[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation

Same, it's so weird seeing normal TV or using the internet without blockers. Feels like living in Idiocracy.

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.

Whenever I see someone's computer who doesn't use adblocker it blows my mind. I can't imagine going back to that shit.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment

"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.

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.

Pihole was the best thing I ever set up for home Internet consumption

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.

its really jarring, and to see people just accept it, kinda hurts my soul.

Absolutely. And it's getting even worse, since some ad networks also broadcasting executable code in the form of javascript snippets intended to make interactive banners, where e.g. you move the mouse cursor over it, and an in-ad mouse button moves along. A bunch of those have been used to run malicious code on the machines and actually cause harm to the user, from crypto miners to keyloggers and trojans.

In this day and age, I consider a system without adblock to be compromised by default.

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

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.

I feel like this whenever I'm subjected to cable ads. Who the fuck can sit through like 4 or 5 minutes of ads every 15 minutes?

Does anyone have recommendations on how to block ads on Android without rooting? I've tried AdAway but it doesn't seem to be terribly effective. I'm pretty tied into Chrome and would prefer not to change browsers but I understand I might have to.

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.

I always get the same 2 responses:

Its not that bad or I dont notice.....grrrrrrr

but occasionally I have to use computers that don't belong to me

Do them a favor and install an adblocker.

Everyone here is so passionately hating ad's. I haven't felt that upset about ad's since I was a teenager back in like 2004.

I use adblocker for my browser cause I don't want spyware/malware. But watching TV ad's is interesting to me. I keep seeing comments about people being complete idiots who just settled and they just take it from the advertisers...

That couldn't be farther from the truth for someone like me. I enjoy nostalgia a lot. So I got a live tv package with regular cable tv channels and there are ad's. I did this on purpose though. I am not some idiot who has been brainwashed. I just find advertising interesting in general.

Seems like a lot of commenters here would think of me as some kind of monster. Why, I'm not sure. I guess cause ad's are some kind of big bad we all have to fight against?

Someone here mentioned that people work on those ad's and I think that's part of why I enjoy them. Because technically, that's often someone's artwork. I'm in favor of more animated commercials too.

But I get it. Consumerism = bad.

Just feels like more like "no fun allowed"

It IS perverse. You're having your eyes groped by strangers, all trying to get you to do what you have no desire to do. You just want to get what you came for and leave, but no, everywhere you look something is trying to block your path and distract you from your goal. And it's not even honest: you already know that none of these extraneous, unwanted come-ons you're seeing is anything close to true. In some cases, it's a full-on mental assault.

It's vile. I used to leave some on, but now there's not even such a thing as "acceptable ads" anymore just because of the sheer numbers involved. So now I don't just block: I go full extermination mode. I'm usually on desktop so if it's a one time thing, like a single ad on YouTube that managed to sneak by all of my walls and filters and I can't just pass it by because it's stuck in my field of vision, I'll actually do an "inspect element" and delete it on the spot. But otherwise, if I can't block 100% or very close to it, I find a different site or source, or shut down altogether.

I genuinely don't think our minds were made for this level of constant information onslaught and never-ending manipulation campaigns, and I don't think it's healthy or life-affirming to subject oneself to it without limit. So I don't. People get angry about it, but hey, more for them to enjoy if that's how they wanna roll.