[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation
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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.
I appreciate the well thought out and articulated response.
The thing is it's not like I'm blindly using Brave; I've tried to dig into these things with Brave which users have brought up, the biggest complaints usually being "forced" cryptostuff (I had mine on first, and now off...), affiliate links and Brendan Eich being an anti lgbt asshole, etc. Then I went down the same hole with Mozilla; their asshole execs laying off people and then giving themselves bonuses, making deals with Google, etc.
Richard Stallmans an asshole too, should I stop using GNU? The world is a fucked up place and people are the most fucked up of all and pitting my morals against pragmatism sometimes only gets me so and so far.
I'd love to get behind some sort of new open-source alternative; I'm hoping we get a viable new thing ASAP, waiting for someone to pull a Linus and create something that truly enables me to consume the web in a manner that I can be personally satisfied with.
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.
Any source of ads I avoid as the plague.
Regular TV? Don't watch it. Only streaming with a good ad blocker.
Radio? Never listen to it, I have my own old-school mp3 music list I update on the regular.
Youtube? Only with uBlock Origin and sponsorblock
Websites? Same as above.
Apps? AdAway removes the ads, and mainly use FOSS ones anyway.
I even avoid game stores as much as possible since those also try to get me to buy stuff.
I don't want to see any ads ever, marketing should be banned.
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.
There's an awesome tool I use to automate this process called TubeArchivist. Automatically downloads new videos from subscribed channels or playlists. Downloads the metadata, thumbnail, and comments too.
It has a built in viewer that works fine so I haven't tried getting the content into my Plex server, but I've seen people in the discord talking about doing it.
I've been ad-free for well over a decade (well, except some unavoidable real-life cases like billboards and such).
Get uBlock Origin.
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.
Started collecting music locally again just because of ads and subscriptions, im done wasting even a single second on attention parasites.
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.
Shout out for pihole. Never ceases to amaze me when I end up on public data sources (cellular/wifi) and my phone is littered with ads and banners that squeeze the viewable area to a thin strip of screen. It's truly toxic. However, you can set up a personal VPN at home on the Pi and get your ads scrubbed by PiHole while you're away from home.
So yes, if I may offer my list (desktop browser):
PiHole (+ personal VPN to connect to when away)
uBlock Origin
Https Everywhere (for the odd site that isn't https by default)
Facebook Container ( if you use FB)
SocialFixer for Facebook - a godsend. I use FB for work and hobby groups. FB insists on cramming "suggested for you" content in everywhere. SocialFixer will filter and block FB posts based on text, and using "suggested for you" as a filter makes Facebook great again.
Duck Duck Go privacy essentials
EFF's Privacy Badger
uBlacklist - an app that lets you block sites in search results. A little tedious, but if you stick with it eventually you end up getting rid of many those awful boilerplate SEO worthless sites.
SponsorBlock for YouTube
EDIT: Guess I didn't answer the question? I despise ads. I will do most anything I can to avoid them. The aforementioned list of blocking and privacy add-ons is proof enough of that. There's nothing that I need to buy that I don't already know I want or need. I walk away from the TV (I can't remember the last time I watched network TV. Probably the primary election?), I put my phone down, and if it's that much in my face I simply close the site if I don't absolutely have to be there.
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.
I never see ads and consume a good amount of video content.
Set your stuff up right, don't expect live to be easy
I believe advertising is a major mechanism for evil in our world. It's accepted brainwashing by definition. It MUST have wide reaching consequences on psychology of people, and it also has incredible power to steer how information is disseminated.
Best example is how media never says anything negative about advertising.
"Branded" is the only movie or media I know that broaches this topic.
I use ad blockers for everything and I'm bewildered when I see TV nowadays or try to use the web or youtube without it. I very rarely see ads and refuse to be brainwashed. FreeTube is awesome too. Resist!
We need other systems, something like a global patreon subscription that is automatically shared to content creators.
It isn't advertisement, it is marketing. Ads are just a symptom of that.
Marketing's only job is to make people buy stuff they do not need. It is the main reason why we live in such a consumer culture. It correlates directly with overconsumption.
Yeah and public relations, the black art of making people vote against their interests.
We need other systems, something like a global patreon subscription that is automatically shared to content creators.
That sounds like Universal Basic Income with extra steps. I approve of this.
I don't see any ads anymore so I'm fine. It's poison to watch that shit.
FreeTube Newpipe Torrents
And the advertisers seem to not care about context. I'll be watching some awful disaster documentary then an ad for, say, detergent will pop up. Now I associate your product with a terrible event. The bombarding too. Do they think if I didn't switch car insurance the first 100 times I saw the ad the 101st will do the trick? And I don't buy the "some people may be seeing it for the first time" excuse. The ads were every few minutes.
That's not why it's repeated a 1000 times, it's so when you actually do want to buy something in that category you're more likely to buy theirs because it's familiar.
See I've never understood how that worked because it has the complete opposite effect on me.
The more I see a certain product advertised the less likely I am to ever willingly purchase that product from that company.
I’m not convinced it does work. Freakonomics did a bit on marketing awhile back and the researchers they talked to said ad dollars were pretty inefficient and that companies would probably net a larger profit by reducing TV advertising.
More anecdotally, they talk about two corporate tests in digital marketing (Ebay and P&G) that seem to indicate that digital marketing isn’t paying off for companies either.
Personally this hurts my soul even more knowing the only people profiting are the middlemen who engineer their products to be objectively worse so that they can shove ineffective ads in my face.
That only applies to the ones you consciously think about. No one is immune to advertising.
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:(
Are we going to be okay?
Not if we don't abolish capitalism, no.
It is like "vote for" signs. If you vote based on a sign you shouldn't be voting.
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 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.
Sydney CBD train stations have in addition to the normal advert billboards, electric TV screen billboards where they'll play nothing but video ads WITH THE SOUND ON FOR THE ENTIRE PLATFORM TO HEAR, so annoying!! It really is everywhere, you just can't escape it.
That would have been broken in like 30 minutes in NYC.