People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
- Banksy
It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
Subverting ads doesn’t even need to be high art. E.g.
I opened youtube on a corporate PC the other day - viewing ads on the platform for the first time in I don’t even know how long, at least 8 years, probably a fair amount more - and was immediately repulsed. How do people live like this? I don’t understand it either.
Pihole, revanced, sponsor block, ublock, … Essential tools to access the Internet. My phones permanently connected to a self-hosted vpn that keeps it behind pihole wherever I am.
I swear god; If I ever look up at the night sky and see a billboard shining down at me from space, I’m bombing my nearest Google office.
I used to just
yt-dlpany YT video links people share, but that doesn’t work anymore and no ETA on a fix.My new favorite thing is my PeerTube instance.
yt-dlpis basically broken for almost all YT videos now since it doesn’t yet support SABR, and most videos are forcing that now.Someone shares a YT link? Copy, paste into Peertube, wait like 30 seconds for the transcode, and watch. No BS. And if I want to watch it later? Well, there it already is.
Edit: It appears the wonderful people maintaining
yt-dlphave fixed that since I last tried back in December.Yt-dlp still works just fine; I used mine lastnight.
Remember to run ‘yt-dlp -U’ to update it.
I watch something like 20 YouTube videos a day from many different subscriptions. I don’t really want to straight download them all.
Huh. I’m on the latest release and every video I download fails with the SABR notice and link to the issue for it. Maybe it’s regional?
Post a link that isn’t working for you? Maybe I just haven’t found a broken one…
What version of yt-dlp are you running?
Oh, you’re right. It does work after updating. I was on 2025.12.08 which was the latest the last time I messed with it around that same time and saw that the SABR bug had been open since March of 2025. Still open so that was what I had been watching.
The 2026.02.04 build worked fine.
Still gonna keep my PT instance lol.
I’m using https://freetubeapp.io/ and so far it mostly works. You have to stay on top of updates, and age-restricted videos can be a problem, but the feature I love most is that it can subscribe to creators without an account, and it just shows you time-sorted feed. It also has native sponsorblock baked in, and has support for downloading videos, or using an invidious as a proxy.
You can turn off autoplay, comments, recommended videos and other engagement-maxing bullshit, so it’s just a video player without distractions that I can use to follow stuff I’m directly interested in, that doesn’t force content on me.
Update yt-dlp it literally works. ETA is 0
Sometimes I go visit an elderly aunt, who watches a lot of TV. One time I was there and watched a bit of TV with her and my cousin. I had the remote, and started manually muting every time that ads came on.
They thought I was crazy. Why would I want to mute ads? They just didn’t understand why I would do that. Anyway, I haven’t watched TV with them since then.
Also, paying for a with-ads subscription like Hulu-with-ads. I honestly don’t get it.
Idk maybe you should and always mute it, maybe after awhile of you doing it it’ll be harder when you’re not there doing it to keep the status quo and they can join us on the fuck ads team lmao
Bill Hicks (video):
By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. […]
There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers, OK, kill yourself.
Seriously, you are the ruiner of all things good. […]
No this is not a joke. You’re “There’s going to be a joke coming.” There’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself […]
I know all the marketing people are going, “He’s doing a joke” There’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. […]
I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too: “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market. He’s very smart.”
Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking, evil scumbags! […]
St. Bill always gets an upvote.
I just canceled an office space my company rented because they put up a TV in the kitchen playing ads. They refused to relent and we are moving out now.
How do folks manage their actively hostile relationship with advertising?
I use VPN, and NoScript.
uBlock Origin with everything enabled, not using apps on phone (using browser instead) and using services like Kagi and Nebula for adfree quality search and videos
Refuse to buy their product if their ad is obnoxious.
Advertising isn’t exactly hipnosis to get you to buy the product. It’s a strategy to get you familiar with the brand/product, so that, if you have to choose between products later, you’ll favor the brand you already know (a common bias we all have). This will happen without you necessarily noticing it, because we’re all blasted with numerous ads and there’s no way to keep track of them all.
And the strictest uBlock Origin’s policy possible. Don’t forget the strictest uBlock Origin’s policy. And Cookie AutoDelete too.
