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.
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.
You'd be surprised how many people don't have the motivation/understanding to do even that.
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
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.
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
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.
They've still got a good reputation for news. So good that after a few combative interviews with Tory MPs (back when they were in power a few years ago) the Culture Secretary wanted to sell the channel off.
Don't get me wrong they can still produce the occasional good comedy or documentary but they used to do so consistently.
True, I remember the government trying to sell off Channel 4. Anyway I guess my point was that ads don't necessarily ruin a platform if the platform has a decent purpose other than just profit... although I definitely do hate seeing any ads, even on Channel 4 or anything else.
Panics while using Boost to view this post
laughs in pi-hole blocking in-app ads
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
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 acceptable necessary, 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.
You know I was just thinking this the other day, and they are just as intrusive as the ones that piracy sites have
What do you mean as intrusive, none of the piracy sites are trying to work around my adblocker.
What ads, on what pirate sites?
I'm talking of ye old days, when you could stream a show or live TV on a pirate site, and the site would be covered with ads with the fake X buttons that would give you malware if you click them
Ok? The rest of us are talking about today.
After Amazon said there'd be more ads recently, yep, more ads tonight. Done with it. My living room is not a marketing platform. It's finally time to go back to the convenience and ease of piracy.
The new model is based around pirating Clarkson's Farm and donating to farmers. That's the point anyway. No need to bring Jeff into it.
That’s normal, it’s the same infrastructure cost then the licensing costs
People upload whole MasterChef seasons on Youtube. Legit
That just makes sense though? The legit sites have to pay for, fund, or in some way support the content which does cost money. The piracy sites obviously don’t have that cost so they don’t need as much income.
The piracy sites also pay a lot less in infra, since they rely on the user to store, seed to others, and serve the content to the local users. All that infra is offloaded to the user.
Sorry, what exactly kind of content are we talking about? You know, the one "legit" sites have to pay for but piracy sites don't.
Fun fact: a lot of the content you see on big sites are advertorials, this means some company writes a fluff piece about how their lastest product can solve all your problems, and then pays the site to publish it. In print, you even have the option to have the ad use the same layout, fonts, colors etc. as the real content.
This means a portion of a site is not filled by content that had to be bought, but actually brings them money.
Do you think that Amazon gets its content (movies on Prime video) for free? Or do you think that piracy sites pay for their content (stolen movies on torrent sites)?
Edit: To answer you more directly, YouTube pays creators a cut of the ad revenue, and Amazon/Netflix pay the movie/show creators through licensing deals.
That's some ground-level hanging fruits - do you know any piracy websites the size of Amazon or Netflix? Sure as hell I do not.
Piracy websites are usually pretty limited in scope. Places like some shady porn repos, pirated games and movies, etc. Of course there are some giants like thepiratebay but even they are nowhere as large as the ones you mentioned.
All of these, especially the big players, have high costs of maintenance and advertising. Just like their "legit" counterparts in size.
Not at all true
edit: oh piracy streaming sites. Probably true for that. I wouldn't know.
Somehow "legit" sites won't try to install malware on my laptop. So, I take more regular ads over piracy crap.
You've never seen a DNS poisoning attack have ya? I've seen Google infect systems just because they looked up a particular football game, because some bad actor somehow poisoned the DNS cache.
So no, "legit" sites aren't always safe either.
I know what dns poisoning is but it usually happens on so called legit sites. Pirate sites serve you malware out of the box.
If you would stop clicking on the 'hot, horny single women in your area' banners you wouldn't have to worry about it
There is this torrent site I use that likes to use javascript to redirect to various malicious websites on every single click. After reaching the desired amount of clicks, it start behaving like a normal, "legit" website. Just of out curiosity I checked few other torrent websites and got the same result. It got so annoying that I'm using radarr and sonarr to look for torrents.
Why do you like to use this site if you know it's trying to abuse you? There are countless others out there.
So far they have not proven themselves to make wise choices, or really know what they are talking about at all
Mostly because of the amount of good quality content. But as I said, I've moved to radarr/sonarr so I interact with less and less.
Hey everybody, this guy uses a shitty fucking site and thinks all piracy sites are bad! Definitely not confirmation bias with a tinge of ignorance
Sounds more like sharehoster behavior to me. Btw, i get that for (legit) Sims 4 mods too.
Who gets malware in 2024? Lol what
I remember my first time on the internet
Edit: Ublock Origin, Sponsorblock, Violent Monkey with anti script and ad block blocker scripts. Countdown bypass, autoclick skip ad and shortlink scripts, and what ever other specific scripts for your needs
I decided to be helpful for others instead of just a smart ass. Not you OP, you have it coming for spreading misinformation
Ah no, most "malware" is just false positive of AV software, since repacked games look pretty similiar. And no such dangers with media files, as long as your system is uptodate.
Wasn't there statistics a while ago already, that most malware comes from "legit" sites, especially newspapers (malvertising), by quite a margin? Hard to find now, too much noise.
Not to say you don't need to be careful. But not much more than always with executing something from the internet.
One rule of thumb: torrent sites usually have a colorful pirate skull things for torrents from reputable groups (if not, look for a better site). They have a reputation to lose if malware gets slipped in. And they do what they do mostly for reputation and competition.
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.
There was DRM from 2003-2009
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.
