On occasion I get a glimpse at someone else's experience on the web and I'm so thankful that I haven't seen many ads at all in years.

I just disabled my adblocker on the BBC website out of curiosity and oh am I happy I don't live like this.

It's an assault on the mind.

What's freaky is there are people who actually like the ads.

Granted, many of us enjoy the kooky ads that occur during the Super Bowl. That's not really what I'm talking about. I've met people who say they enjoy midroll ads in videos and podcasts. There are even folks who like banner ads. To me, those all represent precious seconds that add up to countless hours of my life wasted, which I will never get back. The more ads I avoid, the more opportunity to experience life I have.

Another horrible thing about ads in general is they distract one from being alone with their own thoughts. A lot of people are too afraid to spend time alone with their own thoughts, so in a sense they might enjoy the fact that any sensory input can take them away from that. To me, modern ads are thought vampires. It might be one thing if ads focused on the merits of products, and if most products today were of quality and a fair price, except that is not the norm.

Not sure why I still have the Google app on my phone, used to like their live score system, until when from the 3 soccer teams I said I follow they started showing me on the lockscreen/live scores from teams and championships that I never in my life followed anywhere. So, the Google app sometimes sucks me in with various articles, and of course when you click on them, you'ren ot in safari with an ad blocker, but the pure google experience, and somehow I get the feeling that almost all websites out there are impossible to use or to get any information from, as they are 90% ads. You get overlays, audo playing videos, more overlays, more banners, it's impossible to use any website that is a bit popular without any adblocker.

I stopped having cable television in 2001 because I lived in a place where it wasn't available. I moved to a new place in 2002 and went completely pirate media (shitty quality episodes of the Simpsons and such). I went to streaming when that became available, but the point is that I stopped seeing television ads a long time ago.

I remember visiting family during the height of the iPod and being offended by how many iPod ads were on TV. I worked for Apple at the time. I couldn't imagine not hating the company if I didn't work for them because of how intrusive the ads were. My family didn't seem to notice / tuned them out.

I haven’t used an ad blocker in years, and, I don’t know, my brain just sort of learnt to ignore ads. Not “promoted” stuff that looks like regular items in the feeds (e.g. Google ads in search results). But just random banners on the website - I don’t even register them consciously. Every now and then I do notice curiosities like “the meatbag bought a mattress let’s offer him 100 other mattresses”, but otherwise I feel like I am totally blind to ad banners.

I leave my adblocker off for YouTube because I want the small channels I watch to get money.

I'm so glad that political season is finally over because I've been being spammed by politicians over and over and over. The worst part was they weren't even from my state.

Advertisers forgot that you shouldn't spam the exact same ad over and over. I am never going to buy insurance from gigco, state form, or liderty for that reason.

Sometimes there is a glitch and I get more generic ads, and I live on the edge of a "rich" zip code so I get ads for jet rideshares and lately ULA, I mean I enjoy Scott Manley's Deep Space Updates but I am not launching sats, so I am not sure why I get those ads.

The BBC website? Arent the BBC like the only media company that dont show ads?

Similarly, it's eye opening to see the "default" YouTube experience. Conspiracy, manosphere, AI-generated "deep dive" videos: just complete dreck.