At these moments that feeling that for most people getting bombarded by ads is normal hits hard. I'm always wondering when the ride will end and uBlock Origin can't protect us any longer.
You're competing with Google. The built-in Drive app does document scanning.
I don't need alternative app stores to download malware and scams, that play store is full of that. And it's advertised front and center.
When you select an app to install on Google Play, it takes you to another screen confirming the install. But that install button on top is not for the app you selected, it's for a different, advertised app. You have to scroll down to find the confirmation button for the app you already instructed the store to install.
This isn't going to ruin any lives, but it's gross.
I chose it because I liked the previous iterations of Google TV. It integrated with everything else, had a nice app ecosystem, and you could put the stuff you watched within a couple of remote key presses. In this new version you are forced to click over icon after icon of paid content before are allowed to see the icons you are allowed to arrange.
Replacing the TV is out, unfortunately. Finding a different UI is on my to-do list. Google TV used to a checkbox feature for me. They've turned it into "check if a device has it, and run away screaming if it does" feature.
Chrome on Android was their first move in that direction, with it's inability to host ad blockers. It must have been a wild success for them because now many Google products have the same "ads shoved down your throat" feel to them, and yes the Play store is another stand out example.
I assume once the Chinese TV manufacturers figure out Google TV is an anti-feature, they will come up with their own replacement. That day can't come fast enough. That's an odd, because I never thought I'd be cheering Chinese software on, given their repeated attacks on the infrastructure of my country. And the the bastards are still doing it. But Trump has lowered the bar so dramatically on so many things. It's a strange new world.
I have never seen such absolute design and engineering genius.
I mean, absolutely retarded.
How people put up with ads is a complete mystery.
Picked up a nice cleaner and hiking boots that my ad blockers were denying me last month.
Life changing.
I didn’t need them. But it’s like walking on a cloud and the fit is perfect. Mostly chance, but that ad started the push.
Interesting choice of phrase
Nice Reddit if that lifestyle appeals, but not for me.
That focusing is the key to the benefit of letting them through the keyhole irregularly.
https://3dvf.com/le-realisateur-philippe-vidal-dumas-nous-qu...
Never mind the dozens of pop-up ads and banners on the site. Random words in the article turn into ads that popup while you're scrolling. And it's easy to accidentally click one because there's more pixels covered by ads than not.
I've been telling her to get an adblocker for years because she, like you, feels like she doesn't need one. But that article last night made her rethink her stance on ads.
For me, I don't mind advertisements. I scroll Instagram a few times a week and there are ads there. I get more ads than actual posts. They're easy enough to ignore. And honestly, sometimes they're interesting.
It's when the ads disrupt my browsing session that pisses me off. If sites didn't have shitty ads that cover your screen and just get in the way, I wouldn't have an adblocker.
I also use adblocker to get rid of shitty non-ad pop-ups, like "you have to install our shitty mobile app to use this site!" Yeah, fuck that. Ublock origin zaps it away.
Ads in public places, bus stops, etc. are kinda hard to avoid unfortunately.
Usually, one of the soft buttons on the left or right edge of the screen is a secret mute button. Occasionally, none of them are, and rarely does anyone else seem to even try to mute their pump.
This usually doesn't stop them from working, because people don't break the voice coil at the center.
You get arrested. That’s what happens.
Kiosk makers have already thought of all of these possibilities. There isn’t a nicely exposed speaker. It’s behind a metal plate with tiny holes in it.
For petty vandalism? That seems like an expensive overreaction.
Perhaps it depends on your demography.
The police won't bother to track down who graffitied your fence, but money-making companies are a different matter.
And it definitely depends on demography. I assume they're still using it, but maybe they just plug everyone's face into Palantir now.
It would not surprise me to hear that someone had committed a crime of that scale while being watched by an SPD officer and still gotten away with it.
> Usually, one of the soft buttons on the left or right edge of the screen is a secret mute button
I found out that's the help button and sometimes a clerk will come out and ask what I need help with and I tell that it stops the annoying noise coming from the pump.
All ads are designed to psychologically manipulate you into acting against your best interest.
By making the bicycle however you get about, you cut down on seeing ads.
(Besides the idea of me having to adjust my route to -for now- not see ads being somewhat offensive to me too.)
Ditto
I dont see any ads online.
I dont have a TV either, I stopped watching that ad infested garbage in 2005.
too old to walk to the bus stop, too much of an introvert to hang out near pulblic places with other people
I went once to a dentist with a TV above my head (sound off); I refused to sit in the chair until it was turned off. The assistant sighed and said "everybody asks the same thing, I wonder why we installed this".
These are very different - and largely interesting to me in their colorfulness and often whimsy. (The cities around here are otherwise NOT visually interesting).
This is something that web sites have always had at their disposal: use static locally-hosted images as ads and respect my screen real-estate, don't try to track me with 20-200 trackers, and I WILL allow them (and do). I will even allow some animation if it respects my bandwidth.
But no, very few web sites feel satisfied with this so multiple ad blockers they get. A few sites do small static image ads. I don't block these and even frequently follow their links.
