And connect on Facebook and Twitter. And tap “yes” would you like the app to track you and personalize ads. And buy things through tiktok.
We are the odd ones I guess
I’ve just put the batteries in a toy a relative bought from TikTok. It’s some drawing pad where you draw on it then press a button and your drawing’s supposed to glow. It’s a total piece of shit, the drawing barely glows and it takes ages to clean. It’ll probably go in the bin tomorrow, I’ve already warned my wife to take the batteries out first.
Is it the clear writing slate with the neon dry erase but not really markers? We got those from a family member last year and were never able to get the kids into them.
They’re all-in on consumerism.
The one weird thing that everyone seems to just accept is smart tvs with ads. I use my smart tv for many things, but disconnected from the internet and hooked into a little entertainment Linux machine that does all the processing. I can’t fathom taking the raw experience.
Consumers are lazy and brain rotted, too much effort to build an htpc or do anything that protect yourselfs and your family’s data when the TV can just do it all for you, who cares that it’s a literal piece of spyware ad riddled garbage.
I guess I shouldn’t be blaming the consumer here, since it’s obviously the predatory capitalist company at fault. But still, I think most people are fucking dumb.
“…too much effort to build an htpc or do anything that protect yourselfs and your family’s data…”
So you change your own oil and do your own brakes, right? Cook all your meals, mow your lawn yourself, hand wash your dishes, and compost your food scraps?
No?
You’re just lazy and brain rotted; it’s too much effort for you to do those things.
(The point is the normal person has no idea and no interest in building a Home Theater PC (HTPC) nor in maintaining one, and I get that. Most people don’t brew their own beer, if it can/will come out superior to what’s in the store. Please just want to come home, sit down, and turn on something that works.
The only thing you got me on there is making all my own food, which I also try to do when I have time. Everything else, yes, I do myself.
Why would I pay somebody money to do a shittier job than I can do.
But yes, I realized my original comment was a little insensitive and rude because I’m just sort of an asshole. So sorry about that.
As another commenter pointed out, I do have a good amount of privilege that allows me to do this stuff, and I’m thankful for that and should work on being less of a jerk.
Upvoted for self realization.
A HTPC requires a tech savvy person with a lot of free time. A Google TV box is better for most as they are as easy to use as the TVs own OS but don’t have the crapware.
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Getting my wife and kids on board and trained on this is a feat I’m just not talented to pull off.
I’m afraid that I have no solution for you, but can I ask how familiar they are with using a regular computer?
Buy an Onn / Thomson box, set it to apps only mode, and there you are. They’re Google TV so Netflix is just as easy to use on it as on the TV itself, and as Google TV is Android based you can sideload whatever apps you want, copyright law compliant be damned.
I bought a micro PC and use that to stream Plex and other Internet media directly to my TV. I don’t connect the TV itself to the Internet and I don’t have cable or public access TV. I can block all ads with my micro PC and home network.
The DRM on Netflix and other streaming sites makes the quality noticeably worse on other devices, even locked down ones like the PS5. On Firefox on Linux the quality is locked even lower, to like 720p.
The ads bother me, but my girlfriend says TVs have always had ads since they were originally created. She isn’t wrong. I see the distinction between the channel playing the ad and the device playing the ad, but I can kinda understand people not knowing or caring about that difference.
Truthfully, I can’t see the difference between 720 and 1080 across a room. I can tell the difference between 720 and 2160+, but nothing before that catches any details I couldn’t already see
Bought a Samsung last year. Never connected it to a non existent Samsung account. Network connected to it has adguard. And the TV is only used for streaming apps (jellyfin, Netflix etc.) Never saw an ad.
Personally I don’t fundamentally despise the concept of advertising. I think it’s acceptable for people and companies to share information about a potentially great product or service that they’re offering, on reasonable terms.
The main problem for me is: advertising went too far and abandoned most safeguards. Advertising in 2025 is essentially manipulation and brain washing. Most ads don’t give you any information about a product or service whatsoever. Just some celebrity saying it’s great. What is this supposed to accomplish if not manipulating people into mindlessly paying for a thing they know nothing about?
I believe all advertising exists to manipulate people. Behaviour change is a key aspect of marketing, from how things are kept at a store shelf, to putting the right hoarding on the right street, it’s all done to guide consumer choice in a profitable way.
Advertising was never about giving you information, it was to make you feel cigarettes are cool or you need an more expensive toothbrush to be more confident. Advertising moved away from giving you information to ‘connecting with consumers on an emotional level’ decades before the Internet.
While yes information age has made advertising a lot more effective than it was 25 years ago, but brands were still trying to get you get the most money out of you back then, same as today, only their tools of doing so have improved vastly.
Every malware infection and online scam I’ve dealt with in the last 15 years has used advertising as an attack vector. I block everything.
Exactly. I’d be much more ok with a standardised block of text and maybe a picture. No music, no animation, basic machine voiceover if any audio.
My favourite advertisements (the ones I’m most ok with) are podcast ad reads, because they never gave music or sound effects or crass images, it’s just the voice making the podcast reading some text. And they’re personalised based on the context of the podcast, no personal information needed.
Brawndo has what plants crave.
It’s ultra-processed!
