This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Seeming that I'm getting increasingly pissed off by Spotify giving 5 or more ads without 30 minute adless times and for every 5th song rather than every 8th or 10th, I'm gonna have even more stress from the doubling of all google ads.
At least ublock origin lite does its job pretty well on YouTube, so I won't need to worry until google eventually kills that too.
...because if I'm not interested in something, I might change my mind after I see it a bunch more times on the same fucking page - what a brilliant idea! Hell, put the ad in 50 different spots and make me click no less than 7 times to close each one - who knows, maybe that will encourage me to buy whatever shit you're peddling!
Thing is, even after buying whatever it is you still continue to see the same ADs…
frequency does help a lot with a customer actually going through with a purchase, but really this is just another way for advertisers to spend more on the same ad spot, because now your competitors can screw you out of multiple opportunities instead of just one
Watched something on YouTube on my TV for the first time last week. Never again. 12 minute video had like 6 or 8 ads, 2-3 were 30 seconds. Fuck. That.
plug in $20 laptop from craigslist and disable internet on your tvs
Or some cheap Raspberry Pi box or those sail the high seas streaming sticks or a Nvidia shield, so many better options than giving the Spyware and adware filled TV OS from getting access to your internet
yea I used to use a raspberry pi but it is way too slow with a massive library. and for youtube even the 4 performance is dwarfed by some random half broken laptop. I haven't tried the pi 5 but doesn't really matter
When we replaced our computers years ago we used the old parts to build a low-spec, but functional, computer to hook up to the TV. Paired with a wireless mouse/keyboard we dont really notice a difference in ease of use compared to a streaming device.
SmartTube
I can’t find it on my Roku or AppleTV or TIZEN or WebOS.
Just checked, sounds like that program isn't working anymore.
plug in $20 laptop from craigslist and disable internet on your tvs
DV is difficult to get working properly on PC, and last time I tried to set up an HTPC I ran into tons of remote control issues and it wasn't simple enough that I could just hand the remote over to a guest (or my spouse).
2019 Shield has plenty of issues sure, but it still seems like the best option for me, personally.
Agree about disable network on the TV itself.
Not sure when the last time you tried doing this is, but it's pretty easy these days. KDE connect can pretty much handle most of the HTPC necessities. Alternatively, a debloated Onn box will do the trick quite easily
I love SmartTube. Every time someone comes over and they want to play something via YouTube, they're like: "holy fuck, no ads? skipping straight to music part? this is divine technology"
SmartTube is the best. There was a small period of time recently where it stopped working and it was so bad going back to regular YT that I just stopped watching entirely.
Yeah, normal YouTube is totally unwatchable. If you have a Roku device, the Playlet app can let you watch without ads. There are probably methods for other devices too.
Sure, after you've waded through the swamp of Roku ads, you could get an adfree youtube experience with that
I dunno, all I see on Roku is an image banner on the home screen. I never even look at it.
Holy shit this is the first I've heard of Playlet. Giving it a go now and it's already impressive.
Yay, now the world’s worst profiling service can show the same completely irrelevant add twice!
If you’re a business and using Google to serve targeted ads, think twice. Their targeting is absolutely horse-shit mumbojumbo. They’re wasting your money, their money, and my time by consistently serving the least-relevant, no-fucking-chance-I’d-click-on-that ads.
You’d be better off paying local pigeons for investing advice.
Adtech is a scam
Recent report showed all these verification companies missed obvious bot traffic and weren’t doing anything prebid even though they were charging for it lol
Multiple sources said that, based on the report, verification platforms appear to be blocking domains based on historical, post-bid assessments of the site’s bot traffic, rather than doing real-time, pre-bid bot blocking on an impression-by-impression basis.
No advertising platform has any incentive to prevent bot traffic; they actively profit from 'failing' to prevent it.
Do you think Google is proud of this work, do you think the people working on double serving ads feel pride in their 'experimentations'. In their personal time and at the end of their lives will they be happy they took things people liked and made them worse, even unusable for their money. That their only contribution was to scrawl their mess over that of others. Do they cling to the idea that it makes delivery free at the point of use as they make far more from their low practices than they would from honest subscriptions. Are they glad that their living makes the world more mundane. Happy to mar the endeavours of humanity, and as we push into space and maybe meet other intelligences ours will be the only ships with ads for toilet rolls on the outside. And throughout all of this shame the kicker is we would buy toilet rolls anyway.
You do not see the scope of the way advertising ruins our society.
We have
Essentially everything you think of as propaganda is just applying advertising methods and societal structures for political purposes.
destroying genuine grass-roots causes and spreading astroturfing to hinder popular movements, unions,…
In my city there is a public vote planned for an ad free cityscape and all of a sudden i see adverts claiming that only adverts keep stuff like Soup kitchens or other charities in the publics focus and how good ads are in public space. It's a goddamn disease
Oh yeah, completely forgot to list the destruction of aesthetically pleasing views with public advertising boards and the waste of lifetime spent on watching ads in my list.
Edit: also loss of life from depression and inferiority complexes caused by unrealistic life and body image goals in advertising
Don't forget light pollution that wrecks peoples and animals biorythms
Light pollution makes me so sad. You have to get so far away from cities to not have the all encompassing glow of the cities to not affect your view of the sky.
Are people concerned with WHICH ads they see?
Do people see ads? I'm on Firefox with an adblocker I haven't seen an ad in ages, anywhere. Except perhaps for that brief interval where Youtube nominally tried to stop adblocking, it worked for like two weeks and it made me go check out FreeTube until they gave up.
Yeah, with Firefox + uBlock Origin I'm always surprised when I come across an ad. It's like getting a spam email in my Gmail inbox in 2025, a novelty :)
Whatever ads slip through are still quite annoying though (especially autoplaying videos when I disabled it in the browser settings) - I either hide them with reading mode, or Stylus if it's a site I visit repeatedly, or if neither works I just go to another site 🤷♂️
Books don't have ads.
Have a look at Qualityland, it has (satirical) ads in it. The whole thing is a comment on consumerism
Sorry I don't watch ads, can be funniest joke on planet if there is brand name in it I don't listen, my immune system don't allow me to do that.
They are fictional
Well, advertisement is form of expression. I don't accept that kind of expression in general just like some people have food intolerance.
Is it really an ad if it's not actually trying to sell something though?
Is advertising art ?
Every 100th page, there will be a small, "unobtrusive" ad near the bottom of the page. Just to cover rising publishing/paper costs. Then it will be every 50th page, 25th page. Then the ad will get bigger, little by little, until a full page advert is shown every few pages.
Just reinvented a magazine, I know but I could see it happening. The fact that we now have ads showing up in cars at red lights...
Enshittification continues.
It's a naturally emergent property of capitalism.
The real group getting screwed here are advertisers who used to get free protection against their campaigns running with excessive frequency.
This change lets Google burns their customers ad budgets of a bunch of junk duplicate impressions.
Yo, I heard you like ads so we put ads in your ads.
