edit: you to your
You joke but YouTube unironically shows ads like that. And more often than not, they're AI generated copyright theft, too.
These are just a few that I've seen in the last few months. It's an epidemic.
spoiler
Wtf‽
It wasn't a joke, it's just funny commentary on how twisted the advertising logic is
current day youtube reminds me of current day nintendo switch eshop. (its also full of adult anime games - largely with neural-network-generated images)
"ads are based on your activity" they say. I like biology and I am frequently engaging in biology related topics on the internet, yet they keep spamming me with gambling ads, israel army recruitment ads (yes these are a thing!), and occasionally the hot girl mobile games, all ads I literally did not ask for. Everything is thrown at me, most being harmful and completely unrelated to my interests, except biology.
Why are you not using adblock?
Because there isn't a biological adblocker yet.
Use adnauseam, sponsorblock on Firefox.
I only watch YouTube on my TV and rarely on my phone and never on my computer.
Use Smartube if possible, but that's only on android TV. Maybe someone knows alternatives for TV apps. I remember webos had some kind of hack, but I'm not sure if it works anymore. Smartube is better than paid YouTube TV which is sad.
Sanity check: are you sure you didn't turn off ad personalization at some point and these are just the standard issue ads that get shown to most people?
I know this sounds crazy but I'm pretty sure those that go through the effort of blocking personalized ads are statistically higher to be consumers of anime thirst traps and gambling if ever interacting with them.
My accounts that have tracking enabled I get "normal" ads but if I have any kind of privacy on the device it defaults to enticing the lowest common denominator. Which makes sense from an engagement standpoint.
I've trained the algorithm that I don't tolerate ads.
I rarely see ads on YouTube. I use FreeTube and yt-dlp pretty much exclusively for my YouTube viewing. I only see ads when I watch YouTube on my TV, and even then, only rarely. As soon as it shows me an ad, I close out of YouTube. Not skip ad, not go back, I close YouTube. I switch to audiobooks instead.
The algorithm wants to increase watch time, the only way it can do that is to not show me ads, so that's what it does. It's surprising how well it works.
**It's learning... **
But for real, after you explained what's going on it makes perfect sense, I'm just suprised that "amount of ads delivered" is a watch time metric that the algo "optimizes" for.
does pihole work for the TV?
Not as far as I know, there's no way to set custom DNS that I've found.
I thought the point of the pihole was to route all DNS traffic through it on your network?
Note: I've never set up a pihole so this is ass talk
Part of setting up the Pihole is adjusting your router (or individual devices) to use the Pihole for DNS, but devices can use their own settings, so a smart TV with 8.8.8.8 hard coded as it's DNS would not be affected by Pihole blocking.
I have gotten actual unabashed, uncensored, pornography as ads on youtube, meanwhile content creators have to juggle not saying "fuck" too much cause otherwise it's adult content and they can't get paid, but they also have to say it enough times for it not to be kids content which also means they can't get paid
On TikTok I've seen an ad showing literal penis in vagina. But people have to say "unalive."
Tumblr won't allow "female presenting breasts" but will serve me an ad showing naked pussy lips.
I'm not kidding. I got ad with exposed labia. And when I posted it as a screenshot they community violated me.
Were the pussy lips also female-presenting?
Its not only ads on social media sites, but on the web in general. I recently used some old unused phone that i had in my house to test something, and i went browsing some websites in chrome, without adblock set up. And there was a lot of in every way bad ads, including pornographic ads, and they were shown on normal, unrelated to all of that websites.
That’s doubleplus ungood.
It is evolving in the direction that eventually ONLY companies will be people. ONLY companies will have rights.
We must dissolve every single one of them and burn their boards as an offering to the gods of nature. I am begging all of you. Look inside yourselves and help me.
I'm pretty sure that those ads are also against the rules and that any advertiser they catch doing that gets their account suspended or terminated.
The thing is, advertisers like this don't care about their accounts. It's not like they have followers they'll lose if they lose access to their account. Lose an account? Just make a new one and try to sneak another ad through the system. Meanwhile for a content creator, if they lose an account they lose all their followers, all their videos, etc.
My favorite but of specific criticism was how they demonetized firearm-related channels because advertisers didn't want to be associated with guns, but they didn't stop running ads on those channels.
Youtube has ads? ;)
Once in a while, You use someone else's device, go on YouTube and see 2 minutes of ads before a video and wonder "how can somebody live like this?"
I am always amazed how people know that adblock exists, is literally one click away, even have it installed in another browser and the like, but still choose to use the shitty app or chrome with all the ads. And then get annoyed when there are more ads than content.
I just don't understand it. Really. Why? That is like punching yourself in the dick and then complaining that it hurts.
Inertia mostly, people are lazy. If they're family or friends, install uBlock origin for them and they'll probably thank you. You can, as an alternative, ask them to use brave browser instead (after disabling the annoyances), it's chromium-based so the functionality is identical plus it blocks ads.
If it's android, they'll mostly use the app. If you want to get them to use NewPipe or Grayjay, tell them it can play audio when you close the app without having to pay for YouTube premium (yes that's a thing)
If they're not friends or family, forget about it. You can give a light suggestion I guess.
An ad about what? Is this real? Creators of true crime documentaries can't say "rape" or "murder" for fear of being demonetized but they show ads like this?
I have had rapey-AI ads in youtube before. I even took a screenshot.
-Rapey AI ad
Took this screenshot of an ad directly from the YouTube app:
Tap for spoiler
Yup
some ads are borderline hentai games
I watched a YouTube ad once that was almost a full-length reading of a porn comic wherein a teenage boy is helping his stepmother move into his home, and he's like "Why does she have so many vegetables??" (Boxes of phallic produce.) It only ended right before they actually fucked.
Oh yeah. I got that one. While I was on break... At work... Listening to a nice guy make traditional candies from across the break room while I made some coffee.
Really lucky it was in the middle of COVID and I was the only person in the office.
Since SmartTube was compromised I uninstalled it and factory reset my tv, then I tried the official YouTube app. I didn't even finish one video before installing ST again. I rather have hackers than ads.
There's also TizenTube Cobalt, but since it's based on the official YouTube app it ends up being sloooooooow compared to SmartTube...
Is smarttube like revanced ext?
Revanced extended folded back into revanced last I heard. But yeah, Smarttube is kind of like that for Android TV boxes/dongles.
Did they remove channel blocking recently? Something very undesirable appeared on my recommendations this week, and when I went to the channel to block it it the button wasn’t there, and worse still me going to the channel auto played more of its shit. So now YouTube think I want more.
I think so. They're also starting to shift the "my subscriptions" button.
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