I've been blocking ads for so long that actually seeing them feels perverse
I've been blocking ads for so long that actually seeing them feels perverse
I use ad blockers and open source privacy focused software whenever I can but occasionally I have to use computers that don't belong to me or an older phone where my usual applications aren't installed and seeing all the advertisements just feels dirty and dystopian.
I think the worst ads are the text to speech ones that say "Download this app today". The unblinking energenic people saying you can make a living at home are probably a close second.
It IS perverse. You're having your eyes groped by strangers, all trying to get you to do what you have no desire to do. You just want to get what you came for and leave, but no, everywhere you look something is trying to block your path and distract you from your goal. And it's not even honest: you already know that none of these extraneous, unwanted come-ons you're seeing is anything close to true. In some cases, it's a full-on mental assault.
It's vile. I used to leave some on, but now there's not even such a thing as "acceptable ads" anymore just because of the sheer numbers involved. So now I don't just block: I go full extermination mode. I'm usually on desktop so if it's a one time thing, like a single ad on YouTube that managed to sneak by all of my walls and filters and I can't just pass it by because it's stuck in my field of vision, I'll actually do an "inspect element" and delete it on the spot. But otherwise, if I can't block 100% or very close to it, I find a different site or source, or shut down altogether.
I genuinely don't think our minds were made for this level of constant information onslaught and never-ending manipulation campaigns, and I don't think it's healthy or life-affirming to subject oneself to it without limit. So I don't. People get angry about it, but hey, more for them to enjoy if that's how they wanna roll.
Ads nowadays are little more than psychological assault and it can't be healthy to be exposed to it regularly. My Home Ec teacher back in the day had a whole unit about the different manipulations present in advertisements and it was really enlightening and upsetting. Modern advertising should be banned or severely regulated.
Every once in a while I find myself looking at the Internet without ad blockers. Like, newly-installing a browser on a newly-installed OS, or trialing a new browser on my phone or whatnot. And when it happens it's a massive shock to me just how unusable the modern Internet is without an ad blocker.
If I were forced somehow to not use an ad blocker, I would probably stop using the WWW portion of the Internet and likely grossly cut down on other facets of the Internet.
its really jarring, and to see people just accept it, kinda hurts my soul.
This is exactly how I feel. Whenever I had to watch a youtube video with ads lately my lovely Hungarian government has not failed once to put a lovely propaganda piece before every single video. It's insane that people actually live like this.
What I think about is how "surfing the internet" has entirely lost its meaning. When looking for something specific your only bet is your search engine's 3rd to 7th results (the first two just being ads or "sponsored"), and you need to put in serious effort to discover unique and interesting stuff.
I can not wait for the ad bubble to burst, and maybe then we'll get some sort of a usable internet once again...
The person who was instrumental in the development of modern advertising was also involved in the notorious little Albert experiment. That really says a lot about how unethical modern advertising is on a psychological level. As a psych major myself I am constantly disgusted by how manipulative and toxic advertising is. It actually troubles me how we've essentially just accepted this as part of our society now.
I'm used to seeing brief YouTube ads when I cast from my phone, but I was in a hotel recently where the only option was live TV (we were in the back of the hotel and the Chromecast didn't have a good enough antenna to pick up the router), so it was the first time in years I saw full-on commercials. If the movie hadn't been so good- After the Thin Man- I wouldn't have put up with it.
I use a VPN which has an excellent ad & bs blocker. But occasionally some sites need me to turn it off to pay for things or whatever and I forget to turn it back on and end up browsing the internet in its normal state.
And wow... welcome to commerce central. It's not that all the ads are obnoxious though some are, but the quantity of them is out of control on some websites.
To be fair, I've found it's a good rule of thumb that the quality of a website is usually proportionate to the less amount of ads they have.
I also reviewed mobile games for a while and had to play without a VPN to get the same experience most players would get - game ads are the worst. Unrepresentative of the games they're trying to sell, but also often sexist (veering towards misogynistic), obnoxious and with false endings.
My husband refuses to use ad blockers for some unknown reason (I installed them on his computer, he won't fucking use them/turns them off) and also is the person who gets the cookie settings menu and clicks "accepts all" every time. I get so stressed trying to use his computer but also like dude! Have you any idea just what you are allowing them to access??? Granted, I'm somewhat ignorant when it comes to how to be completely safe and private on the internet, but I try, and to see someone just blatantly not care makes me lose my cool a little.
