Ads on a website? Unlock minus
Ads on your computer? That’s not YOUR computer. Install Linux and get your computer back
I know it’s a crazy concept but a web browser is in fact running on your computer
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?
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.
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.
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Joke’s on you, I never saw a netflix ad
You have never seen a Netflix show or you have never seen an ad for marlboro on Netflix? My point was that Netflix puts subliminal advertising in their retro shows. So for example in The Get Down, there is multiple scenes with a wide street/city shot with Marlboro billboards in the corner the camera zooms in so the marlboro ad was indirectly visible for 1 second, not long enough for people who aren’t aware of subliminal advertising to register consciously. A tactic Australia television was using in the 2010s was switching ads after 1 frame pretending it was programming errors when in reality it was one of the most egregious forms of subliminal advertising. I don’t watch Stranger Things but they are accused of sexying smoking & subliminal marlboro advertisement. Remember the front of counter at grocery stores? Advertisements purposely placed at child eye level.
Jokes are on all of us I was only using an entirely modern example of this problem.
Brawndo has what plants crave.
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
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!
I don’t know if this refers to politics, but in general, what politicians, and I mean all politicians do where they refer to their opponents and topics consistently with specific words meant to elucidate specific emotions is stomach-turning. And yeah, you’re right, it’s not only politicians, but corporations, newspapers and basically all PR orgs doing the same.
It’s not a layoff, it’s a reorg. It’s not in-person attendance requirements, it’s an inevitable “return to office”. And so on, so forth.
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Linux superiority post at the top of All? Must be literally any day.
Gets people stuff without money 🤷♂️
Use wireguard to stay on your home network.
I think adblock software is generally the first step before Wireguard for most people.
The Adblock is at home
For everyone else too?
That’s what the title of the post implies. It’s a problem away from home.
This is part of the reason they don’t want you to own your own computer anymore.
I won’t even wear clothing that overtly displays a brand name
One time I was talking to a guy and noticed he was wearing Nike everything. So as a joke, I said, “Jeez, you wear so much Nike, they should pay you.” And he said they do.
And then he told me how he works at Nike. And he gets a lot of free stuff.
oof reminds me of my aunt’s computer, stuff was popping from all over the screen. Combined with the fact that it was an old laptop with low RAM, it was a total nightmare to use
“I haven’t seen that one since the 90’s! If your computer was a person, I’d shoot it in the face.”
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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It’s bad on multiple levels. Like 99% of the “for kids” stuff on YouTube is total brain rot with no educational value whatsoever. Then a barrage of totally not targeted ads beamed straight into the kids face.
Seriously. When I was a kid, people said that tv would rot your brain. But at least TV required you to actively engage with it. Even kids shows have a plot, a coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end. You have to actively watch, consider what’s happening, and engage with it. You have to use your mind, even if just binging soap operas. Putting your kid in front of a stream of shorts is like having them watch a large array of randomly blinking lights. There’s no content. No thought. No processing. No development of any kind can come from that.
Yup, I know several other parents that blindly trust the algorithms because their experience with TV wasn’t too bad. They fail to realize they’re basically giving their kids digital crack.
Wait until you see the clothing most people wear… and what they dress thier kids in. They even pay for the privilege.
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)
God, the modern Google TV launcher is so fucking ass. Ads every fucking where.
Last week I was setting up my box and the first thing it showed me was a Netflix ad that I think contained spoilers for Squid Game??? (I don’t watch that show but it looked like a serious spoiler)Get your friend Projectivity Launcher.
They probably don’t care enough. I’ve talked about blocking YouTube ads before and they zoned out after exactly 2 seconds. So I’m not going to bother.
I use flauncher myself, but i will check projectivity launcher out sometime.
They probably don’t care enough
Don’t know if I’m horrified or jealous
To be fair they are less annoying than the ones you have to watch on YouTube, etc. I was mostly annoyed by how incredibly slow they made the interface.
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.
Unpopular opinion, but i rather have them in/on something i own like a newspaper or tv where they won’t do harm as opposed to in/on something i don’t own on like a billboard next to the road or inside a supermarket. I can be impulsive and easily distracted and then they are much more dangerous.
Buy Gerald’s Nuts for the low-low price of 2.50
They allow their fridges to show advertisements
They allow their Start Menu to show advertisements.
You can not shut down a fridge
