almost the exact same thoughts. Good TED talk.
I used to think anti-consumerism was a lot more popular. It's a significant disconnect from how I thought people are. Apparently I took more media related courses in high school and university than most people do.
One thing that continued to confuse me is how tech cultures are unrepentantly consumer capitalists. The earlier times of the world wide web was very counter-culture. So it's been an unending source of befuddlement how tech nerds have been deep-throating the adtech boot.
Pacified by $$$ signs. Counter culture doesn't pay for Bezos next yacht.
Not just personal mind poison, but societal poison too. Most of our media companies are just ad businesses with whatever they portray as their main products as window dressing. Meta, Google, NYT, all TV networks, even NPR is increasingly funded by ads. I was hopeful in the shift to paid streaming services this might change, and it did sort of, for a while, but increasingly they too are turning to ads.
i came to realize this when when my home built router died a few months ago.
it was based on pfsense and i had setup publicly shared advertisement blocking; so i hadn't see any ad at all for years.
i became annoyed when i started seeing them after the router died and then i actively became angry when i was bombarded by them while watching tv as i was visiting family, yet they didn't think anything was wrong with watching the same mcdonalds advertisement 500x in a single hour.
that shit has an impact on your psyche whether you know right away or not.
Yup. For me it was when I went on vacation with my family. Tried to enjoy a movie in the evening after a day out and my god. Ads every literal 7 minutes of movie. How the fuck anyone can deal with that is beyond me.
same here, i couldn't finish watch the movie because i was so angry about it. lol
I grew up with every internet ad being likely hostile, you didn’t click any of them. It kinda stuck with me.
But also they went way overboard. If it’s a site funded by advertising and there was just a simple banner at the top or something then fine, I’d just ignore it still but whatever. But everything is so obnoxious now, so fuck ‘em.
Its crazy how much people put up with it every time I see someone elses browser I ask them why they dont use an ad blocker and I always gets some nothing reply.
Have you installed Bonzi Buddy yet?
I remember pushing my mom to install one that had a black and white cat wander around the desktop and on top of windows one time when she had to take me to work.
I found a video of a newer version (with bonus Bonzi Buddy), but it doesn't appear to do the walking along the tops of your windows that I remember.
Appropriately for the topic of this thread, it was all an advertisement for Purina Pet Food
I don't do any of those things, because my devices block them before they ever reach me.
Yep. One must move beyond an "I hate you and I hope you die" relationship with ads, to a "I don't think about you at all" relationship with ads. Regardless of how many fits Google throws about ublock, one can always do VPN/DNS type filtering. I've honestly almost forgotten ads exist.
There's some tech blog/news site (can't recall the name right now) that tries to shame me into turning off my ad blocker and viewing their ads with an extra pop up
"Hey! We noticed your browser isn't displaying ads. Can you..."
HAHA NO
What do you mean fits about ublock?
I had to download it off the internet and not the play store on both my phone and computer, but it worked, still works great, I see about zero ads and it blocks a lot of pages entirely.
It blows my mind that some people on my team were excited to watch the commercials during the Super Bowl.
I live my life in a way that minimizes the advertising I'm exposed to, and some people are just mainlining that garbage.
I mean, it blows my mind that people were excited to watch the Super Bowl at all. The advertisements are often the best part, given that the game itself is so mired in interruptions - often to deliberately increase the amount of air time for ads.
I think there is an American ritual aspect to it. I hate football and never watch it other than the super bowl. I've always just watched it for the funny ads, halftime show, and social gathering aspect. There is nostalgia for the 90s-00s where funny Superbowl ads became cultural touchstones, and early "memes" that people would quote and talk about the rest of the year if not more. Though honestly, it feels like the mojo is gone. The ads rarely seem as funny as they used to be. Or maybe we are just so inundated with internet ads and the lightspeed meme cycle that they simply can't draw the same level of cultural relevance they once did.
Yah but the ads during the Super Bowl are usually interesting and fun and I don't mind them.
Which begs the question, why aren't all ads fun and interesting? I've seen some YT channels make them this way and it makes them far more palletable.
Fun and Interesting ads are actually the worst ones, because they get you to associate pleasant feelings with their product/service/brand, which dilutes your ability to make rational, objective choices about them. That's one of the ways that they are manipulating you.
you felt that the big brother ad for the ring cameras was interesting and fun?
