Has Google considered making their advertising engine better? Allow us to skip every ad. Allow us to block all those fucking cryptocurrency scam ads. Forcing me to watch an ad for a company that I’m not interested in guarantees that I will hate that company and never buy their product even if I need it. I will go out of my way to buy something from a company that hasn’t tried to ram their advertisements down my throat. If ads weren’t so fucking terrible I might agree to watch them.
Thank you, this is an exact point I was making earlier today in a different conversation.
Google has two decades of information about me. Just as one random example, I’m hooked into their mapping app so they know everywhere I go and on what schedule, and can infer what I buy.
Not once in 20 years has Google advertised something to me that is in line with my interests and needs. Google knows I go to the cigar store every Monday to replenish my supply, and they’ve never suggested to me a product or service that can save me time, money, or make it more convenient.
Google’s ad system seems to shove garbage products in my face like black label shit from China (raycon, manscaped, etc) and products/companies that do not operate in my region.
How hard is it to know everything about a person, and still fail to advertise one single thing that is useful to them over decades??!
I worked for years in tech, and adjacent to marketers and sales people.
I know from direct experience that people want relevant advertisements for things that will solve a problem in their lives.
Going back to my example, I would very much appreciate an advertisement for a cigar store that will either give me a discount, introduce a new product to me, or deliver my product on my schedule.
I also make and buy mechanical toys, and I’ve had an interest in them for decades. I would really appreciate an ad that highlights a new collection of mechanical puzzles.
But instead I get badgered by Google ads for things that are nuisances and of no relevance to my life.
Instead of sharpening service for the professional barber clippers I own, because Google knows I cut my own hair, I get advertisements for Manscaped.
I steadfastly maintain there is an opportunity to advertise to people in a helpful way, but Google doesn’t do it.
You see YouTube is a American company and in America every thing is extreme you ether have a lot of ads or no ads you can have a extremely massive car or a cat that’s soo small it doesn’t exist
Straight up what made me switch to YouTube premium was a bit of a 2 pronged thing really
They started including Google Play Music with it, and then I got an unskippable 1 hour ad in front of a video that after I reloaded the page I got the same ad again.
Edit: I don’t have an issue paying for a service if the price is right. I got what I wanted for I price I’m willing to pay.
They bundle YT Music in your subscription because they wanted a share in music streaming, invested in an infrastructure on their platform and then realized that their service doesn’t offer enough to make people want to use it over their competitors’ music streaming services. Instead of taking that loss or making their service worth using, they bundle the shit nobody wants with what everyone needs and use that to justify a price hike.
If there was a basic subscription that just removes ads on the videos I click on without any other useless crap attached to it, I would pay for that. But no, it’s predatory, anti-consumer bullshit, so I just block their ads.
The whole reason is to either make it so annoying that you switch to their paid service or get as many ad dollars into the shortest amount of time possible either way. This is just greed to squeeze as much out of the consumer before they break us.
Windows X-lite is amazing, they have 10 and 11. All telemetry disabled, can install w/o defender, Cortana, and edge. Windows updates disabled, they provide update files to install themselves on their website. No ads in the start menu or anywhere. No bloat like Xbox or Store. Programs to help customize the UI a bit more.
It feels like a time machine back to XP, fresh install with nothing but bare bones Windows. You even have to install .net runtimes and c++ redists yourself.
It’s the only reason I haven’t rage quit Windows yet.
X Lite is basically just a crappy bootleg. If you want something lightweight, use IoT LTSC with MAS (you can’t activate IoT anymore, sadly) (actually, you can now)
One thing I'll throw in to help with dependencies is that if you add a games installer as a non-steam game, set proton experimental compatibly, and when you run it will install all the dependencies you need.
Then, after install, edit the non-steam game you created to point the path to the game executable. You can't remove the game from steam for the installer and add a second one for the game because adding a non-steam game creates a steam managed folder that holds dependencies that will be deleted when you remove it. This you need to edit the game entry for the installer to point to the game executable inside that steam created folder.
Doing this I installed battle net, and then changed the path for the exec to the battle net launcher, and was able to play Blizzard games. For me I did it to get diablo 2 resurrected running for my kids on their steam decks, but I was super impressed by the proton compatibility layer.
Update: tried with a few repacks. Both Dodi and Fitgirl setups fail during installation for some reason with Proton. Running them with Wine works fine.
When you added them as non-steam games did you manually set the compatibility to proton experimental?
I've only used the original game installers getting things going for my kids, so it's possible something in the way the files are repacked is different than what proton is used to.
That’s a great list, you could probably add yt-dlp for those who want to download and/or convert on their desktops (on Android Newpipe dose a great job for that) but in terms of noteworthy frontends and clients the list looks very comolete to me!
My approach may be not most anonymous, but it gets the job done. I’m downloading from multiple free VPNs. That’s it. If I exhaust quota, just switch to another one.
This is what I do also. Can be a hassle switching and finding an IP with free quota but it has worked for me so far. I do not DL a lot though nor do I automate the process.
If you want to get away from just Google, you can try iCloud or whatever Microsoft calls their Mail product now. If you want to get away with big tech run products, I recommend Proton. Of course you can always go full tinfoil hat and host your own email server with your own domain, but that will set you back at least 7 bucks a year, even if you for the cheapest register (Cloudflare, they don’t add their own fees at all, so you can’t really go lower).
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