Ask Lemmy

Artists are being treated worse, that is for sure, why do the details of if artists can still manage to create equally good art as we begin to treat them worse and worse matter? I don't know if I want artists to be capable of that past a certain point as it just ends up worse for artists anyways when they do this and normalize even worse treatment of their profession.

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.

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

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.

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.

Things have been getting shittier by the day for years.

I did the math, and it looks like when the Twitter crowd came online everything went to shit.

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.

Entertainment notwithstanding, you are definitely getting old.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

I don't watch ads, and I have been watching all sorts of great TV and movies. You just know how to find it and where to get it.

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.

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.

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

I stick to ad-free platforms, either by paying it or using alternative ways, books, single player games, and Spotify without ads.

We are in a shitty point of society and all we can do is brace ourselves and do conscious choices that pull us out of this algorithm riddled internet.

It's tough though. Lots of times I wake up and the first thing I do is open media to see if there are any tragedies or worldwide events going on, and then when I notice it... oops! There goes 30 minutes away of your life doomscrolling on Reddit/media... I just shut it all down when I notice it and go back to my routine. Trying to make a habit of it, but it is hard

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.