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Games get outdated Book is book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.

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!

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.

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 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.

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.

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Entertainment notwithstanding, you are definitely getting old.

Set up ad blockers. Both in your browser and on your network. Stop using commercial streaming services. Torrent your content and watch it locally.

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.

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.

If in doubt, raid the local used bookstore. Yeah, and do use uBlock Origin, Freetube as your YT front end, and maybe sail the high seas. Curate your entertainment.

I switch on the news and its 90% pure political propagandano matter the station.

I'm using Bluesky mainly as a newsfeed.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 do think its getting worse. Lots of media is just "hey remember that thing?". Sparingly its fine but for example the german movie "das Kanu des Manitu" a long awaited sequal, was all just "hey rememher this? That was in the first movie and it was great!".

Everything just is mainstreamed to get the most profit and no longer tell a story with emotions.

And this is defenetly me but older movies from the 60s-70s-80s, with their old microphones and cameras just feel like a story. How they catch the sound, it sounds like someone is retelling a tale.

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 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.

Those types of youtubers havent been replaced; they still exist, just hard to find because of so many low quality videos

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