Jon Stewart made a point in some video not too long ago about how modern media presents us with a constant drip of ultra-processed speech and how it manipulates and harms our brains for our short-term gratification but the long-term benefit of others who don’t give a shit about us. It is much like engineered ultra-processed food in that way.
Thinking of advertising through that lens, hell that industry has been at the bleeding edge of all kinds of manipulation and shady data gathering for decades! Ultra-processed speech and ultra-processed advertising are basically a package deal!
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Joke’s on you, I never saw a netflix ad
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It’s never sharing information about a great new product unless it’s a scam. It’s always scams or large companies screaming how their 2026 version really is superior somehow to their 2025 product and how competitors somehow suck
Not just pc’s. More and more electronics are going that way. Two weeks ago I was at a friend and they activated their Google TV for the first time. Bam first thing you see is ads for Amazon prime. They didn’t bat an eye even though they just paid €80 to be shown ads in their living room. It’s only going to get worse. We really need to grow the community to open source firmware for all electronics. (not just because of the ads tho)
Cursed timeline…
I think most of the population has simply been conditioned to accept and even expect advertisements to be a normal part of everyday life.
Maybe it’s a situation where ignorance is bliss, to not have ads pull your attention away from what you’re doing, and not feel like they are violating your personal space and resources.
But that’s also part of living modern life on auto pilot like The Shareholders prefer. Work, consume, engage with content, repeat!
I go out of my way to get my all of my gas from one specific station that doesn’t have advertisements on their pumps.
If I were you, I would find who owns that gas station. Then hand write an actual physical letter and mail it to them, explaining why you only get gas at their station. That could make enough impression that when that station’s owner is tempted to put in ads, they’ll remember you. Maybe that will be enough to get them to not follow the crowd and to keep their pumps ad-free.
That’s a really good idea, I think I’ll look into it
I love it, and now that you’ve said that I am going to be keeping mental notes to see if I have such an option. Fortunately, buying gasoline is a pretty infrequent thing for me.
I would also love to know where that habit lands you in the greater population’s percentiles when it comes to avoiding advertising. I assume most people reading our comments are already the 1% because it’s Lemmy, lol. (my usual is Linux + LibreWolf + ublock origin at both home and work)
Personally, I am likely within a very small percentile of people when it comes to be privacy aware. I use Linux + Librewolf, but also self host Searxng and have it do all my internet searches through Mulvad, I host my own recursive DNS server, and various other things that most people wouldn’t even know are an option.
Ads on a website? Unlock minus
Ads on your computer? That’s not YOUR computer. Install Linux and get your computer back
I visited someone with a 5 year old child recently and they were watching minecraft videos (specifically for child audiences) with 2 min ads every 10 min, that cant be good
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Wait until you see the clothing most people wear… and what they dress thier kids in. They even pay for the privilege.
You mean pageants?
Seeing people click and sit through minutes of insanely obnoxious ads feels so dystopian to me
I won’t even wear clothing that overtly displays a brand name
Must be rough.
Haven’t been, don’t know.
What pisses me off regularly is educators playing youtube content for kids and having them listen to and/or watch a minute of ads before it starts. Some education, that.
Yep, it bugs me too. As an educator that uses YouTube because some things simply aren’t available on my work computer, there’s only so much I can do. I mute the ads when I can, and skip them as soon as the option becomes available. Sadly, I can’t control my coworkers.
I mentioned this in a different comment on this post, but one thing I’ve been doing to counteract the ad-onslaught is to say, “Boo, ads” whenever they play. My kids think it’s funny. One has started to imitate me.
I can see other kids (that I don’t work with) reacting properly to ads. When my coworker put music from YouTube on for them on the day before Christmas break, one of the kids took it upon herself to go up to the laptop and skip the ads every time they came up. It was heart-warming in many ways.
So yeah. I can’t do much, but some of us are trying.
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I’m proud of y’all. My friends in high school in the 00s were the ones doing such hacking, so I can easily imagine this. Good times, good people. I’m glad to hear about other defiant, tech-savvy types out there.
Why don’t you just* use yt-dlp? Or one of the YT-oriented browser addons?
*not sure how easy that is on a modern, corporate controled Windows computer, but it does not require installation.
I don’t have control over a lot of things with my work laptop, since it’s owned/controlled by the company. However, if it doesn’t require an install, then I’ll try that when I get back on Monday. We use Chromebooks (ugh), but any way I could get around ads would be a blessing. Thank you for the suggestion, I’m open to any ad-blocking options I could use.
This page has some hints.
Hmmm 🤔 All Chromebooks use Chrome as a web browser, right? Can’t you just add an adblocker extension?
After a small web search, this seems to be the recommended solution:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adguard-adblocker/bgnkhhnnamicmpeenaelnjfhikgbkllgThere’s also https://pie.yt/ which lets you watch yt video adfree straight from the browser. It looks OK to me, no suspicious 3rd-party scripts/requests.
I gave my mother one of my old thinkpads I used to use at school, and on setting up her account (fydeOS btw, since it’s perfect for what she uses computers for), I installed an adblocker so she doesn’t see those scam supplement ads she was always convinced were factual, and it’s worked flawlessly.
True and obviously a phone, a TV, a console, etc are computers.
Fridge
Linux superiority post at the top of All? Must be literally any day.
