I won’t even wear clothing that overtly displays a brand name
One time I was talking to a guy and noticed he was wearing Nike everything. So as a joke, I said, “Jeez, you wear so much Nike, they should pay you.” And he said they do.
And then he told me how he works at Nike. And he gets a lot of free stuff.
They allow their fridges to show advertisements
They allow their Start Menu to show advertisements.
You can not shut down a fridge
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!
I go out of my way to get my all of my gas from one specific station that doesn’t have advertisements on their pumps.
If it’s Costco, I agree.
The membership pays for itself. I’m paying $3-10 less for gas every time I fill up, every month.
Shit, am I an advertisement?
If I were you, I would find who owns that gas station. Then hand write an actual physical letter and mail it to them, explaining why you only get gas at their station. That could make enough impression that when that station’s owner is tempted to put in ads, they’ll remember you. Maybe that will be enough to get them to not follow the crowd and to keep their pumps ad-free.
That’s a really good idea, I think I’ll look into it
I love it, and now that you’ve said that I am going to be keeping mental notes to see if I have such an option. Fortunately, buying gasoline is a pretty infrequent thing for me.
I would also love to know where that habit lands you in the greater population’s percentiles when it comes to avoiding advertising. I assume most people reading our comments are already the 1% because it’s Lemmy, lol. (my usual is Linux + LibreWolf + ublock origin at both home and work)
Personally, I am likely within a very small percentile of people when it comes to be privacy aware. I use Linux + Librewolf, but also self host Searxng and have it do all my internet searches through Mulvad, I host my own recursive DNS server, and various other things that most people wouldn’t even know are an option.
I only pirate. And play it on raspberry pi, libre elec and dumb tv. I never see commercials.
It amazes me that anybody can stand that filth for even a second.
Nice. Jellyfin fan here.
Sometimes it’s like I’m living a double life because I’m married to a normie and we’re active in the local community where normies of course abound. I got my piracy over here, and I pay for a couple streaming services over there as long as they actually get used, but I still take steps to keep ads away.
It’s wild when my wife will just turn on the radio in the car when her phone isn’t connected properly, or throw on some live TV stream (whether pirated or a plan somebody shared with us), and it will play minute after minute of ads that don’t bother her.
On the car radio it usually doesn’t take long before some annoying local dealership ad comes on that repeats the same loud annoying crap they did 20 years ago and I have to turn it off.
I just listen to the main public broadcast radio station in my car. Ads? Only for the album of the week and their own programmes. Usually a few seconds to mention something and very infrequent.
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.
Seriously. When I was a kid, people said that tv would rot your brain. But at least TV required you to actively engage with it. Even kids shows have a plot, a coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end. You have to actively watch, consider what’s happening, and engage with it. You have to use your mind, even if just binging soap operas. Putting your kid in front of a stream of shorts is like having them watch a large array of randomly blinking lights. There’s no content. No thought. No processing. No development of any kind can come from that.
Yup, I know several other parents that blindly trust the algorithms because their experience with TV wasn’t too bad. They fail to realize they’re basically giving their kids digital crack.
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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.
Seeing people click and sit through minutes of insanely obnoxious ads feels so dystopian to me
I can’t stand sports bars. Sports is literally 60% as ads and people just watch it.
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
And why I think apple and Samsung phones are overpriced
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.
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.
You’re saying “in 2025” and then listing a bunch of things that have been that way since the 40s at least.
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Joke’s on you, I never saw a netflix ad
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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.
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.
Brawndo has what plants crave.
It’s never sharing information about a great new product unless it’s a scam. It’s always scams or large companies screaming how their 2026 version really is superior somehow to their 2025 product and how competitors somehow suck
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 haven’t seen that one since the 90’s! If your computer was a person, I’d shoot it in the face.”
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
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.
They’re all-in on consumerism.
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
If this keeps going I will. It is not my main browser and I only choose it to not have to go through the paramater to get rid of ads.
I’ve been on Librewolf for a year or two and it works great
I offer setting up adblocking to friends and they’re like no im alright thanks WTF.
I had some family members staying with us a few nights. I “warned” them, that my WiFi is using a PiHole and should block (some) ads. Just as a heads up if e.g. an app or a website would act up so that they could report that to me.
They asked me, why anyone would want to block useful ads…
What are useful ads? People really weird me out.
People like to be shown relevant products to their interests to facilitate consumption of products. Seriously, these people exist and have told me such.
