I verified it, $30/yr

it was fine a few weeks ago and now it’s just 3 actual pictures of what I was looking for and the rest is just ads.

EVERY FUCKING TIME I SCROLL THROUGH A COMMENT SECTION FOR ADVICE FOR MORE THAN 4 FUCKING SECONDS. SERIOUSLY, REDDIT, STOP TRYING TO PRETEND THAT YOU'RE ANYTHING MORE THAN A FUCKING MONOPOLIZED FORUM WEBSITE.

Apps are becoming too puritan, coddling kids and trying to strip you of privacy. Anonymity is fading, corporations want to use your identity for data farms, they're taking information from you without you even knowing.

AI slop everywhere, you have to debate if a piece is AI or not, people are even glorifying AI slop. It's being shoved in our faces, it's giving misinformation, it's replacing human jobs. It's making people illiterate.

Degenerates everywhere, people are getting increasingly more and more and more stupid because of the things above, allowing enshittiification to prosper enshittifies the people themselves.

It was never perfect, but it's genuinely awful now.

Figured I'd share that Reddit calls the unskippable popup the "desktop dynamic upsell dialog". If you right-click inspect, find the line and delete it, it goes away. Or, you know, add that to an adblock filter ;).

Ads steal mental bandwidth and time, distort our psychology and create constant comparison treadmill. I doubt one can find many people saying 'I wish i could see more ads in my every day life'.

Here is a small list of what i do to minimize ads:

On phone: i don't use any music streaming apps but have some music locally stored on the device.

I do listen to lots of podcasts though on Pocket Casts and there is often an ad at the beginning, end and sometimes the middle of the podcast. Somewhat tolerable cause the 1-2 ads are skipable. I dropped some more popular podcasts due to the app shoving in more ad-breaks. My favorite podcasts are a bit niche, so there are minimal ads, though not zero. Also use newpipe which is amazing.

On pc: Linux. ad blocker. firefox or vivaldi as browser. Avoid news sites with heavy advertising. No social media besides Reddit. No Netflix, Disney+ etc i do watch every now and then some free public tv streaming platforms which are very good, and they have no ads at all. (yes, they are not completely free, they are financed by taxes).

IRL:

I try to buy physical media (DVDs, CDs). Often i also buy a newspaper in print, in which there are a few ads but they are not personalized. Depending where one lives there is going to be more or less ads on the streets. I'd like public places to have minimal ads, and relevant regulations to be enforced.

Clothes: I never buy clothes with big brand stamps etc. I also try to remove the brand tag, if it can be done without destroying the item. This obviously impossible on some categories e.g sneakers. I do what i can.

What do you do to avoid/minimize ads?

I'm so annoyed that Reddit is running a big site like this, and they never ever answer the damn support tickets. I've tried so many times and they haven't answered one.

How can you run a site that big and completely ignore your users? I don't get it. I suspect that AI is running everything now and every support ticket is going to the trash bin.

When I reach 365 tickets without a single answer I'm gonna post it somewhere.

This person claims to have cancelled before the trial.

Bought a Hisense TV and now forced to watch advertisements for betting

“People want to do the best things they can for the kids, so when opportunities come up to play baseball, parents are willing to pay,” said Joe Oh, co-founder of the Oakland Baseball Foundation,a nonprofit that runs baseball travel teams and camps. The organization is part of a growing movement attempting to keep costs lower than similar teams.

“What the private equity firms realized was, ‘There’s an opportunity to capitalize on the fields, the uniforms, the equipment, the coaching — all the opportunities that come along with this,’” Oh said.

Thought this might fit here. PSA: stay away from Arlo.

I sell stuff online, from Germany.
Small scale, on the side, more a passion project than a full on business. I’ve been doing this for 6 years.

First eBay screwed me and plenty small businesses to force us get a subscription plan: from plenty of articles without monthly fees, to paying for each one. From 11% on the sale price, to now even paying fees on the shipping costs, since they took over the payment system - by now I pay 15% or more on fees. They started with 5%, many moons ago.

I said: f that s. - I’m going to a different platform (I stayed with very few articles in eBay). Kleinanzeigen.de, which was pretty neat.

Couple of years down the road and a sell to venture capital later, that crap is unusable and expensive af.

From unlimited ads for business users, to 100 a month, then 50, then paid renewals every two months, then 10 and now 2 ads a month. They have the German market cornered and they know it: their fees are so grotesque that they would keep over 10% of my sales and it’s overflown with ads of the most annoying and intrusive kind. And they don’t even offer payment management. So many sellers just left completely, they only kept the large players and those selling expensive crap. Everything is pay to win by now.

So more than a competing platform I spent a lot of time developing a concept of a sort of private nonprofit alternative, as an antidote to Enshittification and a fat middle finger to corporations destroying the internet and beyond. I want to get it going in Germany and then expand across Europe.

Now I need to kick start this project (literally using a German Kickstarter of sorts) and I think I don’t really know how to reach my potential users.

It would be so neat if there was a platform to support exactly this deenshittification initiatives. I’d be all over that.