The NHL put computer graphic advertisements on the boards and it has nearly ruined the sport for me. There are some bootleg streams that have a broadcast without the advertisements but most of them I find have the ads. Flashing shit. Cars driving down the boards. Animated logos. It's insane what the NHL decided to do with their broadcast product.
The worst ones I've ever seen by far are ads for mobile games. Some, if not the majority, are full of fetish content, gore and other gross and disturbing stuff just for the shock value; most of the "gameplay" that's shown has nothing to to with the actual game.
Some ads have real people in them act out what (supposedly) happens in-game, those are almost worth watching for their trash value.
My latest ad-shock was over at a friend's house. I've not had cable since probably '03? They have cable because a parent lives with them and insists/pays. Just having the TV on playing random things felt weird. Weirder still is having the movie interrupted by ads every 5 seconds. And the ads are just gross. The only thing that was decent was using it as a discovery service. The movie, one of the X-Men that was not one of the good ones, was what we stumbled upon. We watched for a bit, then ended up switching to watching it elsewhere to dunk on it. In ad-free, interruption-free, 4k with surround. Paying for the cable experience (which is rapidly the streaming experience) seems entirely anachronistic.
I notice this more when I have to search for things online on the work laptop. I had no idea how bad some sites were. Things blinking on the one side, a video playing on the other. Huge banners everywhere telling me to download this or click here for this clickbait article.
I’m so accustomed to Firefox, uBlock, Facebook Container, Privacy Badger, and a VPN at home that I feel overwhelmed when I’m online without them. Even my phone has ad blockers and the VPN. It’s a nightmare when you’re running sites…raw.
I feel you, I've been using an ad blocker for so long I've lost count of the years. I'm always obliterated by how vapid and meaningless modern ads are, its all psychological hacking which is a violation of our mental sovereignty.
I also feel like the "happy young people, living their best life with our product" style ads help keep people delusional about the current state of the world and where we are heading. Like that "Everything is fine" meme, but the dog has a vr headset on and sound cancelling headphones that constantly chant "The heat you are feeling is good for the economy. Everything IS fine!".
I agree, it is 100% dystopian.
Absolutely. And it's getting even worse, since some ad networks also broadcasting executable code in the form of javascript snippets intended to make interactive banners, where e.g. you move the mouse cursor over it, and an in-ad mouse button moves along. A bunch of those have been used to run malicious code on the machines and actually cause harm to the user, from crypto miners to keyloggers and trojans.
In this day and age, I consider a system without adblock to be compromised by default.
I stopped over at my parents' house a few weeks back for a get-together and the TV was on. I nearly felt physically ill at the amount of ads- at one point I saw an overlay ad on top of an actual "commercial" ad. The program that was on was definitely less run time than the adverts that ran in-between short sections of the program.
At this point I actively avoid brands that shove ads into my web browsing.
I forget that YouTube has ads. And then I go to watch on a platform that doesn’t have blocking and it freaks me out.
"When I'm watchin' my TV
And a man comes on and tells me
How white my shirts can be
But, he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke
The same cigarettes as me"
The Rolling Stonessat down to watch TV with the parents for the first time in a loooong time and when ads came on I was astounded how many there were and how long they were... insufferable TV ads >_>
yeah, i've been trying out different browsers and it's so so bad. like, they're pure garbage
don draper era ads actually had fucking thought in there. people made art and worked on the typesetting. now it's pure AI vomit garbage that means nothing to nobody, nobody along the entire chain of making this gave a single fuck about it, no one that's ever seen the image has had a genuine feeling come from it other than disgust and doom.
I gave up trying to get my wife to use anything that blocks ads, and she won't switch away chrome. When she bakes, she leaves her tablet or phone open, with multiple video ads destroying her battery. Seeing this thing just turns my brain to mush as I don't see any ads. I don't know how she puts up with having ten video ads on one page.
Whenever I use a browser without adblock, it takes me back to the early 2000s, and not in a good way.
