I’m old enough to remember when HBO’s entire point was you paid for cable so you wouldn’t have ads. That was their business model.
Then sometime in the late 80s or early 90s (I dunno, that decade’s kind of a blur) they started sneaking ads in between shows, but not in the middle of shows. But you were paying a higher price, with a few ads. Then they started showing ads to everyone, and still making you pay. I’m still salty about that.
This was always going to happen. They’ll compound paying PLUS ads, and you’ll like it, because what choice do you have if all services are doing it?
In the early days they didn’t; that was the whole point of them. You paid a subscription specifically not to have ads like free broadcast television did.
It only lasted like a decade, but it was their whole selling point.
e: keep in mind, too, that broadcast tv at the time was where all the good content was. HBO only showed movies that had already been in theatres (thus the name Home Box Office) and Showtime’s hook was soft-core porn. (‘Do your parents have Showtime?’ was sleepover code for ‘can we watch kinda-porn after the ‘rents have gone to sleep?’) There wasn’t the dearth of original shows/movies we have now. They weren’t studios back then.
e2: sorry for multiple edits, but also bear in mind that when HBO first came out, people were watching their content on televisions like this, which was so inferior to movie theatres that ‘it’s in your home advertising free!’ was basically their whole selling point at first.
That’s a false belief that keeps getting spread, cable TV started as the same channels with clear reception instead of having to rely on antennas, so no people didn’t pay not to have ads, they paid to be able to have a good reception of the same channels then had access to for free with bad reception, then some exclusive channels started appearing without commercials, but it wasn’t the norm.
I mean, I’m not going off a belief, I actually lived this.
Yes, the clear reception vs bunny ears was awesome, but that was also limited on televisions like this, and I’m talking specifically about the content.
My family were always early adopters of technology (I started gaming in ‘79 with both the Intellivision and Atari – Intellivision was far superior). We had HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime as soon as they were available.
I’m talking about the late 70s and early 80s when they were commercially available to the masses and the cable wars began.
The late 70s were absolutely the early days of commercial cable tv.
First phrase: Cable television first became available in the United States in 1948.
The majority of channels has commercials, the ones you paid extra for (like HBO) didn’t, they weren’t the majority and the point of paying for cable wasn’t too remove ads, you still had them on the majority of the channels because they were the same as what you got with antennas.
You’re not the only one who lived it buddy, you just don’t remember it properly.
So far I’m the only one providing sources, an anecdote of when you were a kid isn’t reliable.
The majority of channels had ads because, again, they were just the same channels as without cable. Cable exclusive channels weren’t a thing before 1970 (when there’s was 10m subscribers already) and ads on a cable exclusive channel first started in 1977 with nearly all of them having ads in the in the 80s.
7 years of commercial free cable exclusive channels that were a minority of channels available at the time. No, people weren’t paying not to see adverts and no it wasn’t the point of cable TV like you said, the point of creating cable TV was to allow people to reliably watch TV by broadcasting the signal in a way that wasn’t affected by all sorts of elements out of the control of the broadcasters.
Again, how old are you? Do you actually remember this time? I gave one anecdote, but ask literally anyone my age and they’ll say the same. You certainly know people my age, don’t take my word for it, ask them what sleepovers were like before and after cable tv became a thing. Everyone my age remembers a massive shift, especially with Showtime.
With/without cable wasn’t an easy change. Lots of people didn’t accept it easily because it seemed technically complex. That’s part of why my family was an early adopter: my dad was an aerospace engineer, so it was a no-brainier.
The televisions sold in the late 70s were not set up for cable, so you needed a cable box and to configure your tv a certain way – typically by setting one of your two dials to channel 2, 4, or I think UHF 12 (?it’s been a while, but it depended on your tv, and you’d have an auxiliary dongle, too), you had to plug a cable box into your tv (which was nowhere near as simple as now), and then maybe sacrifice a goat. I joke, but the wiring out of the back of those things wasn’t easy. It wasn’t clear ports with matching inputs, but more like in the back of old school audio speakers, but more of them.
That doesn’t sound hard, but for most people the tv was a magic box that pictures came out of. These were your grandparents, they weren’t good at technology.
The majority of channels had ads because, again, they were just the same channels as without cable.
In the late 80s, yeah. That’s after what I’m talking about. It sounds like you’re talking about the era of Nickelodeon and the height of Showtime/Cinemax porn. I’m talking about more than a decade before that.
