I'm still unable to accept that people accept ads as a part of life. I can't use instagram it's full of ads. I did finally get YT premium convinced by people on here but UBO all the way. Thankfully
I never got sucked into Twitch.
I get it too I'm a bad person for not accepting articles where every other paragraph is an ad.
There was a Firefox extension long ago that did NOT block ads but hid them. Basically it loaded them and for all the site knew, the add was showing, so it was transparent.
But, the ad wasn't rendering in the page. So the user didnt need to suffer them, but the website owners still profited.
The only losers where ad buyers, who IMHO are exactly the ones that should be affected.until they realize that ads are not effective.
Someone should bring something like that for current platforms. Even for video like, a placeholder video with a tip, interesting fact or whatever, playing while the page load the real video.
I pay for YouTube Premium to block YouTube's "native" ads on Apple TV, but yeah, the sponsorship crap is getting out of hand. I need to look into getting the Apple TV sponsorblock thing set up.
This is a side complaint on YT but I have purchased so many UHD movies and they only stream in 480P. I think you have to have some kind of YouTube certified device to play it in UHD but annoying.
Pro tip: If you still have a local record store with a used section, you can probably buy blurays and dvds super cheap. They’re typically 25-50% the price of renting on Amazon/Apple, or buying used media on Amazon.
Also, it’s actually easier to bypass the DRM crap than not, so they’ll continue to play in full resolution moving forward.
Honestly if you've bought (oh sorry "licensed") a movie, I'd have 0 problem torrenting what you've paid for vs dealing with these games. Companies just want forever subscriptions, not purchasing in any case.
I've noticed this with shorts. I'll go through 20 or so, check my YT history and Google treats the worst ones as a watched video. I'll spend less than a second as my brain processes the slop and then skip. Sure as shit they act like I watched the whole video and recommend me more. It has to be some sort of revenue scam, no customer advantage has appeared to me yet.
If you have YT Premium and start skipping ahead while an in video ad is playing, it helpfully provides a button to skip it. Still annoying, but much less so.
I watch stuff related to photography/cinematography, fishing (creeks), hobby electronics stuff, cars. That's most of it. Some makers like Hyperspace pirate. Travel videos like Japan Maibaru travel is good. Music recommendations, search a song and click on the "Song name + mix". The travel stuff I don't travel myself but the mood/atmosphere is great like Japanese towns near coast lines.
It's funny being a developer you don't watch much developer content like Primogen though I'm jealous these guys can just talk into a camera and make money. It is a skill to be likeable/mass appeal, being entertaining.
I already know the ad anyway, "this video is sponsored by SquareSpace". Bro I'm not going to use square space alright, I'm going to go into VS Code, make a SPA, host it on S3, buy a domain, connect the DNS, setup up ALB, CDN, setup RDS, cognito and then I'll have a website. Oh I also need github actions to do the build and push out the new changes.
Will throw this random comment in. Competition with the masses is hard. I paid a friend of mine $100 per song he produced for me (which were bad). But then I can go on Epidemic Sound and for $10/mo pick from a shit ton of good songs... how does a single creator compete with that.
I am just today experience an issue where the volume is reset 100% for each ad. Ads play, I turn volume down to 8%, I have the tab still on display (though I have focus on a separate window), and when the 1st ad ends, the 2nd ad is as loud as 100% even though the slider remains at 8%. Click to reset it to 8%, then 3rd ad plays at 100%.
I noticed during the olympics that they would hide the in-page volume controls during commercials. I hadn't seen that before. Fortunately it's still possible to mute via the tab control.
> Avoid minimizing or muting Twitch for a better experience.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that it's not possible for javascript to detect that you've muted the browser tab itself, at least. Doesn't solve the problem of them checking whether you have the tab focused, of course, but it should be mutable.
I suspect this is one of the less nefarious reasons age verification is getting pushed so hard. 2026: you need a webcam to prove your age. 2030: we know you have a webcam because you verified your age. It must be left on with echo cancellation and background noise suppression disabled so we can hear the ad we are playing.
<insert obvious ways in which this will be misused here>
that's the thing about advertisers. people who don't want to see them get very good at ignoring them, and finding ways to prevent them entirely via technical means.
this means that advertisers must constantly move the "we won't cross this" line further and further into absurdity. it will never stop. not ever, not so long as people have things to sell.
i hope i'm dead when ad viewing only counts when you buy the advertised product.
