I once explained to a sixty-something-year-old that she could use firefox+uBO instead of paying for youtube red or whatever the hell it’s called Course, then I had to try to explain the concept of browser extensions and I’m not sure she got it
This is what its like when I turn on the TV at someones house or at a hotel or something. I encounter TV ads so rarely (only commercial free streaming / downloaded content in our house) that its fucking jarring as hell to be watching something and then suddenly there are commercials.
Not just ads but there’s a ton of malicious ads out there. Scareware that you don’t have to even click and your computer is now “infected” with a “virus” and you have to call some shitbag to just turn off the notifications for money.
Advertisers know this which is why they use sponsored content and LLMs to post on social media.
You might think you’ve not seen ads but you have. They are not always as blatant as the pop ups of old. Things like ‘news articles’ from reputable organizations that were paid to write. Things like posts on Reddit that might not promote a product directly but always make sure it’s part of the conversation.
I’ve been using ad block for years and was so confused when I went to watch the Rick and Morty marathon on Adult Swim. I had no idea it showed ads during the “intermission”. I immediately muted it, tried to figure out why ad block wasn’t working and questioned how anyone could put up with it.
Coming from a guy who watched infomercials as a kid, I could recite them from memory, living ad free for almost 20 years makes ads nauseating to me.
I once caught a reddit ban for sharing NSFW content even though the youtube video had none. I had to ask why and it turned out there was porn in the ads and apparently that was my fault.
Wow, that’s… kind of impressively sophisticated for the system to pick up on that.
But wait, aren’t the ads account-tailored?
Sure, If male = true, show porn ad.
When I have to go off my network because some website won’t load because I am blocking their trackers I get sick from the AI ads, its gross. Truth in advertising is dead so so dead. They are not even trying to make products look real anymore.
I won’t allow list the things the site needs, I would rather just go on mobile for a min. I wish I could set DNS settings per browser so I could spin up a lighter adblock that will allow the sites I have to rarely access and then just have a dedicated browser for.
I wish I could set DNS settings per browser
This is extremely achievable
What browser? Or do I need to do split tunneling per app in VPN settings?
In Firefox, under privacy settings, activate DNS over HTTPS (DoH). The default DNS (CloudFlare) should work, but I prefer the custom setting
https://dns.quad9.net/dns-query
I literally had this thought yesterday. I’m so glad I know how to use technology. I have no idea how folks raw dog the internet today.
I have this conversation with my wife. I installed a pi-hole on our network, works nearly perfectly, however every site thinks we have ad-blockers installed, and kind of we do I guess.
She got mad because all the sites she wants to read (she love celebrity drama) won’t let her read any more, so she just uses cellular data instead of the home wi-fi. I don’t know how she reads anything with all the ads everywhere.
oh god, same here. I have Pi-Hole set up with a two layer system so it blocks less for my partner’s phone and laptop and more for everything else.
I started with pihole and eventually switch to AdGuard home. Sucks for apps that “requires” an occasional ad, but 1 thing I still can’t figure out is why Hulu won’t work anymore.
But I feel you on the benefits and why I won’t give one to my parents. These are people who took 2 months to realize my dad isn’t on the family text group because he accidentally “left” the group, and why my mom’s iPhone stopped ringing because she consciously used the physical mute switch on the side (buried beneath the phone case).
Heh, my dad wanted to use sites where he needed to have ad blocking disabled. I set his device up in adguard home to be ignored by all of the global blocking rules
Couldn’t you just change her phone’s DNS settings to circumvent the adblocker? Then she could still use the WiFi.
Lets call it a combination of “not tech savvy enough” and “it did what I needed and she had a bypass, and I put 0 thought into it after”
One day I installed AdGuard on a Pi and routed my parent’s traffic through it, effectively blocking ads. I thought they would love to live without ads but she asked me to remove it because the games she plays won’t progress unless she watches ads.
I have a pi hole and my wife likes the Google shopping links that it blocks and my sister in law likes to play games with ads. I ended up just making a bypass list and putting their devices on them.
You know, if the people who go out of their way for ads make it so the people who won’t don’t make such a huge target, I’ll take it.
Same for me. I have a group called
noblockon my pihole. If someone complains, I go and add their device to it. I have given up arguing with people…
Sounds like I will be working on next
these people addicted to those freenium ad games.
On the other hand, we should be thankful for the masses. If most people used adblockers that shit would get choke slammed off the Internet so hard our heads would spin. It’s only because like 10% people use it that it stays under the radar.
Wait, does the average person not use an ad blocker? Like am I within the 40%? 30%? i have really no idea
The average person uses whichever browser their OS came with. They won’t go out of their way to get an adblocker, especially if they became desensitised to ads. They don’t even know it could be better.
