I definitely consume too much dystopian content to be a fair dystopian barometer, but the sheer amount of ads being pushed my way is starting to make me feel legitimately anxious. It feels like a techno-dystopia where all of the neat and artistic elements have been extracted and then ground into dust for our corporate overlords. Even the ‘regular’ people are just trying to sell themselves. The streamers, the funny videos, the pet videos, the porn, the reposts of all of those, so much of it is just monetizing my attention.
Do ads even influence people that much? Does anyone even eat Church’s Chicken?! Do people consider switching their car insurance? I though the postmoderns were jumping the gun a little with the pictures they painted of a future with corporate logos and other advertisements spread across every visible surface, but now I have to see 5 ads and a cookie consent pop up to look up a quick definition. Watching a friend’s youtube video? 30 seconds of rapidfire ads from 15 brands. It’s starting to feel absurd. Are we going to be okay?
lesbianic Github
ClitHub
Finally something to commit to
Gods, I love Randal’s hover texts…
In case you can’t easily see it for this strip:
“Branding: Actually, 'RSS&M is kinda catchy.”
And that one actually piqued my interest
I believe most of us here block as many ads as possible by any means possible. I so rarely see ads that every once in while when I do (on other peoples devices) I’m shocked and disgusted.
https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole
Is enough for me. If I watch YouTube on mobile it’s in Brave browser as that block the ads on iOS.
If I watch YouTube on my TV it’s in https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ which also blocks ads.
You don’t have to live like that and I feel sorry for all the people that do.
All that being said I know what you mean, even the content itself is now saturated with ads, i.e. a word about our sponsor for five minutes at the start of any video…
For the in-video sponsors try sponsorblock.
Or FreeTube, an open source desktop YouTube client with sponsorblock built in.
❤️
I’m sure you know about Brave being called out here lately so I just want to give you some iOS alternatives so you can stop using Brave (if you care enough, of course)
AdGuard (I paid for the lifetime, $12 I think) and it works great. Just like having uBlock on Firefox, but in safari so I still get all the integration that safari offers on your iOS device.
Dark reader is on the App Store.
When it comes to YouTube, I sideload a YouTube app with all the essentials installed using Sideloadly.
The rest is up to you.
If you are looking for a good YouTube client on iOS, you don’t even have to get into sideloading. Check out Yattee with this guide.
Wipr is also quite good for Safari!
How do you actually load the smart tube app on your TV? I have a chromecast btw.
EDIT: Just figured it out. Involves installing the Downloader app on my chromecast from the Google Play Store, then within the Downloader app I downloaded and installed the Smart Tube apk file from GitHub (after enabling Developer Mode in chromecast settings first).
Tested it on a gamer content creator channel and it skipped the sponsor segment at the very beginning. I’m in!
Is this just an ad for Church’s Chicken?!?
Reminds me of Bill Hicks.
"I know all the marketing people are going, “He’s doing a joke…” There’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. Whatever, you know what I mean.
I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too: “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market. He’s very smart.”
Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking, evil scumbags!
“Ooh, you know what Bill’s doing now? He’s going for the righteous indignation dollar. That’s a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We’ve done research – huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”
Godammit, I’m not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!"
RIP
Going for those Bill Hicks nostalgia internet points I see, very smart.
There’s a lot of money in nostalgia these days. I agree. He’s made the intelligent decision and we should be seeking to uphold the nostalgia momentum he’s generated.
Eddie Murphy’s Purple Suit.
I’ve been ad-free for well over a decade (well, except some unavoidable real-life cases like billboards and such).
Get uBlock Origin.
For anyone with toddlers who watch their cocomelon and the like when you just can’t take it anymore - I’ve used yt-dlp to download some videos and just play it via plex. No ads, no tracking, no drama.
Librewolf will block ads for you in addition to a fair amount of other nifty stuff
I used to pay for Youtube Premium for actually quite a while; out of all the cacophony of “it’s only $29.87 a month you can afford that” voices it was actually one that had a pretty significant impact on my happiness. But now I just block the ads and fuck 'em.
It’s only $2.27 if they think you live in a certain country.
2.27 feels reasonable for my family of 5.
Any other adblocker will also do. I use uBlock origin for Firefox, but there are many other adblockers just as good (or full browsers like brave)
Librewolf comes bundled with uBlock Origin, which is why it blocks ads so well. I havent seen an ad in years lol.
I’d also recommend the alternative player extension for twitch, as it’s one of the only websites that uBlock doesn’t block ads on.
