Watched something on YouTube on my TV for the first time last week. Never again. 12 minute video had like 6 or 8 ads, 2-3 were 30 seconds. Fuck. That.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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SmartTube
I love SmartTube. Every time someone comes over and they want to play something via YouTube, they're like: "holy fuck, no ads? skipping straight to music part? this is divine technology"
Right! Why is an adblocker such a foreign concept to the bulk of humanity.
SmartTube is the best. There was a small period of time recently where it stopped working and it was so bad going back to regular YT that I just stopped watching entirely.
plug in $20 laptop from craigslist and disable internet on your tvs
DV is difficult to get working properly on PC, and last time I tried to set up an HTPC I ran into tons of remote control issues and it wasn't simple enough that I could just hand the remote over to a guest (or my spouse).
2019 Shield has plenty of issues sure, but it still seems like the best option for me, personally.
Agree about disable network on the TV itself.
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Yeah, normal YouTube is totally unwatchable. If you have a Roku device, the Playlet app can let you watch without ads. There are probably methods for other devices too.
Holy shit this is the first I've heard of Playlet. Giving it a go now and it's already impressive.
Sure, after you've waded through the swamp of Roku ads, you could get an adfree youtube experience with that
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plug in $20 laptop from craigslist and disable internet on your tvs
When we replaced our computers years ago we used the old parts to build a low-spec, but functional, computer to hook up to the TV. Paired with a wireless mouse/keyboard we dont really notice a difference in ease of use compared to a streaming device.
Or some cheap Raspberry Pi box or those sail the high seas streaming sticks or a Nvidia shield, so many better options than giving the Spyware and adware filled TV OS from getting access to your internet
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Yeah, it's not worth it. Maybe sometime I'll get something like pihole set up so YouTube is usable on my TV, but for now, I just plug in a laptop w/ proper ad block.
I'd totally pay for YT if it was reasonable for my usage. But I honestly watch so little that their monthly sub just isn't worth it for me.
I have a pihole and the youtube app on a smart TV. Trying to block the ad domains from the TV just bricks the app. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but, I got no luck.
You can't block youtube ads with DNS blocking; youtube serves ads from the same domains it serves the actual video from.
You need a custom youtube client like Revanced.
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Adtech is a scam
Recent report showed all these verification companies missed obvious bot traffic and weren’t doing anything prebid even though they were charging for it lol
Multiple sources said that, based on the report, verification platforms appear to be blocking domains based on historical, post-bid assessments of the site’s bot traffic, rather than doing real-time, pre-bid bot blocking on an impression-by-impression basis.
No advertising platform has any incentive to prevent bot traffic; they actively profit from 'failing' to prevent it.
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...because if I'm not interested in something, I might change my mind after I see it a bunch more times on the same fucking page - what a brilliant idea! Hell, put the ad in 50 different spots and make me click no less than 7 times to close each one - who knows, maybe that will encourage me to buy whatever shit you're peddling!
frequency does help a lot with a customer actually going through with a purchase, but really this is just another way for advertisers to spend more on the same ad spot, because now your competitors can screw you out of multiple opportunities instead of just one
Thing is, even after buying whatever it is you still continue to see the same ADs…
Do you think Google is proud of this work, do you think the people working on double serving ads feel pride in their 'experimentations'. In their personal time and at the end of their lives will they be happy they took things people liked and made them worse, even unusable for their money. That their only contribution was to scrawl their mess over that of others. Do they cling to the idea that it makes delivery free at the point of use as they make far more from their low practices than they would from honest subscriptions. Are they glad that their living makes the world more mundane. Happy to mar the endeavours of humanity, and as we push into space and maybe meet other intelligences ours will be the only ships with ads for toilet rolls on the outside. And throughout all of this shame the kicker is we would buy toilet rolls anyway.
You do not see the scope of the way advertising ruins our society.
We have
- a world-wide surveillance and profiling network collecting data about everyone for advertising purposes that is beyond the wildest dreams of authoritarian regimes
- ruining our planet's climate through advertising efforts by the fossil fuel and automotive industries among others
- ruining our health through advertising efforts by the tobacco, alcohol, sugar and similar industries
- destroying our systems of government through advertising efforts for political causes and for populist candidates
- keeping our population divided by using advertising methods to spread wedge issues
- destroying genuine grass-roots causes and spreading astroturfing to hinder popular movements, unions,...
