#use adblock though

[thevalleyoftriumph]

god youtube is such a baby of a corportation "wahhh wahh youre using an adblock... sniffle sob thats against our TOS!!!!!!! WAAHHH pwease turn of your adblock for poor little indie website youtube :((((" shuuut the fuck up you are a multibillion dollar corporation thats a fan of putting 5 one-minute long ads you cant skip in a 30 second video grow uppppp

[supmaww]

Also hello. since when

[preheville]

to no one's surprise my top artist was the oh hellos another year in a row

[torchickentacos]

MY COMPUTER WORKS PROPERLY AGAIN 🎉

[sonknuxadow]

ads in mobile games are starting to get way too bold with the way theyre automatically taking me to the download page without me clicking anything or making me click like 3 different skip/close buttons before it actually closes . Like fuck off

[eksentrismi]

what was the name of that comic you're brainrotting about? i think i missed it

It's a really short horror comic (its title being smth like "Untimely Tomb" iirc), from this old issue #142 of Creepy-magazine. Idk, I've only read very few comics from some of them magazines, one example being the comic of "The Body-Snatcher" and that one's so silly, I love it to pieces.

[comradecowplant]

is my browser broken (oh because it HAS been broken irt tumblr specifically not loading properly/refusing to scroll back up/needing to refresh the page after reblogging, but that's not the point right now) or is there no schewpid april fools thing this year? hm the musicians sure have started playing from the life boat deck of this site huh

[oysterie]

tumblr app going to shit. now pinterest changed something so i cant block the "sponsored posts" anymore on the site. we should kill someone.

[adetheenby]

ipods in 2024 anyone?

So, my iPod does this fucking genius factory thing where it forgets which artwork goes with which album and it makes guesses. Because it’s pretty sure I won’t notice.

Needless to say, I noticed.

[subjectsix]

I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!

[silverwolf242]

I can never update tumblr, because i might loose the feature (bug?) of getting the Hey please don't use adblocker :) frog pop up ONLY in the app, where i am incapable of using an adblocker.

[skyburger]

im watching hlvrai cast commentary & mr. radiotv himself called sunkist a "jpeg" and well. interally i went "Well actually 🤓 jpgs dont support transparency ☝️ so that would have to be a png" and dude it is finally setting in for me how much of a nerd i am. Who thinks that shit!!! well me i guess. but u know what i mean

[bougonia]

Hey OP, sorry in advance for the essay but you stumbled upon something I've been thinking about a lot recently. Yes, perfumes are more popular due to advertising but it extends far beyond scentbird.

So... I just (rather abruptly) snapped out of a several-months-long fixation on fragrance. I had always been somewhat interested in fragrance from a sensory-seeking perspective but a few months ago I was reminded that there were various online communities about fragrance, a switch flipped in my brain, and I became completely obsessed. Spending hours and hours per day on various subreddits, websites, and blogs dedicated to personal fragrance.

While I did spend a lot of time just earmarking different scents that I wanted to try (most of which I never actually tried-- it was more of a "the research is the fun" kind of thing), I also became familiar with the culture surrounding perfumes, how we talk about them, and why they're having such a big cultural moment right now.

Up until recently, fragrance had more or less been a woman's game. There was enough cologne enthusiasts to keep the industry going and your average man would have a bottle or two, but if you pulled a random person off the street and asked if they wear fragrance daily, more women were going to say yes than men. Here's a survey among university students from 2020-- 56% of men vs 81% of women.

But as much as the recent trend targets women and girls, it has affected men and boys far more. In January 2023, r/perfumes had 21.2k members and has now increased by (a still absurd) 480% to 123k. r/colognes, on the other hand, had a mere 7165, and has now increased to 92k, an increase of almost 1200%. That is more than double the rate of growth. For context: reddit's userbase as a whole has increased about 21%.

(I wish I could get better data, including when the majority of users joined up, but because of reddit's API changes last year that's not really feasible)

To be clear, I do get that a certain amount is just due to the natural consequence of diminishing returns. Since more women were interested fragrance in the first place (enough to join a subreddit, anyway), there's a larger body of potential men and boys who could become consumers. But what makes people get "into" them in the first place? Obviously (and as OP pointed out) advertising.

And boy howdy are they advertising to men and boys. Specifically cisgender, heterosexual males aged 13 to 25. (Yes, 13. There was a New York Times article about the rise of designer cologne among teenage boys.)

There are so many tiktokkers and youtubers who are recieving promotional bottles of very expensive scents (seriously, it isn't uncommon for a single bottle to cost >$250, and a $100 bottle is often considered inexpensive) in return for hyping them up.

