💯
You have ads?
Ublock, provacy badger, pi-hole, sponsorblock 💁
ublock and privacy badger. umatrix for fine tuning.
I run uBlock on top of a pi-hole, with invidious and de-arrow for youtube stuff.
I don’t see ads anymore.
And when I’m on a different device, where I can’t stop the ads, I simply don’t consume the content.
I may be extreme, but on those rare occasions when an ad slips through my adblock wall, I actively wonder it there’s a way I can avoid buying that specific product in the future.
That’s how much I hate ads.
No kidding, if I happen to hear an ad on a tv or radio I’m passing by I plug my ears and go lalalalala until I or it are gone. I truly can’t stand them that much, it’s a psychotic invention meant to constantly brainwash you into becoming a mindless consumption robot and I refuse to partake.
So when you’re in a store or a restaurant that is playing the radio and an ad comes on you’ll walk around the entire commercial break with your fingers in your ears going, “lalalalala?”
Sure. Sure you do, buddy.
YEP!
I would not even mind them if they did not repeat so fucking much.
Another word for “marketing” or “advertisement” is Manipulation. Shady, manipulative, tactics.
Fuck them. I love Lemmy because it seems like the ratio of like-minded people is much larger here. Nothing better than seeing other principled people that would rather give up some comforts than deal with ads and bend the knee to the pieces of shit that try to push them.
Even products in the supermarket (such as bread!!) come with ads in the fucking plastic wrapper. I have changed my bread brand due to this. I will absolutely give up any comfort to avoid your manipulation. I will fucking shower in cold water if it means I don’t bend the knee to pieces of shit.
Another word for “marketing” or “advertisement” is Manipulation.
Don’t worry they’ve solved that, it’s called 🩷 𝐼𝓃𝒻𝓁𝓊𝑒𝓃𝒸𝒾𝓃𝑔 😎. That’s much less ominous! They just influence!
It’s been a minute so I could be misremembering, but you’re not far off. Another word for public relations (the shaping of public opinion) is propaganda.
Edward Bearnays wrote a book titled Propaganda, where he talks about the need to rebrand the work of Propagandist after it became associated with negative influence during WW2. From what I recall he used the term public relations, but seemed to prefer the term propaganda.
He’s also the person infamous for convincing Americans that we should eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. Another interesting story is about how he advertised to make music rooms in homes trendy, so he could help sell more pianos.
He talks about some of the early manipulation tactics advertisers use. Such as trying to sell you an experience instead of a product. Think of how modern car commercials show a lifestyle more than they show you the car.
It’s an enlightening book that shows that before the war, calling an advertiser a propagandist wouldn’t be out of place. Those propagandist manipulated us into calling the PR now.
Oh, and if I recall correctly propaganda comes from Latin and means “to propagate.”
Well said. It disgusts me a lot, and it also dismays me to see a lot of people don’t care at all about ads. I even rememeber people in my old job talking about ads on tv. Boggles my mind.
If I am forced to see or interact with an ad I will do absolutely everything in my power to excise that ad source from my life.
Ad-blocking is a property right. I have every right to control what my device does or does not display, by definition of ownership. Conversely, advertisers or other parties attempting to colonize my device by forcing it to display something against my (the owner’s) will is a hostile act that violates my rights.
Except we are beginning to not own what we own. The computer is yours, the software is just licensed, and they are trying to take everything away from us, from ovens to washing machines, they want to make it all subscription, spying on us, and serving us ads. We don’t have the right to repair the products when we break, and it’s a federal felony to “break” any sort of digital lock on a device, and I think to change it’s programming too.
That said, it’s a moot point as of yet, because while websites forced me to whitelist their sites to use them when I had adblock, I was told about ublockorigin, and I see no ads, and the sites can’t tell I am using it.
the software is just licensed
That is a GODDAMN LIE perpetrated by copyright cartel shysters to swindle all of us. The entire legal theory that assertion rests on is absolute nonsense: they want to pretend that you “need” to accept an “EULA” to use the software because otherwise copying it from the installation media onto your hard drive and/or into RAM would be a violation, but that is wrong because 17 U.S. Code § 117 (a) (1) carves out an explicit exception that allows it. EULAs are bunk and do not constitute a valid contact, as they not only lack ‘acceptance’ because they attempt to work on adhesion (trying to impose new terms after-the-fact when the transaction to obtain the copy has already occurred and concluded), but fail to provide any meaningful ‘consideration’ to begin with!
They can pry my hardware and software that I own from my cold, dead hands.
Free Software is essential
Need free food, rent, healthcare, education, and housing first. As long as we still need money to pay for those things then there’ll always be too few experts with skills willing to work for free.
