Comment by stego-tech
2 months ago
Just from the headline alone: oh please dear god yes.
The internet became usable after implementing the Pi-Hole. So much noise, so much wasted bandwidth, so many unnecessary lookups, gone with a Raspberry Pi and a few packages.
While other commenters are getting into the technical weeds of things, the reality is that the OP is right. Ads don’t inform, they manipulate. They’re an abusive forced-marriage that we cannot withdraw from even with ad and script blockers, because so much of society is built upon the advertising sector that it’s impossible to fully escape them. People like the OP and us are mocked for moves to block billboards in space as being “alarmist” or out of touch, yet driving along any highway in the USA will bombard you with ads on billboards, on busses, on rideshares, on overly-large signs with glowing placards, in radio and television, on streaming providers who raise our rates on what used to be ad-free packages.
Advertising is cancer, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. Let’s get rid of it.
Youtube so badly wants me to pay for premium. But the ads they show me are almost entirely scams and questionably legal content. Ads for guns. Ads for viagra knockoffs. Ads for “stock market tips” that use AI generated celebrity impersonations. Ads for “free money the government isn’t telling you about”.
It’s constant and ever-increasing. I stopped watching a 30 minute video recently after the 5th ad break just over 10 minutes in.
On desktop uBlock still works in Firefox at least. But I’ve basically given up YouTube on iOS.
I feel naive saying this, but a certain percentage of the ads on YouTube seem to contravene what would be legal of they were shown on television - in Australia at least.
It feels like standover tactics, showing the worst of the worst unless you pay up.
I should also at least admit that recently,Like the last 12 months, those greasy-type ads are less common, having been replaced with more television-style ads, although they last longer. Still an improvement overall though.
The trick with YouTube on iOS is to delete the app and use the website in Safari instead. There, you can use Wipr 2 or other ad blockers.
Only reason I keep brave browser installed in iOS is to block ads for YouTube vids
Serious question: Why don't you pay for YouTube premium?
Isn't it hypocritical to want YouTube to offer you its content for free? If the content is valuable to you, you should be willing to pay for it. If not, just stop watching YouTube.
It's not only hypocritical, it's nonsensical in this discussion.
It's obvious that if advertising was made illegal, we would need to pay for all those services that we want to use. YouTube premium is the best example of how that would actually work.
> If the content is valuable to you, you should be willing to pay for it
But I do, by supporting those creators through Patreon. Paying for YouTube Premium sounds like a bad deal since I'm not directly supporting the creators for which I go to YouTube in the first place.
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Maybe its hypocritical. But I have no issues with blocking ads on youtube on my PC, since 95%+ of the ads I see on youtube mobile are blatantly breaking Youtube's own TOS, if not breaking actual laws. I shouldn't be seeing these advertisements anyway if Youtube actually enforced their own policies. But I assume they'd rather advertise scams than miss out on a single empty ad spot.
I'm surprised Youtube hasn't faced any legal consequences for all the scams they allow to advertise on their platform. As far as I could tell, the ad I saw for a gun that was "easy to sneak past security" and "no license required" was up for well over a month, and I'm not convinced Youtube actually took it down. I saved that one, and as far as I can tell, the video ad url is still up, but now requires a sign in to view the video.
Being cheap and also having standards of what you'll watch is not hypocritical.
YouTube is great if you pay for it, which I do. Any time I open it on a device I’m not logged in and get an ad i instant close.
you can also use a VPN when paying to pay significantly less, though ive heard theyve cracked down on that a bit more recently
I can still remember ads on TV from when I was a kid. Mind worms, embedded deep. And it makes me angry.
Call education conn-ec-tion!
Inflamed hemorrhoidal tissue
> Advertising is cancer, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not.
That's the most "hacker" newsy thing to me. Whenever advertising critical articles come up, there's a large percentage of people commenting pro advertising. Yeah, I get it, you don't bite the hand that feeds you but come on. Does working in ad tech somehow influence your brains like the ones you are targeting?
I don't think it's exclusive to advertising. Humans in general desire stability (myself being no exception), and anything that disrupts a system they've become accustomed to can very quickly become perceived as a threat.
My theory is that the people who fight against changing the status quo are just fundamentally opposed to change itself, not necessarily supporting the system as it currently stands. They know the ins and outs of the current system, and changing it means they have to dump knowledge and re-learn things - which they're fiercely opposed to doing. The enemy you know, over the enemy you don't, in a manner of speaking.
Those of us who can visualize futures starkly different than a continuance of the present day are a threat to those people who demand indefinite complacency and an unchanging world. Unfortunately for them, the universe is chaos and change is inevitable - so finding your own stability amidst the chaos is a skill more people need, such that necessary change might be embraced.
That's not why I oppose banning advertising.
I've made a product. The people who use it, like it. But I have no online following or presence, and I'm really not the kind of charismatic person who could build one. All the "community" places where I could share it in good faith are incredibly hostile to self promotion, I think because of the wave of people selling vibecoded openai wrappers as language tutors.
I can pay £40 for reddit ads, and while it has negative ROI, it gives me lots of feedback that I can use to iterate. Sure, my project seems to be a commercial dead end - people find it valuable, but most people don't find it quite valuable enough to pay for the high cost of translation - but I still think those ads had a lot of value.
That said, I use an adblocker myself, I wish more intelligent people worked on rockets rather than targeting algorithms, and I do agree that ads have a negative effect in a lot of places - it's just that they do have a real (and IMO moral) utility in some places. If you banned advertising for everything, you'd just encourage bribing moderators to let you self-promote or ensure only people with existing followings can make things.
(it's https://nuenki.app, if anyone's curious)
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Trotting this out again because somehow it hasn't completely saturated the internet yet:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
--Upton Sinclair
>People like the OP and us are mocked for moves to block billboards in space as being “alarmist” or out of touch, yet driving along any highway in the USA will bombard you with ads on billboards, on busses, on rideshares, on overly-large signs with glowing placards, in radio and television, on streaming providers who raise our rates on what used to be ad-free packages.
I lost a lot of faith in the decency of others a month ago when I heard a song on my car radio, looked at the display to see the artist and title info that comes from the radio station, and was met with "Bounty the quicker picker upper." That slogan stayed up for at least a minute. Every possible channel of communication will be sold for ad space.
I've been using browser ad block for more than twenty years now. Back then it was to block flashing banners etc. I use Firefox everywhere so have it on my phone too. Due to this I haven't realised how bad it's become. I didn't even realise YouTube had ads until recently and how ridiculous they are.
I run DNS blocking at home which helps somewhat with shitty devices like Apple that don't give users any control. But my partner was looking at a local news site on her phone on the train the other day and I couldn't believe it. Literally an ad between every single paragraph plus one sticky ad at the bottom. It was like twice as much ad as content. Sickening.
Brave browser on mobile solves the problem for me