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?

  • Libb
    142·
    11 days ago

    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 ;)

      • Libb
        1·
        11 days ago

        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 ;)

        • andrewta@lemmy.world
          1·
          11 days ago

          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.

          • Libb
            1·
            11 days ago

            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.

            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