Ask Lemmy

Yes

Absolutely not.

We live in a time of so much entertainment, that there is simultaneously more bad and more good content being produced.

The entertainment is still pretty good but the entertainment business is sure fucked up. The most brazen, spit in your face moment for me was, "It - Chapter 1" on one streaming service and "It - Chapter 2" on another one. They're not even trying to hide their fuckery anymore. Go Community Theatre!

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."

You lost me here. This is where you start to sound like a boomer. The annoying thing about 67 isn't that it doesn't have any sense behind it, it's the sheer ubiquity that kids say it. Which, unless you have kids or work with kids you probably really aren't seeing. Look at old MLG montage parody videos. Why was that guy saying "wow" and winking funny? There's no reason. It is just something we laughed at. 67 is the same.

A lot of everything else you say I resonate with. Ads are getting more intense and ubiquitous. My country is going mask off with fascism and disappearing citizens. There's a lot to be upset about. I don't think much of it is related though, you know? Ads just suck because they want more money and that just means showing more ads.

This is some serious advice. Find things to be thankful for, no matter how small, and focus on them. Your perception is your reality. What you fill your mind with is what you see. I know it sort of sounds obvious but, if you're thinking about miserable things all day you'll be miserable. If you think about things that make you happy, you'll be happy. I'm not saying to ignore the bad things or to give up, but you can't fight back if you're miserable. It is okay to take a break. It is okay to want to be happy.

If you're in the northern hemisphere we're in the time of year that gets dark super duper early. Seasonal affective disorder is real. The older I get the more I realize it. I'm not saying blame your thoughts on it being less sunny, but just be aware it can be a component.

I hope you can find some joy. 💜

Until the pandemic the answer to this question was always you are getting older.

Not since though. Entertainment is fucking dogshit now. Good TV shows are few and far between. Most movies are utter dogshit.

Influences and micro content is just fucking terrible. I swear to god all of it is just PG Porn. Oh look a channel about a couple sailing around the world. Every shot is at her ass level in a bikini as they film the content.

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.

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.

For what it’s worth, I recently learned you can turn off the gooner porn bait visual novels in the store without turning off incidental sexual content games like BG3. They have gradations of sexual content.

(This doesn’t solve the other categories, but I suspect you can tailor your store experience to limit those as well.)

Radio and TV always sucked. That's not a new thing. The only time I see ads is during sports.

You have less free time as you age. Happens to us all.

This is where social media shines. Go to any forum that's focused on one of your favorite entertainments and ask the users what their top 10 things of late are. Check out the most mentioned. Fuck it's December. There's likely year-end lists all over the place.

You already have a shared passion with those folks so it's likely you'll have similar tastes.

Try listening to one of the records they recommend on your commute instead of the podcast that agrees with you.

Sure that show seems stupid but it's 22 minutes and I can put it on while I make dinner. ...and since when do I hate stupid?

When you were younger you prided yourself in ignoring the spoon-fed bullshit you referenced. It takes a little bit more effort at our age. You obviously care about it.

Cheers.

You just cant rely on algorithms to show you anything good, they might but dont expect them to. You have to search for content yourself and also try blocking the shitcontent so you might find anything decent more easy. In a way, internet is kind of like post apocalypse wasteland now. You might find something, or even communities that have a lot of stuff, but a lot of it is just crap.

Maybe try archiving some of the things you like best in case it disappears one day. Also try connecting with other people and communities you find that are nice, we have only eachother against the corporations that just want to show us brainrot content.

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

Go to book stores and retro game stores. And the library. Some libraries have movies, music, and videogames in addition to books.

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

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!

Pop music sounds very bland today and most news articles are pure clickbait and riddled with spelling and grammar errors.

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.

You being confused by 6 7 is literally the reason why it's popular. The younger generation is rebelling against the older generations by doing things differently. You are just getting old.

theres a lot of hogs out there eager to gobble up the slop

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.

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

At this point I accepted we will not get stuff like lord the rings movies ever again from any studio.

Everyone knows 67 = basketball star Lamelo Ball's height (6' 7"). It's a reference to a song that talks about that. It's now just a silly in-joke reaction to hearing/seeing the numbers 6 and 7, literally the exact same thing as millenials and 69.

Well not everyone knows that I guess - just everyone cool!

Also how weird is it that 2 of the biggest memes of the past decade - the dab and 67 -are both made famous by sports stars based in my hometown of Charlotte, NC (not exactly a cultural mecca)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.