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0 pointsWorldMaker5y ago0 comments

It's been really interesting to see the shift in ads and other things across the entire web when I forced all of my Google interactions to non-default containers. The amount of painful ReCaptcha interactions I've had has gone way up, but getting rid of a lot of the low quality "personalized" ads generally seems worth it.

It was most useful for cleaning up the horror show that is YouTube recommendations if random YouTube videos from searches and chat recommendations don't get tracked to my logged in account. There's still a ton of noise in the recommendations engine and I will never trust auto-play again, but I'm having to block and/or report fewer channels and I don't automatically shudder just seeing the recommendations column show up above the fold anymore (though I still tend to prefer browser widths that drop recommendations below the video I'm watching because what a waste of space that is).

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sundarurfriend5y ago· 1 in thread

> The amount of painful ReCaptcha interactions

I've found that clicking the Headphone icon and transcribing the few words makes this a much less annoying experience (especially as a non-American [1]). It also seems more forgiving of errors, though the audio is pretty clear anyway.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805

WorldMakerOP5y ago

I have resorted to that more than once at this point. I consider that part of the "painful" as I may not always have speakers at the ready and/or at certain times of day feel a need to take the time to plugin headphones so as not to bother neighbors/etc. I also suspect given how many bots have moved on to using that themselves that those are going to get nastier and worse "soon" too.

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