There's a sub set of people who get upset if you tell them that get upset when you saying watching content on a smart TV is the worst experience, and will call me dumb for using a PC connected to a dumb TV.

They argue that its silly to have to use a mouse and keyboard to type out things in the living room as they spend 10 minutes chicken pecking out one word on their remote control.

That and all the service providers know they are mouth breathers and intentionally give them more ad time because they know they won't do anything about it.

You can't even buy a decent television anymore because there's more money in the money they get from prebundling spyware on the TV. Then fucking tv manufacturers use your TV as a proxy so ai and Israel not farms can use your residential IP to scrape the internet and write fake reviews. Stuff that you aren't allowed to do but some how this is all just business. Disney would have your ass in a federal prison with no chance of parole yet they can rape and pillage the entire internet.

LOL. Same. My tolerance for ads has dropped down to zero over the years of aggressively blocking them. The more you block ads, the more you realize how much you hate them. Once you start using DNS level blocking, there's no way back.

Imagine someone looking at terrible slop and saying: “You know what, this is good enough to be published”. Does that person really exist somewhere in the chain? Does that person really know what they’re doing? Maybe there are multiple people like that.

I've set things up so I never see ads (uBlock Origin, AdGuard Home, etc.) but I watched an NBA game the other day on broadcast TV and immediately saw a Wendy's ad that was entirely AI generated. Blew my mind. It was slick. I'd bet most people that are accustomed to seeing ads wouldn't have even noticed.

no more fight left on those kinds

Fuck me people are stupid as shit.

I really dislike the general population, they seem to just zombie walk themselves through life paying no attention to anything at all.

A lot of it was blocking IP's and Domains in your hosts file since a lot of those connections were dial up, not high speed.

Once networking expanded a bit, it was blocking the same in your router. There were maintained lists around like there are today as well.

Yeah, I've seen that a few times. Luckily, none of the websites that are important to me fall into that category.

Most of the time when I find a site like that, I just say fuck it and go to a different site instead. If I really need that site for something, I'll open it up in (mostly vanilla) Brave instead of the noscript Firefox I'm usually using.

You don't have to whitelist the whole site at once. Most sites break up their scripts into multiple categories that come from different servers, and noscript lets you pick and choose which of those to block.

You can usually get most of the site's core functionality working while still blocking most of the ads and trackers and junk.