Do normal people mute the ads or just let the television keep going?
I diligently mute them, I'm a freak I cannot stand them. But from the nature of many people's complaints about ads, it seems like they listen to them and want to retain the words they've said?
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I solved this problem by having not watched cable television in like ten years.
same. something like 17 years here.
Caught some TV a couple months ago at my moms place, and was horrified about the amount of ad breaks and length. I don't know how anyone can tolerate this
Frog in the pot, man. It's crazy what people put up with. Same with rawdogging YouTube
With a DVR you haven't had to watch a commercial on TV/cable in over 20 years. Streaming is bringing unskippable ads and surveillance. The internet is making things worse, not better.
Torrents bring neither and are higher quality and more user friendly.
No, it's not. Before the Internet you could only watch what was on, when it was on.
Now you can torrent anything you want to watch, whenever you want to watch it, and in much higher quality than TV used to be. And, again, without ads, which TV has always been riddled with.
That's infinitely better, on multiple metrics.
I don't watch it, but I definitely second hand consume it because my parents still watch cable. I don't really have a choice either since most every night I'm helping cook dinner while my dad watches his nightly reruns of MASH and Emergency (unless it's something else for a change). The ads aren't extremely unbearable because they're aimed at middle-aged to elderly people like my dad, but I don't care for them.
Visit a house where they have the tv on all the time. Commercials and everything. It's harsh.
I jolly roger everything. No commercials.
I found a cool way of ad-blocking back when I watched TV. Probably does not work anymore, and relies on Teletext page 888 (closed captions, the number varies by country) not being updated during ads.
What British wizardry is this?
https://www.noblecollection.com/Item--i-PRP-HP-8050
Raise it straight up in the air and say "Addi-nau-seum" into the microphone, then quickly point it at the TV.
Sadly I don't think Teletext has been broadcast (in the UK at least) in over a decade
It definitely still works in the Czech Republic and Germany. Our pre-2023 president was an avid user. Public TV stations hand-format their own and syndicated news for 39 columns and pick monthly poetry. Commercial stations just automatically jam syndicated news into the format, sometimes overflowing to another subpage just by 1 word, and host huge amounts of banner and fullscreen ads with meh graphics by Teletext standards, mostly for dodgy phone services like tarot and erotic hotlines. They also host "chat24", probably the worst message board ever: imagine a public IRC room but $0.50 per message (by SMS) including setting your nickname and color.
Pics: https://imgur.com/a/JF3wN6L
Why you askin Lemmy what normal people do?!
What are ads?
I haven't had an ad in my house or on my devices in like 15years. I block all ads.
When I go elsewhere or out and see an ad I literally get confused for a second before I remember people still let them play.
Don't suffer through ads friend.
People think i'm crazy when i tell them that. I think it's crazy to get ass blasted by ads. The only time i see an ad is when i'm at someone's home and the tv is running. I'm almost mesmerized by it because of how bad and frequent they appear.
I stopped watching TV some 15 years ago or smth.
I have not put myself in a position to be forced to watch ads in a very long time. Even when I had normal TV service I was recording shows to a computer that would identify the commercials to automatically skip them when I watched a show. But I guess I'm not anywhere near normal in that regard.
Lol, the fuck is an ad???
I either pay for no ads, or sail the high seas
Fucks ads
Ads?
One of the best things I did was raise my kids ad-free for the first 5 or 6 years of their lives. The first time they saw ads, they were baffled about what they were, then they were baffled why people would put up with them.
I take ads as a personal attack on my psyche. I turn my toothpaste around so I'm not looking at the logo. I pirate any shows I want to watch, and I use uBlock Origin in my browser.
This is the way
Ads? Hmm. No, now that you mention it. I must be doing it wrong, because I never see ads.
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
No TV, no ads. Simple.
My spouse and I have not been forced to watch a TV-ad since the late 90S. Since the day we got rid of our TV once and for all, when we realized the were expecting us to pay good money to buy a TV set and then still have to watch their ads, and more and more of them? Not the best deal. So thx, but no. 25 years later, we still have to regret it once ;)
Do you watch any streaming services or do you mean zero tv, no shows, nothing?
