[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation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.

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.

I'm always disgusted with tv ads and it blows me away that people just let commercials scream at them all day to buy viagra, anal leakage meds, insurance etc. Why would you let that shit in your home? Ugh

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.

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

"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.

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.

Every once in a while I find myself looking at the Internet without ad blockers. Like, newly-installing a browser on a newly-installed OS, or trialing a new browser on my phone or whatnot. And when it happens it's a massive shock to me just how unusable the modern Internet is without an ad blocker.

If I were forced somehow to not use an ad blocker, I would probably stop using the WWW portion of the Internet and likely grossly cut down on other facets of the Internet.

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

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

Do them a favor and install an adblocker.

I've wondered how businesses advertise anymore because I never see advertisements. I don't watch TV. I don't listen to radio. I have ad blockers on my devices. I just assumed most people used as blockers too.

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?

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

I'm used to seeing brief YouTube ads when I cast from my phone, but I was in a hotel recently where the only option was live TV (we were in the back of the hotel and the Chromecast didn't have a good enough antenna to pick up the router), so it was the first time in years I saw full-on commercials. If the movie hadn't been so good- After the Thin Man- I wouldn't have put up with it.

My husband refuses to use ad blockers for some unknown reason (I installed them on his computer, he won't fucking use them/turns them off) and also is the person who gets the cookie settings menu and clicks "accepts all" every time. I get so stressed trying to use his computer but also like dude! Have you any idea just what you are allowing them to access??? Granted, I'm somewhat ignorant when it comes to how to be completely safe and private on the internet, but I try, and to see someone just blatantly not care makes me lose my cool a little.

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.

yes, I despise ads. It's gotten to the point where if I'm forced to endure an ad before a youtube video, I'll mute it and avert my eyes. It feels like a psychological assault out of nowhere. it's worse at gas station pumps, where I can't always mute it

The worst ones I've ever seen by far are ads for mobile games. Some, if not the majority, are full of fetish content, gore and other gross and disturbing stuff just for the shock value; most of the "gameplay" that's shown has nothing to to with the actual game.

Some ads have real people in them act out what (supposedly) happens in-game, those are almost worth watching for their trash value.

The NHL put computer graphic advertisements on the boards and it has nearly ruined the sport for me. There are some bootleg streams that have a broadcast without the advertisements but most of them I find have the ads. Flashing shit. Cars driving down the boards. Animated logos. It's insane what the NHL decided to do with their broadcast product.

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

I always get the same 2 responses:

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

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 notice this more when I have to search for things online on the work laptop. I had no idea how bad some sites were. Things blinking on the one side, a video playing on the other. Huge banners everywhere telling me to download this or click here for this clickbait article.

I’m so accustomed to Firefox, uBlock, Facebook Container, Privacy Badger, and a VPN at home that I feel overwhelmed when I’m online without them. Even my phone has ad blockers and the VPN. It’s a nightmare when you’re running sites…raw.

I feel you, I've been using an ad blocker for so long I've lost count of the years. I'm always obliterated by how vapid and meaningless modern ads are, its all psychological hacking which is a violation of our mental sovereignty.

I also feel like the "happy young people, living their best life with our product" style ads help keep people delusional about the current state of the world and where we are heading. Like that "Everything is fine" meme, but the dog has a vr headset on and sound cancelling headphones that constantly chant "The heat you are feeling is good for the economy. Everything IS fine!".

I agree, it is 100% dystopian.

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.

I stopped over at my parents' house a few weeks back for a get-together and the TV was on. I nearly felt physically ill at the amount of ads- at one point I saw an overlay ad on top of an actual "commercial" ad. The program that was on was definitely less run time than the adverts that ran in-between short sections of the program.

At this point I actively avoid brands that shove ads into my web browsing.