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?
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 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.
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.
Oh yeah….
Member, remember Steve Martin with an arrow through his head?
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.
What’s an “ad brake”? Haven’t had ads for years now and beginning to forget…
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.
That only applies to the ones you consciously think about. No one is immune to advertising.
Same. Being annoyed by excessive ads is a surefire way for me to blacklist a product or company. Particularly obnoxious ads can do it with just a single exposure.
I won’t ever buy a car from Frank Lita because of how obnoxious their ads are.
Not even just out of spite but also because I can‘t help but wonder how bad the product must be if it needs that amount of advertising to sell.
Oh hello fellow St. Louisan.
Oh hai
Same. There’s a product I’ve used for years and I’m now getting ads for on youtube and it’s completely put me off of using it again. Like fuck off already.
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.
deleted by creator
It is like “vote for” signs. If you vote based on a sign you shouldn’t be voting.
Are we going to be okay?
Not if we don’t abolish capitalism, no.
You can’t even avoid this shit if you take all kinds of extra steps and even hoist the good old black flag and stop consuming live TV or streaming: Product Placement is pretty much standard in blockbuster films nowadays (the latest Aquaman really took in-movie advertising for a certain beer brand to a ridiculous level).
I can’t avoid the ads on tv so I just mute it and read something else for a few minutes.
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.
Do you ever watch YouTube on your living room TV?
I do, also without ads. SmartTube
Living room tv is a large display for my living room laptop, my remote is a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, youtube is in firefox with UBO and sponsor block. Streaming is emby in the browser.
I agree that we are living in an Ads-nightmare but there are ways to avoid them.
I don’t see any ads anymore so I’m fine. It’s poison to watch that shit.
FreeTube Newpipe Torrents
I never see ads and consume a good amount of video content.
Set your stuff up right, don’t expect live to be easy
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.
You’ve got my attention, Mister! Thank you!
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.
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?
You’d probably want to look into blocking traffic on your network using pihole or if its possible to reconfigure your xbox network settings and point it at adblocking DNS servers such as AdGuard:
https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html
Xbox Press the Xbox button on your controller to open the guide. Select Profile & system → Settings → General → Network Settings. From the Network screen options, go to Advanced Settings → DNS Settings. Select Manual. Change DNS addresses to the addresses of one of the servers below. Default servers AdGuard DNS will block ads and trackers. 94.140.14.14 94.140.15.15 Non-filtering servers AdGuard DNS will not block ads, trackers, or any other DNS requests. 94.140.14.140 94.140.14.141 Family protection servers AdGuard DNS will block ads, trackers, adult content, and enable Safe Search and Safe Mode, where possible. 94.140.14.15 94.140.15.16 If your game console supports IPv6 addresses, add them as well. Default servers AdGuard DNS will block ads and trackers. 2a10:50c0::ad1:ff 2a10:50c0::ad2:ff Non-filtering servers AdGuard DNS will not block ads, trackers, or any other DNS requests. 2a10:50c0::1:ff 2a10:50c0::2:ff Family protection servers AdGuard DNS will block ads, trackers, adult content, and enable Safe Search and Safe Mode, where possible. 2a10:50c0::bad1:ff 2a10:50c0::bad2:ff Press B to confirm changes and exit the menu.And I’d recommend running jellyfin instead of plex.
https://www.androidauthority.com/jellyfin-vs-plex-home-server-3360937/
Thanks for both suggestions! I’ll take a look at jellyfin again when I have time to deal with this. In the past I’d heard it was pretty hard to integrate with xbox smoothly, and I have friends with plex I was hoping to share with.
If just pointing the xbox at adguard or similar would work that would be quite elegant, but I’m not sure how I’d add vpn protection? At the router?
I need to prioritize this before I go mad. Anyway, I appreciate that you took the time to cater some responses to my use case:)
Hey, this is a pretty good question that I think might get overlooked as it’s a child comment in this post.
Try asking that question here:
https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted
I don’t know if that link works properly and hopefully a bot will rescue me if it doesn’t
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
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
It’s only $2.27 if they think you live in a certain country.
2.27 feels reasonable for my family of 5.
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).
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.
This requires a ridiculous amount of work and expertise, the average person can’t do this. I also question how trustworthy these apps are and that they aren’t data harvesting or opening security holes.
News sites are the worst offenders for “lets cram as much shit on the screen as humanly possible”. The last 80% of the screen is click bait trash. Videos chase you constantly and pop ups begging for your email always harass you. I fill in the email with “admin@{their domain}”
The pihole is the only one requiring a level of tech above that of installing the add-ons I mentioned.
Sure, you could question the trustworthiness of the plugins. So what’s your choice? Suffer through known ads, tracking, and whatever else or judiciously install a few plugins that have tens or hundreds of thousands of users and no history of foul play?