We do, from time to time. We will subscribe for a month to such or such streaming and watch the few content we're interested in. Most of the time, though, there isn't that many stuff we really want to watch. And if you're wondering, we watch content on simple computer screen (hooked to a Linux machine) that has nothing 'smart' in it — it just displays pixels.
Note that a few years ago, when they all started appearing, we were subscribed to quite a few services and that was fun, at the beginning. Alas, we quickly grew tired of always being fed the same kind of politically correct, highly sanitised, and very... formatted type of content. Like with books, my spouse and I both enjoy challenging content (which includes being confronted to things and thoughts we will deeply disagree with). Don't get me wrong, there are a few very high quality content that is streamed, just not enough to our taste for us to be willing to pay the always more expensive monthly fee they're asking for it.
That said, we own a large DVD collection, which we prefer to streaming because:
This is also why I quit reading ebooks almost completely, to read printed books again. I don't want anyone to be able to remotely edit or delete a book from my bookshelves (Hi Amazon, please go kindly sit your naked ass on some cactus), nor to feel entitled to look over my shoulder while I'm reading so they could 'data mine' my reading habits.
Wooops, sorry for this lengthy and 'ranty' reply. Hope you won't mind ;)
I agree with a lot of what you said. It’s why I buy my disks. Can’t be deleted.
I am going to disagree with one item. You say you don’t have a tv. The screen you use to display the image is effectively a tv. So in essence you still have one. You just don’t have cable tv or an aerial antenna. You even use the streaming services from time to time.
But otherwise yeah I definitely understand where you are coming from.
Well, technically it is not a tv since it has not the thingy (whatever the technical term is) that makes any TV able to receive a signal and transcode into a meaningful image all by itself. The thing that makes it so you just plug the TV to a cable or an antenna and get some content. Our screen needs to be plugged into a computer to do the work of creating the image the screen is displaying. Here in France, every household is required to pay a tax on the TV sets they own, for many decades, computer screens were not concerned by the tax because they could not do that stuff a TV does, so they were not considered TV.
But I understand what you mean. I was... misleading.
To make myself clearer maybe I should have said that we own screens (more than one, as we both work from home and own more than one computer each) but no TV set and have not owned one since the late 90s, and probably never will again. Edit: we watch stuff on screens, obviously, we just do not watch TV content.
re-edit: typos
That's one of the reasons I cut the cord.
And unsubscribed from Netflix/Prime when they started asking for more money for ads.
And freak out whenever the weird hacky fix from the depths of Lemmy that kills youtube ads stops working for a day.
Ads are the goddamn worse, Carpenter had them dead to rights in They Live.
I don't watch shit with adds lol. I just recently learned that in the US Netflix, Amazon Prime and the such offer paid subscriptions that still show adds. Like what the actual fuck? Just pirate at that point, the bad sites have an equal share of adds and the good ones have none, it's a much better experience.
Ads aren't a thing in my life. On the off day I have to visit someone who lives with ads and suffer through one or two I tough it out, or look at my phone, or do something different.
I don't watch live TV. I dont pay for any subscription services except phone service and internet data. I watch YouTube content that has the ads stripped out. I download youtube videos that get often rewatched to hard drive. For movies I buy DVD that can have the drm stripped out.
I play good video games preferably drm free (steam is the one service I can't really give up easy, but it has offline mode and the deck so praise gaben!). I read e-books that are drm free. I have a mp3 player downloaded with all my music drm free.
The better question is, why are you willing to live with ads at all? Assuming you are in control of your living situation and have the power change whats shown on tv or played through speakers.
Why would you tolerate being constantly bombarded with manipulative messaging by companies, political canpaigns, and all the other powerful groups who want to affect he masses for their benefit?
Why is it so hard just say no? To give up the forms of toxic entertainment delivery? Why can't you sacrifice ease and convinence and familiarity to regain some control overhow your attention is spent during free time?
If you like something, buy it and really take the steps to own it physically.
My TV lets me pause live TV, so I pause, leave the room for a bit, come back and fast forward through the ads.
