I don’t think the facts match the claim, but I completely agree with the sentiment.
For years, the ‘legit’ consumer has had to deal with ad interruptions and bad UI and service disruptions and having media removed from their library. Something that pirates don’t even have to think about. The music revolution that Jobs and Apple created with iTunes, which allowed people to just buy music and just own it and just use it however they want (no DRM) with an ease that made piracy look difficult and seem too risky to bother, never came for TV or movies or books or any other media category.
And now the streaming revolution has all but undone that progress as well. You don’t own anything, a company decides when you have or lose access to something, and even if you pay money for access you are still advertised to and your data is still sold off.
I remember iTunes only letting you change computer like 2-3 times max before the drm would make mysic not work any more, but maybe it was no-drm in the beginning.
I had a chinese 1GB shuffle though so IDK if that’s correct.
The chinese shuffle also doubled up as a usb key (very useful back then) and also didn’t need iTunes to function smh.
Yeah IIRC you’re right, though I remember you could contact apple and reset it.
It was called FairPlay DRM and they only really got rid of it around a decade after iTunes launched. I’m not 100% but I think I had to pay to upgrade my already paid-for library to DRM free too
It may have originally had DRM but it doesn’t now.
But then later for like $10 I could take all my pirate music, legitimize it, and download a copy from iTunes if theirs was better quality. That was nice.
Edit: iTunes Match
That didn’t last very long.
Yeah this guy is on some Apple fanboy shit if he thinks iTunes was drm free. Their shitty design for iTunes and decision to force you to use it despite it making the experience of listening to music much worse is the primary reason an ipod is the only Apple device I’ve ever owned. Freedom of choice and Apple have never mixed. That’s such a weird angle to take when describing them.
So they only forced everyone into their ecosystem for seven years and once they cornered their market they gave back the illusion of choice? That’s cool I guess but that’s explicitly the opposite of what I mean when I say freedom of choice, open source, DRM free, etc.
I’m not defending Apple. Just stating that at one time iTunes was DRM free.
DRM apologist, like so many of the Steam fanboys. “No, it’s good DRM, you see?”
Meanwhile, in a dark and forgotten corner of my PC, I STILL have several thousand MP3s I downloaded from Kazaa back in the day.
Ads you say?
I’ll have to take your word for it…
I feel like most of the kind of people who go out of their way to pirate also go out of their way to avoid ads.
- Download Firefox (or other preferred gecko browser)
- Install uBlock Origin add-on
Really going out of the way to avoid them.
I mean I set up a Pi-Hole along with U-Block Origin, and I have my Jellyfin NAS running all my shows/movies so that I very seldom see any advertisements ever…
Pi hole is definitely great but I’ll concede that getting that going probably qualifies as ‘going out of the way’. That said, it is worth every penny/second spent configuring.
Absolutely. I simply have a deep seated hatred of ads of all shapes, sizes, and purposes (=
Ads are like tribbles, keep slayin away
You’d be surprised how many people don’t have the motivation/understanding to do even that.
Had this bite me once growing up. Forgot to get an ad block on my friends PC and ended up blasting porn ads on the family PC.
Never raw dog the net like that…
Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It indiscriminately pollutes whatever environment it’s conducted within, and causes secondary harm to non-participants by incentivising hoarding of PII in the cheapest and least secure manner.
It causes genuine harm, I’m visually impaired and I’ve wandered into construction zones because advertising billboards are mounted near and “road work ahead” signs and everything is all just bright and bold.
I don’t know what’s official, everything is competing for my attention but I have very little capacity to dedicate my full attention to a visual sign. The end result is incredibly fatiguing, seeing a bright sign and straining to ensure I read it because it’s colours look important, nope, it’s an ad, that was a waste of energy, oh look another one with the same blurry colours and type setting it’s probably the same ad… Nope that one actually needed my attention, and now I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be and I’m in danger.
I’m also hard of hearing, but fortunately audio adber in the public isn’t as bad, but anyone who’s hearing impaired knows how fatiguing it is to try and filter through noise. It’s the exact same for visual impairment.
Adblock is a cure for migraines.
Amen, I just need IRL adblock now please.
Once ads are allowed into a platform they will ultimately be what destroys it eventually.
Might take a week or a decade. But the lust of that easy ad money will ruin the thing they were put there to fund in the end.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true - maybe it depends on (a) the owners of the platform and/or (b) whether there are sources of funding besides advertising
E.g. here in the UK, the BBC and Channel 4 are both broadcasters owned by the government, and both are funded at least in part by adverts. But I think both of them are relatively healthy and aren’t on the brink of destroying themselves.