From a quick search it seems like it’s under 30%. Crazy.
Crazy, but understandable when you realize how many people use iPhone mobile apps for 100% of their web browsing
I mean, there are reasonably effective adblocks for iOS available.
ublock origin light even blocks YouTube ads. It’s perfect.
ublock origin light even blocks YouTube ads.
Do you mean the website or app version? Because as far as I can tell the YouTube app is effectively a quarantine zone for ads. The only thing I know that works there is pressing the little info button on ads and blocking them one by one, but that gets annoying pretty much immediately.
Oooooh… yeah, I see what you mean. I don’t use the YouTube app for precisely that reason. That, and better playlist control through the website. I can accomplish everything I want from the website version of YouTube, which usually isn’t much when I’m just using my phone, and if I want anything more complicated, I usually have my MacBook Pro with me, so I just use that instead.
And that usually is just using AirPlay for videos to my Apple TV, and I certainly don’t use the YouTube app on that, again, because I can’t use ad block on the YouTube app on my Apple TV, which is why I AirPlay videos from my MacBook Pro. And that works great, because the YouTube website offers much better control in creating playlists. So I would probably be using the website on my Mac anyway just for that.
I guess it really comes down to my particular use case
Crazy how many people are raw-dogging digital sewage.
More like getting raw-dogged by it…
It’s an ouroboros of shit-fuck, really. People just going down on themselves unto perpetuity.
It’s worse than average person. I don’t even see tech-savy friends use adblockers nowadays. No idea why, I never asked.
And I feel like majority of people don’t even know browser extensions exist, and those who do think it’s all shady and malware, so they avoid those like plague.
I showed my wife the world of extensions like ad block and dark reader. Then she asked for some help one time and I saw she had some sort of tab grouping manager thing and had like a million tabs and was horrified of what I’ve done. I let her know there should be a setting that purges the browser when she closes it but she refused
Some people use tabs like bookmarks. I remember an ex telling me that Chrome takes 10+ seconds to launch on her phone. When I checked, she literally had 1000+ tabs opened. I kid you not, the tab count said
:Dlike it basically gave up. My flabbers were gasted.If you do that in incognito it shows a
;)instead.The
:Dmight be my favourite feature of Chrom-ium on Android. It’s so whimsical!
Chrome doesn’t really have an ad blocker anymore. Firefox + unlock origin is a different level than chrome users can even access.
well ublock lite is surprisingly helpful
Yeah, I use uBlock lite on my work computer since i don’t want to have to fight websites for hating FF. It works perfectly fine for your regular everday purposes.
My dad browsing on his tablet, shows me a page. “Ahhhh, my eyes! You need an ad blocker!”
“Ok give me one”
“You’d have to use firefox”
“Never mind then, I want chrome”
Then continue drowning in ads and tracking, chucklefuck.
TBF Firefox on Android is not as good as it could be, it can be frustrating when it doesn’t load tabs sometimes or slows down to a crawl for no reason.
I still use it, but I can see why people might have bad experiences with it.
Yeah… As a Firefox user on android, Firefox on android isnt very good :/
I don’t have an issue with it. I’m also using privacy badger and noscript
Set him up with a DNS blocker. It’s browser independent and can also be used on mobile.
You mean like a pi-hole? I use one of those and I love it. Ain’t no way I set up one of those for him. Then that’s another thing I have to support when it inevitably has problems.
Not a pi-hole. DNS name resolver can be set by system. You just need to use some sort of blocker that is maintained by someone else for the namespace
Any suggestions?
Adaway on fdroid works pretty well. It’s better if you have root access, but it functions fine as an adblocker without. I think it pretends to be a VPN service if you don’t have root
Ehhh… this is my dad’s Samsung tablet. F-droid is a nonstarter for a boomer.
check out this list: https://publicdns.info/best-adblocking.html
using the adguard dns is probably easiest, fire and forget. nextdns gives you more settings and controls.
on android you can e.g. drop “dns.adguard-dns.com” in the “private dns” setting and you’re good, system-wide
Firefox on Android kinda sucks. Hook him up with Cromite.
Cromite is buggy af from my experience and it’s pretty out of date. Brave is the only remaining chromium option other than like DuckDuckGo, but it has its own big problems.
The browser situation on Android is screwed
Does it? I haven’t tried anything else in years.
It’s literal madness.
No wonder nobody’s fucking brains work anymore
There has been a few times when I showed people my ad-less internet. Their heads exploded! They went, “Oh dear internet fairy, show me your ways of serenity!” and I did. I installed adblockers on their devices. Each and every time they went “Thank the heavens, I’ve never known such comfort in my digital life before!”
