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I think most of the population has simply been conditioned to accept and even expect advertisements to be a normal part of everyday life.
Maybe it’s a situation where ignorance is bliss, to not have ads pull your attention away from what you’re doing, and not feel like they are violating your personal space and resources.
But that’s also part of living modern life on auto pilot like The Shareholders prefer. Work, consume, engage with content, repeat!
oof reminds me of my aunt’s computer, stuff was popping from all over the screen. Combined with the fact that it was an old laptop with low RAM, it was a total nightmare to use
I opened brave yesterday and I saw two ads on YouTube. What is happening? Is something broken or have I been betrayed?
Brave is based off chromium. You’re going to get ads. Chromium blocked most adblocker from functioning properly. Theirs a reason why chromium browser’s only have ublock lite. Not ublock origin. Use librewolf or any of the other non-chromium browsers or firefox forks.
Also brave is trash and ran by an egotistical, homophobic bigot https://vger.to/sh.itjust.works/post/52290131
I gave my mother one of my old thinkpads I used to use at school, and on setting up her account (fydeOS btw, since it’s perfect for what she uses computers for), I installed an adblocker so she doesn’t see those scam supplement ads she was always convinced were factual, and it’s worked flawlessly.
Completely wild to me to think that creating services and content doesn’t come for free and ads are the primary avenue for making money to make it sustainable + people don’t want for things they can get for free elsewhere.
I visited someone with a 5 year old child recently and they were watching minecraft videos (specifically for child audiences) with 2 min ads every 10 min, that cant be good
It’s bad on multiple levels. Like 99% of the “for kids” stuff on YouTube is total brain rot with no educational value whatsoever. Then a barrage of totally not targeted ads beamed straight into the kids face.
Seeing people click and sit through minutes of insanely obnoxious ads feels so dystopian to me
If you want to show me a youtube video and a fuckin ad starts playing, we gon have problems
There have been some times where all my efforts failed and YouTube still showed me an ad. I realised that i’d rather not watch the video than the ad.
If I can’t skip a video ad, and I really want to see the content, I simply make note of the advertiser and never buy anything from them.
I’ve switched insurance companies because the one I had was wasting my time advertising to me.
Oh that’s a good principle in gonna adopt
I think of it that advertising costs money, and that gets passed on to the consumer. So the bigger the advertising budget the higher the final price.
Word of mouth is free.
Part of why Sennheiser is better then Dr Dre
Honestly, the best ‘ad blocker’ is a 10-minute cleanup: uninstall the bundled junk, disable startup apps, and run Malwarebytes once. Makes an old PC feel new again.
Uninstalling windows and installing KDE with a windows skin worked on my aunts laptop. She just used the browser anyway 🤣
True and obviously a phone, a TV, a console, etc ate computers.
Our man spitting cold hard facts right here.
I literally almost never meet someone that use adblockers
(except like 1 person)
i never use adblockers either - that’s because i avoid the worst offenders (youtube, some especially obnoxious news sites). i’d rather not visit the site if they’re already stating that they don’t respect me.
i just thought about it - and i never met anyone who doesn’t use adblockers. and i worked in adtech company that literally does that shit.
I put an adblocker on my moms laptop browser and she disabled it for some sketchy coupon website…
fucking hell
Personally I don’t fundamentally despise the concept of advertising. I think it’s acceptable for people and companies to share information about a potentially great product or service that they’re offering, on reasonable terms.
The main problem for me is: advertising went too far and abandoned most safeguards. Advertising in 2025 is essentially manipulation and brain washing. Most ads don’t give you any information about a product or service whatsoever. Just some celebrity saying it’s great. What is this supposed to accomplish if not manipulating people into mindlessly paying for a thing they know nothing about?
Every malware infection and online scam I’ve dealt with in the last 15 years has used advertising as an attack vector. I block everything.
Advertising in 2025 is essentially manipulation and brain washing.
Sad that you think that. Never noticed a netflix marlboro ad? Yea that was the point.
Joke’s on you, I never saw a netflix ad
You’re saying “in 2025” and then listing a bunch of things that have been that way since the 40s at least.
I believe all advertising exists to manipulate people. Behaviour change is a key aspect of marketing, from how things are kept at a store shelf, to putting the right hoarding on the right street, it’s all done to guide consumer choice in a profitable way.
