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SmokeyDope @piefed.social

Is entertainment getting worse or am I getting old?

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?

206 comments

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Ads are destroying everything. IDK how much of any industry’s budget goes to ads, but whatever it is, the consumer is paying for it in multiple ways even if you don’t want the thing being advertised. It’s baked in to the cost of the product or service. It’s shoved in your face driving down the highway or listening to music, or even on your refrigerator. And they do their best to handcuff you by withholding some facet of your product or service unless you watch the ad or at least permit it to be displayed even if you already paid for the thing you get the ad on. Youtube is utter garbage with everyone filling space in their videos with maddeningly useless fluff and shallow chatter (like and subscribe!) to increase the adspace available do so their videos get pushed to the top.

    Entertainment? IDK, it feels like people haven’t had an original thought in decades. It’s rehashing or reviving old ideas in worse ways. Music is lyrically and musically shallow (yeah, pop music has always been mostly like this) but it seems like it’s overrun with low-effort junk. We have almost no artists who can actually weave a story into a listenable and desirable form. Maybe some indy stuff is good, but some people seem to think that different and obscure suckiness is good because it’s not mainstream suckiness.

    Even books are shit a lot of the time. It’s like every author has to dumb down the book and write it as close to movie format as possible so they can hopefully get just that - get a movie deal. NYT bestsellers are emotionally manipulating triumphs, failures, Lifetime TV crap designed to be consumed on airplanes after your third vodka tonic makes it seem deep and meaningful while you’re stuck in that middle seat.

    I rarely watch any TV at all. No broadcast or cable channels at all. Some streaming. I might try out a dozen books before I find anything that sticks.

    Entertainment has been fully consumed in a desperate churn to be the next short-lived viral “thing.” There are too few who take the time and effort to actually create material instead of being the 150th person to make a reaction video to some clip. So yeah, I think you’re right. Things have become incredibly shallow and short-lived as desperate people fight for their viral hook and ad money.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I don't see ads on my media aside from watching TV at a hotel every now and then. The secret ingridient is piracy but also privacy (tools) that block ads.

  • Steam has a lot more great games now, but you have to put up a block list to get rid of the flood of goonerasset flipstreamer bait garbage. Also, shovelware is nothing new.

    The bside games comm (look for “bside@fedia.io” if the link is broken) here on lemmy is great for chill indie game releases, as well as the patientgamers comm.

    Going through steam discovery queues and clicking “ignore” or blocking associated tags also helps massively.

    YouTube has been black box algorithm hell for like 10-15 years now. That started with pewdiepie in like, what, 2011? Maybe use an incognitosigned out page and search for specifically what you want?

    Radio has also always been largely shit, exhibit A being Rush Limbaugh from the ‘90s‘00s on US AM band radio. Go even further back and you have the payola scams of the 1970s. Spotify, Bandcamp, Qobuz, niche music communities etc. will be where you find something you like.

    Centralized media will never be something you have control over and I’d bet that’s your real problem with most of this.

  • You know it sounds like you were younger in the early 2000s. People have been saying this every generation and every leap Forward in technology. So you get the boomers talking about how they wish they could go back to the old TV and the old school everything. It really depends on as I keep saying on here how you consume your media and what you pay attention to. You don't know how many times I've said that on here. People are like I wish the internet was young again I wish I could not be influenced by so much politics so much strife so much negativity. I wish that I could go back to old school YouTube and see these things again. Hell most of those things are still available and are still on there you don't have to be influenced so much by all the negativity and all the politics around. You can just watch things as they happen and as they come out and still avoid a lot of that.

    • Yeah, it's just a common thing generationally to pine for the days of olde, and for my generation it was apparently playing outside and then early internet, and OP was there for the YouTube heyday, and I can probably commiserate with them, but by the same token I'm like, well, YouTube ruined my favorite medium, whatever that was.

      It extends into everything. Music, my favorite band's earlier records were better, the new kids in the scene have ruined it, etc. etc. Nostalgia is a real removed, unfortunately, and we're all just stuck on Mr. Bones wild ride with no way off it.

      I think part of it is experience. You've seen it. You've heard it. You were there for it, and it now just feels old. But I always tell people who never watched The Wire or Breaking Bad that I'm jealous that they get to experience then for the first time. There are only so many greats out there, and you experience them, and you reflect on everything else you experience in that light now.

      That's all not to say that there won't be some great shit you'll experience again. You've just experienced so much great shit already that this new great shit has a higher bar. It's your first love. The first time you ate apple pie ice cream. The first time you heard a song that just touched you. Everything else gets measured up against it, and at 15, for the first time, shit seemed better, but only by comparison.

      Getting old is a ride OP. The biggest hill on the rollercoaster is always the first one, but that doesn't mean that we can't enjoy the corkscrew or that sharp turn later on. I'm sitting here at Kalahari with my kids, and I go down slides on my own and they don't hit the same, but going down ones with my kid all of a sudden puts a new spice on an old recipe.

      I have friends who continue to chase the dragon, and that works for them. Do what you wanna do, don't feel like you need to stick in the same circles and routines you used to. And if your medium isn't entertaining to you anymore, just put it down. I don't play games the way I used to, and that's okay. I pick back up here and there, the same way I pick up my guitar, and the same way I'm thinking about strapping on the skates to play hockey again. And I've positioned myself in a way that I can do these things too, if I want. And if I don't, I don't.