AND THEN THEY JUST STOPPED USING THEM AFTER A WHILE???
Edit: Not my Mom though. My Mom looooves the adblocking.
My grandmother clicks on everything, constantly… On her phone I tried setting her up with a DNS based ad blocker and it made it so her freemium games stopped working, the ones that give her 5+ minute ads every 15 minutes…
She refuses to use an adblocker because of it, but gets herself scammed out of money weekly due to these shitty malicious ads.
I recently had an opportunity where I could have put a 79 year old lady on the internet.
Then I remembered that she once told me how she was waiting for money from like publisher’s clearing house or something.
Then I remembered that bulk of the internet, as a whole, is kinda shit…
very little have adblock on, plus alot of them likely uses apps on thier phones. and i think men use adblocks more than thier counterparts.
I had this experience at work last year. I shared some article that was relevant to work and half the people complained that it had a full page ad they couldn’t dismiss. The other half of us used Adblock, apparently.
I’m the “tech guy” in my family and friend groups. Every time I need to help someone with something I have this experience and it’s crazy.
I’m surprised people are capable of tolerating the shit it’s fucking awful
For decades, if I happen to hear ads playing on radio or something, i literally stick my fingers in my ears and go LALALALA until it stops or I have left.
You’re not selling me SHIT today, I will never be part of your brainwashing scheme.
I am willing to die on that hill so help me god.
I feel like it’s turning into a genuine schism in our society. The “it’s fine, I just deal with it”s and the “I swear to fucking god I’ll burn it all down before I see/hear a single goddamn ad”s.
The Time Machine needs to be remade with this in mind.
I just switch it off. If its not my device my interest in what ever was on immediately shuts down and I go do something else.
Like a comedy show is on the TV at a relatives house and I walk by, its entertaining and I sit down to watch with them. Oh adverts, off I go then.
I take the remote and mute the ad for its duration.
I listen to or see and enjoy the adverts, then I don’t buy their products. They spent that money advertising at me, and get nothing.
Do you know how many car adverts I’ve seen on TV in my life? Hundreds.
I can’t even drive.
“Sticking it to the man”
The reason why ads are such a big business is because they work on everyone, even those who say they’ll go out of their way to not use the brand they saw ads for.
Oh yeah, its so wild when you see it.
Like, I forgot Youtube even has ads.
And just to throw out therr, I get it, people need to make money, I am not against advertising, but fuck the ads are SOOOOO MANY and all come off as SOOOOOO scammy.
If you are showing me an ad online, I assume you and the product are just trying to rip me off and whatever is being promoted is a scam. If it was just “Hey, McDonalds has McRibs” in a little banner, ok fine, whatever. But its all this wild cheap garbage from weird fucking bull shit websites. What happened to actually having a sales person vet this shit?
Same here. A buddy of mine was listening to YT Music on a speaker when an infomercial length ad started talking (uh, I mean, lying) about all the how and why the United States has the best healthcare system in the world and there’s no good reason to change any of it.
My head almost exploded. What. The. Fuck.
A lot of ads just seem like AI advertising made-up products that don’t exist, gambling, or payday loans. Or sometimes totally normal things like a local college.
Normal college that makes you take out loans, or worse, sketchy technical schools that promise they’ll help you find a job if you just sign up for a 20k loan
Surprisingly just the local community college that’s been around for decades. ~$1000/semester for full-time in-district residents or ~$1600/semester for in-state but out-of-district). Not sure why they’re doing ads like they’re a scam, unless there’s been some changes such that they are.
The ads on some podcasts, like anything NYT, are shockingly conservative lately.
I realised this myself when i had to watch some youtube video in a browser without adblock. There was literal porn as an ad. The second of two was some hentai game, but at least it was half blurred. I have no idea who used that browser to get those targeted ads, it was a shared computer.
Even the companies displaying the ads can’t always tell why a particular ad was displayed to a particular person.
Thats the thing.
They used to know.
Because instead of shitty algorythms, some sales person would go out and be lke “hey Ford, want to advertise on our car website?”
Excuse me, are you insinuating Tai Chi Walking is a scam?
They also interrupt video at random times on web video. It is like web advertisers are unaware of the transition that existed on linear broadcast so the viewer can retain context. Web videos are so jarring they have the reverse effect.
I would pay for an app to tell me the nearest McDonalds that had McRibs.
How do you watch YouTube on mobile without ads? Do you just watch on mobile browser instead of using YT app? Is there some alternative front end app that includes adblock?
