I think the problem is, I feel like most ads are so empty,hollow & fraudful on the internet...
I am okay with ads, if they aren't all the above.
But I don't know what the Algorithm overlord serves me as an Ad, so I use Ublock Origin.
I actually think ads should probably be changed from paid promotion to actually use that money on such a good level of ad that even if you release it as a standalone video for example, people would want to watch it.
And I think people are doing it, I still listen to this Splendor Song Chalta rahe because of how great the music of this ad is.
But Most ads are of frauds trying to sell you a get rich quick scheme etc. (atleast I feel like every ad wants to sell me a course?), and I don't want to be the fraud's shitty course's next victim, I hate such course sellers so much that I kind of want to punch them through the video just thinking how the whole economy of ads is generally revolving around these frauds..., and how they make money is by scamming innocent individuals.
All of this while building a privacy nightmare, a dystopia.
No thanks. I am going to keep ads off of any of my services to a higher level of degree though I do imagine that most people don't donate shit & I don't even think that in businesses, the real money are in normal clients because they require free tier and way too much hassle for like 10$?, but rather business clients (B2B).
Though I also feel this moral obligation to open source whatever I build.. but then businesses can simply self host it, maybe I should probably only release it as fair source?
IDK, the whole system boils down to money, I can be only so good a person as the constraint of money requires me to. If money is low, morality has a higher probability of being ignored... , IDK, there is too much competition, sometimes unworthy,sometimes not, but still too much competition on a lot of ideas and they have not much differences so they try to do ads...
Why would you spend any amount of time at all on a website that you’ve observed to serve known fraud ads for more than a week or two (and hasn’t sacked their advertising provider)?
If you actually lived your life like this you wouldn’t be on any website other than Wikipedia. Surely you don’t _actually_ live your life like this despite your tone that suggests it would be crazy to live your life any other way?
My way to circumvent most of this: I am using Safari with AdBlock Pro and AdBlock and see zero ads when browsing the web.
I spend more time on YouTube than I care to admit, so I got a Premium subscription, bought an extension called UnTrap for YouTube to hide most recommendations and turned off all YouTube history etc.
I regularly visit BlueSky, Hacker News and YouTube, but not X, TikTok, Instagram or Facebook.
The hardest thing is to not use Amazon, but I am working on it.
You are using the inferior way to block ads, which will continue to degrade as advertisers take advantage of Google killing synchronous blocking of web requests with Manifest v2.
I'm like the parent, on Safari – apparently also using an "inferior" way to block ads that, somehow, inexplicably, works 100% of the time and has never let an ad slip through. Is it supposed to be inferior because it's brittle and requires constant work on the side of the developer? Is it blocking too much and I'm just not aware of it? Is there some new ad tech that it's not prepared for, and can't adapt to, and will fail in the near future?
I finally went back to firefox, recently. I needed to update some of the flag defaults to turn on tab changing with mouse scroll and similar, but they are unlikely to break things like ublock any time soon.
I was a frequent profiles user under chrome, and still don't like firefoxes UI there, but just made a bookmark to the profile launching screen.
You all still use the web? I've been transpiling video game frame data into shader, geometry, lighting, color gradient data, and an agent system that mix-n-matches styles.
I got into software modding game engines, though. Never cared much for web apps, SaaS. Never much saw the use in paid software since it's just geometry. We made a lot of dumb busy work out of SWE with web apps.
DRY? Yes, let's not repeat ourselves still bothering with lame day jobs that obfuscate it's just physical statistics in a machine of known constraints.
Am really excited about the rest of the world flipping the US off, nVidia full-steam ahead on autonomously organizing distributed systems. Propping up SWEs props up a dangerous delusion.
Yes. This is visible on news sites. The title and lede are rewritten as clickbait. The actual story may not be so bad. On some sites, the title on the home page may not match the article. Yesterday there was "(something happened) in Red State" on Fox News on the home page, but the actual article begins "(something happened) in Florida".