I mean I get it in principle, but that’s not how ads work. And those products that might seem relevant are either cheap crap or induce a artificial desire to own.
“How will I know what I want if I don’t see ads?”
the conversions I’ve had would drive a lesser man insane.
I have a nephew that when asked what he wanted for Christmas one year replied, “I don’t know, I’ll have ro watch some commercials first”
I use YouTube sometimes with the kids I work with. For like a solid week in November, every single ad was for the new Furby. I mute ads when I can and skip them as soon as the option becomes available, but the ads made me cringe (the new one looks freaky. It’s long. Like the original wasn’t nightmare-inducing enough.)
I was worried the ad would influence the kid. But thankfully, he showed no interest in it when asked what he wanted for Christmas. In fact when the ads started getting replaced, he made some comment about Furby going bye-bye.
It also helps that he looks up to me, and at some point months ago I started saying, “Boo, ads” whenever they came up. Now he thinks it’s funny to boo at commercials. It makes me smile. :)
the conversions I’ve had would drive a lesser man insane.
the conversations you’ve had would drive a lesser man to also buy said products
If you don’t know you need it, do you really need it?
get a new family omg haha
😭
People be morons
“Why would anyone want to block ads? I will answer that, but first I’m going to tell you about why reverse polish notation is a neat idea for calculators, sorry you can’t skip this part, it’s only 5 minutes for the first part and then I will talk about Cory Doctorows new book for a few minutes, then I will answer.”
I remember when adblock was released and you had to manually block ads.
I took great joy in going to ad heavy pages and blocking all ads manually, it was very cathartic.
We are living in Idiocracy.
In some ways, you could say we’re on a worse trajectory, because the movie didn’t account for Dunning-Kruger effect
But it’s got
electrolytesads!
Useful ads
Wtf? I’d sooner believe in the Tooth Fairy than the existence of a useful ad.
Holy shit that’s full on glue dunce mode.
It’s like they don’t realize time is finite
“Useful” ads?
Awww… So cute.
…While visions of Tide Pods danced in their heads…
I don’t offer. If I have a minute with a computer alone, adblock is going in there.
🤫
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.
Bought a Samsung last year. Never connected it to a non existent Samsung account. Network connected to it has adguard. And the TV is only used for streaming apps (jellyfin, Netflix etc.) Never saw an ad.
The DRM on Netflix and other streaming sites makes the quality noticeably worse on other devices, even locked down ones like the PS5. On Firefox on Linux the quality is locked even lower, to like 720p.
The ads bother me, but my girlfriend says TVs have always had ads since they were originally created. She isn’t wrong. I see the distinction between the channel playing the ad and the device playing the ad, but I can kinda understand people not knowing or caring about that difference.
Truthfully, I can’t see the difference between 720 and 1080 across a room. I can tell the difference between 720 and 2160+, but nothing before that catches any details I couldn’t already see
You can just cast from your phone anyway. Dunno why more people don’t do that…
That defeats the purpose of my setup, personally, as it invites more ads and targeting rather than less. Two routers going for data transfer was an option I considered, as I don’t know how to connect a smart tv to a router without allowing it to access the internet otherwise, but it’s not as wholistic.
You’ve got ads on your phone?
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.
“…too much effort to build an htpc or do anything that protect yourselfs and your family’s data…”
So you change your own oil and do your own brakes, right? Cook all your meals, mow your lawn yourself, hand wash your dishes, and compost your food scraps?
No?
You’re just lazy and brain rotted; it’s too much effort for you to do those things.
(The point is the normal person has no idea and no interest in building a Home Theater PC (HTPC) nor in maintaining one, and I get that. Most people don’t brew their own beer, if it can/will come out superior to what’s in the store. Please just want to come home, sit down, and turn on something that works.
The only thing you got me on there is making all my own food, which I also try to do when I have time. Everything else, yes, I do myself.
Why would I pay somebody money to do a shittier job than I can do.
But yes, I realized my original comment was a little insensitive and rude because I’m just sort of an asshole. So sorry about that.
As another commenter pointed out, I do have a good amount of privilege that allows me to do this stuff, and I’m thankful for that and should work on being less of a jerk.
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.
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.
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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.
True and obviously a phone, a TV, a console, etc are computers.
Fridge
Ads on a website? Unlock minus
Ads on your computer? That’s not YOUR computer. Install Linux and get your computer back
I know it’s a crazy concept but a web browser is in fact running on your computer