Did I say "every ad"?
This may be a hot take here but I do not actually hate the concept of "paying money to promote a product or service". However, in practice I can hardly think of an advertising method that I find tolerable in the slightest due to the manipulation tactics. When you look at vintage photos advertising is usually some hand painted sign on the side of a bus stop that says "Try Zuckerman's Flour!" I don't hate that, but we also don't have that.
"Hey this thing is here" and "have this problem try this" are useful enough that even without paid ads people make that content.
The lifestyle manipulation, feeding unfounded fears, biases, anxieties, and rage for almost anyone reason is evil to me.
100% agree
Back in the good-ish days of reddit, they had ads that I actually appreciated. They were clearly labeled as ads and had a different color, were at the top of the feed only, so once you scrolled past the first one you were done, and we're essentially just sticky promoted posts, so they had comment sections.
You could find honest reviews of the products in the ads. Shills we're identified and down voted into oblivion, so the real shit tended to land on top. It encouraged advertisers who actually had quality products on offer and who understood their audience. They were the only online ads that ever led directly to me buying a product.
For me the problem use to be it having gone from "Our product is great and here's why" style of adverts to the psychological manipulation shit (image of beautiful woman seducing handsome man, queue name of perfume).
I'm fine with people trying to convince me but detest when they try to manipulate me.
However the recent tendency to relentlessly shove it in front of me ALL THE TIME does get on my nerves - it's like getting constantly harassed by a shameless salesman with no respect for other people.
There is this little community here on Lemmy focussing on vintage german ads:
/c/die_[email protected]
Ads have changed, but those ads telling you that your body is ugly and that you need $product to change it are old and have been around since the 19th century and the beginnings of modern advertisements. It is also quite interesting how old some of the usual scams are. There are currently people on TikTok scamming people with some method invented in the 1800s
Yeah good points there, and I certainly didn't mean to imply ads were historically better on the whole. Ads from a a century ago also featured a significantly greater amount of flat out lying about their products, especially when it came to medicines and "tonics".
But even if we accept that their honesty has improved (dubious) I do think advertising today has become more intrusive, and the function of advertising is today is more about disrupting our focus than it ever has been.
No kidding, if I happen to hear an ad on a tv or radio I'm passing by I plug my ears and go lalalalala until I or it are gone. I truly can't stand them that much, it's a psychotic invention meant to constantly brainwash you into becoming a mindless consumption robot and I refuse to partake.
So when you're in a store or a restaurant that is playing the radio and an ad comes on you'll walk around the entire commercial break with your fingers in your ears going, "lalalalala?"
Sure. Sure you do, buddy.
YEP!
The funny thing is that I’m actively making Spotify lose money for me, I use ad blockers on desktop which entirely bypass the ads and I close the iOS app when I hear an ad (they won’t count it as an ad watched until you see the whole thing, which I never)
https://snapcraft.io/calaboka
Some people like to say that nobody's immune to advertising. Maybe so, but there are definitely some of us who aren't as affected by it. When most ads you see are for things you'd never buy anyway, all the crap kind of blends together.
For me, no amount of fast food ads, car ads, vacation ads, etc. are going to have any meaningful effect. I already don't buy fast food, don't purchase new cars (and if I'm shopping used, there are certain criteria that matter far more than a brand or dealership), and am way too poor to take a vacation. Yet, the ads persist.
Even if I weren't muting and skipping them at every chance, you can't get blood from a stone. End stage capitalism, man. Can't spend money I don't have!
The deluge of gambling, crypto currency, GLP, and AI ads only make me hate those things more.
I do exactly the same. Ads were tolerable when they were just a few tv commercials, but nowadays we are flooded with them everywhere, and for me they manage to do the opposite of what they are made for, the more I see a brand advertised the more I despise the brand.
True. I remember two ads specifically in my country that pissed me off so much I vowed to never purchase anything from their company. Both were phone service providers.
One was an ad where the guy gets the message of the ad out in 5 seconds and then the rest of the ad is him sitting in silence for 25 additional seconds, eating some food. That ad pissed me off enough to contact the company and let them know what I thought.
