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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Yes
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
The loss of widely shared cultural touchstones in media has messed with my perception of time. But also, I’m getting old.
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.
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?
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 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”.
This sounds like a perfect opportunity to start reading books.
Society changes Book is book
Media changes Book is book
Trends change Book is book
Government changes Book is book
Games get outdated Book is book
Servers get shutdown Book is book
Book will always be there in its original format, no ads, no change, no tracking, no brainrot, no trends, no algorithmic content creation.
Book is book
You are deluding yourself if you think that books are immune to AI slop.
Enshittification is coming for all things. It’ll take a lot of careful human curation to keep finding the value among the deluge of crap.
To be fair, there has always been crap. Sure, llms automate the process of slop creation, but you always had to rely on curation and often pure luck to find decent books.
The solution is to have a backlog and read books years after publication. Thankfully plenty of good stuff has been written over hundreds of years, no need to jump on fresh books.
The world remains largely unchanged according to ducks
I volunteer in wildlife rescue. I can tell you ducks have had a rough 2 years.
Why?
Where I’m located the main culprits are bird flu, virulent newcastle disease, fowlpox and decreasing water quality due to things like algae and botulism.
Hmmmm
Books are getting worse too. Publishers seem to be perfectly happy to publish books with no solid plot that have no proper ending because the writer couldn’t think of one.
Sounds like me but unpublished lol
The reason why I’m not writing a book is because I have a vague idea but I won’t be able to tie it all up fairly neatly and make sure everything makes at least some sense (ergo: why did x do y?). But apparently that’s not necessary anymore.
I’ve already read ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ and ‘American Psycho’, thanks.
Check and see if those books are published versions of webnovels. I find most (though not all) webnovel series have this problem, and I’ve seen a rise in web novels being converted to full books and audiobooks. I’m willing to bet it’s less prevalent outside of webnovels due to normally needing to submit a manuscript to an editor first.
Book is book.
Fool of a Book.
Frodo Bookings!
There still are a lot of shitty books out there, and literature is not immune to trends, whether they are mainstream or limited to specific subcultures. And as long as there is at least one existing copy avaible for streaming/download, any piece of media lasts forever.
That needs to be on a t-shirt or something!
Book will always be there in its original format, no ads, no change, no tracking, no brainrot, no trends, no algorithmic content creation.
Until someone figures out how to generate books written by AI that will ultilize algorithms, curate them to include ads and trends, and that will have unavoidable AI brainrot. For now books are safe.
Think about it. Today we say that AI will never write a good book. But 3 years ago we were saying that AI will never generate a realistic footage after that “Will Smith eating pasta” video. Today AI-video is getting harder to distinguish. Same with music. Not a lot of time has passed.
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.
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.
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.
I imagine the fact you’ve watched and removed it from ypur history are both held as data points.
It wouldn’t work for everyone but my gut says that would help their algorithm fine tune etc.
Clear your history and check for yourself. It’s not hard to do.
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.
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.
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.
I only get Criterion blu rays. They consistently go on sale from $12-20 on Amazon
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.
Sure, but libraries are literally free
That dilemma is also solved for me.
The Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, my beloved
Yeah no, that’s the opposite of what I’m trying to do by listening to people who have seen films from countries other than the US.
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, it was better.
Now its still good but you need to go underground to find it
Join small clubs. Ditch corpo net and go on the small web. Leave social media walled garden bot farms. Have blockers on all devices.
And shut off the internet/phone on weekends if you can. Makes life better. Go play that ps1!
There’s merit to this. One of the beautiful things about this era is it’s cheap as fuck (compared to other eras of history) to make and put out cool shit. Hell, we had a kid in town a few years back make a feature-length horror film with their phone that got screened at the indie theatre here. But you’ve got to dig and deal with the Sturgeon’s Law factor to find gems among all the cruft out there.
Also noted that folks may want the mainstream entertainment of old, but real talk - once you’re a certain age/level of experience, there’s a good chance you’re not part of the mainstream audience. Large groups don’t make the stuff you like because you’re not the target audience anymore, and four-quadrant approaches are dealing with a very different audience than they used to.
Been thinking about this quote from Terrence McKenna a lot recently (might seem a little quaint in the face of today’s media landscape, but I take away a good message):
We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y.
This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
Thats very interesting and accurate.
I think a lot of people, including myself, sometimes have the urge to give up creativity because we are seeing 3 billion other people online doing everything better than us.
Then you realize, no one cares, do what you want.
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.
Old man yelling.
As we age, we tend to lose our connection to what’s new and hip. So instead all we see is lame pop culture stuff. I think back to my teen years; my parents were only really aware of the non-pop stuff because I exposed them to it, from music to movies.
I still find plenty of new and interesting media it just takes more effort. It all came naturally back when we had plenty of young friends but now we’re old with old friends and legacy media connections.
I got around to watching The Amazing Digital Circus last night. Pretty good!
Last month I listened to Sophie, because I enjoyed some hyperpop and wanted to hear more. She’s not my style, but it certainly is different.
I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was, and now what I am isnt it, and what is it is weird and scary to me.