I will never understand this. My ex bought tons of extensions to do stuff with Safari that other browsers do for free. He paid for a PiP extention for some websites, password managers, Tomagachi pets... dozens of trinket apps that would be depreciated in 2 or 3 major updates. I'm continually wowed by Mac users that insist on paying for a native solution to a problem that doesn't exist in any other ecosystem.
iOS/MacOS users are more predisposed to shell some bucks because of their walled garden upbringing.
Devs would usually prioritize iOS releases (early on, when no React Native nor Expo was as common place) only due to this fact that iOS users where much more likely to spend money than Android ones.
This might have equalized since the early days but i bet some of it still stands
Is there anyway to fully disable youtube shorts/reels/whatever that mess is called ...? I quite like youtube long form content but have found myself occasionally in short form rabbit holes (which are both very addicting and extremely unsatisfying and which motivated me to delete instagram to escape when i realized how much a time and emotion suck they are)
Turning off youtube watch history stops the shorts tab from working. And you can use a userscript to swap the "shorts" word to "watch" in the url to convert all shorts to normal videos.
For example:
// ==UserScript==
// @name Redirect YouTube Shorts to Regular Videos (Mobile-Friendly)
// @namespace https://example.com/
// @version 1.4
// @description Redirects YouTube Shorts URLs to regular video URLs on mobile
// @author YourName
// @match *://*.youtube.com/*
// @run-at document-end
// @grant none
// ==/UserScript==
//Written by GPT-4o Mini
(function () {
'use strict';
// Function to redirect Shorts to regular video URLs
function redirect() {
if (location.pathname.startsWith("/shorts")) {
const videoId = location.pathname.split("/")[2];
const newUrl = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=" + videoId;
window.location.replace(newUrl);
}
}
// Observe changes to the DOM and check for navigation
const observer = new MutationObserver(() => {
redirect();
});
// Start observing the body for changes
observer.observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true });
// Initial check in case a Shorts URL is loaded directly
redirect();
})();
Untrap is amazing. On top of that, things like removing all apps from my home screen and turning of almost all notifications has improved my focus and my life a lot.
I’m hopeful browsers with LLM support are the future of ad blocking for users. This enables robust and sophisticated control by users of their experience.
I have been groaning about income inequality a lot but it is amazing how much of this can be explained by it. People do not have the disposable income to spend on services so you make people pay with attention. Give them the carrot for free so they don't notice. On top of that, the product is free so there is no expectation of support for the end user. You're getting it for free so what are you complaining about?
An ad for Pampers shown to a family with a toddler; an ad for Tidy Cats shown to a cat owner; an ad for Reese’s shown to someone who exhibits poor impulse control; an ad for McDonald’s shown to someone who works two jobs and doesn’t have time to cook food for themselves; an ad for a gambling app shown to someone using a gambling app.
Does the client know they lack disposable income? This is just as much an exercise about fleecing a client out of their adspend by giving shoddy metrics on your end.
In the ancient times there was an ISP selling Internet access where the catch is, you dial up via their program, and this program would have an always-on-top window showing ads...
Then again, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube started "You pay for it with your attention (and your data)" and only later have they implemented payment for being ad-free, although with Zuck's properties, the EU forced it.
Perhaps interesting anecdata - I have a close friend who has a great career, plenty of assets and income, etc., but doesn't pay to remove ads in their streaming services. Thus, together we watch unskippable ads on a brilliant 70" OLED TV while resting on plush leather sofa in their beautiful loft, haha.
Nothing to do with income equality, organizations will show whatever ads they can get away with. I paid Microsoft thousands of dollars for my Microsoft laptop. The hardware and form factor are admittedly pretty fantastic. But in spite of this, Microsoft is still determined to try (and fail) to show me ads.
Money alone wouldn't fix this, as a Web where every page has a paywall wouldn't be much better either. Which in turn would concentrate most of the Web in a few services just as it is today and enshittyfication would bring the ads back sooner or later, even if you pay for the service.
> bring the ads back sooner or later, even if you pay for the service.
