6 ms·

There's a plausible argument that advertisement killed "mainstream media" as a mass media. It survived only while there were no other options, giving the illusi

There's a plausible argument that advertisement killed "mainstream media" as a mass media. It survived only while there were no other options, giving the illusion of genuine mass appeal. The reality is it was an entirely fake constructed world designed by advertisers, and to some lesser degree, the political class: governments in the TV age pressed hard to ensure the public never got what it wanted (consider, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood). It seems we are roughly in a place where power has equilibrated between creators giving the people what they want: advertisers have no choice but to go to mass media platforms, because one's under their control are dead. And "free speech" is increasingly been given an ahistorical radically liberal interpretation. Thus we can have multi-hour podcasts with politicians asked real questions on the audiences mind; we can have companies held to account for the real quality of their products; films, games, and other media can be reviewed by people who share the tastes of their audiences -- rather than have their tastes "made" by the nominated ad-friendly elite. The whole traditional media ecosystem, of course, is in a full-blown panic about this -- and continues to blame the new media and their audiences (their customers, whom they long forgot existed as anything other than domesticated animals that will turn up to the only game in town). It's hard to tell how many involved realise they are purely a construct of an advertised-determined, government-sanctioned world -- a world that almost no one ever actually lived in. My great concern with the "YT is being TV" direction is that this history repeats. Just as facebook (etc.) centralised and ad-santisied the "local, independent" internet -- so will, YT/spotify/etc. just return the mass media back into advertiser hands. Many will say: this has already happened, etc. But I think: not quite. I think at the moment it feels like a balance. One hopes the internet stays free enough, in protocol, that if advertisers (and governments) try again to dominate and control the mass media, there are ready-made alternatives to spring up.