Revanced ftw
We’ve been using Xbox as our main media player for a long time, I want to set up a plex server or similar but haven’t had time to do my homework on safe execution. Anything that would alleviate ads on xbox?
Does it also keep recommendations?
It does; you can log in to Youtube and all and still operate everything as normal. Some things don’t work (Netflix and HBO Max) because of DRM, which is a little bit of a worrying development. Librewolf seems like it cuts actually a pretty good balance of scrubbing stuff, making you log into services again when you restart it, but working pretty normally 90% of the time and not showing ads. It’s a much more pleasant experience (to the point that going back to Chrome and dealing with ads is real off-putting now).
I don’t see ads. I use uBlock Origin for the internet and view all youtube via browsers and pay for streaming services I want. I don’t have cable and am absolutely baffled when I’m forced to watch it at other people’s homes.
I occasionally use youtube for background music at work (I have headphones on, leave me alone) and can’t install ublock there and holy fuck are youtube ads terrible. I’ll never watch that crap.
If you have an android, you could look into installing revanced on your phone so you can listen to YouTube with it without ads instead of on your work computer. That’s what I do.
Yep! I like revanced a lot. But sure to NDAs no phones at work. It’s a minor thing since I’m mostly WFH.
Started collecting music locally again just because of ads and subscriptions, im done wasting even a single second on attention parasites.
I don’t see any ads anymore so I’m fine. It’s poison to watch that shit.
FreeTube Newpipe Torrents
Are we going to be okay?
Not if we don’t abolish capitalism, no.
Not just on the internet, either. If you really want to drive yourself crazy, pay attention to each time you see an advertisement in real life, and imagine if instead there was a piece of artwork in that spot. How would that change how you feel in that moment?
What if people didn’t have to sell themselves:(
I’ve felt this way for years now. Especially now that you can’t watch a Youtube video without first watching some ad for Jardiance or something. And then being interrupted every 60 seconds to watch more ads.
To be honest, I’ve never felt compelled to buy anything or switch to any other brand just because of an ad. I’m not about to go out and buy a Ford Bronco because I just saw an ad where a guy is tooling over the sanddunes and rocky cliffs in one.
I wish there was an option for clepping out of ads once you’ve already viewed them once. But there would just another million more behind it.
I watch way less YouTube now. I can’t stand the ads and they never change. For me it’s Hertz and some local politician. I have to watch the same ads dozens of times just to watch an hours worth of crap
Firefox +uBlock Origin = no youtube ads other than the ones that are part of the video itself, which can be skipped. Works for me on PC and android.
sponsorblock crowd sources skipping in video and dearrow crowdsources non clickbait thumbnails and titles.
Well the thing is I really only watch Youtube videos on my android TV. On the PC, no way because they’re just too slow on this old PC of mine. No way to block the ads but at least you can skip parts of them, sometimes.
I was actually fine with consuming ads maybe like 8 years ago but things have exponentially ramped up. Nowadays, it’s pretty much essential to use ublock and dns level adblock filtering. Also a shame that it’s physically outside plastered everywhere.
Do people consider switching their car insurance?
Absolutely. I don’t switch mid term, but I definitely look at switching at renewal time. Use a comparison site and check what’s available.
Pretty much every year the comparison sites give me better prices than my renewal, sometimes by a massive amount.
I remember when I started hating ads.
HEAD-ON: APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD
I genuinely have fond memories of some ads before this time that I’ll occasionally reference, https://youtu.be/R7vNn-utP8Q for example, which I didn’t remember was a chuck e cheese ad before just rewatching it, and whose pizza was objectively criminally poorly made.
And now I’ve essentially cut them out of my life entirely, but I’ll occasionally hear them during podcasts and such and they come across as so bleak, like who the fuck are you selling this Chumba Casino thing to? Did the directors for these ads tell their VA’s to sound as dried up and worn out as possible? Is that the market they’re aiming for?
I think advertisement is a part of commerce that isn’t going away till we get that luxury gay space communism, but it would be nice if there was some kind of panel of artists who your ad had to pass in order to be displayed in markets of a certain size. But then the creatives who threw their lives away learning the most fundamental aspects of how we leave our mark on reality would have some aspect of control over the people who wisely and sagely learned the intricacies of how line go up.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/R7vNn-utP8Q
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
online ads never do. but if i saw a billboard advertising even just the mere presence of a culver’s at an exit 100 miles further down the highway… and it was getting close to feeding time… yea, we’re stopping.
