I follow Blender on Mastodon and, about a month ago, they started this campaign to see if they could double the amount of donations (from approximately 1% of users to 2% of users), and it’s been decently successful so far just by putting “Can you donate?” banners in more places (and posting memes about donating on their social media).

Here’s a short video they put out about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v7Uhoot4Qg

I think the funding campaign only lasts a month, so it’s probably about over (though donations are always accepted, this is just a brief social media campaign to increase development funds for FY2025).

As others have pointed out, there’s a lot to hate about ads since the industry is routinely dishonest, insulting, obnoxious, deceptive, intrusive, and all manner of unpleasant. I’ve been adblocking religiously for most of my life for these reasons.

So I think a more interesting question might be the other way around: “What do you like about commercials?”

The only commercials I’ve ever liked are the ones for local small businesses. The ones with a nonexistent production budget that aren’t beating the viewer over the head with blatant lies or dishonest sales tactics.

Adult Swim used to have faux-ad bumpers for the fictional business “Strickland Propane” from King of the Hill, featuring the honest-to-a-fault character Hank Hill as the spokesman, which I felt captured that vibe well.

Rhett and Link also made a funny homage to these kinds of commercials in this classic skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnOyMSEWNTs

I happened across a thread on Lemmy recently that discussed the usefulness of certain extensions, and this “Don’t Bother” section of the Arkenfox wiki was linked:

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-dont-bother

A lot of conventionally useful extensions like Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, Decentraleyes/LocalCDN, etc are apparently not necessary (at least in Firefox) if you have certain browser preferences selected, like Strict Mode/Total Cookie Protection.

I felt outdated cause I still run Privacy Badger and Decentraleyes in my Firefox environments, but it was nice to see that a lot of these “extra” features that used to require extensions are now options built into the browser (or Firefox, at least).

let’s be real, youtube is a big waste of time

I see people say this a lot, especially on the fediverse, and it makes me wonder why people think youtube is a “waste of time” when youtube’s uses are what the user makes of it.

I primarily use youtube for learning things. There are so many thousands of hours of useful, educational content on youtube that I find the suggestion that the entire platform is useless clickbait to be reductive and disingenuous.

Sure, there are channels I watch for typical mind-numbing content like Let’s Plays and such, but I wouldn’t suggest that youtube is wholly a waste of time just because there’s plenty of mindless content on it.

Just like Reddit or Lemmy, I can create an account and subscribe to a bunch of dumb shitposting communities, but I can also subscribe to a bunch of interesting hobbyist/intrigue communities.

Lots of people work on weekends.