The second was this stupid bint sitting in a pink room, smugly wringing her hands and going: Oooh, you really want to get to your video, don't you? Here it comes! 🤪
I was like: I don't give a fuck if your phone service provider is the best in the galaxy. I will never use it ever.
Technically I have a third ad that made me despise charity for life, but that was before the time where ads online were what they are today and this ad did not show up online. I'll tell the story anyways because this is the type of ad that every charity should avoid if they want people to donate:
Rewind to 2012. My boyfriend and I were dirt poor. Literally had to borrow money from our parents to have enough for food. He was a full time student and I was sick with a mean depression at the time.
We get some birthday money. I forget who it was from and who it was for. Normally, we would spend birthday money to pay bills but this time there was a tiny bit left over and we decided to go to the cinema for once. Have a date night. We only had enough for tickets. No snacks. No drinks. Just the tickets, but we didn't care because the fact that we got to go to the movies felt like a massive luxury.
Ads pop up on the big screen. One of them is this close up of an African child with flies on his face, looking real sad. Across his face a text appears: "How much was your movie ticket?"
That singlehandedly made me boycott that specific charity for life. Fuck them forever. Worst part is that i used to actually volunteer for that charity and help them collect money by going door to door once a year with a friend. We collected so much money for those assholes. Haven't bothered with volunteering since. It wasn't solely that ad that turned me off charity, but a series of gross experiences that just made me fucking hate charity and the vultures who use it to scrape money from normal everyday people who think they are helping little impoverished children in third world countries.
I have seen similar charity ads on social media after the terminally online realized that there is a neverending war in Gaza. So many ads with obvious scammers prematurely blaming you for skipping their ad and leaving them to suffer. My reaction? 🖕👁👅👁🖕
There for sure are good and honorable charities out there and I have no ill will towards them, but I see the vast majority of charities as guilt tripping scams where they try their best to make people feel ashamed for being born in a privileged country and wringing money out of them while exploiting children in poor countries who will never see a dime.
In short: I hate ads too and the more they annoy me, the more their company or charity ends on my permanent shit list.
This 100%. I have so many brands in my black list to never consider after happening to get interrupted by their ad, not even neccessarily a dumb ad. Reoccurring ones do that quite effectively too: Seeing an ad once is maybe no biggie (unless it’s long/dumb), twice starts to annoy, three times and you’re out.
Even if you adblock and sponsorblock. Advertisement is everywhere. It's on tv series and films as product placements. It's on every bus stop, metro station, in the form of billboards, every casually on TV even muted still showing ads on the corner of your eye, or just company logos, even every single product you buy comes with a damn logo on it.
Bought a new pair of shoes, new headphones, new pair of fucking glasses? Which you need to wear everyday and can't see without them? Enjoy being a walking billboard for everyone who looks at you.
This drives me crazy and yes, I do hide most logos I can with a permanent marker, and even then it's not enough.
I made it a point to never wear or use anything with obvious logos most of my life. Want me to tell people my shirt is nike. pay me!
Good.
Worth the extra price to not be enslaved as the corporation's advertising bitch.
Smh. Actively hostile relationship is like throwing bricks at their offices, or, at the very least, calling their support and bogging them down with stupid questions with no intention to buy their services. Or... spreading information on why you shouldn't use their services.
I'll start: Ground News is a site based on the stupidest idea ever and it's use is actively dangerous for the society. It steals traffic from real news sources doing actual grunt work, and then has the gall to ask you to pay them for it. It teaches you to turn off your critical thinking and to just trust them on rating news sources biases which they pull from... where, exactly? Ah yeah, straight out of their arses. But worst of all, they put left and right outlets on equal pedestals as if both have the same merit, promoting this weird centrist position of half left ideas and half literal fascism. American fascism, to be precise, because those ratings don't even make sense outside of USA. For example, they've rated Al Jazeera, the news agency wholly owned by an authoritarian monarchy state, as "left leaning". Like, what?
I mean, it sounds like they're not even running an ad blocker. That's not even an effectively defensive relationship.
I also make a mental note to not buy products that have intrusive ads. There are always alternative brands.
Also, I go out of my way to get all my gas from the one station near me that doesn't show loud ass video ads everytime I get gas.