Essentially everything you think of as propaganda is just applying advertising methods and societal structures for political purposes.
destroying genuine grass-roots causes and spreading astroturfing to hinder popular movements, unions,…
In my city there is a public vote planned for an ad free cityscape and all of a sudden i see adverts claiming that only adverts keep stuff like Soup kitchens or other charities in the publics focus and how good ads are in public space. It's a goddamn disease
Oh yeah, completely forgot to list the destruction of aesthetically pleasing views with public advertising boards and the waste of lifetime spent on watching ads in my list.
Edit: also loss of life from depression and inferiority complexes caused by unrealistic life and body image goals in advertising
Don't forget light pollution that wrecks peoples and animals biorythms
Light pollution makes me so sad. You have to get so far away from cities to not have the all encompassing glow of the cities to not affect your view of the sky.
I've been contemplating the effects of a constitutional amendment to ban all forms of paid advertisements for physical and digital and Im only able to think of YouTube being shut down but that's alright by me
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Yay, now the world’s worst profiling service can show the same completely irrelevant add twice!
If you’re a business and using Google to serve targeted ads, think twice. Their targeting is absolutely horse-shit mumbojumbo. They’re wasting your money, their money, and my time by consistently serving the least-relevant, no-fucking-chance-I’d-click-on-that ads.
You’d be better off paying local pigeons for investing advice.
Are people concerned with WHICH ads they see?
Do people see ads? I'm on Firefox with an adblocker I haven't seen an ad in ages, anywhere. Except perhaps for that brief interval where Youtube nominally tried to stop adblocking, it worked for like two weeks and it made me go check out FreeTube until they gave up.
Yeah, with Firefox + uBlock Origin I'm always surprised when I come across an ad. It's like getting a spam email in my Gmail inbox in 2025, a novelty :)
Whatever ads slip through are still quite annoying though (especially autoplaying videos when I disabled it in the browser settings) - I either hide them with reading mode, or Stylus if it's a site I visit repeatedly, or if neither works I just go to another site 🤷♂️
Honestly, at this point the dealbreaking enshittification stuff I bump into is mostly subscription requests and paywalls from the sites themselves. Which, fair enough, people need to get paid and I don't have a particularly good answer to give them about how. I am not watching ads on purpose as a support gesture, though.
Protip: you can also block a lot of those by enabling some "annoyances" blocklists in uBlocks settings.
And while you're there, take a look at all the other blocklists they don't enable by default. You might find something useful to you.
Enshittification continues.
It's a naturally emergent property of capitalism.
Books don't have ads.
Every 100th page, there will be a small, "unobtrusive" ad near the bottom of the page. Just to cover rising publishing/paper costs. Then it will be every 50th page, 25th page. Then the ad will get bigger, little by little, until a full page advert is shown every few pages.
Just reinvented a magazine, I know but I could see it happening. The fact that we now have ads showing up in cars at red lights...
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Amazon says "hold my beer"
Have a look at Qualityland, it has (satirical) ads in it. The whole thing is a comment on consumerism
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The real group getting screwed here are advertisers who used to get free protection against their campaigns running with excessive frequency.
This change lets Google burns their customers ad budgets of a bunch of junk duplicate impressions.
The real group getting screwed here are advertisers
On no the parasite funding this whole circus getting screwed over by a mega corp...
Fuk 'em, they deserve each other.
Deny the Parasite profit 🐸
The people paying for content are the parasites?
I thought it was the monopolist in the middle engaging in rent-seeking behavior like this.
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Yo, I heard you like ads so we put ads in your ads.
Seeming that I'm getting increasingly pissed off by Spotify giving 5 or more ads without 30 minute adless times and for every 5th song rather than every 8th or 10th, I'm gonna have even more stress from the doubling of all google ads.
At least ublock origin lite does its job pretty well on YouTube, so I won't need to worry until google eventually kills that too.
Wasn't Google in the middle of an antitrust investigation?
Wasn't that with the old administration?
Sounds like an awesome way to get me to boycott your product for annoying me
You wanna triangular phone?
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degoogling and demicroshit defaceberg over last decade is really printing now
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