I could still turn it on for now but there's a warning that it's no longer supported. I have ADHD and I can't live without cosmetic filtering. (I'm not tech-oriented enough to know if that's the right term for it. I mean the ability to point at elements on a page and say "take this off for me".)

I use the function to remove YouTube shorts, recommendations, the block that nudges me to get Premium and probably a gazillion other bells and whistles that I've already forgotten about. I wouldn't use YT at all if I couldn't do this. Same deal for Reddit.

I also use it to remove moving graphics and other things on some web stores that break my focus. I wouldn't be able to get through my workday without that option. I have to source countless small items for my business from sites that are already complex enough to navigate without any additional distractions. The site designers likely have no clue how much worse their animated banners etc. make my day. That's okay. They can't take everything and everyone into account at all times. But I must be able to adapt environments to be kinder to my brain if I am to retain my executive function so I can do my job.

Are there other similar options out there that you guys can recommend? Another extension I absolutely have to have is called "You're fired". It removes everything I don't like from my YT feed based on search terms. It's perfect because interacting with the unwanted stuff doesn't seem like a good idea (at least it doesn't remove it from my feed even if it's supposed to). I don't have to interact, just add a search term one single time and it'll be gone for good. That extension wasn't widely available for other browsers last I checked so I'd like to keep using Brave if possible.

If you know me you probably know I hate advertising with a passion. I have blocked ads on my computer but I have limited control on my TV and phone when it comes to YouTube advertisements. And the other day I got this incredibly bizarre ad.

I only speak the tiny amount of Spanish I have learned through osmosis, but the phrase they are using is essentially “we’ll eat at home.” The scenario is a familiar one; you’ve got a kid in the car out in town and they see a restaurant they want to go and they ask if they can stop to eat. The parent says no, we’ll eat at home, because there are a lot of reasons why it’s better for them. Home cooked meals are cheaper. They can be higher quality, both in terms of taste and nutrition. They might have food that will go bad soon and so they want to go and eat it first. They don’t want to normalize eating rich unhealthy foods for their kids.

But this isn’t an ad for groceries or processed food products. This is an ad for DoorDash. A food delivery app. Literally none of the reasons you would want to eat at home apply here. Actually, using DoorDash in this particular situation is dramatically worse, because you are paying more money to get food you could have just picked up on the way only to get a worse version of it because it is no longer freshly prepared and is likely cold.

I just can’t get over this because it’s so incredibly out of touch with reality. Many people have had to have signed off on this for me to see this ad. What were they thinking? Are they so out of touch with reality that they think this is something that people do? The fact that this is clearly targeting Hispanic Americans makes it even worse. I live in Southern California and about a third of the people I know are Hispanic and all of them would laugh at this. I can’t help but wonder if the teams working on them were full of privileged white guys who are saying “yeah, this is what Mexicans are really like” or if there are also rich Hispanics on board who thinks this is something that people really do.

But this is just the most egregious example of out of touch advertising. YouTube ads are supposed to be targeted right? But why do I get ads for CRM, ERP, and accounting products when I don’t own a business? Why do I get ads in languages I don’t speak? Why is it that I can report and tell Google that an advertiser is inappropriate or against their terms and still they will show me the ads again?

And beyond that I am astonished at how many ads I see that exist to mislead you. Almost every time you see something compared or tested there is somthing they aren’t telling you. The most obvious example is Scott toilet paper; they advertise that they have rolls that are significantly longer than their leading competition. But what they neglect to tell you is that their product is single-ply while their competitors are double- or triple-ply. They actually have a very comfortable amount of toilet paper on each roll. Weirdly, all toilet paper is misleading though; what is a “mega roll”, how does it differ from an “ultra roll”, and why is one roll of it somehow equivalent to six of some unspecified other type of roll? In the meanwhile Old Spice is trying to take advantage of balding men like me by telling me that their shampoo increases the volume of hair by however many percent while there is fine print at the bottom saying that it is compared to unwashed hair, meaning their shampoo probably doesn’t do anything the cheapest generic product at the dollar store won’t.

I know this is basically just a rant, but I can’t be the only one who notices this stuff, am I?