Mind you that, if you have to make a mental note, they have won.
They can have the moral victory. I'm concerned about not giving them my money.
We just had a sporting event in the US where people are more interested in the ads than the actual event itself.
The Super Bowl commercial with the Backstreet Boys and MGK was nostalgic and funny. Generally I find most ads annoying and block them or avoid the sites/channels where they show up.
I tolerate ads (to a point) if it's a free service. If I have to pay to use, the product should have no ads.
I literally dropped my Internet Provider which had a Net+TV+phone packet when their TV box got enshittified with Ads.
Got me a different, Internet Only, provider and made my own TV box from a Mini-PC with Linux and a wireless remote control.
Interestingly, I ended up paying 1/3 the price and getting 5x faster internet relative to the previous provider, so thanks for trying to shove adds on my face Vodaphone!
I go around installing solutions on my friends and family's phones and TVs (ad-free YouTube clients, stremio, etc) and I fucking hate it when they use the official ones out of habit. Like I didn't just do this for your convenience, this is mainly anti-advertisement activism. I fucking hate ads
It's becoming best practice in IT to install uBlock Origin on browsers to help prevent scareware
YouTube music Revanced has entered the chat
I'm so hostile about advertising my son has picked up the habit.
Stop doing this nonsense manually !
thnx for advertising those to us.
/jk
I almost never watch you tube anymore because of this
You can try invidious instances like yewtu.be
Invidious is an alternative front end for youtube that allows you to watch videos without ads or other tracking. And it's self hostable. But the public instances work just fine - I actually have issues with YouTube stalling constantly, I assume because of my ad/script blockers. But going to yewtu.be/watch?v=(youtube video code) allows me to watch in HD with zero ads or interruptions.
Youtube does try to fight it, so it occasionally will break, but just like Ublock, Invidious has talented people on the team fighting back.
There's also a firefox extension for auto redirect: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/invidious-redirect-2/
For some reason invidious never works for me, i just get errors and it doesn't load, but FreeTube works great.
There have (especially lately) been a lot of times when it goes down.
My understanding is that Youtube has been changing the way they present or stream videos. I'm not familiar with the technical aspects, really, but Invidious is actively working on the issues.
For me, when I try to use it, it's down maybe 10-20% if the time, but occasionally for longer stretches at once. Not a perfect solution, but another tool you can use to avoid Youtube directly
I use Firefox with Ublock Origin on Android, and if I watch youtube in the browser, it filters pretty much all ads. Sometimes I get one at the start of a video, but closing the tab and starting again has got rid of them so far 👍
One day I need to share a screenshot of how youtube looks on Firefox after a few tweeks. I've used Ublock Origin to block everything I didn't like. It's literally just the player, description, the comments and a link to the settings and my subscriptions.
It's actually shocking when I see unfiltered youtube on someone's stream.
God I do have a weird relationship with it. I have adguard set up to block ads at the DNS level, I have adblockers on everything, and yet I spent the other night binge watching "Will it Blend?"
You are a person of culture, and I respectfully tip my hat to you. Of course, the question left unanswered is: Did it blend?
Can I see it?
It did blend! Many times over the span of several hours (I watched... Most of that channel that day...)
How long did it take to un-break basically every website? I tried doing this and it made pretty much every site that had this problem unusable. I could never find a sweetspot that only blocks ads and let's legitimate traffic through; and it caused issues with my partner's work portals.
Moving target. They ho to work every day to fuck up uthe internet.
Start with the default block list. That shouldn't break everything, if it does give examples of the problems and the sites and I'm sure we can find a solution.
It weirdly didn't break every website? It said it might, but it ended up not. No idea how, or what I did. The only issue has been my room mate plays mobile games and some of those give ads for a benefit, so they can't watch those.
I'm using HaGeZi's block list (https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists). Not saying it'll work for everyone, but it doesn't cause me any issues, even on the strictest one.
Which of HaGeZi's blocklists are you using specifically?
Ultimate, the strictest one. I remember picking one down, but just pulled it up and it is the Ultimate blocklist
Invasive ads are my reference to not buying the product.
Advertising is a technology of control that sacrifices material reality for authoritarian bullshit.
Advertisers deserve the wall.
And/Or: Take a higher ground.