There are so many youtube videos that are top 10 lists of perfumes you need to buy Right Now using terms like "panty dropper", "smellmaxxing", and "beast mode". An emphasis is put on how the perfumes will get you compliments, how ladies love them, and how they are "the best scent" (which I find absurd; scent is a very subjective experience).

But why are boys watching these videos in the first place? What drew them there?

I actually don't necessarily think this was initially a calculated move by the perfume industry. They're encouraging and capitalizing on it now, for sure, but I don't think the initial domino was intended at all.

In my opinion, ground zero for the cologne phenomenon: Jeremy Fragrance.

Jeremy Fragrance has been a fairly popular youtuber for some time now, having been reviewing fragrances since 2014. But around December 2022, he began to go viral for his odd behavior. Interest in him died down for a little bit, but then again in March 2023 he goes viral again. After that, the previously eccentric man began an extended meltdown (theorized to be the result of cocaine usage) that cemented him as a target of parody and mockery. For lack of a better term, he became a lolcow. Clips of him would frequently go viral on tiktok-- particularly (albeit not exclusively) among teen boys and young men.

And that tiktok virality had an interesting side effect. As anyone who has ever used tiktok can tell you, it has a tendency to send you down rabbit holes. For all intents and purposes, Jeremy Fragrance was a fragrance reviewer. So you and your buddies watch a few of his videos, have a good chuckle, and then tiktok keeps showing you fragrance reviews. And hey, this sounds kind of interesting actually, maybe this would help me with women...

Eventually the tiktok algorithm recognizes that other content for teen boys and young men is frequently viewed alongside cologne reviews. So other members of that demographic get those reviews. And so on and so forth-- a self-reinforcing loop.

This is a major win for fragrance companies. More interest in reviews = more reviewers = more people to get to shill for you.

Of course, I don't think Jeremy Fragrance is the only factor. I don't think people would have taken to fragrance in the same way if there wasn't already fertile cultural soil for such a trend.

I suspect the (perceived or real) disenfranchisement of boys, the same atmosphere that bred manosphere content, is at least partially to blame. There's certainly some overlap in rhetoric. I can also imagine it's a reaction to the ubiquitous punchline that teen boys are smelly and gross.

I think a similar thing happened among women, except with a bunch of smaller, less conspicuous factors. Instead of the viral smash of Jeremy Fragrance, they had the "clean girl", skincare, and other trends that encouraged girls and young women to buy all sorts of products to perfect their bodies, fragrance included. Fragrance companies, having perfected social media marketing, could pull the same tricks.

(The idea of needing to have a different perfume for every occasion/season is more or less a new phenomenon outside of hobby circles. Sure is convenient for perfume companies, though...)

The increase of girls' interest in perfumes is more or less ignored. Granted, it's not as striking as teen boys suddenly spending thousands of dollars on niche and designer perfume, but it is a massive increase. But hey, women are supposed to be into perfumes, after all. It's just another one of those costs of femininity that we expect women to bear.

Obviously a lot of this is just speculation on my end. My suspicion that it's Jeremy Fragrance's fault is especially suspect. But a lot of this is based on trends that I have noticed, and I'm far from the only one.

Anyway, I love the idea of perfumes. I love having a scent that you really like that you can smell whenever you feel like it. I like coming across something and thinking, woah, I didn't know perfumes could smell like that. However, I am very disillusioned with the perfume industry, and I especially hate the way that they utilize social media to push their overpriced products (which have been getting more and more expensive!), especially to young people who lack the critical thinking to realize they're being advertised to.

"advertising doesn't work" the increase in scentbird ads and people talking about a "personal signature scent" directly correlates with my family's interest in perfumes. Even if they're not using scentbird, something probably changed to make them want perfumes more, right?

[psychicpinenut]

sometimes you'll see people complaining about Microsoft or Google and then people will link alternatives to them like 'omfg guys just use this open source, free site instead' and i'm always like y'all are kidding yourselves if you think any of these things offer the same quality or experience that literal YouTube or Office do and that anyone will switch from the big company to some small site nobody knows

[tetranymous]

You can also adjust it from the PWA version of tumblr under

Left hand sidebar > account > click on the arrow next to each blog > blog settings > and it should be towards the bottom above blocked tumblrs

They are already selling data to midjourney, and it's very likely your work is already being used to train their models because you have to OPT OUT of this, not opt in. Very scummy of them to roll this out unannounced.

[tobacconist]

i dont use adblocker i just mute the video and do something else lol