The frequency and duration of ad breaks is beginning to make me feel like I’m in that black mirror episode where they had to pay to stop ads from constantly playing.

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?

ImInLoveWithLife,

Is this just an ad for Church’s Chicken?!?

Reminds me of Bill Hicks.

“I know all the marketing people are going, “He’s doing a joke…” There’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. Whatever, you know what I mean.

I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too: “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market. He’s very smart.”

Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking, evil scumbags!

“Ooh, you know what Bill’s doing now? He’s going for the righteous indignation dollar. That’s a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We’ve done research – huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”

Godammit, I’m not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!”

RIP

paddirn,

Going for those Bill Hicks nostalgia internet points I see, very smart.

Detheroth,

There’s a lot of money in nostalgia these days. I agree. He’s made the intelligent decision and we should be seeking to uphold the nostalgia momentum he’s generated.

Eddie Murphy’s Purple Suit.

TubeTalkerX,

Oh yeah….

Member, remember Steve Martin with an arrow through his head?

mindbleach,

They think that they get it but they always get it wrong.

Neato,
@Neato@ttrpg.network avatar

I don’t see ads. I use uBlock Origin for the internet and view all youtube via browsers and pay for streaming services I want. I don’t have cable and am absolutely baffled when I’m forced to watch it at other people’s homes.

I occasionally use youtube for background music at work (I have headphones on, leave me alone) and can’t install ublock there and holy fuck are youtube ads terrible. I’ll never watch that crap.

JowlesMcGee,
JowlesMcGee avatar

If you have an android, you could look into installing revanced on your phone so you can listen to YouTube with it without ads instead of on your work computer. That's what I do.

Neato,
@Neato@ttrpg.network avatar

Yep! I like revanced a lot. But sure to NDAs no phones at work. It’s a minor thing since I’m mostly WFH.

Mechaguana,
@Mechaguana@programming.dev avatar

Started collecting music locally again just because of ads and subscriptions, im done wasting even a single second on attention parasites.

LemmyN,

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.

Corkyskog,

That would have been broken in like 30 minutes in NYC.

sagrotan,
@sagrotan@lemmy.world avatar

What’s an “ad brake”? Haven’t had ads for years now and beginning to forget…

SocialMediaRefugee,

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.

tomten,

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.

ThatWeirdGuy1001,
@ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Custodian1623,

That only applies to the ones you consciously think about. No one is immune to advertising.

ReallyKinda,

I’m not convinced it does work. Freakonomics did a bit on marketing awhile back and the researchers they talked to said ad dollars were pretty inefficient and that companies would probably net a larger profit by reducing TV advertising.

Transcript of part 1

More anecdotally, they talk about two corporate tests in digital marketing (Ebay and P&G) that seem to indicate that digital marketing isn’t paying off for companies either.

Transcript of part 2

Personally this hurts my soul even more knowing the only people profiting are the middlemen who engineer their products to be objectively worse so that they can shove ineffective ads in my face.

RavenFellBlade,
@RavenFellBlade@startrek.website avatar

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.

stringere,

Oh hello fellow St. Louisan.

RavenFellBlade,
@RavenFellBlade@startrek.website avatar

Oh hai

Thteven,
@Thteven@lemmy.world avatar

Same. There’s a product I’ve used for years and I’m now getting ads for on youtube and it’s completely put me off of using it again. Like fuck off already.

SocialMediaRefugee,

It is like “vote for” signs. If you vote based on a sign you shouldn’t be voting.

Aceticon,

You can’t even avoid this shit if you take all kinds of extra steps and even hoist the good old black flag and stop consuming live TV or streaming: Product Placement is pretty much standard in blockbuster films nowadays (the latest Aquaman really took in-movie advertising for a certain beer brand to a ridiculous level).

SocialMediaRefugee,

I can’t avoid the ads on tv so I just mute it and read something else for a few minutes.

Honytawk,

Any source of ads I avoid as the plague.

Regular TV? Don’t watch it. Only streaming with a good ad blocker.

Radio? Never listen to it, I have my own old-school mp3 music list I update on the regular.

Youtube? Only with uBlock Origin and sponsorblock

Websites? Same as above.

Apps? AdAway removes the ads, and mainly use FOSS ones anyway.

I even avoid game stores as much as possible since those also try to get me to buy stuff.

I don’t want to see any ads ever, marketing should be banned.

yo_scottie_oh,

Do you ever watch YouTube on your living room TV?

gingernate,

I do, also without ads. SmartTube

BlueMagma,

Living room tv is a large display for my living room laptop, my remote is a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, youtube is in firefox with UBO and sponsor block. Streaming is emby in the browser.