diggan 1y ago
Today I was gonna watch a ~14 minute video on YouTube while having a quick lunch. After the 1:30 mark, YouTube showed me a five second ad. Fair enough. After 4 minutes, it served me a 30 seconds ad, bit less fun, but fine, YouTube gotta get theirs also. After 6 minutes they showed me a 1 minute ad, and now I started getting frustrated. At the 7 minute mark they tried to show me another 1 minute ad, but at that point I just shut off the TV as it's just too frustrating when they're trying to shove in as much ad-time as there is real-content-time. One of the initial reasons YouTube was better than TV was because it lacked so much ads everywhere. Same for the streaming services. They're quite literally shooting themselves in the foot with adding so much ads... Now my fingers are itching to build a tiny little service for myself, where I can have a bunch of YouTube channels in a .txt file, and have yt-dlp iterate over them once a day and add automatically to Jellyfin, or something similar, almost solely out of spite. Realistically, I'll probably just avoid YouTube on the TV for a week, until I forget how painful that experience is.
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  The "they" that is shoving those mid-roll ads in the video is the content creator, not YouTube. YouTube won't stick ads in the middle of the video unless the creator opted in to monetize it.
  - j1elo 1y ago
    Do you mean that creators choose explicitly how many ads to insert and their length? Because if it's just an ON/OFF switch and then Youtube proceeds to put almost equal lengths of ads than of content (1+ min ad after 2 minutes of content, as per the previous comment) then that's truly terrible. Also... ads after only 2 minutes? Am I the only one who thinks that feels much worse to bear than longer ads more spaced out? There's something that feels odd with having to get interrupted by an ad after mere 100 seconds of watching something.
    - bongodongobob 1y ago
      Yes. They can either let YouTube stick ads in or they can manually place them if they opt into mid-roll ads.
  - h2zizzle 1y ago
    This is a bit misleading, IIUC. "Content creator" in this case means the nominal copyright-holder, which often means someone simply claiming copyright, in practice, and not necessarily the uploader ("Fair Use" be damned). The person who uploaded the video might have fully intended there to be no ads run during playback, but has little say in the matter if someone comes along and claims that their content is used in the video.
- derektank 1y ago
  YouTube Premium is a very reasonably priced service that actually results in more money going to the creators of videos than watching ads does.
  - homefree 1y ago
vasco 1y ago
Many real people sharing real personal stories and real doctors sharing their real experiences in hospitals got banned from YouTube during COVID lockdowns. It's freer but it's not free.
- anonym29 1y ago
  That's not strictly a platform problem. US Federal Government (intelligence agencies) were conducting aggressive information operations (i.e. narrative control) and has effectively infinite taxpayer money to bully / sue / harass / force any noncompliant corporation to play ball. Corporations, being naturally focused on profit-seeking, tend to fear loss of revenue more than they love civil liberties, freedom of information, freedom from censorship, etc. It's a match made in hell. The only real way to beat these is to stick to information sources that are small enough to not be a target. Or to just accept that much of what you see, hear, read, and think has been deliberately curated by a government that is aggressively hostile against your ability to access narratives and information they either disagree with or simply dislike. Some might see a government scrubbing "malinformation", but the Chinese government would call photographs of Tienanmen Square "malinformation" even though they were real, important, and culturally relevant - they just stood in opposition to the Chinese government's efforts to quell any hint of opposition. Narrative control by silencing people who see things differently. What the US government did here was no different.
h2zizzle 1y ago
>The reality is it was an entirely fake constructed world designed by advertisers, and to some lesser degree, the political class This applies to American car culture also, as mentioned in this video on Tempe, AZ's "Cul De Sac" carless community: https://youtu.be/4UAZMEpOKTI https://youtu.be/4UAZMEpOKTI Something important to remember on this matter is that the American car industry almost collapsed during the GFC and had to be bailed out. Ford, GM, et al. exist today largely because their potential failure represented a national security concern, not because they make products that people desire (at least, at volume), or because those products enable a way of life that people desire. >My great concern with the "YT is being TV" direction is that this history repeats. Just as facebook (etc.) centralised and ad-santisied the "local, independent" internet -- so will, YT/spotify/etc. just return the mass media back into advertiser hands. Likewise, it would be nice if our realization that forced car ownership is bad for society didn't push us into a world where public transit was the only option, and owning a car too expensive to justify. In all, sociocultural monopolies seem like the thing to avoid. Not just a matter of not allowing one company to own a market, but not allowing one notion to monopolize our imaginations and ideals. Choice and competition in a capitalist society, whodathunk?
- fingerlocks 1y ago
  Nit: Ford did not receive any bailouts or declare bankruptcy during the GFC.
  - h2zizzle 1y ago
    Eh. Ford didn't declare bankruptcy or receive TARP funds, but they did receive significant government and financial assistance in that time frame.
Barrin92 1y ago
>and other media can be reviewed by people who share the tastes of their audiences -- rather than have their tastes "made" by the nominated ad-friendly elite. There's nothing wrong with taste-making, having criticism structured and communicated in an intelligent way that gives an audience a way to look at things is valuable when engaging with art, including popular art. What you have instead now is entirely audience captured creators who will just produce viral and controversial content and tell audiences exactly what they want to hear. A literal echo chamber where any critic that would say something unpopular is immediately dropped because they can never offend their audience. The advertisement is of course as omnipresent, and in addition without shame or guard rails. Now you have mainstreamed bogus medical advice, VPN ads, nutrition pills, cam and porn sites, and stuff you'd otherwise only found at the bottom of a email spam folder. There's basically a complete collapse in audience and discourse quality. Very practical example, I came across an interview with Frank Herbert, and funnily enough almost every youtube comment on the interview mentions how articulate it is (https://youtu.be/26GPaMoeiu4 https://youtu.be/26GPaMoeiu4). That's what you had when culture was still discussed at a level that wasn't a Joe Rogan podcast. On TV we used to have interviewers who were at least intelligent enough to comprehend the topic they were interviewing on, instead of just sitting there stoned.
