For real. No one else in my life uses Adblocker, so when I visit, I’m reminded of how horrible ads have gotten.
I don’t like the term “NPC”, but like… the adridden experience they just endure without just googling “how to stop ads” makes me really wanna call them “NPCs”
Any term we pick is going to be offensive. We’re gesturing at the concept of them being less human than us
But like… It’s kind of true. It’s like they don’t experience the world around them, they just adapt to it without comment like a Sim
They just seem like they’re missing the spark. NPC is probably a kinder term than what we’d come up with otherwise
Needs alt text.
I don’t go to sites full of ads, or if I do, I just switch to reader mode and poof better readability without ads.
a lot of judgement here from someone that doesn’t know what a hamburger is
Yesterday I sat across a woman that had to rapidly tap her smartphone’s screen every few minutes to stop loud video ads.
Was tempted to lecture her about the existance of adblockers. (But didn’t, following established subway etiquette…)
She’s apparently never heard of earbuds either
She didn’t watch videos, just scrolling and reading.
Only interrupted by regular autoplay video-ads from hell…Jesus. I don’t think an adblocker would help if she couldn’t manage the fucking volume buttons.
Lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink and all that.
My wife doesn’t use an ad blocker. I installed a pihole about 6 years ago and she got so incensed, and demanded I remove it. Eventually I carved out a rule on the router to assign her a different DNS server. I just don’t get it.
My wife was annoyed with my dual piholes until I got some basic whitelists dialed in for her. She’s a stock Android user, and my Google blocklist broke basically all of her phone’s native apps… Because Google’s invasive tracking is fully wormed through all of them.
It basically took an evening of us hunt-and-peck’ing our way through her phone’s blocked requests, whitelisting one thing at a time to see what was necessary and what was just tracking BS. I set her up with an automatic VPN that connected whenever she was away from the house, so she was always connected to the home network, and always protected by the pihole. Once we got that figured out, (and she learned to stop clicking the damned sponsored Google search results, which fail to connect with the pihole), she basically stopped noticing it. She got used to having it. She started taking it for granted…
We recently moved, and I haven’t had time to set my media/server stuff back up yet. I’m just running the basic ISP modem/router for the time being. And now that she got used to the pihole, she has been hit with whiplash because she’s suddenly seeing ads again. She visited her usual World of Warcraft site, and was like “what the fuck is this? The damned site is basically unusable…” She insists on using Chrome, (because it’s what her phone uses, and she wants to sync between the two), so I was only able to install the lite version of uBlock Origins as a stopgap, because Google intentionally broke the full version.
What really got her was when she noticed our Roku TV’s idle screen suddenly had ads. She was like “what the hell do you mean the goddamned TV has built-in ads? We aren’t even watching anything right now! It’s just the fucking sleep screen!”
Yes dear, why do you think I insisted on setting the pihole up years ago? Ads are invasive, and you don’t even realize how bad it is until you’re out. Once you get used to living without them, going back is rough.
She probably also feasts on AI slop. Just gobbling that shit up.
She ever give a reason, or nah?
If it’s not about getting points in games for watching ads then there’s never a reason given.
Mine literally got upset that she wasn’t seeing/able to click on the sponsored google results…
Time to get a divorce
My work PC does not have adblock, and I’m always a little culture shocked whenever I am forced to use Edge for something.
Playing through Persona 3 Reload at the moment. Not come across this gem yet but I have come across this:
Want to be cloooooooooose
wtf
ROG ALLY USER DETECTED??
I get what they’re doing with the lens flare or whatever, but I feel like illustrating the glasses like that just doesn’t work in a still shot. Looks like he’s wearing a white eye patch or something.
I genuinely said “beep boop” in this scene and she did not appreciate the joke. 😂
Going for the evil ending, are we?
The other day I had to use a browser without any plugins to go to a site, and it was unrecognizable with all the ads. When I normally visit it’s clean and simple. These ads pushed content under the fold. Horrible.
I’ll never understand how people just rawdog the internet like that
Reminds me of talking to a tech bro excited to give Google more information so his ads are more accurately targeted to him.
If the ads actually targeted me with things I’d actually like, instead of trying to manipulate me, I’d probably care less. But they don’t, because shareholders want larger margins.
True… Except there’s a big problem with that
There’s not many things I would want that I’m not aware of
So would they going to show me 2 ads a day, or would the same 4 things be plastered everywhere each week?
Whenever I disable it to access a feature that breaks under it, I remember how cursed these sites have become. Reminds me of just before pop-up blockers were common.
I miss policeman. It was the best blocker addon. Fine-grained easy control.
Brave does well.
For watching video, use a media player (e.g. mpv + yt-dlp). No ads (except what the content creator added to the video itself… in which case, tap the cursor keys to skip, no problem).
Maybe those who don’t block adverts just don’t know. Like an animal born in captivity. Like a fish oblivious to water. We can escape, we can evolve, show them the better life awaiting them. :)
Imagine working in IT and having colleagues that don’t use adblockers.
Good time to mention this if you don’t already use it, or if you do use blockers, maybe consider this:
It’s AdBlocker, BUT actually, what it does is “click” on all the ads. Every adclick costs the advertisers, and makes targeting ads meaningless because of all the noise. From your end, nothing has changed, the ads are gone… but from the advertisers end, you’re costing them more money and making their data useless.
Is it reliable? Ad-blocking is a cat and mouse game and to actually have a useable ad-blocker ot needs to be well maintained over a long period of time (for example like ublock origin).
Their concept looks nice, but they are researchers and I’m a bit afraid that they just drop that, write a paper about it and that’s it. Of there is no constant maintenance this will likely stop blocking YouTube Ads once Google deploys the next changes.
Update: checked the repo and it’s actually a fork of ublock origin, so it should (for now) be pretty similar, but still they would have to keep maintaining that.
It’s been maintained for over 10 years by now so it shouldn’t be going anywhere.
Wow didn’t now that. I’m surprised I never heard of it, but I will definitely give it a try.
That’s… Beautiful.
It’s not that cut and dry. Yes, it brings the ad industry ever so slightly closer to collapse…
But until then, you’re just helping Google sell ad buys faster and pumping up their metrics
Google has gotten fined for doing exactly this fraudulently multiple times to juice their numbers
