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Comment by Belopolye | Hacker News Reader

> TV ads never did these sorts of utterly shitty, tedious things.

Until the CALM Act was passed in 2010, networks actually did increase the volume on advertisements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...

Didn't know about that, but unsurprising. At least they couldn't extend their length almost indefinitely too, unless you manually skipped.

It was around that time that I stopped watching cable television altogether.

If you want to back down memory lane, search on YouTube for old recordings of network TV ad breaks from the late 90s and early 2000s- they’re just obnoxious.

Yeah, I was reading this and thinking wut, TV sucks. Like half the time watching a show (most likely a rerun) is ads, even if it's a paid cable channel. And even after that 2010 law, pretty sure the ads are louder than the shows. And the ads are even worse nowadays because the ads exclusively target old people, so 90% are drugs or gold-buying scams. Somehow the cable STBs are super laggy nowadays too, like they rewrote the video decoder in Javascript or something, cause it used to be fine.

The only thing I miss at all is being able to leave a TV on and have it keep playing something reasonable, not convince itself that watching a car review means I want to watch a screaming kid trolling in Minecraft followed by the Syrian Civil War.

Live TV apps like Pluto scratch that last itch for me. Can put it on a movie channel or stargate reruns and just leave it alone.

>exclusively target old people, so 90% are drugs or gold-buying scams.

Haha, so then what if i'm young but want some shady gold investments while I look into trying Ambien?

Oh the gold buying ads come by mail, you only sell your gold on TV. I heard they pay even higher than market rate if you order some orbexlitol with it.

Some did, some of the time. And many of us stopped watching those stations when it really kicked in back in the early 90s.

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