This has already happened for subscription TV services. Your previously ad-free subscription now has ads, but you can get rid of them again by upgrading! It’s fucking gross. It’s also of course just going to work, and become the new normal.
One thing I've noticed is that Reddit is very, very aggressive about how it implements its telemetry.
Not only is the endpoint that it uses for collecting events randomized each time you load a page, but it also happens that every event collector URL is a valid API endpoint that is used for other things. You can't block any of them with regular ad blocking tools unless you're okay with blocking the corresponding API endpoint. And given that the website itself uses the API, this can be difficult.
I don't see ads on reddit. Where are they? I use pi hole and ad nauseam extension. Everything is default. I also have RES I think, but I'm not even sure what that does anymore, I've just had it for a decade.
I'm not talking about ads, I'm talking about telemetry. It just happens to be that ad blockers can also block other resources as well - but not Reddit's telemetry, for the reasons I explained.
The irony of watching this 2017 TED video in 2025, and find out that my NoScript extension reports half a dozen of JS trackers and ads providers on this page - including Google, doubleclick.net, sail-personalize and sail-track.
Oh, and if you navigate to this page without NoScript, AdBlocker or a PiHole DNS you'll probably be presented with a cookie consent banner, a bunch of ads on the page and before watching the video, and your data being shared with at least half a dozen partners (a number that can increase dramatically if you visit the page of any news outlet instead of ted.com).
So yeah, I guess that the message of this video aged like fine wine.
The funny thing is that we fought so hard against pop-ups throughout the 90's and 2000's only to re-implement pop-ups in javascript as soon as we could.
At least, generally, they no longer open hundreds of windows above or below the current window, which may or may not have browser control bars, may ‘warn’ on exit etc etc
If a page wants to cover itself in noise and dialogues, sure it’s annoying but it’s not quite on the same level as back then.
I have always wondered what the web would be like if we added the scripting language later and only solidified CSS and HTML for the first 15 years or so.
I wonder if things would actually be better overall. I’m not going to argue that having a scripting language for the web was a mistake, it definitely isn’t on the whole, but I think having it come at a more mature point for the web might have helped stave off a lot of really bad decisions
Doesn't always work (sometimes it kills the website functionality), and I have no clue what it's actually doing (I'm not a coder)... but usually it gets rid of hover-overs.
Google began as a search engine with a popup blocker extension for a competitor's browser. Now they're a display ad company with a browser that includes a built in popup blocker extension blocker.
> we fought so hard against pop-ups throughout the 90's and 2000's only to re-implement pop-ups in javascript as soon as we could
A group of people who thought that web users should not be abused may have won the first pop-up battle, but the businesses that made money from intrusive advertisements clearly won the war.
In hindsight maybe it wasn't a such a great idea for web users to switch en masse to a browser made by an advertising company.
The endgame is a probably a war between web sites that are endless mazes of advertising and user agents that try to navigate the maze and extract the non-advertising content.
Well, there are really only three things that form the aggregate of the world we see today.
There are accidents of history, money, and ideology.
These things fit squarely in the money category. The advertising industry was subsumed by adtech during that time, which was driven by government grant and fiat debt-based financing. Advertising fraud has never been harder to account for, and the justified use of analytics for that purpose has driven surveillance capitalism with governments being the customer.
Money printing is the role of the state, so technically if you remove all indirections its state apparatus which makes sense that an individual wouldn't be able to fight against it.
At least these popups are restricted to the page. It's one thing for a website to decide to block my use of it for some asinine reason. It's quite another for it to block my use of everything else on my computer.
For balance, I clicked the link and (after a moment of my browser imposing my will) the video started playing. Opera + Ghostery is quite a pleasant experience, at least when compared to mobile browsing (at the other end of the spectrum).
