Microblog Memes

Advertising in 2025 is essentially manipulation and brain washing.

Sad that you think that. Never noticed a netflix marlboro ad? Yea that was the point.

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.

You're saying "in 2025" and then listing a bunch of things that have been that way since the 40s at least.

Brawndo has what plants crave.

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.

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!

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.

Getting my wife and kids on board and trained on this is a feat I’m just not talented to pull off.

Consumers are lazy and brain rotted, too much effort to build an htpc or do anything that protect yourselfs and your family's data when the TV can just do it all for you, who cares that it's a literal piece of spyware ad riddled garbage.

I guess I shouldn't be blaming the consumer here, since it's obviously the predatory capitalist company at fault. But still, I think most people are fucking dumb.

I had some family members staying with us a few nights. I "warned" them, that my WiFi is using a PiHole and should block (some) ads. Just as a heads up if e.g. an app or a website would act up so that they could report that to me.

They asked me, why anyone would want to block useful ads...

I don't offer. If I have a minute with a computer alone, adblock is going in there.

That was the biggest flabbergast for me when I took care of a few work machines recently, after not opening a Windows machine for years.

I installed Linux Mint dual boot on my main PC with Win10 over the holidays.  I will not take the ads and ai BS on Win11.