DVRs are great. I don't think they're really a thing much anymore, I guess because of the declining popularity of FTA TV. Is this a feature that's built in to your TV or is it a separate DVR? How long have you had it?
I'm not American. I don't know what those terms mean. I just have a skybox.
I'm from Australia, I haven't seen them for a long time but around the mid 2000s to early 2010s we had products that were like set-top boxes that were variously referred to as PVRs (personal video recorder) and DVRs (digital video recorder). They had digital TV tuners in them and hard drives and would prebuffer paused TV up to a set amount of time allowing you to skip through ads and pause a show as you describe and they usually had more than one TV tuner in them so you could go through the Electronic Program Guide menu and set it to record another show while you watched or recorded a different one. My parents had one and it was great. I guess growing up with Free to Air TV, the novelty and unusualness of consuming media this way and not having to miss the show to get up for tea or not having to suffer the ads and just hitting fast forward still resonates with me even though now the idea of having to watch stuff on a schedule is becoming a weird and alien limitation that shouldn't be there in the first place. Ironically though now you'd have a tougher time evading the ads in some contexts despite watching almost whatever you want whenever you want.
Jellyfin has a built in DVR. It works with HD Homerun tuners.
I can't stand ads. It's even worse on TV when they yell them at you. So I actually stopped watching TV in 2009 because I couldn't stop the ads, and I was tired to have the TV trying to convince me to buy a car every 15 minutes.
If I want to watch something that was on TV, I download it from... * the internet *.
My parents still watch TV and just let the ads blast in the background, and we need to yell over them to talk. I hate it. Then they're like "oh it's just like in the ad". I don't know how they can tolerate this. I did when I was younger but when I realized that the TV was trying to sell me twice a car in 15 minutes, or about 8 times an hour, I couldn't help but notice and it's just really annoying.
Marketers: "So what you're saying is, the problem is that the ad was not personally relevant to you??? Can we collect more of your personal data to give you ads based on who we think you are?" skin cream
Ain't no ads on Jellyfin.
I stream everything and pay for ad free services. I hate ads.
I have no idea what normal people do, but I avoid ads at all costs. Sometimes I pay premium, sometimes I just don't watch.
i have not owned a television since I was a child and came to develop my quirky ad-reviling character trait
Has anyone watched an NHL game lately. They got annoying moving ads on the boards. Hard to concentrate on the puck with whirling ads in the background. Someone needs to use AI to counter thier AI. It's enough for me to stop watching. And I mute ads of course.
Haven't those ads always been there?
No. There were static sponsors on the boards. Now they do injection in live broadcasts on the boards with actual ads that move.
Yeah just watched some highlights of ducks and golden knights, that game had static ads. I think I was remembering watching Olympics soccer, I think those had moving ads
I just started watching again this year.
Mute ads in live sports. Absolutely.
Avoid ads in all other formats.
I recently tried to watch sports. It was fun but disgusting. The biggest racket I've ever seen. $80/month to watch Baseball?! $17,000 for World Series tickets?!
I always thought not wanting to watch sports was a choice. Apparently you can only watch sports if you're a fucking millionaire.
My wife normally mutes them, but I generally don't care enough to pick up the remote and push the mute button. I just tune them out and use it as a chance to grab a snack or go to the bathroom, or just check stuff on my phone.
I stopped watching 'tv' because of ads. No way will I pay for ads or be subjected to them as best I can.
This is the way.
Finding other ways to get your media that doesn't blast you with ads.
Or if it always blasts you with ads, find a way to block them.
Don't let the terrorists win.
I don't watch TV.
I use a TV and pi connected to my server thus no ads but what gets me is radio ads in cars such as a taxi or in the barbershop, I hate them, they're obnoxious.
And restaurants! That makes me quite angry - if a restaurant forces me to listen to ads while waiting for food, I may not really come next time.
Restaurants playing radio are the worst... Once you're at your table and you realize you will hear ads the whole time it's already too late
Agreed. I'm in the UK and exclusively listen to the BBC radio stations which have no ads. It always annoys me when colleagues have other radio stations on with ads
record everything. skip the commercials.
the need for having them in an ad supported environment is understood. but it's long since gotten out of hand as to how many there are. 8-10 minutes per hour when i was a kid to 20-22+ per hour now.
