Something about his framing makes me suspect it's an artifact of his age - he pegs the golden era to the time before he was fully cognizant of people's fears and worries. Then he matures and starts noticing the fears and problems, and doesn't realize they were there all along
That's a nice way of putting it. I don't know about him, but I have just been thinking about, I my own life, the question about the extent to which feelings of, "gosh there are a lot of things getting worse" is partially a reflection of aging.
I also remember the drowning-in-pop-ups era of the late 90s, when I literally stopped using my computer altogether because I couldn't figure out what to do about pop-ups,
Well, that subsided a bit, no? Google came along with text ads and I suspect because precisely because people were tired of popups it was more effective for a while, and more sites without popups became available, especially in the high-blogosphere era. Now the chaos is back in new form.
The next logical step seems to be taxing the platforms to pay the journalists, no? Australia tried that, California is trying at the moment, the platforms pushed back hard, but in 10 years I bet they'll welcome something like it because otherwise they're picking off an ever cleaner carcass.
it's an artifact of his age
A variant of the age dependence of favorite music and political views. There was a favorite web-cartoon of mine that I have annoyingly not been able to find for years which said something like " The peak of pop culture occurred the year that you -yes you, the reader turned 12 (or maybe 13...). Would really like to find it.
There was a tweet recently along those lines that went, "I'm bored of all my music. Any recommendations with a good beat and that was emotionally significant to me when I was 13-15?"
2: It did subside! I was just asserting that things didn't fall apart for the first time in 2010. All these themes have always braided together in various ways.
6: Anastomosis is heebie's weakness.
Still, there was a golden age of stability in the model. The model was, in fact, so stable that nobody predicted anything going wrong with it/i>
When I think of a golden age of stability in the model, I think of major network tv, before cable and of course before the internet. Probably not coincidentally, that was how it was when I was 12 years old.
8: Pretty much me as well. But I do recall having confusing talks with my parents as to "who pays for TV?" I just refused to intellectually accept that advertising could be that lucrative.
My emotional attachment to music extends well into my mid-20s before plummeting. I know this just goes to prove the rule, but it was a lot easier to form emotional attachments to physical media than Spotify playlists.
10: I feel this, and yet I have not noticed a lack of emotional attachment among young Taylor Swift fans.
I miss the days when media was stable and you could rely on Phil Donahue and Keith Olbermann to express dissenting views on war. These days we all live in bubbles where that kind of rigorous exposure to a diverse range of ideas and perspectives isn't possible anymore.
11: Taylor Swift fans apparently buy her music on physical media. Don't know if they then *listen* to the physical copies or stream it. ??
This, Stormcrow? https://www.reddit.com/r/decadeology/s/U0w74MSwoP
An interesting extension of 11 is what's happened in K-pop fandom, where everything is available on streaming services and mostly consumed that way, but physical releases do brisk business as high-priced collector's items, with elaborate packaging, booklets, foldout posters, trading cards and whatnot included. An album or EP will often exist in several different versions and fans will arrange trades for the items they particularly want.
My emotional attachment to music also faded after my mid-20s but then came back in a big way in the last couple years. I don't think it has anything to do with the physicality or virtuality of the medium.
I've bought maybe six cassettes in my life. I don't think I've bought a music cd except as a gift. I've never used a streaming service. My sources of music are FM radio and whatever my wife is listening to.
The first of which is about 10% Taylor Swift and the 2nd about 40% Taylor Swift.
And I say that as someone who never learned to stream.
FM radio is a pretty amazing technology.
14: That is certainly the concept, but I think where I saw it was in a web comic, probably 20 years ago.
The peak of pop culture occurred the year that you -yes you, the reader turned 12 (or maybe 13...)
Fwiw, I don't think anybody except the residents of East Germany would put my 12th or 13th year as a high water mark for pop culture.
"War" was released when I was 12. Not that I heard it until I was maybe 17 or so.
It's like, how much less good for could this be? And the answer is none. None less good for."
15: This. To the extent that such purchases are offered me as reasons for traveling to Korea.
It's barely far for you. It would be a real schlep for me.