"Thank you for your Twitch subscription. You've used all of your paid time, and can no longer view streams. But, good news, buy 1 product advertised to you in the next 15 minutes and you'll get another 24 hours of streaming!"
then watch as they increase the number of products you must buy while decreasing the number of hours you get from it.
it will never ever stop.
advertising should be illegal or be highly regulated. the arms race between viewer and advertiser will never stop until one or both of those things happen.
I think it was the MPAA that tried to develop DVD players with cameras so they could count room occupancy and lock the content if you were tying to exceed the terms of their license.
Was it Sony that had the patent on a device that would require the watcher to say the product name out loud to the microphone to continue watching? The product to my knowledge doesn't exist but the patent for it did.
> Maybe the people on charge have personally invested heavily in Kick?
Twitch is owned by Amazon. AWS sells the streaming tech Twitch uses to Kick.
Amazon would probably rather sell IVS to Kick than try and figure out how to make Twitch profitable. Or the just don't care enough to notice the people at Twitch are just LARPing at business.
Long ad breaks were real annoying on Twitch, I try to watch the same streamers on YouTube now if possible, since I have a YouTube family subscription (seems like avoiding ads on Twitch requires a subscription to each streamer?).
That YouTube is much better technically (e.g. immediate rewinding) is also a nice bonus.
Edit: I'm seeing now that there's something called Twitch Turbo for $12/month to avoid ads, though YT premium family still seems like a better deal as long as you have 2+ people for it, since you also get a YouTube music sub and, y'know, no ads on the rest of YouTube proper.
Why does the Window Manager have to provide focus and even visibility info to the application? I could foresee an evolution of runtime controls where "Is Focused" is a user-selectable permission for apps, just like how the browser requires user approval to allow web notifications or PeerConnection access to network or webcams.
I think this case was the browser was active, but not the tab, so the browser reports that.
Many, many telemetry metrics have been added in the name of power and efficiency. If a page refreshes every 30 seconds, is it still worthwhile doing it when the tab isn’t active? It would be better to wait until the tab is active again, then refresh immediately.
That being said, all of these capabilities are a privacy nightmare, only increasing the precision of browser fingerprinting and user monitoring. Firefox could have taken a stance on refusing to implement them, but I don’t think it has an easy opt out.
This is related but also kinda an aside: has anyone been able to find a solid, reliable ad blocker for Twitch?
Brave use to block it for a while by default (it does great on YouTube ads).
There also use to be a ping pong between Twitch and some chrome extensions which worked temporarily and then Twitch broke a week later.
The best I've been able to find is Alternate Player for Twitch.tv which does hide the ads (essentially freezing the stream while they play), but I have been unable to keep the stream playing ad free for quite some time.
> The best I've been able to find is Alternate Player for Twitch.tv which does hide the ads (essentially freezing the stream while they play), but I have been unable to keep the stream playing ad free for quite some time.
This is not my experience. Alternate Player for Twitch.tv essentially ignores twitch ads for me. Using Brave, not sure if this is relevant.
All this is also a great argument for just not making browsers capable of conveying this kind of information in the first place…
Some might argue that it allows for better web apps, but the delta between how much better in can make web apps and how much poorer it can make the overall web experience is too great to be worth it, and that's before one gets into the privacy implications of browsers being so eager to share all these little nuggets of info.
This is the only correct answer. The second firefox is actually no longer viable, I guarantee you chrome is going to rapidly go closed source or require software attestation to prevent modification (not sure what the analogous plan for Safari will be, but it won’t be good).
No, they do not. They just value their silicon valley paycheck over personal integrity.
And really, this isn't a big deal. It's a bold lie everyone can see through, but it's not nearly as consequential as other bold lies society tolerates or is complicit in. Many of these lies make modern society function in the first place - they're necessary fictions everyone participates in.
This lie is... laughably irrelevant, which is why calling it out won't make you a pariah. People are jumping at the chance to point and laugh when doing so carries no consequence.
Other examples of inconsequential bullshit: "Your call is very important to us", "We value your privacy", "We're like family here", and "It's not about the money".
Unfortunately, browsers "solved" this by intentionally adding APIs that enable websites to do this to you. It wasn't possible to abuse users this way until the relevant APIs for detecting focus and occlusion were added. :(
In some way it’s a feature, leaves more room for products that are more user friendly. Of course overall it's still bad; this framing gives me some hope at least.
Friendly reminder to use a browser you can disable the active tab apis in, IronFox / LibreWolf are both great (Mobile / Desktop), Firefox if you value convenience the most.
Good fiction writers seem to have a very deep understanding of human behavior, both as individuals and groups/systems. It's probably a combination of art imitating life, imitating art, and part prediction based on this understanding how human behavior and human systems evolve and interact.