aspenmayer 1y ago
> The reality is it was an entirely fake constructed world designed by advertisers, and to some lesser degree, the political class Did anyone else hear this narrated in Adam Curtis's voice, or is that just me? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation > HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIHC4NNScEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIHC4NNScEI HyperNormalisation explained by Adam Curtis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to72IJzQT5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to72IJzQT5k HyperNormalisation (2016)
mschuster91 1y ago
> Thus we can have multi-hour podcasts with politicians asked real questions on the audiences mind; we can have companies held to account for the real quality of their products; films, games, and other media can be reviewed by people who share the tastes of their audiences -- rather than have their tastes "made" by the nominated ad-friendly elite. The problem is, it's increasingly less attractive. Like, the NordVPN, AG1 supplement or whatever else shill scripts, they're all the damn same, it's annoying, particularly if you know the product being shilled is a fucking scam like AG1. With "traditional" media you at least had some regulatory requirements here in Europe - either ad blocks clearly labeled as "advertising", or a permanent "infomercial" text overlay. And anything that was advertising outside of these two factors meant fines, sometimes serious ones, for violating the regulatory framework ("Schleichwerbung", see Art. 13 European Convention on Transfrontier Television [1]). But these days? You can't be sure that influencers comply with even the bare minimum of regulation that exists, and no one takes care about prosecuting anyway. [1] https://rm.coe.int/168007b0f0 https://rm.coe.int/168007b0f0
- mjburgess 1y ago
  Sure, but let's do like-for-like. MLMs and other scams were institutionalised before crypto -- the bushes and top cliton admin people were right there on their payroll. Madelein albright was infamous as an MLM shill. All this was conducted on the mainstream media of that era. TV never protected people from scams, the law did. TV was the propaganda organ of a corrput elite --- see no more than george bush snr complaining about the simpsons, prefering the cosbys -- a man himself who turned up at the funeral on one of the most psychopathic of the Eron scammers, who was flown to his own inauguration in one of their private jets. The original conservative cultural elite used the mainstream media to create an illusion of western life consistent with values they wish to see the public perform. Values they themselves did not practice. They were not protecting people from scams. They were in on the largest scams in american history.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > TV never protected people from scams, the law did. Indeed, that's my point. And that even for Americans, despite y'all's regulations (particularly when it comes to product placements) being far more relaxed than in Europe. The problem is, the law hasn't even come close to catching up with reality for well over a decade. Influencers obviously - look no further than Fyre Festival or multi-million subscriber YouTubers that have a primary audience of children shilling online casinos [1] - but also the platforms themselves. YouTube is particularly egregious... in TV the regulation here is 12 minutes per hour and minimum 30 minutes between ad breaks [2], but YouTube? If you're not subscribing for Premium, it's a 30 second preroll and about a minute or two every 5-ish minutes - on top of the influencer's own ad roll that's usually 2 minutes per 10-minute video. That ad load is ridiculous. [1] https://www.ingame.de/news/illegales-gluecksspiel-marcel-eris-buxtehude-montanablack-online-casino-deals-92691576.html https://www.ingame.de/news/illegales-gluecksspiel-marcel-eri... [2] https://www.rnd.de/medien/eu-und-fernsehwerbung-warum-es-nur-zwoelf-minuten-werbung-in-deutschland-gibt-HJSK2TT3WFFTPFHWG5AKRUQD3Y.html https://www.rnd.de/medien/eu-und-fernsehwerbung-warum-es-nur...
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
This is such a current era comment. Vast conspiracies? Check. Ignore that creators now are audience captured in a way worse, way more manipulative of the outcome, and way less free for the creators then previous capture, check. Ignore that 'unpopular manufactured' previous mass culture was popular, mass culture, check. People literally talked around the water cooler about 'did you watch XYZ'? Did you got see XYZ movie yet? Your argument makes sense if you had no experience with the past and sounds plausible. It would be perfect for a Youtube video, especially one for someone audience captured by a 'we know the truth' type audience. They would eat it up.
- mjburgess 1y ago
  I don't really see how any of these points relate to my comment. 1. That advertises played a shaping role in what could be broadcast on TV is not a conspiracy, but documented fact. That, eg., the FTC had "public airwaves" obsceneity rules that made saying "shit" on TV revolutionary in the 2000s is, again, a fact. And so on. 2. That the mainstream media of the past was highly limited is again, a fact. Fox news, indeed, only arose post elimination of the fairenes doctrine (again, another extrordainary gov regulation on speech for a so-called Free Speech culture). It took the end of the FTC's public airwaves rules, via private means; the end of the fairness doctrine, and the like, for any diversity to arise: this was cable. HBO was the first breaking through of what-the-public-wanted. Therefore that the public engaged with the mainstream media is beside the point: it has nothing to do with my comment. My comment describes what happened when these extraordinary government and advertiser require restrictions were relaxed. (See, even hollywood before they existed: precode hollywood is a vastly more "modern" place than the gov-constructed fantasy land on TV which followed). 3. You diagnose problems with the present day mass media landscape ("audience capture") and the like. This was already a problem with TV, and indeed also caused by advertisers (see, e.g., the movie Network which basically diagnoses an aduience-captured TV host as necessary schiozophrenic). The relevant comparison I am making is not between the sins of one and the sins of the other. It is to simply observe that the modern mass media is not a product, in origin, of vast state and ad-sponsored censorship. That TV was is extremely well-documented. I've given you many search terms in this reply.
  - 1y ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"One hopes the internet stays free enough, in protocol, that if advertisers (and governments) try again to dominate and control the mass media, there are ready-made alternatives to spring up." What if the "alternatives" are dominated and controlled by intermediaries that are 100% funded by advertising, e.g., YT is subsidiary of company that sells online advertising "services", YT is used to deliver ads and data obtained from YT is used to support the parent company's ad services business

