I’ve been seeing a lot of posts & comments ranting about how long YouTube ads are [Edit: specifically, ON LEMMY], how tiny the little X is to close popups, etc and I don’t get it. It’s less effort to install blockers than it is to keep complaining about ads.
Browser: uBlock Origin on Firefox, works on both Android and Desktop (Windows/Linux)
Most Android apps: RethinkDNS to block third-party ads
YouTube: NewPipe or ReVanced Manager
Reddit: ReVanced Manager
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These are just work arounds for how bad ads are, all the criticism about advertisements is still legitimate.
I get that you can effectively make them not a problem (at least, for now), but it shouldn’t be a problem in the first place.
This quote from Banksy is pretty much my take on advertising:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
It’s not enough to just block them on your own computer. Ads are literally everywhere and pretty much inescapable unless you’re a forest hermit living on the land.
Damn, this is pretty accurate to my views too, just… phrased better.
Plus us adblock users and advanced users are like, 5% of the population… max. Most of the world have no idea how to use these things or that they even exist, and I empathize with them. For every stupid ad I see they see 1000s more. No wonder we have a propaganda problem.
I’m not saying their complaints are illegitimate. Ads are atrocious. I’m just asking why people continuously complain instead of demonstrating and unwillingness to tolerate such bullshit by punching the companies straight in the wallet while also benefiting themselves.
Because many people are not as technically literate as you are?
As long as we are not paying for the services the service providers will do what they can to show us ads and frankly… rightly so.
The problem is there is no other established way for paying for services. One that would be widely use and fair. Current state of things is ‘we say it is free, but we will get the money from advertisers or by selling your data’. Yes, some people are often able to avoid some of the ads and privacy loss, but that means the service gets no money from those people, so the service is built and being run for the rest of users – those who cannot install ad-blockers or who don’t care or don’t know how to care about their privacy. This is one of the reasons of enshitification – any ‘free’ service needs to be only as good as required to keep the users who watch ads and give away their data. Catering any more conscious user is just a cost.
When enough of people will be using ad-block then the ad-block will stop working on many sites or the sites will disappear or become paid service. No one will provide commercial services for free and not everything can be a public service founded by a government or a community. I am not even talking about ‘corporate profits’ – even in the worst corporations there are normal people working and they should be paid for their work. Whether they are paid fairly and whether the corporate profits aren’t too big is another topic…
They get their money from advertisers and by selling your data even when they charge for it. Advertising is out of control and paid services are increasingly including them despite charging you. I wouldn’t have a problem with paid services if they had a fair price, offered a good service, and didn’t have ads but the trend has been to increasingly offer worse service for more money, oh and maybe some ads too! Gotta chase those profits.
I can hold a shield up while still complaining about someone shooting arrows at me. The complaints aren’t suddenly negated simply because I got my hands on a shield.
Also, companies are actively and constantly finding ways around those blockers, and there are psychological and UX reasons as to why companies use tiny X buttons, or X buttons that are often very hard to see. Take a look at dark patterns.
I’d say it’s more like complaining about the neighbors running their heater too high and you having to crack a window to compensate. Once the blockers are installed, ads are something you only rarely even become aware of. If you were holding up a shield, it would be a constant effort. That’d be more like if you had to reinstall ad blockers every time you watched a video.
There are websites detecting adblockers that instruct you to disable them in order to view the website. It’s a constant game of cat and mouse between ad companies and adblockers.
And I would like to not watch and hear 3 x 10 seconds unskippable ads when one of my parents wants to show me some 30 seconds funny cat fails clip on their phone.
I feel legitimately bad when I see friends and family obediently sitting through ads. I absolutely do install extensions and 3rd party clients to remove ads. I alslo help my parents and close family install ad-blockers. I just don’t want to be the guy who gets blamed when YT changes something and a 3rd party instance, client, or extension inevitability breaks. Just because I keep up on the latest blocking methods, doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like an ad-free experience for all.
I’m always surprised when people don’t use some level of adblocking. DNS-based on mobile and a browser extension on desktop seem like the bare minimum.