I agree that we are living in an Ads-nightmare but there are ways to avoid them.

GBU_28,

I never see ads and consume a good amount of video content.

Set your stuff up right, don’t expect live to be easy

RememberTheApollo_, (edited )

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.

SocialMediaRefugee,

This requires a ridiculous amount of work and expertise, the average person can’t do this. I also question how trustworthy these apps are and that they aren’t data harvesting or opening security holes.

News sites are the worst offenders for “lets cram as much shit on the screen as humanly possible”. The last 80% of the screen is click bait trash. Videos chase you constantly and pop ups begging for your email always harass you. I fill in the email with “admin@{their domain}”

RememberTheApollo_,

The pihole is the only one requiring a level of tech above that of installing the add-ons I mentioned.

Sure, you could question the trustworthiness of the plugins. So what’s your choice? Suffer through known ads, tracking, and whatever else or judiciously install a few plugins that have tens or hundreds of thousands of users and no history of foul play?

didnt_readit,

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…

RememberTheApollo_,

Because there’s a limited number of ad blockers for iOS, they charge for features, and the ones I looked at were designed for safari. I use Firefox on iOS, my VPN/PiHole is free, so there’s no reason to change things up or sweat it.

LarmyOfLone,

I believe advertising is a major mechanism for evil in our world. It’s accepted brainwashing by definition. It MUST have wide reaching consequences on psychology of people, and it also has incredible power to steer how information is disseminated.

Best example is how media never says anything negative about advertising.

“Branded” is the only movie or media I know that broaches this topic.

I use ad blockers for everything and I’m bewildered when I see TV nowadays or try to use the web or youtube without it. I very rarely see ads and refuse to be brainwashed. FreeTube is awesome too. Resist!

We need other systems, something like a global patreon subscription that is automatically shared to content creators.

ShaggySnacks,

We need other systems, something like a global patreon subscription that is automatically shared to content creators.

That sounds like Universal Basic Income with extra steps. I approve of this.

Lesrid,

It’s only a stand in for UBI if everyone is a content creator.

LarmyOfLone,

There are systems for musicians like BIEM and CISAC that do something similar. So systems like that are not unprecedented. I believe we need something like this for journalism too. Of course there are issues with this, but right now conformance is rewarded, while dissent or serious topics are punished on e.g. youtube with demonetization. All because of advertisement. Nothing new of course, mainstream media primary customer are advertisers too.

Honytawk,

It isn’t advertisement, it is marketing. Ads are just a symptom of that.

Marketing’s only job is to make people buy stuff they do not need. It is the main reason why we live in such a consumer culture. It correlates directly with overconsumption.

LarmyOfLone,

Yeah and public relations, the black art of making people vote against their interests.

Illecors,

For anyone with toddlers who watch their cocomelon and the like when you just can’t take it anymore - I’ve used yt-dlp to download some videos and just play it via plex. No ads, no tracking, no drama.

local_taxi_fix,

There’s an awesome tool I use to automate this process called TubeArchivist. Automatically downloads new videos from subscribed channels or playlists. Downloads the metadata, thumbnail, and comments too.

It has a built in viewer that works fine so I haven’t tried getting the content into my Plex server, but I’ve seen people in the discord talking about doing it.

Illecors,

You’ve got my attention, Mister! Thank you!

1984,
@1984@lemmy.today avatar

I don’t see any ads anymore so I’m fine. It’s poison to watch that shit.

FreeTube Newpipe Torrents

DessertStorms,
DessertStorms avatar

Are we going to be okay?

Not if we don't abolish capitalism, no.

AlwaysNowNeverNotMe,
AlwaysNowNeverNotMe avatar

I remember when I started hating ads.

HEAD-ON: APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD

I genuinely have fond memories of some ads before this time that I'll occasionally reference, https://youtu.be/R7vNn-utP8Q for example, which I didn't remember was a chuck e cheese ad before just rewatching it, and whose pizza was objectively criminally poorly made.

And now I've essentially cut them out of my life entirely, but I'll occasionally hear them during podcasts and such and they come across as so bleak, like who the fuck are you selling this Chumba Casino thing to? Did the directors for these ads tell their VA's to sound as dried up and worn out as possible? Is that the market they're aiming for?

I think advertisement is a part of commerce that isn't going away till we get that luxury gay space communism, but it would be nice if there was some kind of panel of artists who your ad had to pass in order to be displayed in markets of a certain size. But then the creatives who threw their lives away learning the most fundamental aspects of how we leave our mark on reality would have some aspect of control over the people who wisely and sagely learned the intricacies of how line go up.

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