Yes, by that point, cable had settled into the subscription + ad model I’m saying was the down slide. I’m talking about way before that, when it hadn’t yet devolved.
Again, I’m not making this up, and I kinda wonder what you think my motivation would be to do so, but I’m very curious how old you are and if you’re just going on things you’ve read or if you were alive for this.
. As an aside, I have to ask: Did you ever get sent up to the roof by your parents after a storm to reset the antenna? Or be the unpaid holder of the rabbit ears by the TV, moving this way and that so your old man could watch his game with the least amount of snow and rolling horizontal lines? I did.
I was a weird nerd, and some of my fondest memories are helping my dad do engine work on our wood-sided station wagon (I was such a cliché) and going with him to the tv shop to pick up vacuum tubes for the tv after a loud pop and faint waft of smoke, then shimmying ass-upwards on the wall like spider man to hold the flashlight at the correct angle whilst my dad pulled the particle-board (I think, maybe cardboard) back off the television and taught me what every single part inside did.
Best time of my young life, hands down.
e: I’ve never been afraid of technology or learning things in my adult life. Thanks, dad.
(And if you’re raising your child like this, thank you. You’re helping to make good people that way.)
almost the size of a couch, so I have no idea what was on the back of it because I could never have moved it.
Oh yeah! Exactly! Mine was very similar to this, but a bit narrower. It was a behemoth, plus the cord was very short.
Thus the shimmying ass-upwards to hold the torch. There was scant space back there, and making more was work.
it was probably masonite or some kind of hard board on the back of the tv
I think you’re right. It was a dark, dense, and very thick board, but not actual wood. I had a radio or clock or something with the same backing, now you mention it. I hadn’t paid much attention except it was thicker than the ikea shit, lol.
BTW, I think your detractor is probably too scared to take me on
You sound just like a COVID denier, hope you realise that? “My experience is true, people who researched the subject and found sources from those in the industry are wrong. Let me show you with anecdotes instead of sources to back my point!”
No, I’m talking about before the 70s when cable exclusive didn’t exist, the only “exclusives” that existed before then was signal from far away local stations that wouldn’t otherwise be accessible with regular antennas, but they were still channels available without cable in their local community. Heck, the FCC ended up forcing cable companies to carry local stations!
Also the number of subscribers might have been lower, but the number of TVs too. Cable subscribers before the 70s still represented a high enough portion of TV watchers that local stations put pressure on the FCC to regulate it.
HBO launched in 72, in 1980 there was 28 cable exclusive networks vs a multitude of local stations.
Why are you so bent about this?
Because I’m tried of seeing people who were kids or not even born back then pretend that it was better than it truly was. Facts are important and “the point of cable TV was to not have ads” isn’t a fact, it’s a lie that started from people who remember wrong (or only watched the few ads free channels because they were kids and uninterested in local TV or didn’t live it at all) when it’s extremely easy to prove the contrary. Heck, your parents would be the ones who could say considering they were the ones who decided to subscribe, not you.
However, due to many legal, regulatory and technological obstacles, cable television in the United States in its first 24 years was used almost exclusively to relay terrestrial commercial television stations to remote and inaccessible areas. It also became popular in other areas in which mountainous terrain caused poor reception over the air. Original programming over cable came in 1972 with deregulation of the industry.[1]
So basically for that first 24 years - around '1948 -'72 it was primarily used to get broadcast television to people in areas with poor reception.
Then came cable companies, producing content… without as many commercials as OTA t.v. I wasn’t born early enough to know the 70’s, but did grow up with antenna television and remember being introduced to cable. First thing I noticed was that there weren’t any ads at all on some channels. When I was a kid the ad free channels on my setup were 09, 10, 19, 20, 21, and some others I’m likely forgetting. I didn’t actually have too many more than that, and a lot of that was filler. The ad free channels were the meat and potatoes of my experience!
So, maybe history doesn’t say it was marketed that way, maybe the cable companies didn’t either, I won’t claim to know, but I will tell you that seeing channels without ads was a pitch on its own back then, you noticed it when you visited others homes and talked about it, others noticed when they visited out home and thought about getting it themselves etc.
Maybe it wasn’t a pitch, and the whole deal, but it was damned sure a selling point.
We got reception just fine, somehow even in my rural area, what we didn’t get was relatively new, commercial free movies, or titties.
And before anyone screeches at me about what link said what, forget it. I’m not interested in reading text about how the 60s and 70s were supposed to have taken place
Check any sources on cable TV history, it’s all the same. Just because you decide to ignore it doesn’t make it false, it just proves your ignorance.