Allow them the autonomy they seek to deprive others.
Like Bill Hicks offered, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 they realise the error of their ways, and they do it themselves.
...' Saved me anyway. One less advertiser in the world. One more anti-advertising advocate in the world. :) A +2 gain, at no expense of arranging a wall and firing squad. ;)
I actively avoid products and services that are advertised to me.
After setting up my devices and everything i noticed i get really really mad when i encounter (especially intrusive) ads nonetheless. It usually makes me stop whatever i was doing and consider if whatever i want to accomplish is worth more than watching a 10 second ad. - Usually it´s not.
Got a samsung smart TV that had ads in the menu bar. I bought the thing, why ads. Learn pihole and reuse of old galaxy s7. block Samsung. then firestick. then buy server space to download movies and TV shows.
I got so upset at ads native in TV 6 years ago I hoist the flag.
My entire homelab is constructed with the unofficial goal of never watching any advertisements ever.
Same here. Glad to hear, that I'm not the only one.
That’s right, refuse this pollution for the senses to rob your time.
Die advertising, just die.
Almost drove off with the gas cap and door open on my car cause I was doing my best to ignore the pump blasting some shit advertisement about some shit product I don't want and wouldn't buy. Wife caught it before I could drive off, but still, I will never voluntarily watch any form of ad. I loathe this world.
Mute button is on the right of the screen, second from the top.
Fucking hate those gas pump ads.
Not every screen has buttons. The ones by me all don't.
Oh dang. That's fucking bullshit. Around here they all have buttons. Wow. I hate capitalism
Yup, it fucking blows. I can't even find the speakers on the ones by me, I think they're behind the screen.
I made it a habit to always glance in my side mirrors to confirm there's nothing unexpected around me (including open doors or connected gas nozzles) before shifting out of park every time. Granted best practice is to walk around the car once as an inspection before even starting it every time, but that's more than I often can be bothered to do
Graphene OS YouTube Revanced YouTube Music Revanced Mullvad Unlock Origin Linux
Never looking back 🌊 🛥🛥
Add stremio to this. (+ the torrentio extension)
Agreed
ublock and privacy badger. umatrix for fine tuning.
Advertisers have made their bed too. I almost fell for some scam/phishing ads myself and that's it for me - no ad is ever showing up on any machine under my control. If you can't maintain your side of a social contract then you lost it.
I run uBlock on top of a pi-hole, with invidious and de-arrow for youtube stuff.
I don't see ads anymore.
And when I'm on a different device, where I can't stop the ads, I simply don't consume the content.
Ublock has always just worked for me? I mean, a couple of times YouTube did a thing, but then a day, or an hour later, Ublock fixed it. I'm referring to YouTube only.
Also, I run NoScript and choose whether I'm willing to allow a site to show me an ad, and slurp my data, in exchange for whatever is on the site that I think I want. Often, I get tired of allowing scripts one at a time until the content appears, and just close the site. Rarely, I'll bite the bullet and allow all, then go and wash my hands afterward.
Fewer than ten sites make up more than 90% of my viewing.
I don’t have a hostile relationship with ads because I block them all.
All advertising is abuse.
I will happily leaf through the adverts in my gardening and cannabis magazines.
I may be extreme, but on those rare occasions when an ad slips through my adblock wall, I actively wonder it there's a way I can avoid buying that specific product in the future.
That's how much I hate ads.
I love ads. They tell me exactly which sellers would rather spend money on manipulating consumers than making a better product.
There is no device in my house with an adblock of some kind, even my router has one.
The best way to hate is to never acknowledge at all
Hi, noob here.
What type of ads do routers with adblock manage to filter that normal browser extensions cannot? Thanks
They block ads from phone apps, which is amazing.
Works wonders for all the ads on apps targeted toward kids.
A network "ad block" is just a DNS level block. If a Roku TV tries to reach ads.roku.net or whatever, the router can simply refuse to forward the request.
This is actually really useful beyond ad blocking. You can block known malicious sites as well.
The problem is the harm to small bloggers and creators that need ads to survive.
I recommend routing your browser around your router ad block by changing its DNS then using uBlock Origin to whitelist the sites you want to support. You can block third party cookies and fingerprinting to mitigate the tracking.