It's also been a long while since clicking "Manage cookie preferences" shows "Opt-out..." pre-checked and "Confirm choices" button, unlike the "Reject all" button also being shown these days. Then unchecking "Opt out..." dynamically shows a "Allow all" button.
also, the premise of the entire lore of shadow run, is corporations building armies and seeing they can get away with it and then just doubling down.
but back to reality... everyone would buy stock of the ad-dystopia and since now their retirement is tired to it they will just normalize and promote it. just like today.
I did read it, but the books I read when I was a teen still learning the world sit deeper in me than something I read in my 30s.
I don't think the last-name-is-the-company adapts well to the so-called "gig economy" where employment is structured as supposedly independent contractors, who in turn can be working for multiple organizations at the same time.
"Corporations building armies", etc. describes the Dutch East India Company pretty well, yes? As I get now into my 50s, that goal seems more and more an intrinsic part of limited-liability joint-stock companies.
Readit News
I am okay with ads, if they aren't all the above.
But I don't know what the Algorithm overlord serves me as an Ad, so I use Ublock Origin.
I actually think ads should probably be changed from paid promotion to actually use that money on such a good level of ad that even if you release it as a standalone video for example, people would want to watch it.
And I think people are doing it, I still listen to this Splendor Song Chalta rahe because of how great the music of this ad is.
But Most ads are of frauds trying to sell you a get rich quick scheme etc. (atleast I feel like every ad wants to sell me a course?), and I don't want to be the fraud's shitty course's next victim, I hate such course sellers so much that I kind of want to punch them through the video just thinking how the whole economy of ads is generally revolving around these frauds..., and how they make money is by scamming innocent individuals.
All of this while building a privacy nightmare, a dystopia.
No thanks. I am going to keep ads off of any of my services to a higher level of degree though I do imagine that most people don't donate shit & I don't even think that in businesses, the real money are in normal clients because they require free tier and way too much hassle for like 10$?, but rather business clients (B2B).
Though I also feel this moral obligation to open source whatever I build.. but then businesses can simply self host it, maybe I should probably only release it as fair source?
IDK, the whole system boils down to money, I can be only so good a person as the constraint of money requires me to. If money is low, morality has a higher probability of being ignored... , IDK, there is too much competition, sometimes unworthy,sometimes not, but still too much competition on a lot of ideas and they have not much differences so they try to do ads...
Its name is youtube.
And For the record, I am already using ad blockers but on some very rare occasions on when I don't somehow, its absolutely nightmare
Deleted Comment
I spend more time on YouTube than I care to admit, so I got a Premium subscription, bought an extension called UnTrap for YouTube to hide most recommendations and turned off all YouTube history etc.
I regularly visit BlueSky, Hacker News and YouTube, but not X, TikTok, Instagram or Facebook.
The hardest thing is to not use Amazon, but I am working on it.
https://ublockorigin.com/#manifest-v3-section
I finally went back to firefox, recently. I needed to update some of the flag defaults to turn on tab changing with mouse scroll and similar, but they are unlikely to break things like ublock any time soon.
I was a frequent profiles user under chrome, and still don't like firefoxes UI there, but just made a bookmark to the profile launching screen.
It's good enough.
Because I haven't seen a YouTube ad in a looong time and I don't pay for premium.
I just use this combo.
Deleted Comment
I got into software modding game engines, though. Never cared much for web apps, SaaS. Never much saw the use in paid software since it's just geometry. We made a lot of dumb busy work out of SWE with web apps.
DRY? Yes, let's not repeat ourselves still bothering with lame day jobs that obfuscate it's just physical statistics in a machine of known constraints.
Am really excited about the rest of the world flipping the US off, nVidia full-steam ahead on autonomously organizing distributed systems. Propping up SWEs props up a dangerous delusion.
I will never understand this. My ex bought tons of extensions to do stuff with Safari that other browsers do for free. He paid for a PiP extention for some websites, password managers, Tomagachi pets... dozens of trinket apps that would be depreciated in 2 or 3 major updates. I'm continually wowed by Mac users that insist on paying for a native solution to a problem that doesn't exist in any other ecosystem.