Here, since you “don’t want to read”, this one has a nice graphic that should make it easy for your brain ☺️
Interesting fact: Did you know that historians study things that happened before they were born and it doesn’t make them wrong and they don’t consider anecdotes to be absolute truth because individual memory isn’t reliable? Crazy right?
No, because the majority of TV channels you got when getting cable weren’t cable exclusive, cable exclusive appeared in 1972 (24 years after the introduction of cable broadcasting) and in 1977 came the first cable exclusive channel with ads.
People saying “not having ads was the point of cable” are wrong since not having ads on all the cable exclusive channels was a thing for 5 years and only happened after cable already had a good fooothold in the market.
You’ve already changed the goal posts. Your initial claim was that most cable networks had ads, and now you’ve walked that entirely back to “well there existed one channel that had ads”
But also the original comment was they were old enough to remember it
I didn’t move the goal post, most of the channels you got access to when subscribing to cable were the same channels you had access to without cable and they had ads, a minority of channels, starting in 72 with HBO, which was the first cable exclusive channel, didn’t have them but in 77 the trend reversed.
That’s 5 years without ads on a minority of channels you could watch and people speak like all cable was ad free and like that was the whole point of it. Well, no, the whole point was to get TV to people who didn’t have good reception and the people here ignore the 24 years of cable TV that came before 1972 and the 46 years since 1977.
in Australia that was the whole selling point of foxtel when it launched. these days it has more ads than free to air TV and still costs like $60 a month for the basic package. most people only use it for sport
Oh I just “remove element permanently” on U-Block origin.
Make sure to remove the invisible element too that covers the whole screen. They tried that to prevent ya from just opening the video anyway.
To deactivate the scrollblock, if you experience it,just go full screen once and go back out. Which can be easily automated via a macro or literally just pressing the F key twice.
YouTube’s attempts at blocking Adblockers are pathetic
You know what, valid. I’m just listing the solution I used. I’ll make sure to check out Grayjay too.
This is the also the reason why Google is guaranteed to fail in their efforts. If one way to bypass their crap fails, 3 others will be developed swiftly <3
An app that lets you watch stuff from youtube, twitch, patreon, odyssey and more while respecting your privacy and having a better UI than any other streaming app.
It’s YouTuber Louis Rossman aggregator for content with the idea that you follow the creator regardless of platform, so if they have a YouTube/twitch/odysee account you’ll get all of their content in one place so if youtube bans someone for something random as they do that creator and their audience aren’t affected
YouTube’s attempts at blocking Adblockers are pathetic
I've long maintained that the majority of programmers working for Alphabet/Google/YouTube spent more time learning how to get the job than how to do the job well. There is a lot more to coding than "Cracking the Coding Interview."
It's not about building cool things over there. Is has not been that way for a long time. They just want the money and reputation.
I don’t know. If I were a webdev at Google I would probably be against this nonsense as much as we are here. So I’d implement the most half assed ‘blocking’ of ad blockers possible knowing that the moron product manager who requested it won’t be able to tell.
That’s a great way to advance your career by the ‘genius’ kid that comes up with the much better way to do it and calls you out during a meeting while showing his already-written code that does much better than your senior dev self.
I partially disagree, the average developer at google is very competent, yet, their work pipelines must be so long and complex that such talent gets somewhat diluted
How does this work? I’ve been considering using a Raspberry Pi for Pihole, but I’ve been discouraged as it wouldn’t work for YouTube anyways. How I understand it is that Pihole is DNS, which just blocks certain domains. Since Youtube ads and videos are indistinguishable from a networking POV, it won’t be able to block them. Am I wrong? Is there something I have misunderstood?
YouTube ads are distinguishable at the dns level for now at least. For the optimal setup I recommend docker-compose on a raspi with watchtower. This setup will automatically keep everything up to date but requires a little docker knowledge. Here’s some documentation:
I don’t see how it could be given that they are loading a detection script in the client.
It has nothing to do with DNS. I suspect those saying that PiHole solves it simply haven’t been rolled out to yet (or are using adblockers but have forgotten)
No. Cosmetic filters don’t stop the message - they just temporarily hide it from view. The anti-adblock script will continue to run in the background and will eventually block you from watching videos. Please don’t use, share or recommend using any of those filters and don’t report any issues when using them.
That’s still a cosmetic block and the script will eventually cut you off from the servers is what I think they more saying - as in, the servers will just refuse to send you the video.