I would much rather do direct support. Conveniently, I also lose so much respect for people that run ads that I don't want to support them. OTOH, I spend way more on patreon and bandcamp than I would on subscription services.
I agree with that.
This is why I use adblock and sale the high seas
We recently got a new cable service, and it's the best I've ever seen. Besides a bunch of other advantages, I can go back to any TV show from the past 4 days and watch them - and skip all the commercials. I almost never watch a show when it's first on, I'd rather watch it in an hour or so, or tomorrow, and skip the ads.
I actively go out of my way to not buy anything that annoyingly advertises to me
They all lulled us with meme culture. Instead what we needed was to create anti ads. Any time our podcast or content creators began showing ads, then we should have first been super pissed off. Pissed Off because these people ruined television. We were in a time when companies were creating patents were you had to shout the brand name at your TV to turn off the commercial. The internet was content creation without those capitalist fucks. Second we should have made an effort to create as hostile and environment to them as possible. Sorry to the little guy, but go to cable access.
For every ad that sucked our free time, we could have produced at least 2 anti ads. Like when a podcast advertised for zockdoc or whatever, we all needed to leave comments like "pretty sure they told my aunt she had cancer even though it was just a cough" or if it's some drop shipper on reddit acting like they just found this cool temu star lamp then every comment should have been about how these lights burst into flames and killed your entire family.
We need to make the internet as hostile as possible to advertisers. They are the reason we are tracked and why have enshittification. They built the systems to track our profiles and market to us all under the guise of selling ads to random content creators. Why is pewdiepie and Jack Paul and Joe Rogan millionaires now meddling in our politics. Because we didn't defend this new frontier. We knew they'd create data scarcity, we knew we had to stop it, but they rat fucked us with cat videos and memes.
I find sponsor reads kinda funny. Its like we went back to dawn of tv. And speaking about statisfying, there is nothing more satisfying than a cool paul morrow cigarrete....
I would not even mind them if they did not repeat so fucking much.
Advertising is one of the most prolific environmental pollutants of economic activity, and needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
I try to keep my TV clear of as many ads as I can and mute the ones I can't. When that happens my arcade machine calls me to it
I bet they take the mute button off the remote on the next chromecast update.
Yep. Browse he internet without adblock? Not even once. Sponsorskip you know I ain't never gonna stop. Annoying services I can't adblock, looking at you twitch, you're eight amazon I do need to do something else with my time.
Similarly with streaming subscriptions. Ahoy matey looks like the tried and true method of finding the files themselves is still the best way to enjoy that show or movie.
Advertising isn’t inherently negative, but people naturally push back when they feel their attention is being taken for granted. Respect for the audience makes all the difference.
No kidding.
Like most of my streamimg is the cheaper ad versions, regular commwrcuals, usually not meaningful, sometimes a bathroom break.
My daughter watches Youtube for music sometimes on the TV though. Good god those are the WORST "ads". So many try to be like 10 minutes long unless you skip. Many feel like some random peraon reading from a card, production quality all around is ass.
I can't change the DNS on the router or TV and keep meaning to set up a new router to block the TV ads through DNS.
Good.
Do everything you can to avoid letting the manipulation get even the tiniest toe-hold on your senses and mind and emotions.
I used to work in "advertising or marketing". I know from the inside, how dangerous it is. I was "just doing my job", seeking to do the best for my client, getting them as big a return for their money as I could. ... That means maximally psychologically manipulating any who encounter the advert (or logo or whatever).
Insidiously created associations, shifting perceptions, contorting preferences, coercing purchases, without you realising that's being done to you.
I'm glad I had the experience to know what it's like. I'm even more glad I got out of advertising as soon as I got up to the level of making TV adverts.
While animating my first TV advert, for the entire 3 months, as background, I would play a Bill Hicks VHS over and over, wearing it out to garbled snow. Meaning around 12 times a day I'd get a dose of "Anybody here work in advertising or marketing?".
Our little team of two (me, making the advert, and Timi, schmoozing the client), made a big impact with our effectively non-existent budget. Changed the culture. Imagine how much could be done by those with millions and billions to spend, on getting into your mind, to play you like their cash-cow puppet, without you realising.
