Sergio

the performance difference is night and day

People say this, but… performance for what? To show us ads?

I’d much rather take the slightly-lower-performance browser that doesn’t show ads. My brain cycles count as performance too.

That reminded me to look up their interview with Saul Alinsky again, and I found a page with a bunch of the Playboy interviews: https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/playboy-interviews/

a problem entirely fabricated by YT

I agree with your basic point, tho to be fair, server costs are a thing, so it’s more like a problem fabricated by… capitalism? the commercialization of the internet? The centralization of resources? I guess it depends on what you think the long-term solution is.

brand recognition. IOW, when you are at the grocery store, you think of Coke in general rather than any specific ads.

Agreed. More specifically, I think brand association plays a part. Even if you never drink cola of any type, the ads make you think “Coke is the kind of drink for people who (whatever)”. Then when you see your friend drinking one you say “Oh you drink coke? I guess you’re the kind of person who (whatever the ad campaign says).” It’s really insiduous.

Some of those old books had ads for cigarettes in them! Mostly the cheaper paperbacks. For some reason it wasn’t as annoying, it was more of a historical artifact, an indication of the context in which the book was originally read.

I will sit on my floor with nothing, for hours, before i watch ads.

I notice that I don’t pay attention to videos as much any more. It’s just stuff playing in the background while I game or edit an image or browse piefed or something. So if it “hangs” for a couple seconds while ublock fights the ads, it doesn’t really bother me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

ikr whenever I visit my elderly aunt, she has cable TV on. I timed it once and there’s like 10 minutes of ads for every 20 minutes of content.

dunno I don’t use mobile clients for piefed… I think there’s one but don’t know much about it.

Piefed is awesome. I really like Scheduled Posts, as well as Feeds (which are collections of communities). There are only a couple reasons why keep my lemmy.world account: uploading images in comments is difficult in piefed, and I don’t think piefed supports custom preview for youtube videos yet. But I imagine those will be fixed at some point in the near future.