And it will happen to you.
TADC is something I could see 20 year old me being completely obsessed with. 35 year old me just thinks it’s neat
Sophie died 4 years ago though she was great
Absolutely not.
We live in a time of so much entertainment, that there is simultaneously more bad and more good content being produced.
There are also full Afred Hitchcock movies you can watch for free on YouTube, presumably since they are now out of copywrite. Sometimes when people lament the state of modern entertainment in a “born in the wrong generation” way, they are forgetting that media from other decades are more available than they’ve ever been.
Or indeed that if they actually looked at everything produced in the past, they’d see roughly the same garbage to gems ratio we have now.
Set up ad blockers. Both in your browser and on your network. Stop using commercial streaming services. Torrent your content and watch it locally.
Television and Radio are 75% advertisement.
This won’t help you, but this comment leads me to believe you’re in the US, where everything you talk about is almost certainly significantly worse than pretty much any other country. Because the US is essentially lawless when it comes to advertising.
Here in the UK, we have the BBC, which only runs promos for its own content, and only ever between programmes. The BBC isn’t perfect by any means. It feels to me like its management has become steadily worse over the past 10/15 years, as the board of directors was filled with Conservative appointees. And the news department really ought to be made to answer for consistently encouraging the worst voices on air.
But in the end, that £175 a year for the licence fee acts as a bulwark from the worst excesses of commercial broadcasting. ITV, for example, is lousy for advertising, but is kept reasonably in check by the BBC because comparison is easy. If they allowed themselves to become too much like the US model, people would be rightly irritated when they switch over from watching something on BBC1.
The same is true of BBC vs. commercial radio. The BBC keeps the other broadcasters reasonably honest, and they don’t necessarily have to turn a profit.
So in answer to your original point; the problem is - as ever - capitalism. The perpetual need for maximising shareholder profit means that the US entertainment industry aims 90% of its output at the lowest common denominator, and it’ll only get worse while that’s the predominant driver.
You’re still getting product placement on imported American TV series and Films, same as everybody else.
Entertainment is getting better overall
Old shows: 20+ episodes per season, little continuity between episodes (see: episodic vs serialized) and lots of filler
New shows: ~10 episodes per season, often with a story arc that lasts the entire season or longer and little filler
Streaming makes it easy to watch shows in order, which makes a serialized structure more feasible. It also offers greater flexibility in length and number of episodes. Ads are not a new thing but are easier to avoid now. The only time I really have to deal with ads are when I watch live sports.
I feel like short seasons leads to insufficient time to know the characters, and causes writers to pack in so much plot and melodrama that it’s exhausting to watch. Every second is packed too tightly , always trying to be EPIC. Miss 3 seconds in the episode? Sorry, that plot point was critical and either you go back and find it, or give up on the show. And heavy serialization also requires more of this obsessive watching and a requirement to not forget minor details between seasons. The higher production values result in 2-3 years between seasons, deepening all of the problems above: it MUST be considered epic, it MUST be tightly serialized to every minor detail, and when people don’t live to watch the TV, well, they might as well cancel it.
Writers also seem like movie writers have come to TV - think up a premise, write a story arc, and then have no idea where it goes after that. The drop off after S1 is usually pretty stark, and then S2 is when it gets cancelled.
TV having 20+ episodes (almost half of the year with weekly releases) means the characters were around long enough that they can actually build meaningful on-screen relationships. Every episode didn’t have to be a high stakes drama, plot, or writing. Lower budgets per episode means that writing quality, dialog, and character building takes precedence over flash, action, location, and epic camera shots.
Give me more Star Trek Deep Space 9 and less Marvel-like Star Trek Discovery.
It also deepens genre-ization. With only 10 episodes, a comedy is a COMEDY. A drama is a DRAMA. We don’t have time to be experimental or weave something more complex.
and causes writers to pack in so much plot and melodrama that it’s exhausting to watch. Every second is packed too tightly , always trying to be EPIC.
I disagree, though I mainly watch anime so that’s probably skewing things a bit.
With the transition to shorter seasons (12/13 episodes vs 24/25), I’m seeing MORE filler added because the studio tries to fit an arc that only needs 10 episodes to fill out 12. With a longer season, there’s more room to play with pacing of various story arcs
Different strokes for different folks. While I prefer the shorter seasons and the streamlining that this leads to, I can appreciate your perspective on this. The general feel of the shorter vs longer seasons varies significantly.
I usually find longer seasons to feel like a slog, however I will note that Deep Space 9 is a notable exception and one of my favorite shows. They really knew how to make use of the time that they had.
Respectfully, THIS is the conversation I want to respond to - instead of what you actually said to me earlier. I have to bang on about it, the medium is the message and streaming is not the same medium as network television. You’re not meant to watch it all in one go, of course it feels like a slog if you consume it that way.
The TV binge is a newer phenomenon (that only exists because of DVR and now streaming) and the point I’m really trying to make here is that this is a medium that structurally doesn’t treat you the same way.