Like if you’re at a friend’s house and they’re listening to pandora with ads, or watching Hulu with ads?
Every time I use the web using 5G data or public wifi, I regret the experience. Then I immediately turn on an adblocking VPN.
I use AdNauseum instead of plain uBlock as just an added layer of protection but it's rarely needed.
> There's no insider trading angle at all
Such a blanket statement would definitely be wrong in the UK for example. Insider trading is defined at Section 52(1) of the Criminal Justice act 1993 as: "(1)An individual who has information as an insider is guilty of insider dealing if, in the circumstances mentioned in subsection (3), he deals in securities that are price-affected securities in relation to the information."
Whether you trigger the offence depends on a number of factors such as whether the information is "inside" information and whether you were an "insider" (these terms are defined in subsequent sections of the Act). As an example, if you were an employee of a listed company (not such an unlikely scenario given the capital requirements to pull this off) that was about to engage in the proposed scheme (publishing pro-adblock adverts) and it wasn't yet publicly known (which would be necessary if you want the scheme to be fully effective), and you shorted Google shares, you could easily fall foul of insider trading.
I'm not particularly familiar with the US legal system so I can't claim you're wrong there.
> As an example, if you were an employee of a listed company (not such an unlikely scenario given the capital requirements to pull this off) that was about to engage in the proposed scheme (publishing pro-adblock adverts) and it wasn't yet publicly known (which would be necessary if you want the scheme to be fully effective), and you shorted Google shares, you could easily fall foul of insider trading.
Yeah, that isn't the scenario described earlier at all. Here's what was proposed:
> I wonder if you could spend a few million on promoting adblockers to justify a short position on Google or Meta.
In this sentence, the entity performing the short and performing the advertising are one and the same.
You're reading "you" to mean the reader (highly implausible), I'm reading it as the generic/impersonal "you" (as in "one could spend...").
So sure, there are a tiny percentage of people who might consider doing this themselves and they don't need to worry about insider trading (although we're still pretty close to market manipulation where the sole purpose of the adverts is to crash the share price and profit from that). A much larger percentage of people who might consider such a thing would need to at least examine whether they might trigger insider trading laws.
Blanket statements don't work here.
Pump and dumps are fraud because you lie about the target stock in order to achieve the pump. The lying is a crucial element to make it fraudulent.
US law does not generally prohibit insiders from trading. It prohibits doing so only in breach of some obligation to keep that information private[2] ("in breach of a fiduciary duty or other relationship of trust and confidence").
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45178318
[2]: https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...
That's not correct. I started this particular sub-thread, and in my original comment I specifically said that the answer is jurisdiction dependent. Your reply may have been US-centric but the overall topic was not.
i guess its also a bummer they are financially supporting facebook/youtube, but maybe the end result would be break even if they get enough people to utilize adblocking. thats pretty crazy compound interest over time for even just like 3 people
As for YouTube, blocking their ads is basically a part-time job at this point. On the desktop it breaks once a month, on Android NewPipe stopped working recently, and soon you won't be even able to install third party clients.
90% of my YouTube use is on my smart TV. There's not really a straightforward way to block ads there. Used to be many years ago that a PiHole or similar would work, but they clued onto that years ago.
There's also this email from YouTube support: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1gnaetv/paying_to_...
It reads:
> While YouTube Premium provides an ad-free experience for most content, promotional ads can sometimes appear for specific partnerships or limited-time offers. These promotions are often targeted based on various factors, including your location, viewing history, and account settings.
It periodically has issues loading videos when Google change something, but the app gets updated every time within a day.
I spend less in nominal terms, let alone inflation terms, for my tv entertainment now than I did 20 year ago, even with Disney, Netflix, bbc, Paramount and YouTube subscriptions.
I do not regularly visit such sites. I do unblock websites that I return to often.
I use uBlock Origin, plus I've configured my Firefox to open YouTube always in a dedicated container, that logs me out of any Google-related stuff as I never upvote or comment anyway. Browsing YouTube anonymously might have helped.
I'm surprised they haven't gone for the "refuse to serve the video stream for 20 seconds or however long the ad would take" card yet, although it's probably a matter of time.
If that happens to you, this thread [1] is sometimes updated with manual workarounds that sometimes work:
www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), *, 0.001)
www.youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.EXPERIMENT_FLAGS.web_enable_ab_rsp_cl, false)
www.youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.EXPERIMENT_FLAGS.ab_pl_man, false)
||googlevideo.com/videoplayback$xhr,3p,method=get,domain=www.youtube.com
www.youtube.com/watch##+js(set, ytInitialData, undefined)
I would gladly pay for an independent alternative but I will never pay for Youtube Premium on principle [1]. If these workarounds stop working I'll just use third party clients all the time, I already use SmartTube on TV.
[1] If I give you my money, I want you to respect me as a customer. Google will continue tracking me, abuse my personal information, and almost certainly re-introduce ads at some point in the future in pursuit of infinite growth. It's never going to be enough, the only winning move (with them) is not to play.
