Wow, that’s… kind of impressively sophisticated for the system to pick up on that.

But wait, aren’t the ads account-tailored?

No they don’t. Modern advertising isn’t informing ppl of something thats available, it’s emotionally manipulative con artistry. They love nothing more than shoving an ad in Yoru face at the moment it would be most manipulative. You don’t have to make excuses for them. In fact, you should maybe, intentionally stop doing so.

Same here. A buddy of mine was listening to YT Music on a speaker when an infomercial length ad started talking (uh, I mean, lying) about all the how and why the United States has the best healthcare system in the world and there’s no good reason to change any of it.

My head almost exploded. What. The. Fuck.

What happened to actually having a sales person vet this shit?

“Optimized” away as fast as possible, you can safely bet.

It all went to shit when advertisers realized that they don’t actually have to sell anything. The ad is the product. That’s why so much advertisement is a scam now. Regulation is so far behind the problems of the internet it is ridiculous. Some companies entire business model is to put out ads, then funnel the data straight to data brokers. The products aren’t real, they just have to get prints, eyes and occasional curiosity or accidental clicks, and they make a margin over it. It is madness.

I’m always surprised when a band mate wants to share a song with me and they whip up their phone and absolutely tolerate 45s of ads before the music starts

You don’t immediately want to click on an AI image of a toe infection, or fingers holding some weirdly anatomical exotic fruit?

I realised this myself when i had to watch some youtube video in a browser without adblock. There was literal porn as an ad. The second of two was some hentai game, but at least it was half blurred. I have no idea who used that browser to get those targeted ads, it was a shared computer.

How do you watch YouTube on mobile without ads? Do you just watch on mobile browser instead of using YT app? Is there some alternative front end app that includes adblock?

What happened to actually having a sales person vet this shit?

That costs money. Why would they do that when it turns out that they don’t actually have to?

They also interrupt video at random times on web video. It is like web advertisers are unaware of the transition that existed on linear broadcast so the viewer can retain context. Web videos are so jarring they have the reverse effect.

I would pay for an app to tell me the nearest McDonalds that had McRibs.

It took me years to accept that mid video sponsor ads are just… a thing now, and it ultimately makes little sense for me to just give a blanket ‘nope’ to everyone who uses them…

We thought we could build a digital utopia, and laughed off ‘the corpos will buy all of it’ as fanciful cyberpunk doomer hysteria.

… well… turns out that wasn’t hysteria.

Oh well. At least I can more easily conceptualize myself as something like ‘down on his luck shadowrunner’, rofl.

The old logic from the 90s still holds -> the more pernicious the ads, the less you should want to be there.

That it all got functionally digitally enclosed and normalized doesn’t change that… you just gotta deal with the terror of knowing most people these days just literally are programmed by advertisements and algorithms.

Excuse me, are you insinuating Tai Chi Walking is a scam?

I still dont understand why YouTube removed banner ads from on top of the video. The ones on the homepage and side feed, I can kind of understand. They want to show more videos to people faster. Sure. But the on-video banner ads were quite unobtrusive imo. Like I didn’t even close them very often in the olden’ days when I didn’t use an adblocker all the time.

Change to Mullvad or Adguard DNS. It’s not perfect, but doesn’t require manifest V2 so it works well even on edge.

That said it’s even harder to fix issues caused by DNS-level adblocking than an extension so consider at your own risk.

My mom is the same, she uses Firefox but I was hesitant to add ublock because if it break something she would have no idea on how to fix it. So I installed Librewolf and changed so it remembers login to make it simpler for her, she never uses it. I think she is so used to the ads that she believes something is wrong when the ads are no longer there.

For decades, if I happen to hear ads playing on radio or something, i literally stick my fingers in my ears and go LALALALA until it stops or I have left.

You’re not selling me SHIT today, I will never be part of your brainwashing scheme.

I am willing to die on that hill so help me god.

From a quick search it seems like it’s under 30%. Crazy.

My dad browsing on his tablet, shows me a page. “Ahhhh, my eyes! You need an ad blocker!”

“Ok give me one”

“You’d have to use firefox”

“Never mind then, I want chrome”

Then continue drowning in ads and tracking, chucklefuck.

It’s worse than average person. I don’t even see tech-savy friends use adblockers nowadays. No idea why, I never asked.

And I feel like majority of people don’t even know browser extensions exist, and those who do think it’s all shady and malware, so they avoid those like plague.

very little have adblock on, plus alot of them likely uses apps on thier phones. and i think men use adblocks more than thier counterparts.

It’s literal madness.

No wonder nobody’s fucking brains work anymore

Chrome doesn’t really have an ad blocker anymore. Firefox + unlock origin is a different level than chrome users can even access.

There has been a few times when I showed people my ad-less internet. Their heads exploded! They went, “Oh dear internet fairy, show me your ways of serenity!” and I did. I installed adblockers on their devices. Each and every time they went “Thank the heavens, I’ve never known such comfort in my digital life before!”

AND THEN THEY JUST STOPPED USING THEM AFTER A WHILE???

Edit: Not my Mom though. My Mom looooves the adblocking.

The average person uses whichever browser their OS came with. They won’t go out of their way to get an adblocker, especially if they became desensitised to ads. They don’t even know it could be better.

Firefox for phones supports adblock btw.

Your wife is the mentality that ensures we can’t have nice things. Too many people are willing to be abused, exploited and manipulated just to get their cookie.

One day I installed AdGuard on a Pi and routed my parent’s traffic through it, effectively blocking ads. I thought they would love to live without ads but she asked me to remove it because the games she plays won’t progress unless she watches ads.

oh god, same here. I have Pi-Hole set up with a two layer system so it blocks less for my partner’s phone and laptop and more for everything else.

Couldn’t you just change her phone’s DNS settings to circumvent the adblocker? Then she could still use the WiFi.

Heh, my dad wanted to use sites where he needed to have ad blocking disabled. I set his device up in adguard home to be ignored by all of the global blocking rules

I started with pihole and eventually switch to AdGuard home. Sucks for apps that “requires” an occasional ad, but 1 thing I still can’t figure out is why Hulu won’t work anymore.

But I feel you on the benefits and why I won’t give one to my parents. These are people who took 2 months to realize my dad isn’t on the family text group because he accidentally “left” the group, and why my mom’s iPhone stopped ringing because she consciously used the physical mute switch on the side (buried beneath the phone case).

good spouses don’t let their SO suffer ADs

But what about the broken glass, lego bricks, jellyfish, brightly colored posionous creatures, and literal feces?

I don’t mind rough ground under my bare feet, what gets me is floor grit.

Nice, didn’t know about kill sticky

Great idea for that bookmarklet, might start using it myself. I use Stylus a lot, so in the past I always just wrote my own CSS for unstickying sites I visited regularly, but this would be neat for those one-off occasions.

Hey thanks, never heard of this

Edit: any advice for how to add the bookmarklet to Firefox on mobile? Can’t drag the thing anywhere like the site says, and I can’t seem to right click to copy the link

It wasn’t every 5 minutes back in the day. Ad time slowly ate into show time over the years.

I once had an ad break so long I plain forgot what I was watching.