Advertising was never about giving you information, it was to make you feel cigarettes are cool or you need an more expensive toothbrush to be more confident. Advertising moved away from giving you information to ‘connecting with consumers on an emotional level’ decades before the Internet.
While yes information age has made advertising a lot more effective than it was 25 years ago, but brands were still trying to get you get the most money out of you back then, same as today, only their tools of doing so have improved vastly.
Brawndo has what plants crave.
It’s ultra-processed!
Jon Stewart made a point in some video not too long ago about how modern media presents us with a constant drip of ultra-processed speech and how it manipulates and harms our brains for our short-term gratification but the long-term benefit of others who don’t give a shit about us. It is much like engineered ultra-processed food in that way.
Thinking of advertising through that lens, hell that industry has been at the bleeding edge of all kinds of manipulation and shady data gathering for decades! Ultra-processed speech and ultra-processed advertising are basically a package deal!
I don’t know if this refers to politics, but in general, what politicians, and I mean all politicians do where they refer to their opponents and topics consistently with specific words meant to elucidate specific emotions is stomach-turning. And yeah, you’re right, it’s not only politicians, but corporations, newspapers and basically all PR orgs doing the same.
It’s not a layoff, it’s a reorg. It’s not in-person attendance requirements, it’s an inevitable “return to office”. And so on, so forth.
Exactly. I’d be much more ok with a standardised block of text and maybe a picture. No music, no animation, basic machine voiceover if any audio.
My favourite advertisements (the ones I’m most ok with) are podcast ad reads, because they never gave music or sound effects or crass images, it’s just the voice making the podcast reading some text. And they’re personalised based on the context of the podcast, no personal information needed.
And connect on Facebook and Twitter. And tap “yes” would you like the app to track you and personalize ads. And buy things through tiktok.
We are the odd ones I guess
They’re all-in on consumerism.
I’d say we’re the ones that know how to use adblockers and know where and how to shop online.
Not odd, just not sheep.
id say thats generous by which I mean we’re all of us sheep to a certain extent
That’s fair. The main differentiation is where our ovine behaviors tend towards…
Transparency of all aspects of my life open to the tech industry?
Ehhh, not so much.
I’m a sheep for people I get a crush on.
By which I mean, I become reduced to a fuzzy, mindless creature that can’t say anything beyond incoherent bleating sounds.
I’ve just put the batteries in a toy a relative bought from TikTok. It’s some drawing pad where you draw on it then press a button and your drawing’s supposed to glow. It’s a total piece of shit, the drawing barely glows and it takes ages to clean. It’ll probably go in the bin tomorrow, I’ve already warned my wife to take the batteries out first.
Is it the clear writing slate with the neon dry erase but not really markers? We got those from a family member last year and were never able to get the kids into them.
The one weird thing that everyone seems to just accept is smart tvs with ads. I use my smart tv for many things, but disconnected from the internet and hooked into a little entertainment Linux machine that does all the processing. I can’t fathom taking the raw experience.
Consumers are lazy and brain rotted, too much effort to build an htpc or do anything that protect yourselfs and your family’s data when the TV can just do it all for you, who cares that it’s a literal piece of spyware ad riddled garbage.
I guess I shouldn’t be blaming the consumer here, since it’s obviously the predatory capitalist company at fault. But still, I think most people are fucking dumb.
A HTPC requires a tech savvy person with a lot of free time. A Google TV box is better for most as they are as easy to use as the TVs own OS but don’t have the crapware.
I bet everyone does wish they had infinite time and an abundance of money to spend on developing everything from scratch. I hope you recognize how privileged you are! 🥲
I do, and I also realize I’m a dick, so sorry.
If only we were all socialists and would never have to worry about ads because most of us starved
Getting my wife and kids on board and trained on this is a feat I’m just not talented to pull off.
Buy an Onn / Thomson box, set it to apps only mode, and there you are. They’re Google TV so Netflix is just as easy to use on it as on the TV itself, and as Google TV is Android based you can sideload whatever apps you want, copyright law compliant be damned.
I’m afraid that I have no solution for you, but can I ask how familiar they are with using a regular computer?
I bought a micro PC and use that to stream Plex and other Internet media directly to my TV. I don’t connect the TV itself to the Internet and I don’t have cable or public access TV. I can block all ads with my micro PC and home network.
