Do normal people mute the ads or just let the television keep going?

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

Why you askin Lemmy what normal people do?!

Lol, the fuck is an ad???

I either pay for no ads, or sail the high seas

Fucks ads

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

When I was a kid I would change the channel until commercials were over

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.

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.

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.

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

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 mute them, look away, or go to another room. Can't let the bastards win..

I mute ads when I can’t ship them and I’m not walking away to get something. They’re so loud. 🔇

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.
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.

One of the following:

Ignore, do nothing.
Fast forward. An ad break is around 15 min so sometimes we start watching a program late so we can fast forward ads later.
Change channel. Sometimes half the ad breaks are at the end of the program so by changing channel you don't lose anything lol.

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.

I ignore them. I don't really watch TV channels nowadays, both shows and ads are just background noises to me.

Ads? Hmm. No, now that you mention it. I must be doing it wrong, because I never see ads.

🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

I mute and change channels. Bout half of them have the same ads on at the same time though

Visit a house where they have the tv on all the time. Commercials and everything. It's harsh.

I jolly roger everything. No commercials.

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.

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 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.

Mute
Switch to another channel and back to clear Teletext cache
Turn on fullscreen Teletext, any page (I like the 89x test patterns)
Type "888" as the page you want to go to
The TV will now wait for 888 to be broadcast, which only happens after ads and trailers
The program is now running with captions. Disable Teletext and unmute if you want sound instead.

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

I stopped watching TV some 15 years ago or smth.

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.
- I just started watching again this year.

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.

Team mute all the way.

BTW I hate using Apple TV.

My home is off the grid

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.

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?
- 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:
  
  We paid for them once, some 20+ years ago. No lifetime rent.
  
  In the same logic: nowadays used DVDs are dirt cheap and one could easily build their dream library for almost nothing.
  
  We're not tracked while watching them.
  
  We're free to watch whatever we want. It doesn't matter if it is trendy or not, if it's popular or not, if it's decades or a century old. We own it? We can watch it.
  
  Last but not least, there is no one that can come at our place to modify the DVDs we own. Be it to remove some content that would be considered unacceptable today (or tomorrow), to change or to add something in it, or even to delete the whole DVD. We paid for that plastic disc, we legally own it. Even if the almighty Sony, Warner, HBO, Universal or Whomever changed their mind and wanted to take it back, they can't. Unlike what we have already seen happening more than once with digital content being modified or deleted, or less dramatically but as efficiently as far as censoring goes 'not being available anymore'.
  
  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 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.

Ain't no ads on Jellyfin.

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.

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.
- Jellyfin has a built in DVR. It works with HD Homerun tuners.

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 don't watch TV.

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.

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 have not owned a television since I was a child and came to develop my quirky ad-reviling character trait

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

I stream everything and pay for ad free services. I hate ads.

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.

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

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.

If its a State Farm ad, its definitely getting muted.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No, I never muted them. How else are you supposed to know when the series continues?

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

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.

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.

when an ad is on I take the time to stand up and do whatever small tasks I have to

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.

Oh yea, I mute that shit before they start.

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.

Ha. Mute point
A mute point or a moot point? You have (accidentally?) made a language pun there.

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’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.

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 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 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.

I use YouTube premium and Twitch turbo to have no ads at all.

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

"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.

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.

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.

Mute the entire TV and use the closed captions when watching the programs. I do this.