[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation

My latest ad-shock was over at a friend's house. I've not had cable since probably '03? They have cable because a parent lives with them and insists/pays. Just having the TV on playing random things felt weird. Weirder still is having the movie interrupted by ads every 5 seconds. And the ads are just gross. The only thing that was decent was using it as a discovery service. The movie, one of the X-Men that was not one of the good ones, was what we stumbled upon. We watched for a bit, then ended up switching to watching it elsewhere to dunk on it. In ad-free, interruption-free, 4k with surround. Paying for the cable experience (which is rapidly the streaming experience) seems entirely anachronistic.

The worst ones I've ever seen by far are ads for mobile games. Some, if not the majority, are full of fetish content, gore and other gross and disturbing stuff just for the shock value; most of the "gameplay" that's shown has nothing to to with the actual game.

Some ads have real people in them act out what (supposedly) happens in-game, those are almost worth watching for their trash value.

so of course I have ublock origin on my computer, AdAway on my phone and pihole on my network, but the school computers actually prevent you from installing any adblocking extensions

anyway at school I see a lot of "download Wave Browser/OneLaunch/PC app store/other random crapware" ads and videos in the corner and I can barely read anything on the site

Whenever I use a browser without adblock, it takes me back to the early 2000s, and not in a good way.

I gave up trying to get my wife to use anything that blocks ads, and she won't switch away chrome. When she bakes, she leaves her tablet or phone open, with multiple video ads destroying her battery. Seeing this thing just turns my brain to mush as I don't see any ads. I don't know how she puts up with having ten video ads on one page.

yeah, i've been trying out different browsers and it's so so bad. like, they're pure garbage

don draper era ads actually had fucking thought in there. people made art and worked on the typesetting. now it's pure AI vomit garbage that means nothing to nobody, nobody along the entire chain of making this gave a single fuck about it, no one that's ever seen the image has had a genuine feeling come from it other than disgust and doom.

I’ve been doing it for so many years across all devices and platforms that I actually get…confused for a second when one slips through. It is normally YouTube that slips through (they seem to be trying new things almost daily to get around any possible ad blocks), but sometimes it is from a major news web site or something. I actually have to look around for a second and then realize what has just happened.

That's because it is.

When I'm not using computers behind my three layers of filters I have here at home.. I feel very sad for the internet.

Only time I ever see actual ads anymore are when I'm out and about and see billboards, when my parents are watching TV, or when I go to furaffinity on TOR for some NSFW images.

I'm fine with the ads on FA since they're at the top and bottom of the pages and not intrusive at all and aren't really much more than ads for probably shitty games (minus the Brok the Investigator ads) and art commission services the vast majority of the time.

What? What ads?

I signed up to Vessel [1] when they were giving out the 1 year free trial, and it was only 9 months or so in that I realised that it had ads. It was kinda jarring, especially for a paid (not that I did) service.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vessel_(website)

I want to be there. I browse strictly on mobile I dont have a computer and I haven't seen to be able to get anything to work properly the few times I tried. It's so much worse on mobile cuz I'm so likely to accidentally tap the ad and they usually take up the whole screen and maybe 3 or 4 lines of am article before another ad. Plus one on top and bottom of the browser that is always there, plus a pop-up video auto playing in the corner.

I think the worst ads are the text to speech ones that say "Download this app today".

Dear god, they read themselves to you now?!? Kill it with fire!!

I want the creator drawn and quartered.

It is jarring. I am feeling a little bad for actual writers though when I have to turn back from a news site because it doesn't like my adblocker or pihole. I haven't relented. But given the whole writers strike thing and the fact that I don't want AI writing pretty much anything meant to be read by human eyes, I do feel bad.