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.
Same, it’s so weird seeing normal TV or using the internet without blockers. Feels like living in Idiocracy.
One of my most used sites has a banner that says “Sign up for a small fee to remove the ads.”
I was a confused for a second, because I had never seen one.
Tried the site with another browser with my default protection off and holy shit, so many ads. The webpage is mostly unusable because of the shear number.
Yeah I agree.
It’s made me very intolerant of ads. It’s kind of surprising how much effort I will invest to avoid ads, and avoid supporting people who make a living from advertising revenue.
people who make a living from advertising revenue
That’s a lot of people, lad…
…just imagine if they were all doing something productive instead.
Props to @DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de for helping to discourage their parasitic behavior and ushering them toward career paths that might actually utilize their potential in a positive way!
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.
I support significant regulation, but it won’t happen. But having a course like the one you took as well as media-literacy should be required middle-school education with a more sophisticated follow-up in high school. That also won’t happen because then you don’t get the people who vote for GOP pieces of shit. It’s in their interest to have citizens who are easily manipulated.
My father said babies were being aborted basically when ready for birth. I said there’s no way that was happening, said send me a link. One glance at the page and I didn’t need to read the article because of the gimmicks all over plus obviously bogus ads. He had a doctorate of mech engineering, but he couldn’t handle life on the internet. Typing this, I’m horrified to realize that I’m glad he passed when he did and didn’t end up with ever-increasingly wacko beliefs that could have harmed our relationship.
its really jarring, and to see people just accept it, kinda hurts my soul.
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.
“The aim of Watson and Rayner was to condition a phobia in an emotionally stable child.”
Whenever I see someone’s computer who doesn’t use adblocker it blows my mind. I can’t imagine going back to that shit.
It’s a fun game of too many ads leading to adblockers, which leads to those not using adblockers to get twice as many ads, more people use adblockers, etc. Until the only way for a company to make money on a website is either to sell your data, or charge for the service.
Yay.
The pattern is always the same. No ads - ads - no ads if you pay - no ads if you pay but we sell your data - personalised ads because you pay, and we sell your data.
“Jarring” would have also been acceptable.
Most people are so desensitized to ads that they barely register. So the advertisers ramp up the attention-grabbing. Repeat. So when I actually see an advertisement it nearly knocks me out of my chair because I’m not desensitized anymore.
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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
Is it wave browser or are you misspelling brave? I haven’t seen an ad in a while
Wave browser is a real thing. It’s a PUP adware web browser based on Chromium with Yahoo as the default search engine
I always get the same 2 responses:
Its not that bad or I dont notice…grrrrrrr
“I’ve been beaten into accepting it.”
so you’ve never heard “It makes me feel nostalgic and I enjoy it”?
Honestly, nope. That would be a new one!
Pihole was the best thing I ever set up for home Internet consumption
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.
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 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.
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.
My condolences on the divorce