Devs would usually prioritize iOS releases (early on, when no React Native nor Expo was as common place) only due to this fact that iOS users where much more likely to spend money than Android ones.
This might have equalized since the early days but i bet some of it still stands
NextDNS works very well on iOS for everything else.
For example:
I just use ublock Origin with Firefox on Mac/Pc and Orion on iOS.
The annoyance list takes care of the cookie banners.
Safari's vestigial "never auto-play" setting has never worked, and still doesn't.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-br...
Deleted Comment
Enhancer For YouTube.
Sponsorblock.
Dearrow.
I can't use YouTube without them anymore. It's so horrible.
The goal is extracting your portion of it via social engineering and other mechanisms available to you.
An ad for Pampers shown to a family with a toddler; an ad for Tidy Cats shown to a cat owner; an ad for Reese’s shown to someone who exhibits poor impulse control; an ad for McDonald’s shown to someone who works two jobs and doesn’t have time to cook food for themselves; an ad for a gambling app shown to someone using a gambling app.
More generally, if the service is free, you're the product, and you're being sold to someone else
Then again, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube started "You pay for it with your attention (and your data)" and only later have they implemented payment for being ad-free, although with Zuck's properties, the EU forced it.
This has already happened for subscription TV services. Your previously ad-free subscription now has ads, but you can get rid of them again by upgrading! It’s fucking gross. It’s also of course just going to work, and become the new normal.
Dead Comment
Not only is the endpoint that it uses for collecting events randomized each time you load a page, but it also happens that every event collector URL is a valid API endpoint that is used for other things. You can't block any of them with regular ad blocking tools unless you're okay with blocking the corresponding API endpoint. And given that the website itself uses the API, this can be difficult.
It's evil and I hate it.
That sums post-IPO Reddit up rather well
Oh, and if you navigate to this page without NoScript, AdBlocker or a PiHole DNS you'll probably be presented with a cookie consent banner, a bunch of ads on the page and before watching the video, and your data being shared with at least half a dozen partners (a number that can increase dramatically if you visit the page of any news outlet instead of ted.com).
So yeah, I guess that the message of this video aged like fine wine.
That really nails it.
If a page wants to cover itself in noise and dialogues, sure it’s annoying but it’s not quite on the same level as back then.
I wonder if things would actually be better overall. I’m not going to argue that having a scripting language for the web was a mistake, it definitely isn’t on the whole, but I think having it come at a more mature point for the web might have helped stave off a lot of really bad decisions
A group of people who thought that web users should not be abused may have won the first pop-up battle, but the businesses that made money from intrusive advertisements clearly won the war.
In hindsight maybe it wasn't a such a great idea for web users to switch en masse to a browser made by an advertising company.
The endgame is a probably a war between web sites that are endless mazes of advertising and user agents that try to navigate the maze and extract the non-advertising content.
There are accidents of history, money, and ideology.
These things fit squarely in the money category. The advertising industry was subsumed by adtech during that time, which was driven by government grant and fiat debt-based financing. Advertising fraud has never been harder to account for, and the justified use of analytics for that purpose has driven surveillance capitalism with governments being the customer.
Money printing is the role of the state, so technically if you remove all indirections its state apparatus which makes sense that an individual wouldn't be able to fight against it.
"I'm watching a video about procrastination... and I've got a test tomrrow! Lolol!"
Obviously your comment is the refined HN equivalent, but still.
The one on TED.com appears to have been removed.
also, the premise of the entire lore of shadow run, is corporations building armies and seeing they can get away with it and then just doubling down.
but back to reality... everyone would buy stock of the ad-dystopia and since now their retirement is tired to it they will just normalize and promote it. just like today.
I don't think the last-name-is-the-company adapts well to the so-called "gig economy" where employment is structured as supposedly independent contractors, who in turn can be working for multiple organizations at the same time.
"Corporations building armies", etc. describes the Dutch East India Company pretty well, yes? As I get now into my 50s, that goal seems more and more an intrinsic part of limited-liability joint-stock companies.