Television and Radio are 75% advertisement.
Most of my favorite youtubers from 2010s are gone replaced with nonstop politics, drama, reaction, and streaming content farming.
I feel it in my heart that short form content is damaging everyones attention spans especially my tablet ridden younger family members.
Weekend trips to Blockbusters to rent out a game and movie is gone.
When I go into the search bar on YouTube I see stuff literally called “brain break” and “brain rot”.
I switch on the news and its 90% pure political propagandano matter the station.
Even the memes suck now, say what you want about caption memes and dancing babies and troll face, Pepe, me gusta but that shit was at least comprehensible in humor. go on 67 Wikipedia and it literally says “It has no fixed meaning.”
Even the steam store just feels different now. Its full of gooner porn bait visual novels and mundane activity sims and 1 season relevant fps shooters.
All the stuff I enjoyed is gone, and everything they make now seems so empty and pessimistic now. The last bastion of enjoyment zi have is older media and indie made stuff by a few select artist/small teams . Is this just me getting old yelling at clouds, or is something wrong?
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At this point I accepted we will not get stuff like lord the rings movies ever again from any studio.
literally
Okay, so we know you’re 35 or 40 from the millennial signal.
You could be just getting old. You’ve lived long enough to have firm opinions and - more importantly - expectations. These are not being met, and you are coping less as your pragmatism wanes a bit with neuroplasticity.
But entertainment has gone a little shitty. Social media is a cancer on global communication, even as it offers the same. We’re communicating now, so there’s benefit, but the algorithm has definitely ruined us.
I say both.
Not just you. It’s worse. It’s all ads, not just the ad breaks, but the 14 billion product placements. Clickbait, rage bait, lies, exaggerated stories for views/sales. Rehash of the same plot/story again. Maybe a remake or reboot of a series that has already been milked to death. There still some quality out there. But it’s buried under a mountain of trash.
People keep talking about divided media and a lack of shared shows - did nobody else see all the KPop Demon Hunter outfits last Halloween? I swear it was about 20% of the outfits at my kids’ school. Nobody seeing the Stranger Things merch in stores for the new season?
There’s still new shows most people see, and some are good ones - but the media landscape changed. Used to be, in the US, you had CBS, NBC, ABC, etc. The difference is now it’s Netflix, Disney, Paramount, and so on. The quality mix is still pretty much what it was, but you’ve got to go to where they’ve moved to - YouTube doesn’t have much professionally done content.
As for 67, that just seems like what memes have always been to me. The Beans meme here was random too, but no less meaningful for it.
Oh, it’s not either/or.
Yes it has definitely gotten worse. I haven’t seen anything good at the cinemas or on TV for a long time.
The last movie I really liked was Nightcrawler. The last TV show I got into was Better Call Saul.
Where are all the artists these days? They seem to have been replaced by people who only know how to churn out the same repetitive boring dribble?
What TV, other than BCS do you like?
The Sopranos and Breaking Bad
Not watched any of them. The natural question from that is to ask if you tried Succession, I guess?
Yes I watched the first season. It was good but not really my type of thing.
Are you primarily into crime thrillers then? I’m mostly into sci-fi/fantasy/speculative-fiction which is omnipresent these days.
Nightcrawler was so good, better call Saul might be one of the best shows ever. Definitely cracks the top ten
Entertainment is getting worse and you’re getting old. The media landscape has fractured, and there are no dominant cultural touchstones anymore. You’re looking for media in all the ways you used to, but everything is different now. There is still plenty of amazing long form content on YouTube, and lots of great movies. You have to do more seeking now, though, where before you could just open up YouTube or turn on the TV
Also, the restrictions of their medium have largely been removed. Time was a tv show had to fit into 42 minutes. And you needed to make enough episodes for syndication.
So you’d have an A plot which is something simple and a B plot which has the season arc plot and it would be short cuts and a lot of exposition.
Now you can make episodes almost as long as you want, and there’s no need for any consideration of syndication. So you get long establishing shots and not much actually happening in an episode.
The loss of widely shared cultural touchstones in media has messed with my perception of time. But also, I’m getting old.
I too am old. I loved YouTube for the lack of prescribed format until it became prescribed format by becoming enslaved to and hopelessly manipulated by an algorithm.
The random free form was lovely and enjoyable. Was.
There was one point in which I stumbled into “beige” culture, then found myself watching a vid, long form, of a millennial discussing decor. Not my thing. I’m there for comedy, instruction, and journalistic documentary forms. Watching millennial man discuss decor, the psychosocial of it hit me. Here’s this personable fellow talking right to me (the camera) about nonsensical daily crap, on a subject you might engage in a work breakroom. Living space decor is pretty light fare.
For people who are fairly devoid of random, natural socialization that is not stressful for them, of course this is popular. It conveys a false sense of human interaction and agreement. Dopamine hit success without talking to anyone real.
Explains reaction vid popularity, for sure. I find them to be the most obnoxious waste of time, worse than ads, but they are popular. And probably for the lack of socialization and need for that type of dopamine hit reason.
If you have people, and get genuine reaction in regular conversation, why would you want this?
My favorite part to that is to discover something for the first time, fall in love with it, think it’s the most amazing thing ever … then realize that it’s ten years old and everyone got excited about it a long time ago.