When i run into ads on Twitch (rare) i mute the stream and leave the tab.
I usually only make it through a couple runs of ads before bailing on the stream.
Firefox + Alternate Player for Twitch = no ads
If its a State Farm ad, its definitely getting muted.
I don't watch television in a way that exposes me to commercials. Same with YouTube and Spotify.
I fast forward through ads during podcasts assuming my hands are free enough to do so, but will listen through them if I'm driving. I don't absorb much from them, I'd be hard pressed to recall any I heard even within the last hour. I think I've been hearing one on repeat lately about subscribing to a service to tell you what services you're subscribed to; couldn't tell you the name of the company though.
YouTube you can skip ads with uBlock origin for the normal kind and sponserblock for the embed "ad read" kind the youtuber does.
No, I never muted them. How else are you supposed to know when the series continues?
When I was a kid I would change the channel until commercials were over
I mute them habitually and very regularly wish muting was kept as a metric so "they" could know just how much I truly loathe them.
I always mute and go off to do something else (meaning, I'm not watching, either). One of my worst hells was when I had to take care of my MIL for 2 months last year and while she watches YouTube non-stop, she does it with all the ads. I hadn't realized how bad the ads there actually are these days. I almost didn't make it.
I find ads on tv to actually be entertaining. Like sometimes even cinematic masterpieces. Last time I watched tv was Olympic games so I don't watch tv all too often anyway.
I don't watch cable TV. I get free Disney plus which includes ads. For these I do in fact mute them. I find ads annoying.
Never directly watch any ads. We record everything on HTPC (NextPVR), ads are cut before the recordings get thrown into Jellyfin. Ads in general simply dont happen in our household
OP was asking about Normal people.
Of course non-normals ad block.
But I've seen my parents use their phone and ignore the 60% of ads take that over the screen.
I set my parents up with YouTube Revanced because they watch YouTube a ton. Now they complain and ask me to fix it whenever it gets out of date and some ads start to slip through...makes me so fuckin proud 😄
I don't watch many things that have commercials. Only if I really want to see something and nothing else is more convenient or it's just for background noise while working on a project.
But since so many streaming sites let the ads be super loud compared to the content, yes, I usually mute it a couple of seconds ahead of time to avoid the jump scare.
You're in good company here.
I expect most people who decide to watch cable or a comparable streaming service would watch ads with the volume on. A lot of people grew up with cable and constant ads and don't see a problem with it.
Use a DNS adblocker on your router and mobile network. 10x easier than it sounds. I haven't seen an ad on my screen that I didn't want in years.
I record everything I watch. Record now and watch later. Then I fast forward through the commercials. If something seems interesting I'll go back and actually watch it.
Don't know what service you go through or where, buty parents have had the unfortunate pleasure of recording some things (don't remember what because I don't pay attention to the TV often anymore of I can help it) through Xfinity and have fast forwarding through the small commercial breaks feature disabled.
I bought a tivo have had a couple through the years. They (spectrum and the tv station) can't control what I fast forward through.
I don't know what normal people do but people like me don't see ads because they use the appropriate protections from the invasiveness of the internet.
Pihole. Firefox. ublock origin, privacy badger, decentraleyes...
It also helps if you don't participate in systems that attempt to intrusively shove ads down your throat, but you do you.
I’d have to pay closer attention to the ads if I wanted to mute them at the right times. My mother in law does the mute thing and either forgets to unmute it until halfway through the scene or gives the silent ads her undivided attention.
I'd rather miss some content (or rewind if possible) than hear an ad.
My wife mutes them, I just ignore them.
when an ad is on I take the time to stand up and do whatever small tasks I have to
When I was a kid my father would always mute the ads, which was annoying to me because the images still demanded my attention and it was frustrating not knowing what they said. Now I don't watch TV and know how to use adblockers so it's a mute point.
A mute point or a moot point? You have (accidentally?) made a language pun there.
Ha. Mute point
I haven't seen an add in years, but I would mute or do something else like a regular commercial break. You know, snack, maybe bathroom, check my phone, etc.