I'm still unable to accept that people accept ads as a part of life. I can't use instagram it's full of ads. I did finally get YT premium convinced by people on here but UBO all the way. Thankfully I never got sucked into Twitch.
I get it too I'm a bad person for not accepting articles where every other paragraph is an ad.
There was a Firefox extension long ago that did NOT block ads but hid them. Basically it loaded them and for all the site knew, the add was showing, so it was transparent.
But, the ad wasn't rendering in the page. So the user didnt need to suffer them, but the website owners still profited.
The only losers where ad buyers, who IMHO are exactly the ones that should be affected.until they realize that ads are not effective.
Someone should bring something like that for current platforms. Even for video like, a placeholder video with a tip, interesting fact or whatever, playing while the page load the real video.
Youtube is still very much ad spam even if you block the ads.
Of course it depends on what kind of videos you watch. But videos themselves are becoming more ad filled and lower effort for me.
I mainly consume software, gaming, cooking and hardware news videos.
Huge portion of human effort going to ads is really sad
The extension 'sponsorblock' automatically jumps over ad reads in the video, with user-submitted start/end data.
Can't recommend it enough. And with this plugin you'll immediately notice if a video is vapid (read: only exists to plug the sponsor.)
I pay for YouTube Premium to block YouTube's "native" ads on Apple TV, but yeah, the sponsorship crap is getting out of hand. I need to look into getting the Apple TV sponsorblock thing set up.
This is a side complaint on YT but I have purchased so many UHD movies and they only stream in 480P. I think you have to have some kind of YouTube certified device to play it in UHD but annoying.
Pro tip: If you still have a local record store with a used section, you can probably buy blurays and dvds super cheap. They’re typically 25-50% the price of renting on Amazon/Apple, or buying used media on Amazon.
Also, it’s actually easier to bypass the DRM crap than not, so they’ll continue to play in full resolution moving forward.
That's one of those things, gotta have all these discs... I already have a hoarding problem, but it is a solution
I want to point out I'm still an apt dweller unfortunately
Nah, you can rip the discs and sell them back/toss them.
You can also get discs from most libraries, book stores, many garage sails, ebay, for super cheap.
Honestly if you've bought (oh sorry "licensed") a movie, I'd have 0 problem torrenting what you've paid for vs dealing with these games. Companies just want forever subscriptions, not purchasing in any case.
We use an official YouTube app, and it’s all ad fraud.
It rapid rolls through video streams showing a second or two of each ad.
Presumably this is so Google can charge advertisers for impressions that don’t actually exist.
I've noticed this with shorts. I'll go through 20 or so, check my YT history and Google treats the worst ones as a watched video. I'll spend less than a second as my brain processes the slop and then skip. Sure as shit they act like I watched the whole video and recommend me more. It has to be some sort of revenue scam, no customer advantage has appeared to me yet.
If you have YT Premium and start skipping ahead while an in video ad is playing, it helpfully provides a button to skip it. Still annoying, but much less so.
I watch stuff related to photography/cinematography, fishing (creeks), hobby electronics stuff, cars. That's most of it. Some makers like Hyperspace pirate. Travel videos like Japan Maibaru travel is good. Music recommendations, search a song and click on the "Song name + mix". The travel stuff I don't travel myself but the mood/atmosphere is great like Japanese towns near coast lines.
It's funny being a developer you don't watch much developer content like Primogen though I'm jealous these guys can just talk into a camera and make money. It is a skill to be likeable/mass appeal, being entertaining.
I already know the ad anyway, "this video is sponsored by SquareSpace". Bro I'm not going to use square space alright, I'm going to go into VS Code, make a SPA, host it on S3, buy a domain, connect the DNS, setup up ALB, CDN, setup RDS, cognito and then I'll have a website. Oh I also need github actions to do the build and push out the new changes.
Will throw this random comment in. Competition with the masses is hard. I paid a friend of mine $100 per song he produced for me (which were bad). But then I can go on Epidemic Sound and for $10/mo pick from a shit ton of good songs... how does a single creator compete with that.
Sponsor block works great.
My 2.5 year old recognizes ads and says “ew, ads” because I’ve intentionally said it each time we see one.
Drink verification can to continue
That was my immediate reaction too. Can't believe how prescient a 4chan post about a doritos munching neckbeard was
13 years ago. For those not in the loop:
https://imgur.com/please-drink-verification-can-dgGvgKF
I was thinking the same thing lmao
I am just today experience an issue where the volume is reset 100% for each ad. Ads play, I turn volume down to 8%, I have the tab still on display (though I have focus on a separate window), and when the 1st ad ends, the 2nd ad is as loud as 100% even though the slider remains at 8%. Click to reset it to 8%, then 3rd ad plays at 100%.
