I find the modern way that advertisers target people using the Internet and social media rather intrusive and, at this point, almost creepy and way too invasive.
I don't care much for ads on the TV or radio either, but at least there you can mostly avoid them by muting the volume or tuning to a different station. On the internet, it's all ads, everywhere you look, and nowadays companies are cracking down on ad blockers, so you can't even block them anymore without extraordinary measures that most average users don't know or don't care to know about. Some sites show popups that act almost like paywalls, in that they obscure most of the content (these are largely bypassable by turning off javascript or by using something like NoScript on a web browser), but some sites block users altogether, claiming that using an ad blocker is a violation of their fair use policies or some such nonsense (YouTube, for example, is starting to do this).
c
I don't care much for ads on the TV or radio either, but at least there you can mostly avoid them by muting the volume or tuning to a different station. On the internet, it's all ads, everywhere you look, and nowadays companies are cracking down on ad blockers, so you can't even block them anymore without extraordinary measures that most average users don't know or don't care to know about. Some sites show popups that act almost like paywalls, in that they obscure most of the content (these are largely bypassable by turning off javascript or by using something like NoScript on a web browser), but some sites block users altogether, claiming that using an ad blocker is a violation of their fair use policies or some such nonsense (YouTube, for example, is starting to do this).
Same here. I did that whole converter box thing a few years ago and found the prospect of free TV rather appealing (for a time, I didn't have cable, nor did I have internet except through my phone, so it was OTA TV or nothing). However, it was such a sterile and generic experience that I got bored and gave up because it just wasn't interesting enough to continue dealing with (I went and got cable instead, which, aside from being astonishingly expensive for rather little variety, is largely an identically boring experience, but at least I don't have to deal with an antenna).
c