dragongirlbunny
i wish there was an easier way to tell the difference between an "if it sucks hit da bricks" situation and a "sometimes being an adult means doing things that you dont wanna" situation
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xanaxfarts
valdevia
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tourdion
theradicalkanji
cuntubus
dragon-in-a-fez
genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital
bigmann-mclargehuge
Share the knowledge
Okay, here we go! I'm gonna try and put this in order from least to most technical knowledge required. I'm not responsible if you accidentally create SkyNet etc.
Level 1: browser extensions
This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.
Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it's one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don't. Iceraven is one that does.
Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).
uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don't like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap 'em.
Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say "hit like and subscribe" or "Raid Shadow Legends" again.
FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you've actually chosen to follow.
Level 2: leaving enshittified services
The software that's become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.
Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.
Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery
DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network's DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don't exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you're doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can't really fuck up anything that seriously.
Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.
Once it's up and running, you'll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.
With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it'll get back a message that says "sorry, can't find it", so it won't be able to load any ads.
Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery
Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can't block ads on your phone when you're away from home - and what's worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you're home.
To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the "local VPN mode", which doesn't require you to do any mucking about with your phone's operating system.
Level 5: automated media piracy
The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what's called an "arr stack" (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you'll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.
The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don't have to do any sharing from your computer, so you're in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.
Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.
Oh, and don't be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.
Level 6: fucking with Android
Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.
Before you buy a device, check where it sits on the Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame. Once you've bought it, check the xda-developer forums for guides on how to unlock it and "root" it (gain admin access) with Magisk.
Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in "root mode" which makes it basically invisible.
You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they're associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.
Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There's always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I've never had any issues with this one personally.
Level 7: fucking with Windows
This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you'll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS "playbook" that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.
Level 8: switching to Linux
I'm not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn't available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you're confused about stuff.
And that, friends, is a comprehensive approach to banishing the demons of capitalism from your home!
doggrowth
Someone on Twitter said this would’ve done numbers on Tumblr in 2015. So here you go Tumblr.
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xensilverquill
propalitet
I feel sorry for children because they never had the experience of playing games or watching things for free. It's why I think a lot of them don't hate ads as much as people older then them do, they just accepted them as a necessary part of their reality and deal with it because the ads have always been there for them.
When I was 14 and started using wattpad it was still a shitty little fanficiton app and everything on that app was free. E v e r y t h i n g.
You only needed an account and you could download countless books and read them offline whenever you wanted. You could write offline and publish and edit whatever and whenever you wanted. There were no ads, no premium no money involved what so ever. It was the reason why I used it, I used to download (well save to my library) 200 fanfics before my summer vacation because I knew I wouldn't have internet and I wanted to entertain myself, I wrote 7 books and published them for fun because I could write and save while offline and then publish them later if I wanted.
When I opened wattpad after a few years I was first met with "upgrade to premium to download and read unlimited books" and then I was met with an ad in between chapters. I didn't continue I deleted my account and haven't even wanted to download it again.
What capitalism and consumerism did in the last few years has had an affect on everything in such a way that cannot be explained unless you've seen the before. Because now you have these platforms crying and begging you not to use an ad blocker, but that means nothing to me because I know they can function without ads, because I've seen and experienced it. Which is why I do not understand people who pay for these things, but if I grew up in an environment where all of these things were already this obsessed with getting money maybe I wouldn't complain either.
Tldr. children do not have spaces anymore where they're not bombarded with ads and it's sad because they were born into this.
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kigoh-neko
helsex
So we all mocked the Minecraft movie and agreed to not give it money...only for y'all to immediately go see it?
It's lazy. It's ugly. They're banking on it being a huge money maker. They totally whitewashed Steve. Afaik there's a boycott on Microsoft rn (the company that Owns Minecraft). It has colonist undertones. Don't go see this pile of garbage. Yes even if they paid off your fave streamer to advertise it
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satisfyingshark
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disgustinggf
twilem
i return to this website after nearly a decade.....my art has gotten better since the last time i logged in
i offer to you a drawing of lily, ready to be your trip sitter at the edm show
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fordtato
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fat-models