It hasn’t really mattered enough for them to spend any engineering time on it before. Zero interest rates are over, though, and money actually kind of means something now. This is just the first move in a chain of many.
A warning for anyone relying on stuff like adblockers for YouTube - it’s not that hard for Google to figure out that we’re doing it, simply query for which users have zero ad impressions. Google also has a certain tendency to permaban Google accounts in violation of their policies and then ignoring all appeals. If you rely on Google accounts for email, photos and the like, this might be the time to plan contingencies.
Personally I’ve started using Piped instead. The lack of recommendations is a bit of a bummer, but in all honesty it was kind of like the switch from Reddit to Lemmy - just had to wean myself off the digital sugar pills.
It might be a cost benefit thing. They probably could hire a team to perfect it and be on hand round the clock playing whack a mole with every workaround that gets found, but the half measure might catch the masses and be enough to not warrant spending the extra to do that.
No, I mean they could do what streaming services do and drm encode the stream, or make the ads indistinguishable from the videos, making it impossible to block.
If the ads were added to the video stream (I assume this is what you’re suggesting) they can be easily skipped by scrubbing the timeline. On the other hand, if they add metadata so the client can make them unskippable, the ad blockers will have something to work with. Classic catch 22.
They aren’t trying right now because they’re running tests. I’m assuming they’re testing what does and doesn’t work. They probably wanted us to find workarounds so they could patch them when they decide to actually roll out the anti-adblock feature.
If Todd was to be asked about any of this you’d be paying for looking at their promo stuff. Greedy cuck. That’s why they pushed so hard for FO76 to be always online, even though it’s completely pointless.
Gamepass is a great deal if it has 4 or more games a year come out that you want to play, and that’s if you pay full price instead of buying cards, etc.
I feel like that’s stretching reality unless you’re getting localized pricing for lower income countries. I’ve never seen an AAA game drop below $10 in just 3 years, especially if it’s an AAA game that also got DLC. On average it’s usually just 40-50% off after that kind of duration, mayyyybe 60% off. Anything more than that is usually because the game sucked ass or it’s really old.
I keep hearing how great Gamepass is but I really fail to see how unless you just began gaming like one year ago. Every once in awhile I look to see what’s on there and it’s just old games I’ve played before.
Gamepass is great for extended trials, especially indie games with middling to good ratings. Other than that, it’s nice to play the back catalog of MS games if you missed them. At least for PC, that’s what I got out of it.
I really don’t get much use out of reviews and trailers. The only way for me to know if I like a game is to try it. I test tons of Gamepass games and finish half a dozen a year, give or take.
They decide what they do offer to publishers for game pass rights. If they increase the fee, it’s because they started to pay more for whatever offered to us.
Sometimes, when I’m deep in thought I forget to turn on music in the car. My partner is convinced that i do it on purpose to piss them off. Really, my brain just sucks at multitasking.
So, I’d probably ride there in silence, but only because I forgot to turn on the music.
i like to listen to music while drawing but sometimes i start in silence, and i’m there thinking “gotta turn on the music” but i never actually do because i’m focusing on drawing
My Y daughter is doing well, maybe it will be shitty for her to buy a house or condo but she can. My Z one, yeah, I’m helping her, paying stuff here and there like groceries, microwave, etc, she’s in her own flat and all and is not too bad but still, rent is 40% of her earning. It’s ok to help your kids.
In the literal sense, yes, but not in the context of marketing cohorts, which are usually based on birth date ranges and are used to group members of society who experience similar pressures and exhibit similar behaviors. Gen Y/Millennial and Gen Z are marketing terms, so it’s possible for a parent to have a child in each.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I was trying to be funny but it totally missed the mark and fell flat. Oh well 🤷♂️ I do think it would be nice if we didn’t find ourselves referring to our social constructs in terms of marketing cohorts.
There’s also us zillenials born between 1990 - 1996. The defining feature is that we’re old enough that we were alive during 9/11 but were too young to understand the way it changed society at the time. Our formative years also occurred during both pre and post internet being everywhere.
I absolutely agree! It’s not a competition, we are all living in the same world with the same problems.
Families are at the centre of any society. Families function best when they help each other out. Parents are meant to sacrifice to help their children, just as their adult children should sacrifice later in life to help them.
it is okay to help but at the same time it sucks you have to do that because life is so economically insecure now that adult children cannot survive without that help.
