Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Oh, it's not either/or.

You're conflating several points here.

Things change. Focus and platform and format and emphasis change.

But also, late stage capitalism is ruining everything.

I still enjoy watching and discovering a lot of stuff that I missed growing up. I'm literally searching for Stargate DVDs right now because I never watched it all the way through. But also, brainrot can be fun, modern depth is just as depth as older depth, with similar rates of rarity. Meaning, it's there, but lots of other stuff mixed in.

So yeah, you are getting old. But only because of your inflexibility to adapt to newer methods and models and stuff. Take the best from the old, and try the new and find the good stuff. That's what I've always historically done anyway. Because if you do that, over time, let's say you get desperate in a drought. Then you just lower your standards a little bit and end up planning on watching things like buffy or sg1 in 2026.

And maybe, just maybe, those things, while problematic of their eras, may have otherwise been way ahead of their time or you'll grow to appreciate them long after their time. Take breaks, come back in a decade or two and try again and maybe it'll be better or worse. There's no wrong answer, even if you're getting old. Especially if you're getting old.

Also, complaining, while valid, is also not as productive as finding things to be passionate about. For example, I just played through the original turok on pc. That game is wayyyy better than I was told it was when I was a kid. And now that I've played it, I can say stuff like "games these days, while fun, are missing X or really could incorporate Y to be even better".

Tldr: getting old. But also kinda worse. A lot of it is perspective and how you get around whatever era's issues.

Oh right, there is one more factor to consider. As you get older, you DO get wiser and more experienced. Stuff stops being aimed at you, and in a lot of ways, I've found society not catering to me because I'm expensive compared to the dumb kids of today who don't know any better.<- now take this, and think about it from an older person's perspective, where YOU are dumb kid.

Now, go out and touch grass. It really is better and will make you feel better. It usually works for me.

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 media being manipulated by megacorps to push whatever they want to cash in on. Also ads. Also also, you're getting old!

Great example would be music industry. If you listen to radio, you would notice that most of the modern music is just bunch of the same artists that are topping the charts. But there are also way more great artists that create music today that are unheard if your primary source of music is radio.

Enter Spotify (or at least how it used to be before 2022). Spotify would give you choice what to listen to. Would suggest artists that do similar music to what you like. It made discovering new artists very easy. For years 3 major labels were dictating what majority of people would listen to. But now people can finally chose what they like. And that is what makes Spotify so hard to drop, considering recent issues.

Same with movies. Not that there are no good movies or series out there. It is just what these mega conglomerates dictate on what is pushed to the masses. An insanely good indie movie has nothing near the budget to advertise itself as some meh-grade Disney flick can have.

I suggest to go off mainstream. Mainstream media is not where "it's at" anymore. Get into indie movies. Might be good to start checking some particular directors and their catalog.

Same goes to YT. I fucking love me some small content creators.

Games? - Single player, online/split screen co-op. Each year there are bunch of really good games are released. Indie genre now is the new hot way to play and enjoy games.

Do not go on mainstream meme subs. These suck. Find some small subs that offer meme experience. Eventually any sub that grows big entshittifies beyond repair.

News. This shit cant be avoided entirely. Maximum you can do is to minimize exposure to news. Do not scroll as much on your phone and use TV just for movies and series.

I'm "only" 40 and I'm judging the shit out of you for having favorite YouTubers. YouTube is for how-to's and music videos only. Following someones vlog just seems really pathetic to me.

But advertising has always been a thing. Even in the pre TV days. Thinking of ralphie from a Christmas story here, with his decoder ring telling him to drink Ovaltine.

Even if you're ancap, consuming ancap material like fallout, and the outer worlds is still capitalism and marketing. Hell, YouTube and tiktok etc are essentially JUST marketing unless you're searching for something specific.

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.

Use Tidal for music. It’s pretty good

Everything has been enshitified by narcissistic oligarchs

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.

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.

Yes. Two things can be true.

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.

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

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