Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world whotookkarl @lemmy.world 8mo ago

Tips for living an advertising free/minimal life?

Just trying to live with as little advertising as possible and curious what tips or tricks the community has aside from moving out to a cabin in the woods.

I can't really get away from road side advertising for now. Public sporting events are completely infected, and for the ads I am forced to see I try to make a conscious effort not to buy their goods or services. I won't subscribe to a streaming service if they have a sub+ad tier, if they're separate free with ads or sub no ads I'll support it.

Not really for any moral stance, but ad blockers are good at avoiding malware and some services are basically broken if you have to wait for an ad network, and I just feel mentally healthier in general without the extra propaganda.

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No tips for physical ads, but you can set up a pi hole and route your home internet through it.
- Browsing the web outside of my house now is horrendous. Pihole was the single best addition to my home network.
  
  Adguard or mullvad dns filters, enjoy!
  
  If you're using an Android device, AdGuard works well :)
  
  You can fairly easily (with many routers) set up a personal vpn to have all your mobile traffic route back to your home network to use your pihole all the time.
  
  Won’t work for like a work computer but all of your personal devices can go on it easy pie. Makes a world of difference, and keeps your traffic more private as a bonus.
  
  I have adblock too but definitely better at home. Very glad I installed it.
- I used pihole and it works, but there is management you need to do and it’s mostly just for devices using your home router.
  
  If you don’t feel tech savvy or just don’t want to deal with managing one more thing in your life, I’d suggest NextDNS. It’s pihole as a service, basically free (first 300,000 queries every month use your custom filtering free), or unlimited queries with filtering for $20/year. They also make it easy to set up on your mobile devices, so you also benefit from low-level ad and tracker blocking on cell networks.
- Another vote for pi hole. It's really great, whenever I'm browsing the Internet outside my house it realize how pervasive ads are.
  
  Set your phone's DNS lookup for adguard. https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html
  
  I have a pihole at home, but it's easier to use adguard on mobile.
- One thing which has drastically helped me, if pihole is not an option, is to use Mullvad's DNS on my phone. It helps a lot:
  
  https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
  
  On android you can set up a custom DNS by going to: settings > network & internet > private DNS Or settings > network & internet > advanced > private DNS.
- Does this work to stop ads on the Roku Youtube app?
Avoid the internet.

Pay for services so you're the customer instead of the product.

Pirate TV shows and movies if you can't afford them.
- Here is the problem: Even paying will not get you out of ads any longer. You bought a TV, well the manufacturer will show additional ads on it. You paid for Windows or a Mac, well Apple or Microsoft will advertise additional services on it, same with Android (Google services) or IPhone.
  
  Just spending money to be ad free is no longer enough, because companies try to find ways to extract even more money (or information to sell others) from you, now that you have proven to have some. Either be it additional subscriptions or vendor lock in. They never have enough money, they just want all of it.
  
  So to live ad free, you have to avoid using any product with profit interest or research every company you deal with on what its incentives are, which is very hard or impossible for many people.
  
  Here is a tip though, try to find hardware that comes without bundled software, and find open source software to use it with.
  
  Was just thinking about this today, as I pumped gas, and the fucking pump wouldn't stop blaring ads at max volume.
- Movies and TV shows are absolutely packed full of product placement advertisements.
  
  If this is your level of ad avoidance you need to completely cut yourself off from all society and humans. Full social death.
- contradicts 1)
Start collecting physical and/or local digital copies of media that you enjoy. Build a library before all the streaming platforms get completely enshitified and the sale of physical media ends.
- That's what I've started doing. Blu-ray and DVD are pretty cheap (for now) at the local thrift stores and eBay. Totally worth it for our favorite movies.
  
  It would be technically illegal for me to burn those movies and put them up on a dedicated Jellyfin server running Linux on a 4th gen MicroFF PC where we could stream them from the local lan, kinda like rolling your own totally offline Netflix with slick UI and cross platform support (Mac, android, Linux, windows). It would be cool and I'm sure it would work brilliantly, not that I would know.
  
  I'm not sure of the legality of putting all my CDs on there as well along with copies of e-reader compatible books.
  