In my own situation, my partner has a 25-year-old son who has autism and cannot be financially independent. We finance his $2,200 apartment (which is standard cost in our expensive city) because on his own he’ll never be able to do that . This will directly impact our own finances for the foreseeable future.
At 16kb/s per connection , I think you have to ask yourself if you’re really helping. Have you checked your settings that you aren’t limiting your upload speeds?
Edit: people seem to be offended by this comment, so let me clarify by what I meant with “are you really helping”.
Torrent clients default to a fixed number of peers they download from. If you end up with only 16kb/s connections, you are being limited by those seeders in how fast you can download.
Whereas if there were less seeders but they could provide 1mb/s connections, you are limited by your own internet connection and are downloading full blast.
I have had torrents that ran at extremely low speeds and also intermittently were offline because the seeder ran a colossal seedbox but rotated “inventory” to be able to seed more than just what they could handle at once. So it was rotating content. I downloaded something for almost three months I think. But eventually I got it all. Funny thing was I seeded it for the next like 6 months to help, but literally nobody ever connected, so I felt very fortunate that being apparently the only person who seemed to want the thing, I had found a seeder.
Well, occasionally I’ll just be lucky enough I’ll try a result on a tracker that says 0 seeds. I try those all the time if I really can’t find a torrent with seeds. Lots of the ones that are seemingly dead, will kick up again at some point. I’ve had a lot of luck with even dead seeds from results on magnetdl.com and bitsearch.to but the latter you really want to have adblocks because they load a dozen of those shitty vpn ads every minute and they’re new window pop ups. Without Adblock I’d never even visit that site. But they have an excellent catalogue so I do use them. Magnetdl used to be my goto but lately they’ve had all kinds of weird cloudflare errors. Cloudflare sucks.
But aside from that and if someone seeds something upon request it’s just blind luck. But my main point I guess would be don’t shy away from links with 0 seeds indicated.
If it makes you feel any better, I had a torrent that took about a week to download. 12 months later my ratio is 139 or something. I like to think I resurrected it with the help of that one lone seeder.
No need to feel any better lol none of what I said was troubling. But it’s nice that the torrenting community in general is not just a bunch of leeches. I suspect that is because of the lack of widespread popularity which is good. This should continue to remain a subculture to a certain extent.
Torrent clients are usually smart enough to decide what the best seeders are to get the best possible availability and throughput.
OP seeding at 16 KB/s to some peers might also just mean that the leecher’s bandwidth is mostly saturated by other peers so they don’t need that much bandwidth from OP.
This feels like you don’t really understand how the BitTorrent protocol works at all. When you watch Netflix, or download proprietary software (for example Steam) you are connected through a CDN to the geographically closest node. That’s one of the main reasons it can be so fast.
However, torrent files aren’t distributed by geographic region, the pool of peers is spread out across the globe. So if someone is on the other side of the earth, your upload speed to them is going to be quite small.
You’re suggesting OP stop seeding because those seeders will be able to download faster, but we literally see just a snapshot. There could be leechers local to OP that come online and have a close, fast seed.
I’m generally seeding at 50-100kB/s, and when I check those connections they’re almost always overseas (qBittorrent resolves the IPs and adds country flags). However, when another Aussie (or a Kiwi, sometimes Indonesians too) leecher connects, it’ll often blow past my (ISPs) 50Mbps upload cap to 160-200Mbps or 20-25MB/s. Are you saying I shouldn’t seed because that way an American or European will be able to download faster? Even though it’s been pointed out to you that it doesn’t even work that way. The BitTorrent protocol was designed from the start to mitigate this by prioritisation of peers on the clientside.
I can’t believe such a toxic and inaccurate comment has this many upvotes.
You’re suggesting OP stop seeding because those seeders will be able to download faster, but we literally see just a snapshot.
I suggested that OP check their settings.
Are you saying I shouldn’t seed because that way an American or European will be able to download faster?
Again, that’s not what I am saying at all. Stop putting words in my mouth.
I can’t believe such a toxic and inaccurate comment has this many upvotes.
If you’re looking for a toxic comment, look at your own where you are wilfully misrepresenting my argument, make wild assumptions and then attack those. That’s textbook definition of toxic behavior.
What you are looking for is a “Bed shaker”. These are often used by the deaf to wake up. A relatively cheap phone-connected one can be found here but it’s iphone only. This one works with Android. Both use proprietary apps. The website linked was just at the top of a Google search, you can find stuff like this on Amazon as well.
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