diggan 1y ago

Today I was gonna watch a ~14 minute video on YouTube while having a quick lunch. After the 1:30 mark, YouTube showed me a five second ad. Fair enough. After 4 minutes, it served me a 30 seconds ad, bit less fun, but fine, YouTube gotta get theirs also. After 6 minutes they showed me a 1 minute ad, and now I started getting frustrated. At the 7 minute mark they tried to show me another 1 minute ad, but at that point I just shut off the TV as it's just too frustrating when they're trying to shove in as much ad-time as there is real-content-time. One of the initial reasons YouTube was better than TV was because it lacked so much ads everywhere. Same for the streaming services. They're quite literally shooting themselves in the foot with adding so much ads... Now my fingers are itching to build a tiny little service for myself, where I can have a bunch of YouTube channels in a .txt file, and have yt-dlp iterate over them once a day and add automatically to Jellyfin, or something similar, almost solely out of spite. Realistically, I'll probably just avoid YouTube on the TV for a week, until I forget how painful that experience is.

bongodongobob 1y ago
The "they" that is shoving those mid-roll ads in the video is the content creator, not YouTube. YouTube won't stick ads in the middle of the video unless the creator opted in to monetize it.
- j1elo 1y ago
  Do you mean that creators choose explicitly how many ads to insert and their length? Because if it's just an ON/OFF switch and then Youtube proceeds to put almost equal lengths of ads than of content (1+ min ad after 2 minutes of content, as per the previous comment) then that's truly terrible. Also... ads after only 2 minutes? Am I the only one who thinks that feels much worse to bear than longer ads more spaced out? There's something that feels odd with having to get interrupted by an ad after mere 100 seconds of watching something.
  - bongodongobob 1y ago
    Yes. They can either let YouTube stick ads in or they can manually place them if they opt into mid-roll ads.
- h2zizzle 1y ago
  This is a bit misleading, IIUC. "Content creator" in this case means the nominal copyright-holder, which often means someone simply claiming copyright, in practice, and not necessarily the uploader ("Fair Use" be damned). The person who uploaded the video might have fully intended there to be no ads run during playback, but has little say in the matter if someone comes along and claims that their content is used in the video.
derektank 1y ago
YouTube Premium is a very reasonably priced service that actually results in more money going to the creators of videos than watching ads does.
- homefree 1y ago

vasco 1y ago

Many real people sharing real personal stories and real doctors sharing their real experiences in hospitals got banned from YouTube during COVID lockdowns. It's freer but it's not free.

anonym29 1y ago
That's not strictly a platform problem. US Federal Government (intelligence agencies) were conducting aggressive information operations (i.e. narrative control) and has effectively infinite taxpayer money to bully / sue / harass / force any noncompliant corporation to play ball. Corporations, being naturally focused on profit-seeking, tend to fear loss of revenue more than they love civil liberties, freedom of information, freedom from censorship, etc. It's a match made in hell. The only real way to beat these is to stick to information sources that are small enough to not be a target. Or to just accept that much of what you see, hear, read, and think has been deliberately curated by a government that is aggressively hostile against your ability to access narratives and information they either disagree with or simply dislike. Some might see a government scrubbing "malinformation", but the Chinese government would call photographs of Tienanmen Square "malinformation" even though they were real, important, and culturally relevant - they just stood in opposition to the Chinese government's efforts to quell any hint of opposition. Narrative control by silencing people who see things differently. What the US government did here was no different.

