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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Pretty much every successful channel you see on youtube these days is made to follow a formula. There are classes you can take on how to attract a demographic, how often to release content, how to keep your followers engaged via discord, what sort of merch to offer…
Well not all empty and pessimistic, but yeah there’s certainly a lot more of that than good content.
All the stuff I enjoyed is gone, and everything they make now seems so empty and pessimistic now.
Eeeeeh. First of all, all the stuff you liked is still there.
But also good stuff is rare. You really need to know where to look and which tips to follow. For example, if you disregard anime as a whole, you’ve probably missed absolute 10/10 media experiences you can’t find anywhere else. Sometimes it’s about leaving your comfort zone and trying something new.
But then also, about the only really good star wars content we got in the last… 30 years is Ep. 3, the clone wars animated series (later seasons) and Andor. And they made SO MUCH.
Also, maybe you should make your own. If you like the old stuff so much, try to make it yourself and give it a spin. get close to it, recapture, reinterpret, re-imagine. Maybe you’ll do that for 15 years, go back to your inspiration and find that your “imitation” has surpassed it.
Necessity is the mother of invention. If you’re bored make your own.
You have all the blueprints for the stuff you like. What else are you going to do? You can watch reruns, of course… not sure if it will be equally satisfying though.
Mathematically, music is getting less complex:
If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere…
To be fair, that’s purely chart-topping music.
News was always political, but I agree, it’s exhausting, and it was exhausting back then.
As for the memes, do you really think “It’s over 9000” was any more comprehensible. I spent way too much time overthinking why that meme was funny, like “Oh, it’s because the power levels grow exponentially over the course of the show and 9000 is such a ridiculously low number when it’s all said and done.” But nah I think it was just random. Then I started laughing at it cuz hehe funny reference. And what even was YouTube Poop, I mean it was the funniest stuff ever wrought by man (HI BILLY MAYES HERE WITH LOTSA SPAGHETTI FOR DINNER!), but don’t kid yourself, nonsense was the whole point. Let the young’uns have their 67’s.
Some of it’s legit though. YouTube is enshittifying, it’s the natural course of things when you have investors to please. That’s also why games are crap now. But there were lowest common denominator adult video games as far back as the Atari 2600, so that’s nothing new. Not saying its OK, just that nothing has changed and is unlikely to change in the future. Look for the good stuff that is out there. I’m having fun with Megabonk.
I also agree short form content can be straight up harmful. I just found out the other day you can turn off YouTube history which stops the algorithm from feeding you anything. On mobile you just get a blank search bar. It’ll still bring up shorts when searching but if you scroll five or six shorts deep it’ll just give you a blank screen that says “recommendations have been turned off.” I turned it off because I realized I’d get up from my desk at work to go to the bathroom but spend a whole minute looking for a recommended video to listen to before actually leaving the room.
I think there’s a kernel of truth in what you say. I actually paid YouTube extortion to get premium but it doesn’t matter. If the channel is large enough, they’ll make the commercial as part of their “content”. At my age I feel like I’ve already seen enough advertising for a lifetime. I’m so sick of being constantly solicited. If I really want to see something, I pay extra to avoid ads and if I can’t I just walk away. Read a book.
There’s just way more content today but probably the percentage of good vs. bad hasn’t changed much. Finding the good in the sea of bad might be harder though. Actively maintain and curate your feeds.
And keep around indie web and federation etc. Internet used to be a niche domain of the nerds. It is happening again where some find it’s just the time to depart from the mainstream web. Just don’t get too attached to visible engagement.
Go to Goodwill and shop some DVDs. I’ve discovered so many films that are either not available on streaming or are available but have never been recommended to me. Just watched The Game with Michael Douglas recently which I had never heard of and was pretty good. For $3/pop, it’s not a huge risk.
“I was drugged and left for dead in Mexico and all I got was this lousy shirt”
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 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”.
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.
It’s absolutely getting worse. Across every spectrum.
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.
It’s really bad. As brains get smaller, the entertainment industry literally has to dumb everything down.
Are brains getting smaller? Is it all the plastic?
Yes. Two things can be true.
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.
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.
Clear your history and check for yourself. It’s not hard to do.
Tastes vary widely of course. There is more content now than ever, and the majority of content has always been crap. Finding gems has always been a challenge, but they are out there. Some of the best streaming shows I’ve ever watched in my life are recent ones.
Movies, I don’t watch much anymore, but with some effort I can usually find something I enjoy.
Games, I’m older, so don’t enjoy them very often, but I had an absolute blast playing some sandbox games on Steam not too long ago. And I had even more fun playing OpenXCom. (Which is a very old game, but it’s been updated.)
And there are thousands of great books to read. That’s one antidote for short attention spans.
I know Lemmy hates AI, but ChatGPT pretty decent at suggesting titles from all of these forms of entertainment if you tell it your likes and dislikes.
