Ask Lemmy

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

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Games get outdated Book is book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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just a reminder that COVID-19 shaves off 3 IQ points when you first get it, and 2 every time you're re-infected. Even more for long covid and hospitalization.

We can't keep pretending this hasn't had a noticeable, immediate effect on... everything.

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.

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.

Mathematically, music is getting less complex:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/jul/04/melodies-chart-topping-music-less-complex-study

If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere...

Well not all empty and pessimistic, but yeah there's certainly a lot more of that than good content.

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.

Steam has a lot more great games now, but you have to put up a block list to get rid of the flood of gooner/asset flip/streamer 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 incognito/signed 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.

Yes. Two things can be true.

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.

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.

shows yes, they have gotten worst over the years. especially how heavy handed streaming has influenced which shows get released, how much budget, and limited the development is. plus the interference of the executive, showrunners, producers that force thier ulterior motive into the show, ruining it.

It’s really bad. As brains get smaller, the entertainment industry literally has to dumb everything down.

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.

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.

Listen, leave my mundane activity sims the fuck alone

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?

It’s absolutely getting worse. Across every spectrum.

It did get better for a while, but now it is worse.

The problem with short form, which is quite evident to those of us who grew up with regular form TV back in the day, is short form format mimics a TV advertisement of yore, most of the time (exceptions exist, we’re talking middle of the bell curve numbers here). The type of music played is exactly that bad as well.

As such, shorts usually hit the brain like an advertisement under the guise of not being one.

I’d be curious to know if shorts consumers are more likely to consume ads, now that they’ve been thoroughly trained to consume advertisement format vids/music.

Everything has been enshitified by narcissistic oligarchs