Netflix doesn’t need you to like all their shows, they want you to obsess over a few of their shows, ideally one at a time, and they’re going to cancel anything that doesn’t get them the metrics they’re looking for. The carrots and sticks all line up to have an effect on the creative side and on the viewer that I’m not at ease with.
That’s a long rant you didn’t ask for, sorry. It’s just that I don’t see these changes as healthy even though some new good shows are still getting made. Hollywood is dying and I feel sorry for anyone who dreamed of going into that business.
I am definitely guilty of bingeing shows that I get into. Even the aforementioned DS9, I watched the 180 episodes or so over the span of probably 6 months. It was great. Though building off the previous comment that you made, DS9 is serialized rather than episodic. The show came out before streaming, but I didn’t watch it until after streaming because of how unapproachable serialized shows are on standard scheduled TV.
That said, I can still appreciate episodic shows. Comedies (including sitcoms) do really well with this format. And interestingly, I would even put sports into this category. There is continuity across a season via record and standings, but each game itself is largely self-contained. You can miss a game, or even a bunch of games, and just jump back into watching whenever. Regarding baseball’s long season of 162 games, I’ve seen someone refer to it as a friend who is always there for you.
I hadn’t thought about sports in that way before. That’s interesting. And you’re right that serialised shows didn’t work so well in broadcast, which is probably partially why I’m so prejudiced against them - they slightly remind me of the daytime soaps I suffered through when I was home sick as a kid. I’ll cop to that.
But as an adult, the reason I still go to bat so hard for episodic as a format is because it imposes a creative constraint on the writer that makes it immediately clear whether the script has succeeded in telling a compelling story. And if it’s a short episode, say ten minutes like with Adventure Time, and it still manages to tell an emotionally compelling episodic story in that time, that’s amazingly impressive.
I liken serialisation to gravity. It sets in eventually no matter how hard you try. But for me, it’s more fun to watch the plane actually fly than to watch it taxi around on the runway. Just a series of events. When everyone’s clapping for that, I’m the one sitting with my arms crossed muttering “no, fuck this pilot, spill the passengers’ drinks! Do a back flip in the sky!”
Another malformed rant. Thank you for being so tolerant.
I miss the days where we had shows without continuity. Just have each episode be a story of its own and be done. Nowadays it’s all just cliffhangers and intense story arcs to keep people on the TV. Just make a show for the sake of making a show and not for money.
I want both.
Depending on mood, I may want a show that is entirely linear.
Other times, a one off.
Shows like that exist. Elsbeth is the first one that immediately came to mind.
Not even serialized shows had no continuity.
They did, but you’d only notice it if you watch them in order.
It’s evolving, but not exactly better. Just because it’s different, doesn’t mean it’s better. Doesn’t mean it’s worse, but not necessarily better.
Get a load of this guy thinking serialisation is so great. The medium is still the message, and a serial is saying “we don’t value your time”.
Hey what’s your new favourite show? Is it Disney’s new “Trust Us It Gets Good In Two Hours”?
It’s not just the serialization (which I do prefer), it’s also that seasons are generally significantly shorter than what we’ve seen on standard TV. The shorter seasons are absolutely a key part of the equation.
People are acting like the existence of shit TV shows means that good shows don’t exist.
There’s more good stuff to find than ever. It’s just that it’s hard to find. There’s too much volume of content out there to sift through, and mainstream tastes have changed so it isn’t as easy to find since the stuff that’s popular really isn’t your taste. You likely liked the stuff that’s was popular back then. Look harder. Find the niche like-minded communities. Look for content related to what you already like. There are tons of new good movies, games, music, etc out now and you just need to find it. Even for news you can find the sources you like and filter out toxicity.
Yeah, this is a huge part of it. The barrier to entry for making music, videos, writing books, etc… is the lowest it’s ever been. Literally anyone with a smartphone, a tripod, and half decent lighting can record reasonable looking video to upload.
Same with music. And video games. And writing books (self-publish to Amazon for pay-per-read). Content creation technology/platforms are very readily available now.
Ebbs and flows of how life dictates how it wants you to consume things has always been there, but you still have choice. For new stuff, you can dig for what’s quality to you. You don’t have to give it to the AI sloptubers.
And yes, getting older objectively makes it more difficult to get into new things, but it’s okay to embrace that. Have your backlog of stuff you KNOW you enjoy.
Yeah I just rewatch Gundam and Star Trek and Godzilla movies over and over and over again with the occasional new show that doesn’t suck mixed in. There’s enough content there that it feels fresh by the time I start over.
There are some (admittingly, crap quality) 90-ish minute clips of straight-up old school Nickelodeon on Youtube. The only ads are the ones that originally aired. It’s like nostalgia soup for me, and it’s pretty clear these are just clips someone set a VCR to record, stored for decades, and then transferred to the internet. Which again, makes for crap quality, but it warms my heart to think that some of this could’ve been lost footage if not for some random tapes some kid in the 90s recorded then forgot about for many years.
Btw, Pete & Pete still slaps.
I used to use a site that had Toonami streams like that. I’m not sure if it’s still around or what the URL even was but it was really cool.