But it also means I don’t give a shit anymore and I just enjoy watching things that make me happy and interest me, instead of trying to chase after the latest fad.
The scifi television renaissance was fantastic, while it lasted. Says the
Star Wars generationgenx media consumer.Things like McNally, fast/fancy/clean woodworking snippets, and cat vids are great short form, in moderation, sure. But short form domination feels like the room time of the main character on the second episode of Black Mirror, “Fifteen Million Merits”.
For tv shows and movies:
Older content is rapidly disappearing/getting less accessible. Especially non english content. Shout out to do your part in legally archiving digital media from public libraries.
At the same time new media is pushed build on Existing mega franchises, everything is the same format with the same formula with no higher goal then the profit-margin.
online: is a different story because google owns it. They decide how youtube presents content to users, what do’s and don’ts get punished or get you recommended more.
Again no goal higher then the profit margin,1 ad for a 30 minute video is not as efficient as 1 every so many shorts. And because shorts are more random and your just consuming the flos its harder to tell the ads apart.
Because shorts are optimised on phone, google also rules how 50% of people use their phone it pushes more people to this more exploitative and less ad blockade device.
Good content still exists, its just a lot harder to find because promoting it is less profitable.
Their is a word for this kind of things falling apart to chase profit. Its enshitification.
Well not all empty and pessimistic, but yeah there’s certainly a lot more of that than good content.
It is sharply ironic to see someone complaining about short-form content immediately after lamenting the loss of their favorite youtubers.
Look, it’s Sturgeon’s law. You’re comparing the best of yesteryear to the whole of today, and 90% of content today is crap. But 90% of yesteryear was crap, too, we just only remember the very best (and sometimes the very worse) and forget the dross.
But you can ignore the dross of today, too. If you don’t like it, don’t read / listen-to / watch it. It really is that simple.
Yes. Two things can be true.
Those types of youtubers havent been replaced; they still exist, just hard to find because of so many low quality videos
SOOO many low quality videos…
Go to your local library. Many have a great selection on blu-ray and dvds. Having to select something from a shelf is way more enjoyable than the endless scroll of junk streaming services give you. I am now actually purposefully selecting movies and shows to watch and making time and effort to finish them instead of just streaming random stuff.
Plus you get commentaries and bonus features.
Sometimes a kind soul has sprinkled Criterion releases on the shelf too!
I donated my DVD collection (200ish titles) to my local library last year. Warmed my heart a bit to read this.
Can also just do that by having a backlog of good films. Something like ‘Roger Ebert’s list of great movies’, for starters. As a bonus, the list has many films from outside Hollywood.
Also, films on dvds tend to have a reddish tint for some reason. Maybe color grading for CRTs was like that, idk. Releases on bluray typically have a more neutral palette, though some lean a bit too much into blue shades.
The Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, my beloved
Sure, but libraries are literally free
That dilemma is also solved for me.
I think on the YT part we can blame the extremely crazy recommendation engine for it, because I can find great content easily, but even just 1 genre alteration throws me into a whole different recommendations.
Ex: You watch 1 political vid, and suddenly half of your new vids are politically related
Carefully curating you watch history is key. I try to check mine once per week and pull out anything that causes me to get angry about something. Basically if it’s not a video that teaches me how to do something, I remove it.
On top of that, I personally set my default youtube app to be newpipe, so if I’m just casually browsing lemmy or elsewhere I can click a youtube link and figure out what it is, even watch it if I want, without it effecting my normal account and watch history.
If I like the video and want more like it, I’ll share to the Youtube (Revanced) app and finish it there.
Are recommendations based on the “watch history” list, or just your actual watch history? I doubt they are just disregrding data they have on you just because you remove it from the ui.
Clear your history and check for yourself. It’s not hard to do.
Nah it works.
Why would they keep forcing content on you when you explicitly go out of your way to remove it?
I know Google is fan of forcing things on their users, but they aren’t that stupid.
My method of using YouTube is to look through recommendations on a video that I liked, and save any promising videos to ‘watch later’. Moreover, I have a dozen ‘watch later’ playlists by topic, each with several dozen videos in them. I can live off these playlists for at least a year.
I also open any links from social media in a private tab, lest my carefully cultivated taste profile gets bungled.
Worse. YouTube peaked around 2010s 100%. There’s a lot of great content to find now, but you have to go digging.
Gaming is at an all time low, peoples standards have fallen off a cliff, games are made like shit. I think this is also because of how big and mainstream it is now too. There’s so much money and manipulation in it.
I think the best of youtube has been pretty consistent, it’s just that there’s exponentially more crap (and the algorithm wants you watching crap).
For games, I do agree that most AAA games are not very good, but we are in a golden age of indie gaming. There are so many amazing games being released constantly it’s overwhelming.
Yeah, but there being more crap, means its less at its peak imo. You used to go on and just have good content mostly, now theres so much clickbait and garbage to sift through, which while the good content is still there, not being able to find it means YouTube is lesser because of it.
And absolutely, indies are the way to go, there’s a lot of low effort shit still posted to Steam every year, but the gems are in there. Big AA, AAA games are just money farmers now and they are also often buggy and unpolished even if the base game is good. All the additional purchases and shit ughhh, gaming fell off. There’s no game I am looking forward to anymore, I’m just waiting to be pleasantly surprised by some random new indie game that will drop.
