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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   3696 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 30, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics, this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Has anyone else noticed that podcasts are such crap these days? so many ads. It's ridiculous. Not just YouTube. Any format. Ads for first 3 minutes , random ads in the middle, more ads. The entire cloud/SAS architecture is dependent on podcast ads it seem.

Which podcasts? The only ones I listen to are the wsj editorial podcast, manifold podcast and macro voices podcast none of which seems to have that many adds.

Macro voices probably has the most valuable users but they have empty space right now. I think they’re picky though

darknetdiaries . com , tim ferris (really bad) anything biz or tech related

No, I haven't noticed, on account of not listening to any podcasts.

No, haven't noticed. I tend to listen to comedy podcasts, and many of them seem to have trouble keeping big name advertisers.

probably because comedy is a not a high ROI niche. Anything biz, tech, entrepreneur related probably has no problem filling inventory

Apparently no advertiser other than boner pills or online casinos will touch Cumtown. They are add free, other than the in-show boner pill endorsements.

Five of my favorite podcasts have zero ads and are consistently high quality: Econtalk, the Fifth Column, Blocked and Reported, the Glenn Show, and Chapo Trap House.

No.

Podcasts on youtube don't even have ads because all the good ones are demonetised.

Isn't part of it the current state of the economy? Even YouTube and Twitch are flirting with more ads.

Google was a cosmic mistake.

I usually use Youtube via a heavily uBlocked and uMatrixed Firefox, which means no ads.

Whenever my wife asks me to play a song via the Youtube program on my phone, I almost drop the thing in fright - people actually listen to music or watch videos that are preceded by several advertisements, plus interruptions, plus another round of ads in between videos? It's intolerable. I'd rather not.

Firefox mobile can install adblock addons & play videos in the background.

Can't do the skipping-sponsored-content afaik

SponsorBlock is an extra Firefox addon I found recently that automatically skips over the "first a quick message about our sponsor" sections in Youtube videos.

Use YouTube Vanced for android. No ads, skips over sponsored content and "ring that bell" spiels for any decently sized channel. Can also skip intro music.

The only downside is being the last person in the world to hear important news about RAID: SHADOW LEGENDS!!

I have just seen someone watch (quite focussed) an entire minute of woke sportswear ads before a song started on their youtube tab in the library. If this is how the average person reacts to ads we are all so screwed

Nice, will try!

Edit: Can't find it.

It's not in Google's app store, you have to install the APK. Hilariously there are YouTube videos explaining how that haven't been banned.

It appears to have been killed a few months back by Google making legal threats. Which isn't too surprising I guess, but is a shame.

Working fine for me. Until Google changes the API to fuck it up I guess.

Well sure, but for new users that isn't much help. :P

Can't you still just DL the APK file? Nothing's changed about how it works, it's just no longer getting updates when Google periodically changes stuff to fuck with people's quality of life extensions.

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I haven't listened for many podcasts lately but various new streaming subscription services are equally garbage. Why can't I watch an episode of Star Trek without being interrupted in the middle 8 times for several minutes to listen in the 20th time for the same moronic ad? Not enough that they want me to subscribe to a dozen of different ones, they also insist on shoving ads down my throat to milk my wallet a bit more.

That just makes me to unfold my old Jolly Roger flag that I hoped to retire for good one day, because there's a limit of how much abuse one can take while paying money for it.

What streaming service has ads?

Hulu, prime, many small shitty ones.

The ads on streaming services infuriate me. It's like, motherfucker I'm paying you. How the hell are you going to turn around and show me ads? If not for my wife (who unfortunately doesn't care as much as I do), I would immediately cancel any service that does that. But, you gotta pick your battles in marriage and this one just isn't worth it.

I’m fascinated by the female propensity to watch ads, to the extent that nearly half of all commercials during sporting events are aimed toward women. What’s going on there?

It's a trope as old as cable television, and a true one at that. Jerry Seinfeld joked about it back in the '90s: Men hunt and women nest. I remember my mum constantly complaining that my dad would change the channel any time a commercial came on, her concern being that she'd miss part of the program if he stayed away too long; my dad always countered that he knew the length of the breaks pretty much by heart at that point so no one would miss anything. A friend's mum complained that she'd be watching a show with her husband and would ask what happened to a specific character, only to be informed that that character was in a different show airing on another channel.

With sporting events this tendency is magnified because most sporting events are aired weekend afternoons and evenings, so there's plenty of other sports programming running counter to whatever you're watching, and the temptation is too great to take a quick look at another game. This tendency is magnified further if you're not watching any particular game and just flipping through channels to find something interesting. In my experience, women are more likely to watch a sporting event only if it's a local team or other event that they have a specific interest in, and while men will do the same, they're also more likely to watch a game because it's on television, so there's no loyalty to a specific broadcast. Networks base ad fees on total viewers, but the advertisers know that a certain percentage of viewers are casual fans who aren't going to watch any commercials, period, unless absolutely forced to. So the advertisers are going to tailor their ads to the demographic that's least likely to skip around.

I would also ad that the NFL seems to be the biggest culprit of this (though I don't watch NBA games). I see less of this in college football and national NHL and MLB broadcasts, and practically none in local hockey and baseball broadcasts or PGA and NASCAR. And the female-centered ads during PGA events, rare as they are, tend to be for women's-specific golf products, which makes sense. This seems to make sense—there are only 17 regular season NFL games a year per team, and they're almost all on weekends, so following the sport is much easier for the casual fan. Baseball has like 150 games on television and hockey 82, and some of those games have rather late start times if you're on the East Coast, so it's hard to keep track of things closely unless you're really dedicated. Golf and NASCAR don't have regionally-based fanbases so unless there's a big national star like Tiger Woods it's hard to even know who you're watching, and golf is particularly bad on this front because the field is huge, the events start during the day on Thursday, and most golfers only participate in select events, so by the time Saturday rolls around the leaders could be all guys who are well-known in the golf world but who most people have never heard of. College is better on this front but most college teams don't generate a lot of national interest.

At least that's my theory; it could be totally wrong.

It's the terminal state in the eventual capital-ization of everything. No one can do anything for pleasure anymore and share openly, all activities eventually must turn into a money generating scheme or they're ultimately not productive.

The open source software world feels like a peek into an alternate dimension of what the world could've been like: in few other places do people share so much toil and effort so openly with others.

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