"War" was released when I was 12.
Which was rather too late for me
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
OP link is astoundingly bad. Almost circle of engineers in a garage bad.
The US media and entertainment industry is very healthy and is growing at a tremendous speed.
For some bits of the media and entertainment industry, the loss of display advertising revenue has been a challenge. For some of those bits, it's been a fatal problem. But those are small bits.
This person seems to have confused "changes in the online advertising industry mean that I personally can no longer make a moderately comfortable living doing comic listicles about Marvel Comics" with "behold, the terminal crisis of capitalism".
I'm not going to pay the truth tax for someone else's link, so I'm just going to assert my best understanding. I stand to be corrected on all points.
-Netflix, Disney+, Hulu* and IIRC Max (or whatever it's now called) are now profitable, without yet introducing ad-supported tiers at scale.
-Peak TV wasn't paid for by ads. It was paid for by cable-bundle fees (partly ad money) and the streaming arms race.
-The streaming arms race wasn't paid for by VC money or ad money. Netflix was the first mover, and started with VC money, but over time moved to funding content out of revenue and debt; all the incumbents competing with Netflix did exactly the same.
-Over 2020-23 incumbents' revenues were hit by covid; production was culled by shutdowns; near-zero interest rates ended; production was culled again by the strike; and revenue from cable bundles started to implode in earnest.
-AFAIK the meltdown in cable revenue isn't attributable to ads or to VC money, except via the proliferation of streaming (see above).
*Also Disney, but a different content model; my guess is Disney will keep it separate for brand safety and maybe spin it out for cash.
I didn't read the article, but I remember back when Netflix just mailed you the movies.
-Streamers' (especially Netflix's) content is actually more diverse than ever, probably in artistic terms, and definitely in geographic terms. I think the latter is an unambiguous good.
-Finished films getting binned for tax writeoffs isn't a trend, it's IIRC one bad decision by the bad CEO of Warner Discovery (who IMO is not long for that job).
In sum, streaming isn't a new industry: it's television over IP.
-The quality of streamers' content is all over the map. Just like TV.
-Streamers have starting canceling shows on a hair trigger. Just like TV.
-What we're seeing now in streaming is exactly what we've seen over and over again, in radio, movies, broadcast TV, cable TV: boom then bust, expansion then consolidation. A lot of people are getting fucked, a lot of shows are getting made; 90% of them are crap, the other 10% goes to Ari Emanuel. Just like TV.
What we're seeing now in streaming is exactly what we've seen over and over again, in radio, movies, broadcast TV, cable TV: boom then bust, expansion then consolidation
On a microlevel you can see this dynamic in the arrival of successive Internet advertising formats. Step one: new format! Yay! Step two: it works! Step three: Decide you're going to Pivot To Video (or banner ads, or AI, or being a Viewspaper, or whatever) and commit everything to it. Step four: Plaster it everywhere in an intolerable barrage of spam. Step five: ad rates crash due to massive oversupply, blockers deployed. Step six: fire everyone and start bleating.
I just wish free network tv had a streaming option for those of us who live in towns without TV. I basically subscribe to cable because it's the only way to watch the Oscars. I should cancel and find a friend who will host an Oscars party.
We might cancel and then just steal my mother-in-laws password for the Oscars.
-Piracy hasn't killed any medium, nor IMO is it driven to any significant degree by ad avoidance.
-Adblockers are much less widely used than one might expect; AIUI a large majority don't use adblock.
-Increasingly obnoxious digital ads are an inevitable result of making ads digital. Once it was possible to measure* how many ad impressions were actually clicked on, advertisers naturally insisted on paying for clicks, not impressions; and of course vanishingly few impressions result in clicks.
-To the extent ads are actually getting worse right now, I would guess the causes are to be found in: the aforementioned end of free money; Google search apparently losing its arms race with SEO; advertisers getting increasingly serious about fraud, opacity, and self-dealing in the adtech ecosystem (cf. various anti-trust suits).
-Newspapers weren't wiped out by social media, they were wiped out by ads moving online (to search, maps, Craigslist and its many more niche successors), and their own slowness to put up paywalls.