  I haven't left the dock and hoisted the Jolly Roger but I totally understand why one would. Last time I sailed I was not an adult and couldn't afford all those great C64 games. With the bullshit streaming companies are pulling they deserve what they get.
I was just pumping gas at a random 76 station a couple days ago and the gas pump started blaring ads at me. Like, FUCK OFF! It made me want to go back at night and stab every single one of their pump screens with a screwdriver.
- I don't know if it's still the case but you used to be able to press the 2nd button down on the right to mute the pump's audio
  
  It changes based on model but yeah generally holding one of em down mutes it
I can't really get away from road side advertising for now.

Some locations don't permit billboards; my impression is that it tends to be wealthier areas.
- And then the people who live in those areas own or advertise on billboards in poorer areas.
- Vermont
Give Kagi a try if you haven't already. It'll cost you a little but you can try it for free (100 searches I think) and see how you like it. The advantage of paying for search is of course that you're no longer the product, so no more selling your data to ad companies every time you search something, plus it's actually in the providers' interest to make searching a better experience for you. Just the fact that I never have to see Quora in my search results ever again (I can just block their site) would be worth the price for me. It's just a little thing that made a huge difference for me since I search the web so many times daily, and for a long time now the results has been mostly useless.
- I like Kagi but fucking hell, it just doesn't seem to get that the vast, vast majority of people don't want search results from the US!
  
  I don't live in the US and I don't have this problem, it returns results from my area in my language no problem. You can also create a lens that locks results that originate in a specific region, haven't tried that myself yet though since the default works so well. But perhaps it depends on where you live.
Stay off the internet.
Billboards / outdoor ads: Yeah, you're out of luck. Best you can do is ignore them and look out for any ballot initiatives that would seek to remove them (rare, but possible). I've vowed never to buy anything from any company that advertises on those obnoxious mobile LED billboards.

Sporting Events: Similarly out of luck. Lucky for me, I can avoid those entirely. Depending on where you go, a lot of those are local businesses, so I'm less offended by them (I try to buy local when possible/practical).

Streaming services: This is a moral grey area, but my conscience is clean. I subscribe to whichever service(s) has what I want to watch but just pirate the shows. That's less about avoiding ads and more about having a better experience. e.g. less crappy apps that often shoehorn in ads, having to use multiple websites with crappy players / buffering, players that won't work on Linux, etc. Like you, I will only subscribe to ad-free tiers.

For general browsing on my PC: uBlock Origin is a standard on all my browsers with PiHole as a fallback.

On my phone: I've got a rooted device which lets me install AdAway (host file based ad block kind of like PiHole). For my other device that I don't have rooted, I keep my VPN running and route DNS to my PiHole at home.

Any other ad, I basically just tune it out.
In the world of streaming devices the AppleTV is the only one I've used with no ads on the homescreen.
I started blocking ads on Facebook. Even ones I might be interested in at some point. I mean every single fucking ad I would hide, block that specific ad, block a user page or something of relevant, and then report the fucking lot of them. It takes a little while, but eventually you get zero ads (for some time). They will of course refresh their ad campaigns and push new stuff occasionally. A simple hide-block-report and it gets cleaned up again in short order.
Linux and a browser with an adblocker will get you most of the way on the computer.

For real-life I don't have good advice. You could move somewhere where it's less common. But I think sports for example comes with ad banners everywhere.
- Didn't Vermont outlaw billboards?
  
  Thanks, didn't know...
  
  "Vermont became the first state in the continental United States to ban billboards (1968). Hawaii prohibited the advertising signs back in the 1920s. Maine and Alaska are the only other states to outlaw billboards." (https://vtdigger.org/2021/07/11/then-again-vermonts-billboard-ban-followed-a-winding-road-to-passage/)
  
  I didn't read all of it. Wonder how that's handled and translates to private property next to the road.
You should def check out the privacy communities. I only vaguely follow otherwise I would direct link you to the best one.
- Shh...
  
  It's private....
  
  J/k
No TV, radio, highways. Avoid things with ads and seek things without.Take the back way to your local library for free media. No movie theaters, no public transport, no cities, lots of DIY.
- When I was in college in 2000 I took a media class. One of the assignments was to spend 24 hours keeping a log of every ad you come across. Physical, digital, didn't matter. I gave up before noon because I had multiple pages of ads written down.
  
  There's no escaping them.
- Billboards and window ads and stuff like that are the first thing I would try to cover up if AR ever truly takes off. Augment that shit right out of my Reality.
Stop using social media, go hike, and go somewheres you enjoy that has lots of new faces.

46 comments