Ads are my chance to get up, make a snack, come back and find that along with the ads I've missed the next 5 minutes of my show
I use YouTube premium and Twitch turbo to have no ads at all.
I avoid ads religiously but when I can't avoid them I mute and look away
You’re not a freak, they’re something that you don’t wanna pay attention to but they’re literally made to grab your attention, so it drives you crazy. Nothing wrong with muting them
Commercial breaks wouldn’t drive me so crazy if every third ad wasn’t for a medication with legitimately gruesome side effects
I made an Arduino IR cloner, took it to the barbershop and when nobody was looking copied the mute button's code so I now have a little device to silence the long Retro Music Television ad breaks I would otherwise have to endure. I don't really go anywhere with TVs otherwise.
How did you do this?
The remote was lying around and I just pointed it at an ATmega on a small breadboard with this code when nobody was looking. I muted the TV briefly to check that it worked, and took the device home to make a transmit-only ATtiny version inside one of those promotional keychains that have a coin cell, button and LED. I didn't bother with writing the program the "right" way (sleep mode and pin change interrupt, which would eliminate button contact problems and allow for more complex behavior like more buttons or multiple-press), the ATmega just plays the sequence on powerup.
The other option is to find the closest possible TV model online (not easy, wall-mounted TVs you can't see from the back barely have any distinguishing features) and check if the listed remote code works. Or use an IR-enabled smartphone, the various apps cover most TV models.
I watch regular tv so little, it mostly doesn't happen. We used to DVR a show, but it's been off the air for a while now (or my settings broke when I moved), and fast-forwarded through them. Now, it's generally only very rarely watching the news and I suppose I let them play.
My guess is that normal people, such as the ones least likely to be on Lemmy, don’t do anything when an ad plays. They’re accustomed to seeing them, and aren’t likely to be inclined to stop them, as quite a few on here would. There are always outliers, though.
You will never see ads skipped through where I am. What's the issue with them?
Ads weren't bad when it was like a minute with of commercials. Now it can be 7 minutes at a time. The worst was when I was watching Star Trek Voyager, a one hour show was actually 27 minutes of ads. Not a joke. 27 minutes of ads and 33 minutes of show. That was what broke me. I now record everything and watch it later and fast forward through the commercials.
Was it through streaming, cable, or some other digital thing?
I don't see advertising as straying away from being a sub-conversation of intellectual property. If a service emphasizes its usage, I'm either going to honor it all the way through or switch to an alternate medium.
Cable tv
And I’m sorry I just disagree. A few ads is one thing. Basically half the show is just stupid. I won’t watch that many commercials. I’ll record the show
What were you doing to end up with a program that was interrupted like that by the minute?
Not sure what you mean by, what was I doing.
But I recorded the show as a test because I was thinking man there seems to be a lot of commercials. I checked the time before I started the show. Then I watched the show and fast forwarded through the commercials. Then I checked the time after the show.
That's how I figured out how out the length of the actual show. They played a little bit of show then a block of commercials.
I mute them unless I’m interested.
Most ads are obnoxious and feel like I’m getting a headache listening to the same repetitive, obnoxious voices/music.
I have a TV but don't have cable, completely replaced normal TV with yt, Netflix, and anime. I use brave browser so I don't get ads
For the few cases I watch live TV over the antenna, I will either lower the volume or leave it be. Muting to silence is usually too jarring but the same could be said about the ad itself
I ignore them. I don't really watch TV channels nowadays, both shows and ads are just background noises to me.
I mute and change channels. Bout half of them have the same ads on at the same time though
I mute them, look away, or go to another room. Can't let the bastards win..
My home is off the grid
One of the following:
Mute the entire TV and use the closed captions when watching the programs. I do this.
Team mute all the way.
BTW I hate using Apple TV.
"Normal people" sit all the way through ads and are having receptacles installed in their carotid arteries for Amazon to pipe petrochemical runoff directly into their blood-brain barriers.
Me? I don't own a working television, I haven't turned on a radio in years, and all of my digital devices run a FOSS operating system I installed on them with layers of ad blockers.