YES! AVOID ADVERTS WITH EVERYTHING YOU'VE GOT! THIS IS SERIOUS! STOP LETTING ADVERTISERS DATA-MINE YOU AND COLD-READ YOU! AVOID ADVERTISERS WITH EVERYTHING YOU'VE GOT!
Same here, here's q tip beside addblocks, if you're still watching yt content, use PipePipe for android based phone, and Smartube TV for android TV. There will be no adds, and the apps skip sponsored segment automatically.
I wonder though if pressing "skip" is a good idea in terms of privacy / not giving them what they want. I don't think this was implemented for our "convienience" and rather as yet another manipulation technique.
Just some ideas what I assume they achieve by this:
By pressing it you have to divert your attention towards the ad, even if it is just for a short time.
You might unintentionally signal your preferences which could be used for profile enrichment
You also provide information, that you are still actively at the device an watching (I assume ad providers have more interest on having more/longer ads on content that is actively watched)
Just use sponsorblock, uBlock, privacyBadger, Dearrow, consentomatic and that one that blocks the JS LAN scans (port authority?)
I hate ads but I'm now having to consider running ads for a Kickstarter campaign and don't know how to feel.
Failing that, the game will need to be ad-supported. Even worse.
Even cutting down on everything life is too expensive to make much without caving somewhere.
I just hope I can make them unobtrusive and short and cause as little disturbance as possible.
Have you tried reaching out to YouTubers who review/play through similar games to yours? Can you buy an ad read from some youtubers as a less intrusive style of ad? Do you have a demo at all that you can point people to right now?
You're on my wavelength!
I'm working on the demo now and was thinking of a few channels that might synergise with it. Just need to get done ready before the cash runs out now.
Once the playable slice is out I was considering putting it straight on steam early access but it would be super early and I don't know if that is wasting the soft release impact. I know steam give you some free promo. Can always just host a download myself though.
Google play early access is extremely difficult to understand. Can't even get ap to appear for testers who have signed up and agreed to test, it's crazy.
I've heard advice to initially release a demo on Itch, encourage those who enjoy the demo to join your org's discord, then blast discord to go buy the game on steam on launch day to help boost your day 1 numbers on Steam.
I'd also check various gaming communities on as many social media platforms as possible to see if they allow indie devs to announce releases
Advertising can feel overwhelming when it stops being informative and starts feeling intrusive. The balance between visibility and respect for attention is important.
That balance is practically impossible now. If you respect people's attention, you will lose that attention to some other advertiser who does not.
Does political propaganda count?
that's the worst kind of advertisements; especially the subtle ones.
Advertising is a threat to your resources.
Pro tip
On youtube, if you get an ad that is related to either gambling or alcohol, you can block the ad and it will skip right to the video tou we're watching
YouTube has ads?
The case with advertisers is that there used to be a covenant between the advertiser and the viewer where the advertiser gave the viewer a jingle or song or funny scenario and the viewer would be entertained to watch the advertisement. This covenant has been broken by the advertiser. They no longer think that they have to offer you anything for your time . A simple pop-up or banner or an obfuscated page is sufficient to divert you from your task in exchange for nothing but inconvenience. Instead of manipulating people with metrics, advertisers might want to get back to that covenant.
You have ads?
i have an actively hostile relationship with ads but i don't see a reason to try and justify it. Ads are bad. -pretty simple.
Truth. We moved from reddit cause of deceptive ad placements.
As much as these ads suck, they were not the problem. The problem was Reddit charging for using their API (which was a big problem for third party readers) in order to force you to view said ads.
Capitalism's most basic promise was that businesses will create value and have positive influence on society because that will be the only way to generate revenue. Reality proves that it's somehow more profitable to enshittify things.
That's true I definitely oversimplified things. I had an issue where there were posts from supposed users trying to push a product. Felt deceptive compared to normal ad practices.
They call me the Fastest Mute in the West
Reading other replies here, I realise, I miss policeman. It was the best web cruft blocker add-on. Really easy non-fiddly high-fidelity controls over what you allow from where. IIRC, last release was 2015, but I think more recently the developer [Edit:Link]asked somewhere if people were interested in it being revived[/E].
