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 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.
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?
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 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.
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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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.
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.
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
They allow their fridges to show advertisements
They allow their Start Menu to show advertisements.
You can not shut down a fridge
True and obviously a phone, a TV, a console, etc are computers.
Fridge
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’ve been on Librewolf for a year or two and it works great
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.
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.”
Our man spitting cold hard facts right here.
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 🤣
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.
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.
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…
get a new family omg haha
“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.”
Holy shit that’s full on glue dunce mode.
It’s like they don’t realize time is finite
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.
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
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. :)
If you don’t know you need it, do you really need it?
😭
People be morons
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.
“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.
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