Sadly, and I am not a lawyer so this is not even close to legal advice(!!), “beginning” is potentially the wrong word when talking about licenses due to copyright. Because even a single flipped bit in RAM on your computer could be constructed as a copyright infringement if pushed in a legal battle and decided in a court. (This all sounds squishy because, again, I am not a lawyer and as far as I know nothing of this sort has had clear ground setting or breaking rulings yet…)
Why am I of this opinion despite also usually loving to take the “my device my rules stance”? Because I got to proof read some final exams for legal professionals-to-be for their technical accuracy and let me tell you: the most likely legal outcome they saw was not good for most of us. (So now I really really hope that some high up court rules on a case like this and sides with “common sense” about what is and is not allowed with our owned hardware!)
Thats fair if you also hold the stance that they can block you if you aren’t paying to use the service. But i doubt you do.
What fucking “service?” Software running locally on my own computer isn’t a goddamned “service” to begin with!
Also, fuck off with your bullshit assumption of bad faith.
Everything belongs to the working class brother
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.
Banksy
Somewhat relevant are the Subvertisers for London (as well as similar groups all over the world):
haha that is great
advertising is just propaganda without a cause
idk about other languages, but in Portuguese it’s literally the same word
Maybe because is the same fucking thing.
I’m surprised the corpos haven’t pushed for a new word with less baggage. That’s exactly the sort of thing they do when you don’t reign them in
We don’t have any advertisements on our platform but there are some occasional commercial breaks
You have it good my friend. Language is powerful.
Neither “anuncios” (adverts) nor “marketing” (yeah, we use the English word) are the same as “propaganda” (its spelled the same as in English but said slightly differently)
Is what you describe a Brasilian Portuguese thing?
Probably is a Brazilian thing, but we have words for publicity(publicidade), advertising(anúncios), marketing(same english words because we are a bunch of removed). Propaganda is all this things, I don’t know if is just colloquialism but people uses more the term propaganda than the specifics.
It’s funny how you can tell when a concept is extremely modern because in languages other than English they tend to just use the English term or a localized variation of the English term
Ah right.
In Portugal in general use “propaganda” is definitelly just the political stuff whilst “publicidade” is definitelly just the commercial stuff.
Mind you, maybe before those two concepts were more merged: I know that in legal terms the political stuff is explicitly called “Propaganda Política” since I’ve done paphlet distribution for a political party here during election campaigns and the rules for putting “political propaganda” in people’s mailboxes are different than for “publicidade”.
Maybe there’s a technical difference, but at least in Brazil, publicidade and propaganda are widely used as synonyms
- https://www.dicio.com.br/publicidade/
- https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escola_Superior_de_Propaganda_e_Marketing
It is uncommon to call propaganda (in the political sense) publicidade, so maybe in popular conversations this makes publicidade a kind of propaganda, and not the other way around.
The cause is to separate you from your money and time. To reinforce and promote capital as the ultimate gatekeepers.
yeah but it’s not made by the people the propaganda works for. they’re just cogs. normal propaganda is made by the people championing the cause in question.
If you work for an advertising agency, you know that your job is to separate people from their money. They celebrate this. They have awards for this. It’s the whole purpose of their job.
Brain r ape. I do not consent.
advertising is forcing you to pay with your time and attention. I started hating all kinds of ads when I first flew with Ryanair. There aren’t headphones big enough to withstand two and a half hours of uninterrupted bullshit
Actively hostile relationship with advertising
Describes defensive relationship with advertising.
Smh. Actively hostile relationship is like throwing bricks at their offices, or, at the very least, calling their support and bogging them down with stupid questions with no intention to buy their services. Or… spreading information on why you shouldn’t use their services.
I’ll start: Ground News is a site based on the stupidest idea ever and it’s use is actively dangerous for the society. It steals traffic from real news sources doing actual grunt work, and then has the gall to ask you to pay them for it. It teaches you to turn off your critical thinking and to just trust them on rating news sources biases which they pull from… where, exactly? Ah yeah, straight out of their arses. But worst of all, they put left and right outlets on equal pedestals as if both have the same merit, promoting this weird centrist position of half left ideas and half literal fascism. American fascism, to be precise, because those ratings don’t even make sense outside of USA. For example, they’ve rated Al Jazeera, the news agency wholly owned by an authoritarian monarchy state, as “left leaning”. Like, what?
I mean, it sounds like they’re not even running an ad blocker. That’s not even an effectively defensive relationship.
If you want to actively shit on them, there is AdNauseam, which is a fork of uBlock Origin but in addition to blocking the ads, it clicks on absolutely everything, sending fake signals. Polluting their database is costing them money and they have to deal with all the noise.
Not for everyone, but definitely an active hostility towards these fucks.
That seems like it opens the door to a lot of security issues. Part of the reason to use uBlock is that ads are a known threat vector.
All clicks are performed in an isolated sandbox separate from the user area (basically imagine the click register signal going out, but nothing more).
What if you have a multi layered ad blocking setup where you’re using ublock origin and pi.hole and a VPN with blocking?
The multiple layers of redundancy would likely clash with Adnauseum, yeah. Although that probably is just wasted compute - you may only need one or two of those solutions to have effective adblocking (uBlock for supported browsers, pi.hole for devices unable to have uBlock installed) rather than all 3 at once.