[Edit: No, seriously, it was really really good. https://www.ghacks.net/2014/10/19/policeman-is-a-rule-based-add-on-for-firefox-to-control-web-requests/ ... I suppose, it's worth vibe-coding a continuation of https://github.com/futpib/policeman (<- I presume's the right one). ]
Soon advertisers will be able to force you to watch their lies, don't worry about that.
Soon your computer won't be yours ever again
Soon enough, I'm sure, we'll even have ads in space so we can't escape any of this shit anymore
That is, unless we start getting.more hostile against advertising and marketing. We need politicians to become hostile against ads
Please put me on the haters list. (For advertising & marketing)
Ads? Ah, those annoying stupid things I watch in TV. Online I don't see any of these since more than 10 years.
When is been years since you had ZERO relationship with advertising, and it took you a while to get the meme...
I try and block everything all the time. the fight is real. PipePipe for youtube , Firefox + Ublock for web . Exploited firestick with Wolf Launcher and SmartTube on TV , Linux on all PCs , DeGoogled phone (wip) and Adguard DNS on the router. Windows PC's at work with copilot, onedrive removed and ooshutup10 . Also use a few modded apps such as Tubi with no ads and my sleep music app with no ads. Probably more ive forgotten but always open to suggestions and the work is never done.
Grayjay is better than PipePipe. I use Freetube on my computer. SmartTube is the best. I love that app so much.
I've heard of it but never tried. I'll give it a go. can I get it on F-droid ?. I don't use Youtube alot on my phone, I listen to the Wan show and do yoga every night haha Thank you!
I'm pretty sure I installed it directly from Github
https://app.futo.org/fdroid/repo/
Someone should tell this poor guy about adblockers.
I don't see them anymore.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=VdMjqcjMVTc
Use https://adnauseam.io/, block ads, annoy marketers
It might be an unpopular opinion, but I like the ads! They are very useful because they help me remember the brands not to buy. Edit: /s was not obvious it seems
True but at the same time entire businesses are built on advertising and wouldn't exist without it. All your favorite YouTubers, virtually all internet published media, etc.
Well too bad for the advertisers cause I don’t see any of what they’re spending money on
I'm old enough to remember when network television didn't cut important scenes from shows in order to show me commercials.
If these businesses are getting so much efficiency from laying off their employees, why do they need increasingly more advertising?
I doubt there are enough of us who block (when it is even possible) to seriously affect revenue.
Also, if they can break their contract with me to pay for a service with no commercials and force me to watch them anyway, I have no compunctions with denying them the extra profit.
That's all entirely dependent on what business you're referring to.
If they can’t exist without ads then it’s time to die
Great, wave goodbye to all your favorite publications.
Bad take. There's also subscription models for example. Or grants or donation / donor based.
Bad take. Those are simply not sustainable in most cases on their own. They just subsidize other revenue models.
Oh no
Anyway
HaHa
Such a small share of ad-revenue goes to creators it's not worth it. You lose in wasting time, getting your brain turned to mush and getting manipulated by the ads. It costs less to support the creators directly.
I just wish there were easier ways to do so. Something decentralised with all the creators where I could fix an amount per month to spend on content creation and getting it split between what I appreciated.
Uhhhh I mean there are lots and lots of people doing it every day, so it very clearly absolutely is worth it for them.
That's great but it's not sustainable.
Don’t forget; sports events. Even the Olympics don’t exist without ads. Adds rule the world (unfortunately). It gets problematic when your privacy gets compromised.
Sporting events existed for thousands of years before advertising—don’t mistake current conditions for necessary ones.
Yeah.. The classical "it has always been like that" when "always" means "in the past 10y". What is 10y compared to the thousands of years we existed as a society?
Sports would be better without ads. Less money in the industry, less corruption, less over paid players, less private jets. More passion.
My husband was watching old basketball games a few weeks back, even as late as 2004, and the differences in advertising is wild, as in, its not present in the older games we grew up with.
Hell, I tuned into the Rocket Leauge tournament recently, and shut if off as soon as I saw progressive insurance on the ball. You can't escape it.
And yet the (modern) Olympics existed for decades without ads. You’ve been tricked into thinking they’re necessary. They are not. Life would exist just fine without them.
I watched the Superbowl on a Sky Sports stream from the UK. No ads, they just cut to talking to people on the field.
You. Lucky you!