Not sure if this applies, but might be worth consideration
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/10/06/no-more-loud-commercials-g...
I noticed during the olympics that they would hide the in-page volume controls during commercials. I hadn't seen that before. Fortunately it's still possible to mute via the tab control.
> Avoid minimizing or muting Twitch for a better experience.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that it's not possible for javascript to detect that you've muted the browser tab itself, at least. Doesn't solve the problem of them checking whether you have the tab focused, of course, but it should be mutable.
I suspect this is one of the less nefarious reasons age verification is getting pushed so hard. 2026: you need a webcam to prove your age. 2030: we know you have a webcam because you verified your age. It must be left on with echo cancellation and background noise suppression disabled so we can hear the ad we are playing.
<insert obvious ways in which this will be misused here>
that's the thing about advertisers. people who don't want to see them get very good at ignoring them, and finding ways to prevent them entirely via technical means.
this means that advertisers must constantly move the "we won't cross this" line further and further into absurdity. it will never stop. not ever, not so long as people have things to sell.
i hope i'm dead when ad viewing only counts when you buy the advertised product.
"Thank you for your Twitch subscription. You've used all of your paid time, and can no longer view streams. But, good news, buy 1 product advertised to you in the next 15 minutes and you'll get another 24 hours of streaming!"
then watch as they increase the number of products you must buy while decreasing the number of hours you get from it.
it will never ever stop.
advertising should be illegal or be highly regulated. the arms race between viewer and advertiser will never stop until one or both of those things happen.
I think it was the MPAA that tried to develop DVD players with cameras so they could count room occupancy and lock the content if you were tying to exceed the terms of their license.
Was it Sony that had the patent on a device that would require the watcher to say the product name out loud to the microphone to continue watching? The product to my knowledge doesn't exist but the patent for it did.
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/fj24w7/sony_...
Please drink verification can.
(This never happened though. The MPAA did a lot of shady things with DRM, but not this.)
I believe this was a Microsoft patent related to the kinect.
Twitch has been speedrunning their own demise. Maybe the people on charge have personally invested heavily in Kick?
When it stopped being about people playing games and became discount reality TV, it's death nell was rung.
The trashiest moved to kick. Twitch is mostly soft porn now.
Thank you for telling me where they went so I know not to go there
Right, but which streams specifically...so I can block them of course.
Even when it was about games there was an absurd amount of "games ... but the host has almost uncovered boobs pointed at the screen" content.
Felt like Twitch was always teetering on the edge and really nobody with any power cared to avoid the inevitable.
It’s owned by Amazon, a publicly traded company. They squeeze as hard as they can, and then some to hit those quarterly numbers.
> Maybe the people on charge have personally invested heavily in Kick?
Twitch is owned by Amazon. AWS sells the streaming tech Twitch uses to Kick.
Amazon would probably rather sell IVS to Kick than try and figure out how to make Twitch profitable. Or the just don't care enough to notice the people at Twitch are just LARPing at business.
Long ad breaks were real annoying on Twitch, I try to watch the same streamers on YouTube now if possible, since I have a YouTube family subscription (seems like avoiding ads on Twitch requires a subscription to each streamer?).
That YouTube is much better technically (e.g. immediate rewinding) is also a nice bonus.
Edit: I'm seeing now that there's something called Twitch Turbo for $12/month to avoid ads, though YT premium family still seems like a better deal as long as you have 2+ people for it, since you also get a YouTube music sub and, y'know, no ads on the rest of YouTube proper.
Twitch Turbo used to be Twitch Prime and was free with your Prime subscription.
You can get a free subscription to a single Twitch channel per month with Prime.
Twitch Turbo is site wide.
IIRC other Twitch Prime benefits (free games, DLC, etc.) were rolled in to the Amazon Gaming brand, and more recently Luna.
Why does the Window Manager have to provide focus and even visibility info to the application? I could foresee an evolution of runtime controls where "Is Focused" is a user-selectable permission for apps, just like how the browser requires user approval to allow web notifications or PeerConnection access to network or webcams.
I think this case was the browser was active, but not the tab, so the browser reports that.
Many, many telemetry metrics have been added in the name of power and efficiency. If a page refreshes every 30 seconds, is it still worthwhile doing it when the tab isn’t active? It would be better to wait until the tab is active again, then refresh immediately.
That being said, all of these capabilities are a privacy nightmare, only increasing the precision of browser fingerprinting and user monitoring. Firefox could have taken a stance on refusing to implement them, but I don’t think it has an easy opt out.