I think most of the BBC’s funding comes from the licence fee (British people pay for a TV licence) but they make some money from ads shown to international audiences. Channel 4 is solely funded by adverts I think, but it’s owned by the government and I think they have to abide by certain rules and targets.
In the UK the BBC only has advertisements for its own content, nothing else. As bad as its got since Tony Blair and David Cameron both undermined its independence and quality, at least there are no ad breaks in its shows.
True, they don’t show commercial adverts in the UK, but they do to other countries. People outside the UK can access the BBC website but they’ll see adverts on there, and apparently BBC America (shown in the US) has commercial adverts
And Channel 4 of course does show commercial adverts in the UK, but I think they still make some decent content, and I don’t think they’re on the verge of self-destruction
Maybe the real problem is when an entity is chasing profits, because Channel 4 isn’t a normal for-profit business, since they’re owned by the government, and I think they have to abide by some rules
Well the distinction here is that TV license paying citizens of the UK don’t get the ads.
But then you could look at Channel 4, which does show ads to UK people, but I think Channel 4 is still okay and I don’t think it has been ruined by ads. So maybe a profit motive is what causes enshittification, rather than just ads. I definitely hate ads but maybe ads alone don’t destroy platforms.
You won’t get any disagreement from me on the corrosive effects of advertising.
I do think that Channel 4 used to regularly produce greater content than it can now. But that probably is more to do with advertising revenue being leeched away to online platforms and the growth of its direct competitors.
Interesting, maybe the content has changed, I probably don’t watch enough TV to have noticed. But I think Channel 4 news is pretty good, and I liked their Paralympics coverage.
Panics while using Boost to view this post
laughs in pi-hole blocking in-app ads
Depends on the piracy site. If you go to some of the pirate streaming sites or the blogs that host tons of pirated software with 30 rapidgator links that die after a month (instead of just using a torrent like a normal sensible person trying to share a 2-30+gb file that is begging to be taken down) without Adblock it’s absolutely comical how many ads there are. Even with Adblock those are the sites that manage to still have ads because they’re on the cutting edge of sketchy shit. It’s like seeing a late 90s to early 2000s website with how much random bullshit is pasted everywhere
Despite that I’m pretty sure that Amazon, google, etc do far more nefarious shit behind the scenes in terms of tracking/fingerprinting you and collecting data to sell
I’m pretty sure that Amazon, google, etc do far more nefarious shit behind the scenes in terms of tracking/fingerprinting you and collecting data to sell
You even get to pay more and more for this privilege…smh
This is all spanish (as in castilian) media. The torrents are sparse and usually really badly encoded, I’m talking stuff like AVI codec in media produced in 2024.
There’s a better chance if you try to find it in the open with those sketchy links you mention or you are “lucky enough” to get invited to a Telegram group that has it uploaded to the platform, severed in hundreds of multipart files.
I’ve seen more Spanish people using the outdated Ed2K protocol through a/eMule rather than torrents even, it’s so depressing.
Bless MySpleen, OR, AR, and AT! Ain’t no ads nowhere no way
ublock origin. I don’t care if some website dies. Whole internet is turning to shit anyways, just let it all burn
Ublock does such a good job at blocking the old janky torrent sites, especially compared to the increasingly aggressive and intrusive new shit.
I’d love it if we started the internet from scratch again with no search engines, just webrings and link books and geocities pages everywhere
We should also bring back the LiveJournal days as well. I was too young to ever really be able to get into that kinda stuff, but I’ve been enjoying writing posts for my 100% fictional company on InsaneJournal, no matter how little, if any, people see it.
neocities!
Whats a piracy site? Theres zero ads in the search window on qbittorrent…
Where you find the torrents
qittorrent has a search function where you input and save the associated plug-in/address of the torrent site/feed you want and then you can just search within qbittorrent for whatever torrent you are looking for and select whatever you want for download without having to go to an website or another app/protocol.
Yes but does it have Dark Mode?
Gottem
It has custom user-made themes that are dark mode, so it probably has dozens of dark modes.
Using the rather fittingly named Dracula theme. Fantastic darkmode theme for qbittorrent
It does
Yep, gottem… it does not have dark mode… but hold on here…
Do the ads on torrent sites adhere to dark mode standards?