Thanks, that explains a lot, why i sometime have trouble with youtube, while having perfectly fine internet connection.
I should sniff traffic to find out why, but my assumption is that it's a mix of CRL bloat and code bloat.
I don't mean this as an attack on you. I find it perplexing that this could be such a difficult thing. If a video isn't worth waiting 10-60 seconds for, is the video even worth watching? Consider a comparison to reading a book or watching a DVD. With the DVD you must stand up, walk to the DVD, remove the plastic wrap, turn on the DVD player place the DVD in the tray, wait for the tray to close, load the DVD, wait for the main menu to load, and finally press play to watch your movie. (potentially after navigating through settings to configure audio / subtitles / etc)
The DVD experience could obvious be _better_ (and if you don't care about picture quality you might be shocked how much more convenient a VHS tape is) but this hardly strikes me as any sort of real problem.
Youtube might actually be doing you an accidental favor here; it is the extreme reduction of friction which degrades your impulse control, and is part of what keeps you on the platform too long. By imposing an small but perceptible cost, they might actually keep from your zoning out and watching and instead intentionally watching only the videos you care the most about.
I won't know that until the video starts playing. I'm not watching a 90 minute movie here and I don't know if the video I'm about to play is the one I want. Spending a minute setting up a 90 minute movie is very different than spending a minute waiting for a video to load that I'm likely going to spend <30 seconds on.
Maybe I'm learning how to use certain software and I'm trying to find a video that demonstrates how to use a specific feature. In that case I might be clicking through 10+ videos to find the niche thing I'm looking for. If I was just vegging out on Youtube this wouldn't bother me nearly as much.
And don't forget that the time penalty doesn't only apply to the initial load, it would pause and fake-buffer every time I jumped around the video.
yeah, I often download things via yt-dlp to watch later and I'm encountering frequent failures that I assume are related to the whack-a-mole yt has been doing for the last two years or so.
NewPipe has been working for me as of late though, and I've not updated it in some time (although my use is infrequent)
I sat on calls with teachers at my previous job and they had no extensions installed. My own sister (a milennial) wasn't aware. Before that, I was at a place where devs could join UX interviews; it was even worse given the generational divide: older folks couldn't even tell when a link was obviously malicious.
We either install good browsers/extensions for our relatives, or let them be easy prey to the current state of affairs.
> ...something is wrong with you.
Regardless, your argument surrounding the insult was well worn 20 years ago. And so was the first response; why would I pay into some nebulous system where I don't know how much is really going to whom?
One of the nicer things about the hellscape that is the modern internet is the low-friction ability to pay creators directly.
...oh, I know why! Because if I pay Google, then Sundar pinky swears not to mercilessly track and monetize everything I do on youtube. \s
> Are ad hominems back in vogue?
GP was simply mirroring the language of its parent post:
> Whenever someone just doesn't seem to care i'm concerned something is wrong with them.
Which IMO is indeed way out of line.
Speaking for myself, no, nothings “wrong” with me. I watch YouTube enough that I consider it a valuable service. So do what you may think is insane: I pay for it. And it gives me no ads.
Mr Krabs voice: money!
No but seriously, if the FBI is telling you to use an ad blocker, use a fucking ad blocker.
My workplace doesn't allow ad blockers for security. Except ads are a MUCH bigger security concern and everyone knows it.
I'm so sick and tired of everyone playing dumb and acting like it's fine. No, it's not fine. Its not okay that Google is serving you a phishing ad that drains your bank account. They should be held liable. Why is everyone acting like their balls have been chopped off?
Do something about it. Minimum is run an aggressive ad blocker. MINIMUM!
I am insulted by the so-called "modern" browser controlled and distributed by (a) companies that sell internet advertising services or (b) their business partners
The ad annoyances would not be possible but for these bloated, sluggish, omnibus programs enabling data collection, ads and tracking by default^1
Every time I have to use one of these programs to access the web it is a terrible experience. Never having visited a crack den, I cannot say whether it is similar. In any event, it's bad
Sometimes I use these browsers to access files offline or on own local network, such as MP4s and PDFs; I think maybe that is all they might be good for
As "ad blockers" depend 100% on the so-called "modern" browser I would be very surprised if "ad blockers" remain effective for much longer, maybe 5-10 years at most; I dislike making predictions but I believe the end of the "ad blocker" as browser extension is inevitable
Already this prediction is starting to come true in Chrome
1. "The message won't be shown in browsers that don't support JavaScript, because those don't need adblockers to begin with." Even just a browser that did not enable Javascript by default would suffice
But I'm insulted, too
2. "exposed by" <-- so-called "modern" browser
When #2 is not used, there is no need for #1
That is, #2 creates the need for #1
If stop using #2, then "ads" problem is solved
It really feels like being assaulted. Watching chill content only to have some ad scream at you, does not make me want to buy your product. I actively go out of my way not to buy things advertised to me on YouTube.
Do companies even care anymore? Is everyone THAT desperate for advertising revenue?