      Love ya OP. Go out there and have fun, that's what I always say when anyone asks just about anything.

  • I'm here to offer no answers, but a few fun activities that help me get out of that same mood. I feel you.

    • Play some DOOM WADs. It's December, the Cacowards are here, and it's a beautiful time of the year to play through some of the most revered levels and mods. Pretty pure if you remember that the original devs open-sourced the engine, the community then built many source ports and now continues to churn out all levels of quality of mods and levels.
    • Read some books. Feels bizarre and unusual these days to consciously choose something slower and ad-free and intentional, with nothing to interrupt you (per the power of the medium alone, alone). Not to mention the endless choice of genres and works to choose from. The bonus here is writing stuff yourself, which has a super low barrier of entry.
    • Play THE FINALS. It's been going well for over 8 seasons now and offers the most unique FPS experience so far with its core gamemode and some twists on staple mechanics. As a long-term Counter-Strike player and a massive FPS enjoyer, this one is a breath of fresh air in so many ways.

    That's on top of other wonderful suggestions in this thread.

    But I think the most important would be to learn when to slow down and step away from the attention- and data-hungry apps and sites and whatever.

  • I feel it in my heart that short form content is damaging everyones attention spans

    The Silent Generation Boomers said this about us watching half hour TV shows.

    go on 67 Wikipedia and it literally says “It has no fixed meaning.”

    Maybe go back and read some Jacques Derrida, because the idea that meaning of words and ideas isn't fixed isn't exactly new.

    Its full of gooner porn bait visual novels

    You take that back about Dispatch right now!

    But more seriously, content changed. Young people just don't watch scripted television and movies in the same form or capacity that we do. Due to this, the budget for that kind of entertainment is slowly receding, because why would companies pour money into a type of content that isn't really making the returns on investment they want because all the old people who enjoy it are slowly dying? It would be like people who grew up in the early 1900s complaining about "talkies" in the 1930s because they preferred the old silent films of their youth. It really isn't for us to say which is better or worse, as much as it is for us to find what's good out of the new stuff that is being produced. There's more content than ever out there, which means you have to sift through more to find good stuff.

    Like I mean, that's just part of getting older, the things we enjoy become less popular, and by extension, less money is invested in making good products that cater to that audience anymore.

    Also, counterpoint: Baldur's Gate 3 was a return to 1990s western CRPG style and it fucking dominated financially. No other game of that style has come close to that kind of popularity for a long, long time. No, Bethesda games don't count because they don't actually lock you out of different outcomes from the choices you make. The Witcher games also don't count because there's not a real RPG, build-your-own-character aspect to them, you're just Geralt whether you liked it or not. When classic styles of media are done well, people still respond positively to them.

    Finally, corporate enshittification dominates all of this, leading to a feedback loop of companies putting less and less money into anything quality at all ever because they don't think its valuable to invest in anything except stock buybacks and firing employees to pump their stock prices.

    There's a lot of aspects to it, and a lot of it has to do with markets and how we're no longer the target market, the coveted 18-24 demographic that made our own brain rot television such as Aqua Teen Hunger Force so popular in the early 2000s when we were in that target demographic. Brain rot media has always been there, in the form of absurdist comedy. You go back farther and you had stuff like Mr. Show and The State. When I think of my own high school graduating class, I think most of them were dimwitted fucking idiots, and I don't think it was because they watched short form media: I think it's because most humans are genuinely dimwitted fucking idiots.

    Anyway, I'll stop rambling, but yeah we're just getting old and we're not the audience that is being catered to anymore.

  • I feel the same, but I just have a nas for my movies so I can enjoy them forever. Most of the current new movies are full of bullshit so I also mostly watch older movies where humanity still exists. You have to start gathering movies like this on physical media or they just will be gone whenever the streaming service wants them to.

    I run Linux so I dont need to update my computer.

    I dont have Facebook or Instagram.

    I use Freetube app on my computer instead of YouTube so I dont have to see shorts, or ads for that matter.

    I use Newpipe on my phone for the same reason.

    So you can do some things to stay away from bullshit.

  • For youtube you should use Revanced and the subscriptions feed. No ads, no garbage recommendations but just a small amount of effort.

    I think movies are worse now, I may be getting old but I the time between "Wow, that was a great movie" seems to be getting longer.

    On the other hand, TV shows are getting better, when I watched Firefly recently (don't kill me) it was good but not great while The Bear and Ted Lasso are just amazing.

    Anime is also getting better, there are new animes that are great being released all the time. Chainsaw Man, Frieren, Solo Levelling, Delicious Dungeon and Dan Da Dan are all great picks that came out recently.

    I feel like Steam is also really great these days, there's a bit of a downturn in AAA game quality but the indie scene is going strong. Slay the Spire, Hades and Balatro all came out semi recently. You're better served with getting some gaming recommendations since the catalog is so full of games that are worth playing you'll have to quit your job to actually get through them. I really would like to dump another 100 hours into Factorio to get through the Space Age DLC.

    All in all, yeah, things are getting enshittified but there's still plenty of entertainment that's good being released every day.

206 comments