I have not seen advertisements in a long time accounting to a few years. I have abandoned all the proprietary data harvesting platforms and rarely surf web for no reason. Using libre software, platforms and only referring to specific reliable scientific sources helps a lot in reducing the wastage of time. It also helps in planning things better and I have seen that I am generally able to complete my self assigned projects faster. It also leaves me with more time to spend in leisure. Of course it also combats addiction to mostly useless Social Media. Being away from all the toxicity on the internet also keeps me happier. It's quite disgusting how tech corporates exploit millions of users' data for Capital generation.
My colleague uses chrome like Google intended and every time she shares her screen I question her sanity. Terminal instead of iTerm, ok. Not using oh my zsh, well, if you insist. But that? You can barely identify the information you're looking for between all that screaming nonsense.
I will go to many lengths to avoid ads. I never use the YT app for example unless I’m on my desktop which has multiple ad blocking extensions and containers. Been using Yattee for iOS that plays nice with nvidious or piped
Get fucked advertisers
When I'm not using computers behind my three layers of filters I have here at home.. I feel very sad for the internet.
so of course I have ublock origin on my computer, AdAway on my phone and pihole on my network, but the school computers actually prevent you from installing any adblocking extensions
anyway at school I see a lot of "download Wave Browser/OneLaunch/PC app store/other random crapware" ads and videos in the corner and I can barely read anything on the site
I’ve been doing it for so many years across all devices and platforms that I actually get…confused for a second when one slips through. It is normally YouTube that slips through (they seem to be trying new things almost daily to get around any possible ad blocks), but sometimes it is from a major news web site or something. I actually have to look around for a second and then realize what has just happened.
I signed up to Vessel [1] when they were giving out the 1 year free trial, and it was only 9 months or so in that I realised that it had ads. It was kinda jarring, especially for a paid (not that I did) service.
I think the worst ads are the text to speech ones that say "Download this app today".
Dear god, they read themselves to you now?!? Kill it with fire!!
I want the creator drawn and quartered.
I set up a pihole and installed revanced on my mom's phone. She was surprised when I mentioned that YouTube has ads once haha.
That's because it is.
Permanently Deleted
I often forget they even exist
Only time I ever see actual ads anymore are when I'm out and about and see billboards, when my parents are watching TV, or when I go to furaffinity on TOR for some NSFW images.
I'm fine with the ads on FA since they're at the top and bottom of the pages and not intrusive at all and aren't really much more than ads for probably shitty games (minus the Brok the Investigator ads) and art commission services the vast majority of the time.
What? What ads?
It is jarring. I am feeling a little bad for actual writers though when I have to turn back from a news site because it doesn't like my adblocker or pihole. I haven't relented. But given the whole writers strike thing and the fact that I don't want AI writing pretty much anything meant to be read by human eyes, I do feel bad.
I want to be there. I browse strictly on mobile I dont have a computer and I haven't seen to be able to get anything to work properly the few times I tried. It's so much worse on mobile cuz I'm so likely to accidentally tap the ad and they usually take up the whole screen and maybe 3 or 4 lines of am article before another ad. Plus one on top and bottom of the browser that is always there, plus a pop-up video auto playing in the corner.
I did my annual reimage and it's always jarring having to put everything back on lol.
What a great way to put it. Years ago my wife was annoyed when I started blocking ads because it was effecting streaming on some apps. Now if an ad gets through look out!
When we see ads, it is so annoying. Page loads are clunky and games blast you with ads.
I’m cool with ads as long as they aren’t filled with malware. Unfortunately they’re all filled with malware.
I remember the times I'd go from watching Tivo to trying to watch live TV.
Everyone here is so passionately hating ad's. I haven't felt that upset about ad's since I was a teenager back in like 2004.
I use adblocker for my browser cause I don't want spyware/malware. But watching TV ad's is interesting to me. I keep seeing comments about people being complete idiots who just settled and they just take it from the advertisers...
That couldn't be farther from the truth for someone like me. I enjoy nostalgia a lot. So I got a live tv package with regular cable tv channels and there are ad's. I did this on purpose though. I am not some idiot who has been brainwashed. I just find advertising interesting in general.
Seems like a lot of commenters here would think of me as some kind of monster. Why, I'm not sure. I guess cause ad's are some kind of big bad we all have to fight against?
Someone here mentioned that people work on those ad's and I think that's part of why I enjoy them. Because technically, that's often someone's artwork. I'm in favor of more animated commercials too.
But I get it. Consumerism = bad.
Just feels like more like "no fun allowed"