Dark Reader extension turns all websites into dark mode whether they like it or not.
Checkmate!
Do you have anything for the qbittorrent app on a Mac that would make it dark mode? Because last time I used it the app didn’t have a dark mode.
But what about the ads on the website, the site might be dark mode enabled but are the ads?
If you just install Linux on your Mac and have a dark Qt theme set, Qbittorrent will also be dark.
I thought we’d blocked ads already?
I don’t. I let my arr apps do it for me.
Hurr durr I don’t so they don’t exist
Lol, ad free is available to anyone if they care enough.
Much like the twenty minutes of unskippable ads on commercial DVDs, the media companies and social media will enshittify until the general public turns to piracy.
Essentially, the sooner we all come to terms with piracy being
acceptablenecessary, the sooner they let off on their enshittification efforts.And yet I see 0 ads in either of those sites.
There are in the videos as sponsors for a lot of channels on YouTube, and as sponsored results on Amazon
Sponsorblock, my friend.
Seriously, this is the only way. My sympathy to the creators who need sponsors because fuck YouTube but damn is it getting absurd. Nearly as bad as cable TV.
Of all the ads being pushed on us, this type seems like the least egregious to me.
Especially when creators find interesting ways to work them in, which is pretty often, in my experience. They’re the one type of ad that doesn’t annoy me.
I just noticed he also mentioned sponsored ads in Amazon results and etc, which are definitely worse than in YouTube/etc videos.
I’ve cut down buying from them quite a bit, but when using the Amazon app, or web without adblock, the sponsored results have made the shopping experience SIGNIFICANTLY worse in the last 6 months.
It used to be that you’d see one here and there, but the volume of “sponsored” results has gotten ridiculous, and the quality is awful. Half of the sponsored results I see - at best - are very specifically not what I searched for. Sometimes not even close.
It’s one of several reasons I hardly buy from them anymore.
Tbh I don’t care about the sponsor segments in videos. It’s actually my favorite way of advertising, as I can skip it or watch the funny ones (tomska does really funny - although slightly incorrect - segments).
But boy do I hate sponsored results on Amazon or similar platforms. I feel like I have to search through them to get to the actual products, and then I can’t trust the reviews
SponsorBlock takes care of the sponsored segments in youtube videos. There are addons for blocking sponsored search results on amazon too.
Ad revenue is like Crack to corporations. Once they get a taste for it, it’s all downhill from there.
Mostly because it’s the easiest money they’ll ever make and it’s more profitable than subscription models. Gotta see those numbers go up at all costs.
Corporations like google and amazon damage the market and the industry more than “piracy” does
I have legit never bought a single thing because I saw and ad for said product. I don’t know who is out here making these campaigns so profitable
Brand awareness gets you subconsciously
I don’t know, I distrust all YouTube ads content creators slide into their videos, because the products are either useless to me, disappointing in real life like the “fruit smells” rings for water bottles or sketchy with some fear mongering like the VPNs.
Yeah I’m not gonna be paying for NordVPN. They’ve got this much money for ads and when buying 2 years at a time they’re cheaper than, say, Mullvad? Suspicious.
I do like some of the channels’ sponsor segments though. Internet Historian is great, OverSimplified can do pretty good ones. The Map Men are pure gold. But I’ve never bought into anything they’ve shilled at me, nor do I feel like I want to.
Sponsor block is a browser addons that addresses this niche
I dunno, I don’t just ignore ads, I find them repulsive, like my scam-alarms go off even when I know that it’s probably a legit product. Seriously unless I get a recommendation from an actual person, the brand I’ve never heard of feels safer to me then the brand I saw a cheap ad for on some janky website. Maybe it’s because so much of the stuff I had growing up was knockoff/store brand, so I’ve hardly ever actually experienced anything that I saw an ad for.
Here’s a really horrifying fact about ads, they don’t expect you to go right out and buy their product. Ads target your subconscious and manipulate your way of thinking. There was a study done by some university and tested by a few people across different fields of study that proved this to be correct. I wish I could remember off the top of my head where this was published. If you do a little browsing you can probably find it and you should because you can’t trust a stranger like me to properly relay the information.
Adblock my beloved
Not the way I use legit sites!
Jokes aside, I agree and I hate it
Besides streaming, i.e. the capability to watch the movies and series when you want and how much you want, and lowering the entry to produce videos for more people, they pretty much reinvented cable. Or did I miss something substantial?
They’re already consolidating in streaming services that bundle content packs.