This is related but also kinda an aside: has anyone been able to find a solid, reliable ad blocker for Twitch?
Brave use to block it for a while by default (it does great on YouTube ads).
There also use to be a ping pong between Twitch and some chrome extensions which worked temporarily and then Twitch broke a week later.
The best I've been able to find is Alternate Player for Twitch.tv which does hide the ads (essentially freezing the stream while they play), but I have been unable to keep the stream playing ad free for quite some time.
Firefox, uBlock Origin, then follow the linked section of the Twitch Ad Solutions GH. This has worked for me for a very long time. Use the VAFT script. https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions?tab=readme-ov...
> The best I've been able to find is Alternate Player for Twitch.tv which does hide the ads (essentially freezing the stream while they play), but I have been unable to keep the stream playing ad free for quite some time.
This is not my experience. Alternate Player for Twitch.tv essentially ignores twitch ads for me. Using Brave, not sure if this is relevant.
vaft with uBlock Origin works perfectly https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions
> claude fork chromium, remove the api so it knows if the tab is open, always return true, compile it and replace my current chrome with it
All this is also a great argument for just not making browsers capable of conveying this kind of information in the first place…
Some might argue that it allows for better web apps, but the delta between how much better in can make web apps and how much poorer it can make the overall web experience is too great to be worth it, and that's before one gets into the privacy implications of browsers being so eager to share all these little nuggets of info.
> use firefox, install uBlock Origin
This is the only correct answer. The second firefox is actually no longer viable, I guarantee you chrome is going to rapidly go closed source or require software attestation to prevent modification (not sure what the analogous plan for Safari will be, but it won’t be good).
The passkey stuff is a step in this direction.
Passkeys work with Firefox.
Seems like something a plugin could solve.
Not sure it can with the v3 changes.
>claude build a plugin to do the above
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
"for a better experience"
Do people writing this type of copy actually believe this?
you'd be amazed what you can believe when eating food and sleeping indoors depends on that belief
They don't specify who gets the "better experience" (hint: it is them, harvesting the ad dollars)
No, they do not. They just value their silicon valley paycheck over personal integrity.
And really, this isn't a big deal. It's a bold lie everyone can see through, but it's not nearly as consequential as other bold lies society tolerates or is complicit in. Many of these lies make modern society function in the first place - they're necessary fictions everyone participates in.
This lie is... laughably irrelevant, which is why calling it out won't make you a pariah. People are jumping at the chance to point and laugh when doing so carries no consequence.
Other examples of inconsequential bullshit: "Your call is very important to us", "We value your privacy", "We're like family here", and "It's not about the money".
tl;dr: "whatever."
This is something that browsers should solve.
Open a new browser window just for that tab. Presto, that tab is always active, even if that window is underneath another window.
In Firefox you can drag'n'drop a tab "out" of the tab bar, which will move it to a new window. Might work in other browsers too.
Unfortunately, browsers "solved" this by intentionally adding APIs that enable websites to do this to you. It wasn't possible to abuse users this way until the relevant APIs for detecting focus and occlusion were added. :(
It's a huge conflict of interest for an ads company to develop a browser, let alone the browser with...(checks notes)...77% market share.
https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play
This, but as a built-in browser feature, configurable per-site, and also for all the other potentially useful/creepy web APIs.
Both could work. The API could be permission based. E.g. without consent the app would always see itself as in focus.
But just use Chrome! Our website only works in Chrome. Everyone should just be using Chrome. What's wrong with a Chrome monoculture?
:)
so basically a more upbeat version of that Black Mirror episode?
That was a black mirror episode.
In some way it’s a feature, leaves more room for products that are more user friendly. Of course overall it's still bad; this framing gives me some hope at least.
Yeah. But anything bad does that.
They'd all enshittify in similar ways if they got traction.
Just think. No matter how bad a day you're having at the office, somebody had to come to work and implement this.
Friendly reminder to use a browser you can disable the active tab apis in, IronFox / LibreWolf are both great (Mobile / Desktop), Firefox if you value convenience the most.
Maybe Spotify didn't do this first but they're the ones I blame. They pause an ad while the output is muted.
It's like someone saw an episode of Black Mirror and Idiocracy and went, "That's it! That's what we need to do!" and began using them as a playbook.
Yeah, I'm sure this won't drive massive adoption of ad blockers or anything.
Good fiction writers seem to have a very deep understanding of human behavior, both as individuals and groups/systems. It's probably a combination of art imitating life, imitating art, and part prediction based on this understanding how human behavior and human systems evolve and interact.