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Mullvad offers a free, anonymous service.
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I do all I can to avoid ads on my devices and networks.
However, I sometimes have to use devices I don’t own. Or work-provided hardware I’m not permitted to install anything on. Or I can get exposed to ads if a friend shows me something on their phone, or if I’m in a classroom/work and someone wants to show a YouTube video as part of their presentation.
And even if I somehow managed to never get exposed to ads, it doesn’t mean ads don’t suck and I’m not allowed to complain about their existence. Additionally, sure uBlock, DNS, alternative front-ends and all other ad-blocking methods are simple enough for computer nerds on Lemmy, but the vast majority of people aren’t computer nerds. If I told my friends to “just get uBlock and a DNS-level filter”, half of them would look at me like an insane person. The vast majority of people who use computers have little to no understanding of how they work and can’t do much more than Facebook, YouTube, and email.
I mean specifically the people that are complaining on Lemmy, where you can’t go more than a dozen posts without running into someone mentioning some sort of ad blocking or privacy tools.
I want to give a special asshole award to bezos for charging for prime video and then loading it down with ads. Fuck’em.
Personally I bitch a lot about ads because they have an immense externality cost - they force dead time when people want to engage and really fucking hurt my segment of the population in particular… people with ADHD. If I want to watch an interesting video on carpentry each ad is a possible chance to break focus and derail me… so personally I use adblockers galore and feel no guilt.
Additionally, I think there is a lot of credence to hypotheses that short form advertising is destroying our ability to focus and causing other chaos in our bodies as dopamine and cortisol are hammered into our system to try and sell marginally more product.
Video and audio advertising commercials should be fucking illegal - they cost society more in externalities than the marginal boost in sales… and it’s not like consumerism is a good thing anyways.
Most people either aren’t aware of these or don’t know how to use/install them. Or like me are stuck on a platform (iPhone) that doesn’t allow them to operate.
My iPhone allows ad blockers. What are you talking about?
Which one? Safari doesn’t seem to support any that work.
It’s definitely possible I’m in the first category of people too.
I used Ad Guard. Blocks everything just fine
My iPhone allows ad blockers. What are you talking about?
1blocker has so far been pretty good at keeping up with YouTube’s changes on iOS on the iPhone on safari. Safari on iOS has allowed full extensions for several years now.
Thank you for a real answer. ⇑
How can they know if they don’t hear, and how can they hear if we don’t tell them? Nearly all the folks in my life I have helped block ads didn’t have any idea it was even possible.
Most of them didn’t even know what a browser extension/add-on was. They certainly didn’t know about ad-blockimg DNS solutions like Pihole, or alternative front ends for YouTube and such.
We must be ambassadors for FOSS, and for consumer/end-user rights and protections.
I was a super nerdy computer kid, so I had to figure out much of my computer knowledge myself. That ended up working out for me, but for most people it isn’t like that. Be the light that guides others to the truth.
I see people complaining on Lemmy, where that subject is constantly on the front page and they’d see it if they scrolled for 3 minutes.
Only going to comment on how small the x is to close something. It’s moronic that companies keep making things smaller and less usable.
How bad it is can sometimes depend on the content creator settings.
I follow a few that are mostly funded by Patreon not YouTube revenue now, they tended to have lower monetization settings enabled.
I have tried to watch some videos that had pre, mid, post adds enabled etc… On a medium length video you would get an interruption frequently.
I use ublock but even with that some changes used to cause videos to hang or fail to play when the ad was supposed to be running.
I think many people would rather complain than install ad blockers. One thing I do hate now is Prime Video, it now has ads even for Prime members. It’s inconsistent though. Tonight I tried to start watching Gev V again and it wanted to show 1:30 worth of ads, I kept going back and pressing play again but best I got was like 56 seconds. I said screw it, I could stand 56 seconds but it’s the principle.
Arrrr!
This would do well on unpopularopinion
I have wondered the same thing, from the point of view of someone who would’ve expected everyone to see them as a necessary part of site viewership. As I look at that, and the battle against AI, and the whole VPN ordeal, methinks the problem lies within consumership.
