Wanna know why prices everywhere went up so much? They had to pay all the advertising companies for the billions of ads they’ve been trying to force us to watch everywhere, from tv to internet to roadside billboards. So the consumer had to pay.

(No, not really, but it sure feels that way)

Unfortunately, it may be difficult to do much without some kind of intervention at a larger scale (i.e. government intervention) but so much money is made from these ads. Money talks. There are also people who don’t know about ad blockers or simply don’t care to run one.

I do agree with one comment below of static advertisements to promote a product or service . It reminds me something like tv commercials. The targeted ones is just asking for trouble for your privacy and getting scammed.

I still think targeted ads should be illegal. I would accept static ads that are based on the content of the site rather than me as a compromise.

So like if I'm looking at example.com/cool-bikes you can show me bike ads. You don't need to know who I am or track me.

It's good enough for the past few decades (centuries?) it's good enough for now. The Superbowl doesn't serve a different ad to every viewer.

Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.

It indiscriminately pollutes the environments it’s projected in to, and causes secondary harms to non-participants by incentivising the mass hoarding of personal information which is uneconomical to appropriately secure.

Don't people use ad blockers? If not, learn how to use one instead to complain.

I never see any ads.

Here's what I do about it:

Firefox plus uBlock Origin is what you can do about it. I hardly ever see any ads. SponsorBlock is great if you watch youtube too.

Because US capitalism.

Garbage ads have been a thing almost since the dawn of the Internet and we found a solution to them years ago. They're called ad blockers. If you are online and not using an ad blocker: Why? That's like finding a $2/night hooker and not using a condom.

What really annoys me is the endless stream of scam, "earn money fast with 1 simple trick" ads

It's literally a scam every single time and trying to report those fall into deaf ears (or blind algorithms) because hey, they're paying to be shown, why should any high ranking executive care? "Oh, I can't be held responsible, sorry!"

For example, Google Chrome has stopped the use of auto-play video.

Even setting aside ads, that was virtually always something that I did not want.

If websites like CNN want someone to watch video, put the video up with autoplay off. If someone wants to watch it, they can start it playing.

The reason is programmatic advertising and Google has 90% market share there. Btw, it helps spreading misinformation too.

What ads?

Remember the purpose of ads is to advertise a product that might potentially sell. Quality control isn't always a priority it's capitalism after all. At the end of the day, if you just want to block ads, just block ads.

Because it's "too hard" for websites to have proper relationships with advertisers vs just signing onto an ad network.

The AI generated car ads are just awful, I made a post about it:

https://lemmy.world/post/14053496

What can we do about it? Is this some grandpa's first time on the internet?