h2zizzle 1y ago

>The reality is it was an entirely fake constructed world designed by advertisers, and to some lesser degree, the political class This applies to American car culture also, as mentioned in this video on Tempe, AZ's "Cul De Sac" carless community: https://youtu.be/4UAZMEpOKTI https://youtu.be/4UAZMEpOKTI Something important to remember on this matter is that the American car industry almost collapsed during the GFC and had to be bailed out. Ford, GM, et al. exist today largely because their potential failure represented a national security concern, not because they make products that people desire (at least, at volume), or because those products enable a way of life that people desire. >My great concern with the "YT is being TV" direction is that this history repeats. Just as facebook (etc.) centralised and ad-santisied the "local, independent" internet -- so will, YT/spotify/etc. just return the mass media back into advertiser hands. Likewise, it would be nice if our realization that forced car ownership is bad for society didn't push us into a world where public transit was the only option, and owning a car too expensive to justify. In all, sociocultural monopolies seem like the thing to avoid. Not just a matter of not allowing one company to own a market, but not allowing one notion to monopolize our imaginations and ideals. Choice and competition in a capitalist society, whodathunk?

fingerlocks 1y ago
Nit: Ford did not receive any bailouts or declare bankruptcy during the GFC.
- h2zizzle 1y ago
  Eh. Ford didn't declare bankruptcy or receive TARP funds, but they did receive significant government and financial assistance in that time frame.

Barrin92 1y ago

>and other media can be reviewed by people who share the tastes of their audiences -- rather than have their tastes "made" by the nominated ad-friendly elite. There's nothing wrong with taste-making, having criticism structured and communicated in an intelligent way that gives an audience a way to look at things is valuable when engaging with art, including popular art. What you have instead now is entirely audience captured creators who will just produce viral and controversial content and tell audiences exactly what they want to hear. A literal echo chamber where any critic that would say something unpopular is immediately dropped because they can never offend their audience. The advertisement is of course as omnipresent, and in addition without shame or guard rails. Now you have mainstreamed bogus medical advice, VPN ads, nutrition pills, cam and porn sites, and stuff you'd otherwise only found at the bottom of a email spam folder. There's basically a complete collapse in audience and discourse quality. Very practical example, I came across an interview with Frank Herbert, and funnily enough almost every youtube comment on the interview mentions how articulate it is (https://youtu.be/26GPaMoeiu4 https://youtu.be/26GPaMoeiu4). That's what you had when culture was still discussed at a level that wasn't a Joe Rogan podcast. On TV we used to have interviewers who were at least intelligent enough to comprehend the topic they were interviewing on, instead of just sitting there stoned.

aspenmayer 1y ago

> The reality is it was an entirely fake constructed world designed by advertisers, and to some lesser degree, the political class Did anyone else hear this narrated in Adam Curtis's voice, or is that just me? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation > HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIHC4NNScEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIHC4NNScEI HyperNormalisation explained by Adam Curtis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to72IJzQT5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to72IJzQT5k HyperNormalisation (2016)

mschuster91 1y ago

> Thus we can have multi-hour podcasts with politicians asked real questions on the audiences mind; we can have companies held to account for the real quality of their products; films, games, and other media can be reviewed by people who share the tastes of their audiences -- rather than have their tastes "made" by the nominated ad-friendly elite. The problem is, it's increasingly less attractive. Like, the NordVPN, AG1 supplement or whatever else shill scripts, they're all the damn same, it's annoying, particularly if you know the product being shilled is a fucking scam like AG1. With "traditional" media you at least had some regulatory requirements here in Europe - either ad blocks clearly labeled as "advertising", or a permanent "infomercial" text overlay. And anything that was advertising outside of these two factors meant fines, sometimes serious ones, for violating the regulatory framework ("Schleichwerbung", see Art. 13 European Convention on Transfrontier Television [1]). But these days? You can't be sure that influencers comply with even the bare minimum of regulation that exists, and no one takes care about prosecuting anyway. [1] https://rm.coe.int/168007b0f0 https://rm.coe.int/168007b0f0

