And with AI sinking its claws in… I can only imagine how rough the ride will be. There is still good content out there, there is just more trash to sift through to find it.
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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It’s absolutely getting worse. Across every spectrum.
Our ancestors used to say the same shit about berries and game. The environment has just shifted. Our ancestors had to get better at hunting and/or gathering or they died out. Modern humans are just in a media environment shift and need to adapt. The days of blockbuster having curated media ready to go on the shelf is over. Good media has been almost hunted to extinction the temperatures are rising and the coasts where new ideas went to grow are flooding.
Don't worry friend there is a light at the end of this dark tunnel. Just like slavery in this country created the fertile suffering that helped bring forth great music so too shall the terrible age of Trump create a people so damaged and broken they will surely go on to make great works of art.
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.
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.
I think the best of youtube has been pretty consistent, it's just that there's exponentially more crap (and the algorithm wants you watching crap).
For games, I do agree that most AAA games are not very good, but we are in a golden age of indie gaming. There are so many amazing games being released constantly it's overwhelming.
Yeah, but there being more crap, means its less at its peak imo. You used to go on and just have good content mostly, now theres so much clickbait and garbage to sift through, which while the good content is still there, not being able to find it means YouTube is lesser because of it.
And absolutely, indies are the way to go, there's a lot of low effort shit still posted to Steam every year, but the gems are in there. Big AA, AAA games are just money farmers now and they are also often buggy and unpolished even if the base game is good. All the additional purchases and shit ughhh, gaming fell off. There's no game I am looking forward to anymore, I'm just waiting to be pleasantly surprised by some random new indie game that will drop.
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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.
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?
Waiting on Hail Mary, the movie. Great book.
I intend to drag the family to the movie theatre.
ETA: try Ted Lasso. It’s feel good, funny, and lightly mocks standard form plotting engrained in those of us who have consumed TV to any degree. It’s smart too.
What TV, other than BCS do you like?
The Sopranos and Breaking Bad
Not watched any of them. The natural question from that is to ask if you tried Succession, I guess?
Yes I watched the first season. It was good but not really my type of thing.
Are you primarily into crime thrillers then? I'm mostly into sci-fi/fantasy/speculative-fiction which is omnipresent these days.
Yes crime and erotica is my diet!
Nightcrawler was so good, better call Saul might be one of the best shows ever. Definitely cracks the top ten
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.
Yes, TV has gotten worse. When I was a kid, a 90 minute movie had one ad in the middle, if it was longer, there were usually two. Recently I saw TV after god knows how many years and there was an ad every 10 minutes.
And yes, the really short content sucks because it damages the attention span. But it's a trend, it's not like it started with this generation, our attention is attacked constantly and has been for a while.
I wouldn't hate on brain rot that much, sure, it's stupid, but hey - you had your own stupid thing when you were young, as did every other generation.
Steam generally shows you what they think will interest you, I don't see any gooner porn there, that one might be on you.
Yes, you're getting old, yelling at clouds. Not a bad thing as long you don't make others feel bad because of it.
By "TV" do you primarily mean network TV?
Yeah, I think so, in my language we simply call it TV.
Listen, leave my mundane activity sims the fuck alone
For tv shows and movies:
Older content is rapidly disappearing/getting less accessible. Especially non english content. Shout out to do your part in legally archiving digital media from public libraries.
At the same time new media is pushed build on Existing mega franchises, everything is the same format with the same formula with no higher goal then the profit-margin.
online: is a different story because google owns it. They decide how youtube presents content to users, what do’s and don’ts get punished or get you recommended more.
Again no goal higher then the profit margin,1 ad for a 30 minute video is not as efficient as 1 every so many shorts. And because shorts are more random and your just consuming the flos its harder to tell the ads apart.
Because shorts are optimised on phone, google also rules how 50% of people use their phone it pushes more people to this more exploitative and less ad blockade device.
Good content still exists, its just a lot harder to find because promoting it is less profitable.
Their is a word for this kind of things falling apart to chase profit. Its enshitification.
Definitely what all of us think.
Television and Radio are 75% advertisement.
They always have been
Most of my favorite youtubers from 2010s are gone replaced with nonstop politics, drama, reaction, and streaming content farming.
Find better youtubers? But also understand that people are going to talk about what matters to them and most people aren't privileged enough to ignore the political hellscape (or are so privileged they think they can benefit from it...). Same with the "drama" since so much of that is intrinsically tied to how the platforms they rely on for their livelihood function.
I feel it in my heart that short form content is damaging everyones attention spans especially my tablet ridden younger family members.
I very much agree. But this has been going on for decades. TV led to a decline in movies ("I only have time to maybe watch five episodes of a show. Not a full movie") and "book reading" has been on a decline for about as long.
When I go into the search bar on YouTube I see stuff literally called “brain break” and “brain rot”.
Okay? I mean, everyone always made jokes about how TV would rot our brains. It is nothing new
I switch on the news and its 90% pure political propagandano matter the station.
... the news is discussing politics? Gasp, shock, and amazement?
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.”
"I'm Rick James, bitch". "Whatchu talkin' bout Willis". "Can you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth".
Kids are fucking stupid. At least this crop aren't racist? Yet...
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.
Don't expect stores to curate themselves for you. Find others who like what you like and let them trawl through the steam slop. It is no different than being a PC gamer who wanted to buy KOTOR back when every store would shove WoW and Halo down your throat the second you entered.
All the stuff I enjoyed is gone,
No, it's not. Retention of media is at an all time high and you can very much sit down to watch or play the things you live
and everything they make now seems so empty and pessimistic now.
Again, curate better.
Is this just me getting old yelling at clouds, or is something wrong?
What's wrong is that you think the world must revolve around you. It doesn't. But that doesn't mean people out there aren't making content you would love to consume. You just have to put a bit of effort in. Because The Algorithm was never about giving everyone exactly what they want. It was about matching people up to personas and feeding content along those lines.
Pretty much every successful channel you see on youtube these days is made to follow a formula. There are classes you can take on how to attract a demographic, how often to release content, how to keep your followers engaged via discord, what sort of merch to offer...