Really going out of the way to avoid them.
You'd be surprised how many people don't have the motivation/understanding to do even that.
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
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.
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
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
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.
They've still got a good reputation for news. So good that after a few combative interviews with Tory MPs (back when they were in power a few years ago) the Culture Secretary wanted to sell the channel off.
Don't get me wrong they can still produce the occasional good comedy or documentary but they used to do so consistently.
True, I remember the government trying to sell off Channel 4. Anyway I guess my point was that ads don't necessarily ruin a platform if the platform has a decent purpose other than just profit... although I definitely do hate seeing any ads, even on Channel 4 or anything else.
Panics while using Boost to view this post
laughs in pi-hole blocking in-app ads
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
https://draculatheme.com/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.
You know I was just thinking this the other day, and they are just as intrusive as the ones that piracy sites have
What do you mean as intrusive, none of the piracy sites are trying to work around my adblocker.
What ads, on what pirate sites?
I'm talking of ye old days, when you could stream a show or live TV on a pirate site, and the site would be covered with ads with the fake X buttons that would give you malware if you click them
Ok? The rest of us are talking about today.
After Amazon said there'd be more ads recently, yep, more ads tonight. Done with it. My living room is not a marketing platform. It's finally time to go back to the convenience and ease of piracy.
The new model is based around pirating Clarkson's Farm and donating to farmers. That's the point anyway. No need to bring Jeff into it.
That’s normal, it’s the same infrastructure cost then the licensing costs
People upload whole MasterChef seasons on Youtube. Legit
That just makes sense though? The legit sites have to pay for, fund, or in some way support the content which does cost money. The piracy sites obviously don’t have that cost so they don’t need as much income.
The piracy sites also pay a lot less in infra, since they rely on the user to store, seed to others, and serve the content to the local users. All that infra is offloaded to the user.
Sorry, what exactly kind of content are we talking about? You know, the one "legit" sites have to pay for but piracy sites don't.
Fun fact: a lot of the content you see on big sites are advertorials, this means some company writes a fluff piece about how their lastest product can solve all your problems, and then pays the site to publish it. In print, you even have the option to have the ad use the same layout, fonts, colors etc. as the real content.
This means a portion of a site is not filled by content that had to be bought, but actually brings them money.
Do you think that Amazon gets its content (movies on Prime video) for free? Or do you think that piracy sites pay for their content (stolen movies on torrent sites)?
Edit: To answer you more directly, YouTube pays creators a cut of the ad revenue, and Amazon/Netflix pay the movie/show creators through licensing deals.
That's some ground-level hanging fruits - do you know any piracy websites the size of Amazon or Netflix? Sure as hell I do not.
Piracy websites are usually pretty limited in scope. Places like some shady porn repos, pirated games and movies, etc. Of course there are some giants like thepiratebay but even they are nowhere as large as the ones you mentioned.
All of these, especially the big players, have high costs of maintenance and advertising. Just like their "legit" counterparts in size.
Not at all true
edit: oh piracy streaming sites. Probably true for that. I wouldn't know.
Somehow "legit" sites won't try to install malware on my laptop. So, I take more regular ads over piracy crap.
You've never seen a DNS poisoning attack have ya? I've seen Google infect systems just because they looked up a particular football game, because some bad actor somehow poisoned the DNS cache.
So no, "legit" sites aren't always safe either.
I know what dns poisoning is but it usually happens on so called legit sites. Pirate sites serve you malware out of the box.
If you would stop clicking on the 'hot, horny single women in your area' banners you wouldn't have to worry about it
There is this torrent site I use that likes to use javascript to redirect to various malicious websites on every single click. After reaching the desired amount of clicks, it start behaving like a normal, "legit" website. Just of out curiosity I checked few other torrent websites and got the same result. It got so annoying that I'm using radarr and sonarr to look for torrents.
Why do you like to use this site if you know it's trying to abuse you? There are countless others out there.
So far they have not proven themselves to make wise choices, or really know what they are talking about at all
Mostly because of the amount of good quality content. But as I said, I've moved to radarr/sonarr so I interact with less and less.
Hey everybody, this guy uses a shitty fucking site and thinks all piracy sites are bad! Definitely not confirmation bias with a tinge of ignorance
Sounds more like sharehoster behavior to me. Btw, i get that for (legit) Sims 4 mods too.
Who gets malware in 2024? Lol what
I remember my first time on the internet
Edit: Ublock Origin, Sponsorblock, Violent Monkey with anti script and ad block blocker scripts. Countdown bypass, autoclick skip ad and shortlink scripts, and what ever other specific scripts for your needs
I decided to be helpful for others instead of just a smart ass. Not you OP, you have it coming for spreading misinformation
Ah no, most "malware" is just false positive of AV software, since repacked games look pretty similiar. And no such dangers with media files, as long as your system is uptodate.
Wasn't there statistics a while ago already, that most malware comes from "legit" sites, especially newspapers (malvertising), by quite a margin? Hard to find now, too much noise.
Not to say you don't need to be careful. But not much more than always with executing something from the internet.
One rule of thumb: torrent sites usually have a colorful pirate skull things for torrents from reputable groups (if not, look for a better site). They have a reputation to lose if malware gets slipped in. And they do what they do mostly for reputation and competition.
Edit: found this, SO had maintenance today.