-Social media (esp FB) dominated inbound news traffic for a few years, but that since reversed.
-Meta is explicitly making its platforms** as news-free as possible, and it seems to be doing just fine.
*Measure at all, even in the face of massive fraud.
**The US-centric ones, anyway. IDK about Whatsapp.
Also if everyone else is at all like me, the overwhelming majority of clicks (especially on mobile!) are misclicks.
boom then bust, expansion then consolidation
Yeah, and the author fails to appreciate that it's the boom that would cease to exist absent the funding by VCs and other parties willing to spend huge amounts of money to entertain me. The bust is just the natural state of the market when companies aren't fighting to gain market share and instead focus on the ordinary matter of making money.
I sure do like television nowadays. I'm normally at a bit of a loss during awards shows because I haven't seen a lot of the content, but the three big winners at the Emmys - Hacks, The Bear and Shogun - are all excellent, and represent a type of television that would have been impossible a few decades ago.
The OP's argument can't be that other news organizations went behind a paywall so they no longer had a business model based on skimming their content, can it?
Anyhow there's scientific research that suggests that people's aesthetic and artistic preferences are flexible in youth and old age, but rigid in middle age when we're all musing about it. This is why nothing has been good since 1999.
I think Heebie is correct that the linked article is overgeneralizing from his specific experience.
I think MC is correct that, in the process, he makes some significant errors.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that he's just sad about the demise of a business model, "based on skimming [news organization's] content." I still miss the feel of the early-aughts blogosphere and seeing conversations that would extend across different sites over multiple posts. I think there are structural reasons why that doesn't happen as much. I am also convinced by this thread that's a specific nostalgia not necessarily a general symptom of the world getting worse.
It's also probably true that the big thing that really shifted compared to the golden era of blogging isn't paywalls but the general tendency for comment sections to become terrible (present company very much excluded).
42: But current music and movies don't seem weird and off putting, like that theory would suggest. They seem kind of boring mash ups of previous generations songs and styles.
This is why nothing has been good since 1999
Two thousand zero zero party over it's time to go
So tonight we're gonna party
Like it's twenty-five years ago
It's also probably true that the big thing that really shifted compared to the golden era of blogging isn't paywalls but the general tendency for comment sections to become terrible
Wasn't this always the case, right back to Usenet days? Serdar Argic and so on? Godwin's Law was first formulated in 1990!
Overly familiar? Made by people who consume too much media? Made by computers that consume all the media?
I blame people who listen to audio at 1.5 speed. I don't know how, but it creeps me out. I've never tried it, but I'm right.
I save time by only listening to the first and last letter of every word.
people who listen to audio at 1.5 speed
Do you just not listen to or watch anything, then? It's unbearable at 1x. Give me text or speed it the fuck up.
I don't listen to anything but music. I watch stuff, but I comment here while I'm watching.
Do you just not listen to or watch anything, then?
You don't speed up TV shows, do you?!
I don't, but know people who do. But anything on youtube I speed up.
-Netflix, Disney+, Hulu* and IIRC Max (or whatever it's now called) are now profitable, without yet introducing ad-supported tiers at scale.
Hulu has always had an ad-supported tier, Disney pushes the ad-supported tier for new sign-ups, as does Peacock*, Netflix has recently introduced ads after beginning without them, Max also pushes ad-supported. If you look at the Disney/Hulu/Bundle marketing in the US, the advertised top-level price is the ad-supported one "plans start at". Except for Netflix, the ad-supported tiers have been the leading tiers in US streaming marketing for a few years now.
The LA Times has lots of stories about the entertainment industry struggling, though a lot of that is about the local-to-California aspects of the industry, which used to be much bigger relatively-speaking.
*If you quit Peacock "premium" or whatever they call it, they drop your account to ad-supported rather than deactivate it.
Disney/Hulu/Bundle
I meant Disney/Hulu/Max bundle.
