Well, it seems to be official now. Starting April 14, 2025 Google will update its Unfair advantage policy to say it is allowed to show the same ad, from the same company, going to the same page, as long as the ad is in a different ad location. Google was just experimenting with double serving ads earlier and now it is officially going to be allowed.
Are people concerned with WHICH ads they see?
Do people see ads? I’m on Firefox with an adblocker I haven’t seen an ad in ages, anywhere. Except perhaps for that brief interval where Youtube nominally tried to stop adblocking, it worked for like two weeks and it made me go check out FreeTube until they gave up.
Yeah, with Firefox + uBlock Origin I’m always surprised when I come across an ad. It’s like getting a spam email in my Gmail inbox in 2025, a novelty :)
Whatever ads slip through are still quite annoying though (especially autoplaying videos when I disabled it in the browser settings) - I either hide them with reading mode, or Stylus if it’s a site I visit repeatedly, or if neither works I just go to another site 🤷♂️
Honestly, at this point the dealbreaking enshittification stuff I bump into is mostly subscription requests and paywalls from the sites themselves. Which, fair enough, people need to get paid and I don’t have a particularly good answer to give them about how. I am not watching ads on purpose as a support gesture, though.
Protip: you can also block a lot of those by enabling some “annoyances” blocklists in uBlocks settings.
And while you’re there, take a look at all the other blocklists they don’t enable by default. You might find something useful to you.