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Friday Fun Thread for October 27, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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In the immortal words of Peter Griffin: Oh, my God, who the hell cares?

Why don't you just hit the mute button and let the ads play while you browse in another browser tab? Did your parents fail to teach to you the overwhelming importance of the TV remote's mute button when you watched traditional television with them, two or three decades ago? I don't understand why people complain so much about watching a few short seconds of advertisements in exchange for dozens of minutes of FREE video.

It's my understanding that, if you don't skip until the 30-second mark, then the ad counts as having been "watched", so the uploader still gets paid. There's at least one Chrome extension that you can set up to automatically skip ads after the 30-second mark. I don't know whether Safari has anything similar.

YouTube intentionally makes it very difficult to actively avoid ads. You’ll be served a varying number of varying-length ads, some of which are skippable after certain periods, and others which aren’t. If such an extension exists, it’s probably a good solution, but it’s historically always been better just to toss the whole edifice.

When I switched to Firefox I was on board with a video-only adblocker. Sidebar and banner ads are both fine by me. But YouTube has really gone all or nothing, so that’s out.

For what it’s worth, the period in which I started to be annoyed by TV ads was right around the time I discovered video games. The consequences were obvious.

Ooh, yeah, a video-only adblocker would be great. It's too bad Youtube is taking this hardline stance.

The creators I watch are generally demonetized anyway, so google just makes money off of their work without compensating them.

No. I'd rather not watch videos at all then.

If muting ads and sitting there works for your lifestyle, good for you