mjburgess 1y ago
Sure, but let's do like-for-like. MLMs and other scams were institutionalised before crypto -- the bushes and top cliton admin people were right there on their payroll. Madelein albright was infamous as an MLM shill. All this was conducted on the mainstream media of that era. TV never protected people from scams, the law did. TV was the propaganda organ of a corrput elite --- see no more than george bush snr complaining about the simpsons, prefering the cosbys -- a man himself who turned up at the funeral on one of the most psychopathic of the Eron scammers, who was flown to his own inauguration in one of their private jets. The original conservative cultural elite used the mainstream media to create an illusion of western life consistent with values they wish to see the public perform. Values they themselves did not practice. They were not protecting people from scams. They were in on the largest scams in american history.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > TV never protected people from scams, the law did. Indeed, that's my point. And that even for Americans, despite y'all's regulations (particularly when it comes to product placements) being far more relaxed than in Europe. The problem is, the law hasn't even come close to catching up with reality for well over a decade. Influencers obviously - look no further than Fyre Festival or multi-million subscriber YouTubers that have a primary audience of children shilling online casinos [1] - but also the platforms themselves. YouTube is particularly egregious... in TV the regulation here is 12 minutes per hour and minimum 30 minutes between ad breaks [2], but YouTube? If you're not subscribing for Premium, it's a 30 second preroll and about a minute or two every 5-ish minutes - on top of the influencer's own ad roll that's usually 2 minutes per 10-minute video. That ad load is ridiculous. [1] https://www.ingame.de/news/illegales-gluecksspiel-marcel-eris-buxtehude-montanablack-online-casino-deals-92691576.html https://www.ingame.de/news/illegales-gluecksspiel-marcel-eri... [2] https://www.rnd.de/medien/eu-und-fernsehwerbung-warum-es-nur-zwoelf-minuten-werbung-in-deutschland-gibt-HJSK2TT3WFFTPFHWG5AKRUQD3Y.html https://www.rnd.de/medien/eu-und-fernsehwerbung-warum-es-nur...

_DeadFred_ 1y ago

This is such a current era comment. Vast conspiracies? Check. Ignore that creators now are audience captured in a way worse, way more manipulative of the outcome, and way less free for the creators then previous capture, check. Ignore that 'unpopular manufactured' previous mass culture was popular, mass culture, check. People literally talked around the water cooler about 'did you watch XYZ'? Did you got see XYZ movie yet? Your argument makes sense if you had no experience with the past and sounds plausible. It would be perfect for a Youtube video, especially one for someone audience captured by a 'we know the truth' type audience. They would eat it up.

mjburgess 1y ago
I don't really see how any of these points relate to my comment. 1. That advertises played a shaping role in what could be broadcast on TV is not a conspiracy, but documented fact. That, eg., the FTC had "public airwaves" obsceneity rules that made saying "shit" on TV revolutionary in the 2000s is, again, a fact. And so on. 2. That the mainstream media of the past was highly limited is again, a fact. Fox news, indeed, only arose post elimination of the fairenes doctrine (again, another extrordainary gov regulation on speech for a so-called Free Speech culture). It took the end of the FTC's public airwaves rules, via private means; the end of the fairness doctrine, and the like, for any diversity to arise: this was cable. HBO was the first breaking through of what-the-public-wanted. Therefore that the public engaged with the mainstream media is beside the point: it has nothing to do with my comment. My comment describes what happened when these extraordinary government and advertiser require restrictions were relaxed. (See, even hollywood before they existed: precode hollywood is a vastly more "modern" place than the gov-constructed fantasy land on TV which followed). 3. You diagnose problems with the present day mass media landscape ("audience capture") and the like. This was already a problem with TV, and indeed also caused by advertisers (see, e.g., the movie Network which basically diagnoses an aduience-captured TV host as necessary schiozophrenic). The relevant comparison I am making is not between the sins of one and the sins of the other. It is to simply observe that the modern mass media is not a product, in origin, of vast state and ad-sponsored censorship. That TV was is extremely well-documented. I've given you many search terms in this reply.
- 1y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

"One hopes the internet stays free enough, in protocol, that if advertisers (and governments) try again to dominate and control the mass media, there are ready-made alternatives to spring up." What if the "alternatives" are dominated and controlled by intermediaries that are 100% funded by advertising, e.g., YT is subsidiary of company that sells online advertising "services", YT is used to deliver ads and data obtained from YT is used to support the parent company's ad services business