I haven't read the link and won't, but in my experience as someone who pays extra to avoid ads, the streaming services really want you to view ads and will find all sorts of ways to weasel out of ad-free meaning actually ad-free. Things like "we're going to show you this ad at the start, and then your ad-free experience - brought to you by the people whose ad you're about to watch - will begin, thank you for being an ad-free subscriber."
A relatively recent innovation on some services I use is to play a long ad, sometimes a minute, when you start watching a live sports broadcast. Did you realize something interesting was happening and rush to catch the game so you don't miss that key point? Fuck you, it's one minute of ads and then you can see the game. Thank you again for being a valued ad-free subscriber.
It's possibly I'm an ad-hating extremist.
44: the theory* is that middle-aged people just don't adopt new aesthetic preferences. Not that they think other things are weird. I just assume they're probably driving their kids to activities instead of enjoying life.
Last night I went to see Pulp, a band to which I was devoted to the point of madness, or at least extreme annoyingness, thirty years ago. I was gratified that they played almost exclusively old material (there was only one song I had never heard before), but I was a little surprised to find that although I still knew every word to every song on His N Hers and Different Class, it was hard to access that part of me that used to love those songs so much. Anyway, it was a fun trip down memory lane, and Jarvis Cocker is a great performer, but it's clear that my tastes have changed.
I spend all my goddamn time driving kids to activities, yes. But I do like that Chappell Roan along the way.
Pulp! I was also annoying about Pulp decades ago, though I think This is Hardcore was my way in. Some distance from the person who loved those songs might say good things for your mental stability?
RWM just saw Pulp and said it was an amazing show.
Some distance from the person who loved those songs might say good things for your mental stability
For sure. Those lyrics definitely didn't romanticize sound emotional health.
I didn't read the article, but I remember back when Netflix just mailed you the movies.
And when that was a big step up from going to Blockbuster etc. And when Blockbuster etc were a big step up from whatever was on TV.
I miss Redbox. I could walk like three blocks and get a movie and a six pack.
68: Redbox lasted longer than Netflix DVDs. I miss the DVDs, because there were movies you could get from Netflix which refused to sign up for their streaming service. Streaming annoys me when you have to sign up for multiple services.
Maybe, but beer in the grocery stores started very recently here.
Didn't you rebel against George Washington so you could brew whatever you wanted?
There's a street by my office named after the tax official. It has lots of midrise condos and deadends in the busway.
Growing up in Washington, beer and wine were available everywhere, but liquor only in the state-run liquor stores. Then I got to Hawaii, where liquor is in the grocery and convenience stores. But it's not like anything goes -- they can't sell liquor between 2 and 6am.
You can't even fight max battles on Pokémon Go between 9pm and 6am.
There was a guy at the bar reading a book on or by Nietzsche and a guy with a blazer who had his shirt and blazer sleeves rolled up together started talking to him. Eventually, blazer guy leaves in a huff with Nietzsche guy mocking him about freewill on the way out.
OT: How hard is it to fight with older Chinese people? I share a wall with a neighbor. His parents, who do not speak English, are visiting from China. They did a repair to the common wall that is so bad it is basically vandalism.
I say older. I'm guessing 60s just on the age of their son. They could be my age though.
Redbox lasted longer than Netflix DVDs. I miss the DVDs
I joined Netflix in 2003 and I think they're selection was much broader in the DVD era than it is now, though maybe not as broad as it was at the peak of early streaming when they were still about the only company doing it. In the US anyway, they could lend DVDs without paying the kind of license fees that apply to streaming. The back catalog of older movies was enormous, practically anything that was available in the US on DVD. I haven't been a regular Netflix subscriber for a decade or so, so maybe things have changed, but very few older titles streamed when I was a subscriber relative to what was on the DVD. As someone who watches more old stuff than new stuff, the decline of the DVD business is why I quit.
there should be a their there where I wrote they're
decline of the DVD business is why I quit.
Same here; I used to get DVDs by mail. I never switched to streaming, I just switched to checking DVDs out of the public library. It works fairly well, but there are an increasing number of shows that look interesting which never come out on DVD.
I just learned you can't cook a live lobster in the U.K. You have to shoot it first.
This bolt pistol does not meet my requirements.