Well I’m not gonna bother turning off any of the layers when I’m out and about. Like, my laptop still needs ublock when I’m not at home. And the vpn is just for certain use cases.
If you set up tailscale, you can connect your laptop to your home network and have the pi-hole everywhere.
I have tailscale set up. I’m not gonna have my wife be using tailscale. And I’m also not going to be using tailscale all the time. I even have an exit node on my server.
Except it still rewards the site for hosting ads in the first place
As someone who works in marketing - they will tote these clicks as a great success and continue to do what they are doing, maybe even more so, but will be distraught by the lack of follow through when it comes to sales. I guess if it happened long enough, And on a big enough scale, they might eventually give up but it would take years
Didn’t Louis Rossmann say that the conversion rate when they briefly ran repair shop ads was less than 2% or something similar? I think he referred to it when talking about using adblock and donating/buying merch for your favorite creators instead.
Or, more likely, they would not include the fake clicks in their metrics at all, and marketing would never see the inflated metrics.
Site gets paid and I get the content I want. Only one losing is the advertiser, which is a good thing in my book
I prefer using Pi-Hole (DNS based block) the ads don’t even waste my bandwith.
It’s a cute idea, but they would just incorporate some amount of false clicks into their metrics.
Exactly, its data poisioning.
If someone is trying to build an ad profile on you (even if you personally dont see the ads) then it feeds them junk data instead of real date.
If you think clicking all the ads makes a meaningful difference, then all the power to you.
Its purely out of spite, plus, im not clicking anything. Advertisment is theft.
I run the full ad blocking suite anyway and see more ads watching a sportsball game with the family than I do on my home network over the course of months.
- I dont see the ads
- The data they generate is wrong and random, if that is used to train AI it runs the risk of poisioning the model.
- The site Im on gets paid by the ad vendor, even though the interaction is fraudulent.
I call it a win-win
Blocking ads definitely doesn’t help the site get paid, that’s what I was talking about above.
For the same reason, it’s probably not doing any meaningful “poisoning” either.
Then go read what the AdNaseum plugin does and we will talk then.
Whatever table you imagine clicks to be stored in, add a column called “Using adblocker”.
Filter out any rows where that column = true.
Yeah they can probably just ignore your entire profile because it’s gives no useful insight, and that’s the point.
Do you know if AdNauseum actively merges in new uBlock Origin changes, or is it fully forked?
https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/ It’s a direct fork that seems pretty up to date, only lagging 26 commits behind upstream
I’ve never had it actually collect an ad
my kids have grown up with my adblocked version of the internet, when they connect to other internet thats not a filtered feed they get annoyed by ads in their games and on their videos
My wife initially hated my piholes, because they broke some of her phone’s stuff. She runs stock Samsung Android, so lots of the built in Google stuff got broken. She was constantly complaining about it. We eventually spent an evening hunt-and-peck’ing the various blocked DNS requests, to see which ones were required for her phone to work properly, and which ones were just Google Adsense BS. Got her set up with a WireGuard VPN connection that automatically activates when she’s disconnected from the home WiFi, so she’s always protected.
Now that she’s used to it, it’s like a wake up slap whenever she encounters ads. We moved a while ago, and all of my more advanced networking stuff (including the pihole) was sitting in a box until I had time to set it all up. She suddenly started seeing ads again, and was absolutely gobsmacked at how pervasive they are. What really sent her over the edge was when our Roku TV was paused, and went to its idle screen. The idle screen is an auto-scrolling image, and it had an ad plastered across the scrolling image. She was like “what the fuck we’re not even watching anything right now! It’s just idle! Why the hell are they advertising to us on the damned idle screen??” That was what finally pushed her to give me an evening to set all of the networking stuff back up.
Do you have links to any knowledge base docs or guides? I tried setting this up a few years back and couldn’t really nail it down and just kinda gave up because it broke too many websites and my smarttv apps wouldn’t work either.
You’ll have to dig but it should be here
deleted by creator
Yeah. Had a guy¹ try to put me on his setup once. Let so much bullshit through. Turned out he was running it through windows.
¹roommate
Our smart TV doesn’t allow an ad blocker on YouTube, but my kids have developed a way to skip ads anyway. They don’t tolerate ads more than I do, and I couldn’t be prouder.
Man you must be a good parent. I can only aspire that my future kids are this smart
Positive comments like yours are like jet fuel for new parents. :)
Jailbreak your TV and install a third party launcher and SmartTube. It gave my Sony TV a new lease on life after it was almost smothered to death by ads, even on the home screen.
Install downloader, then go get SmartTube TV.
We just had a sporting event in the US where people are more interested in the ads than the actual event itself.
The Super Bowl commercial with the Backstreet Boys and MGK was nostalgic and funny. Generally I find most ads annoying and block them or avoid the sites/channels where they show up.
