I definitely consume too much dystopian content to be a fair dystopian barometer, but the sheer amount of ads being pushed my way is starting to make me feel legitimately anxious. It feels like a techno-dystopia where all of the neat and artistic elements have been extracted and then ground into dust for our corporate overlords. Even the ‘regular’ people are just trying to sell themselves. The streamers, the funny videos, the pet videos, the porn, the reposts of all of those, so much of it is just monetizing my attention.
Do ads even influence people that much? Does anyone even eat Church’s Chicken?! Do people consider switching their car insurance? I though the postmoderns were jumping the gun a little with the pictures they painted of a future with corporate logos and other advertisements spread across every visible surface, but now I have to see 5 ads and a cookie consent pop up to look up a quick definition. Watching a friend’s youtube video? 30 seconds of rapidfire ads from 15 brands. It’s starting to feel absurd. Are we going to be okay?
Sydney CBD train stations have in addition to the normal advert billboards, electric TV screen billboards where they’ll play nothing but video ads WITH THE SOUND ON FOR THE ENTIRE PLATFORM TO HEAR, so annoying!! It really is everywhere, you just can’t escape it.
That would have been broken in like 30 minutes in NYC.
lesbianic Github
ClitHub
Finally something to commit to
Shout out for pihole. Never ceases to amaze me when I end up on public data sources (cellular/wifi) and my phone is littered with ads and banners that squeeze the viewable area to a thin strip of screen. It’s truly toxic. However, you can set up a personal VPN at home on the Pi and get your ads scrubbed by PiHole while you’re away from home.
So yes, if I may offer my list (desktop browser):
PiHole (+ personal VPN to connect to when away)
uBlock Origin
Https Everywhere (for the odd site that isn’t https by default)
Facebook Container ( if you use FB)
SocialFixer for Facebook - a godsend. I use FB for work and hobby groups. FB insists on cramming “suggested for you” content in everywhere. SocialFixer will filter and block FB posts based on text, and using “suggested for you” as a filter makes Facebook great again.
Duck Duck Go privacy essentials
EFF’s Privacy Badger
uBlacklist - an app that lets you block sites in search results. A little tedious, but if you stick with it eventually you end up getting rid of many those awful boilerplate SEO worthless sites.
SponsorBlock for YouTube
EDIT: Guess I didn’t answer the question? I despise ads. I will do most anything I can to avoid them. The aforementioned list of blocking and privacy add-ons is proof enough of that. There’s nothing that I need to buy that I don’t already know I want or need. I walk away from the TV (I can’t remember the last time I watched network TV. Probably the primary election?), I put my phone down, and if it’s that much in my face I simply close the site if I don’t absolutely have to be there.
Why not just use an ad blocker directly in your phone’s web browser? Works on any connection, works better than DNS based blockers because it will properly remove the page elements, and no need to connect to a VPN. PiHole is nice for devices you can’t install an ad blocker on like a smart tv or something but on anything with a controlable browser it’s objectively inferior to a native ad blocker…
And the advertisers seem to not care about context. I’ll be watching some awful disaster documentary then an ad for, say, detergent will pop up. Now I associate your product with a terrible event. The bombarding too. Do they think if I didn’t switch car insurance the first 100 times I saw the ad the 101st will do the trick? And I don’t buy the “some people may be seeing it for the first time” excuse. The ads were every few minutes.
That’s not why it’s repeated a 1000 times, it’s so when you actually do want to buy something in that category you’re more likely to buy theirs because it’s familiar.
See I’ve never understood how that worked because it has the complete opposite effect on me.
The more I see a certain product advertised the less likely I am to ever willingly purchase that product from that company.
Same. Being annoyed by excessive ads is a surefire way for me to blacklist a product or company. Particularly obnoxious ads can do it with just a single exposure.
I won’t ever buy a car from Frank Lita because of how obnoxious their ads are.
Oh hello fellow St. Louisan.
Oh hai
I believe most of us here block as many ads as possible by any means possible. I so rarely see ads that every once in while when I do (on other peoples devices) I’m shocked and disgusted.
https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole
Is enough for me. If I watch YouTube on mobile it’s in Brave browser as that block the ads on iOS.
If I watch YouTube on my TV it’s in https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ which also blocks ads.
You don’t have to live like that and I feel sorry for all the people that do.
All that being said I know what you mean, even the content itself is now saturated with ads, i.e. a word about our sponsor for five minutes at the start of any video…
I’m sure you know about Brave being called out here lately so I just want to give you some iOS alternatives so you can stop using Brave (if you care enough, of course)
AdGuard (I paid for the lifetime, $12 I think) and it works great. Just like having uBlock on Firefox, but in safari so I still get all the integration that safari offers on your iOS device.
Dark reader is on the App Store.
When it comes to YouTube, I sideload a YouTube app with all the essentials installed using Sideloadly.
The rest is up to you.
If you are looking for a good YouTube client on iOS, you don’t even have to get into sideloading. Check out Yattee with this guide.
