Wrench Wizard

According to the wiki article that you linked:

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.

I live inside a firetruck

I think cars are cool, but I prefer fire trucks.

Wait hold on, I’m just now learning how to operate my raspberry pi, what is pi-hole?

I installed Rvnc on it last week, is pi-hole similar?

I think you’re onto something. U.S citizen here and I actually love driving stick but where I live it’s a few hour drive to anywhere which makes driving a manual seem like more of a hassle, whereas those long trips in an automatic feel leisurely and I’m more well rested when I arrive.

Couple that with manuals more commonly found in larger trucks around here. I work on vehicles, see many and can’t remember the last small car or truck that was manual. It’s all semi’s, dump trucks, dualies, you know? Big trucks which adds another barrier to people.

I feel like if there were smaller manuals in my area then perception would change. As it is they’re reserved for work, big work at that.

It’s sad to lose manuals in society but I’m seeing them less and less, everything seems to be going electric now, even companies known for diesel manuals.

Tbh it did affect me, I had just joined and it was out often, & it seemed like a hassle (being new) to find and join new instances or w/e especially when I had to create a new account for every one. Didn’t necessarily think it was trash just buggy and unreliable especially for that to be happening during such a big migration (after Reddit changed the api’s)

Idk it’s nice here but that did reduce my usage. Something that I’m new on being down for a day or two means I’m less likely to use it the next day and incorporate it into my daily routine

Yep, also an easier way to explore/sign up and filter instances and their different pages. I’m new and have no idea what I’m doing regarding that. So far I’m just signing up to instances and hoping new interesting stuff appears on my page… I’m on Lemmy.world as I assume we all are, how do I view the different pages on this instance or is it all just in a singular feed?

It’s insane how well this timeline syncs with reddit’s API bs!

From the very first day spez announced the API changes and steadily increasing until most of the 3pa shut down then BAM. Good for Lemmy and hopefully bad for reddit!