I watch Youtube in my Firefox Android with uBlock Origin, zero ads 👌
So for Android there’s for example Grayjaj (available on Playstore or https://grayjay.app/ ) or how about Newpipe ( https://newpipe.net/ )
For IOS I have no Idea but how about firefox with UBlock origin
Brave browser on iOS will do it. Orion probably will as well.
Newpipe has been pretty great for me on Android.
+1 for grayjay, works really well for me
I’ve heard Firefox with Ublock Origin and Sponsorblock works well on Android. I’ve personally had frequent issues with Grayjay. But I haven’t tried the above solution yet.
Brave blocks it automatically. Easy.
I don’t want to get in a debate about brave.
I mean it’s the same with any other browsers with ad blockers on mobile platforms.
Firefox on Android and Orion on IOS both let you use ublock origin.
No need to use crypto bro ad company browser.
Brave users are in a cult. I swear to god.
I’m not, I just really don’t care that much.
Then just watch YouTube with ads or pay for premium.
I mean you care enough to mention it randomly. 🤷♀️
What? No I just know everyone wants to have a big discussion about brave or Firefox. I don’t particularly care. Brave blocks it out of the box.
No one was talking about crypto bro ad company brave (or Firefox) till you brought it up randomly.
https://f-droid.org/packages/InfinityLoop1309.NewPipeEnhanced
PipePipe is kind of like an RSS reader for YouTube. It’s not going to give you algorithmic suggestions based on your viewing activity, but it will let you follow channels, and it doesn’t show the ads.
I don’t use the app and disabled it. I watch via Firefox Mobile which has Ublock Origin. Also I run NextDNS, which I pay $2/month to, to block ads.
Similar set up on the desktop and laptop, though I also yt-dl a lot.
I also just, really hate video as a format for 99% of things. I MUCH prefer reading blogs and such. Most of my Youtube watching is concert videos. I love live music, even if its mediocre cell phone footage.
What happened to actually having a sales person vet this shit?
“Optimized” away as fast as possible, you can safely bet.
What happened to actually having a sales person vet this shit?
That costs money. Why would they do that when it turns out that they don’t actually have to?
I’m always surprised when a band mate wants to share a song with me and they whip up their phone and absolutely tolerate 45s of ads before the music starts
Oh yeah, and Spotify pays artist garbage. Its best to buy direct from their website or Bandcamp (on Bandcamp Fridays).
Though Bandcamp is starting to get enshitified.
What’s going on with Bandcamp?
I want to say they recently laid off a bunch of people for AI coding despite pushing against AI music. Plus their owners are kind of increasingly Vulture Capitalisty.
I can’t find it at theoment but Insaw something on reddit and lined up a list of alternatices but of course, the alternative suggestions are even more smaller and niche.
It took me years to accept that mid video sponsor ads are just… a thing now, and it ultimately makes little sense for me to just give a blanket ‘nope’ to everyone who uses them…
We thought we could build a digital utopia, and laughed off ‘the corpos will buy all of it’ as fanciful cyberpunk doomer hysteria.
… well… turns out that wasn’t hysteria.
Oh well. At least I can more easily conceptualize myself as something like ‘down on his luck shadowrunner’, rofl.
The old logic from the 90s still holds -> the more pernicious the ads, the less you should want to be there.
That it all got functionally digitally enclosed and normalized doesn’t change that… you just gotta deal with the terror of knowing most people these days just literally are programmed by advertisements and algorithms.
Sponsorblock
+1 for Sponsorblock
I never see ads almoat anywhere, I have layers of blocking, PiHole, UBlock Origin, Ghostery, often use a VPN, NextDNS on the phone, a few other plug ins.
I’ve been using adguard dns on my phone for a few years but have noticed a lot more ads sneaking though on certain sites. Would you recommend next dns?
I have had good luck with it and there is a pretty generous free tier I think if you want to try it.
It all went to shit when advertisers realized that they don’t actually have to sell anything. The ad is the product. That’s why so much advertisement is a scam now. Regulation is so far behind the problems of the internet it is ridiculous. Some companies entire business model is to put out ads, then funnel the data straight to data brokers. The products aren’t real, they just have to get prints, eyes and occasional curiosity or accidental clicks, and they make a margin over it. It is madness.
I still dont understand why YouTube removed banner ads from on top of the video. The ones on the homepage and side feed, I can kind of understand. They want to show more videos to people faster. Sure. But the on-video banner ads were quite unobtrusive imo. Like I didn’t even close them very often in the olden’ days when I didn’t use an adblocker all the time.
You don’t immediately want to click on an AI image of a toe infection, or fingers holding some weirdly anatomical exotic fruit?
I have no idea what you are even talking about because I basically never see ads anywhere.
You’re not missing much.
