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Is the average person actually better off after the late 90’s internet is probably a harder question than it might seem. The long tail may be closer to what I

• amscanne 1y ago
  Are you being objective or just romanticizing the past? Just to use your example: YouTube is filled with talented writers and storytellers, who would have never been able to share their content in the past. *And* the traditional media complex is richer than ever. I don’t think average quality matters. Just what you want to consume. If anything, I’d be more open to the opposite argument. Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too high!
  • glohbalrob 1y ago
    Media is rich but not in proportion of the thousands of new creators doing very well. An extreme example is playboy vs only fans creators
    • bobthepanda 1y ago
      show business and things like it are famously pyramidal in shape. there are decades' worth of people who couldn't make it in previous generations in Los Angeles and New York. i think what is relatively new is the unaffordability crisis making it so doing such pursuits and not being that successful is no longer a way to make a living on its own.
  • Retric 1y ago
    I was trying to be objective which is why I didn’t try to compare individual shows. Thus average production quality seems like a useful metric. There’s currently a handful of “traditional media/streaming” shows with absolutely crazy budgets today and if you happen to like them then that’s great. However, if you don’t things quickly fall off a cliff in terms of production quality. The same is true of YouTube. The quality of 50,000 one man operations is irrelevant if you happen to like MrBeast, but if you don’t like MrBeast budgets drop off fast. A reasonable argument is you and everyone else may prefer a specific YouTube cooking show over Baking with Julia or other 90’s show with a much her budget, but there where several options to chose from. Thus purely objectively even if 90’s TV had lower maximum budgets the floor being relatively high is worth taking into consideration.
    • bobthepanda 1y ago
      It's worth noting that due to advances in technology, it is possible to deliver the same show for less money and time. The average "how to cook on a food network" show was, ultimately, one person in the kitchen of a large home cooking for the camera, produced once a week. There are plenty of people delivering that style of cooking show with high production quality today. Obviously it's not the same because some things are less deliverable with smaller or one-person teams (Miss Piggy is not going to visit some Youtube show the way she visited Martha Stewart) but there are people making this content ranging from big shops like NYT Cooking to smaller outfits like Binging with Babish, Glen and Friends Cooking, etc. and there are even outfits like this dedicated to more niche topics like Tasting History or Emmymade.
      • epicureanideal 1y ago
        I’m also a fan of Tasting History. Highly recommended.
      • Retric 1y ago
        A wide range of things have gotten dramatically cheaper, but that only goes so far. Many YouTube channels make great use of Zoom calls for example. It’s still generally a compromise vs an actual face to face conversation. Safety is another real concern. People have died doing stuff solo that wouldn’t have been particularly dangerous with minimal supervision.
        • bobthepanda 1y ago
          I mean as far as this goes > Many YouTube channels make great use of Zoom calls for example. It’s still generally a compromise vs an actual face to face conversation. A lot of today's news footage with experts etc. these days is also not shot from studios but from online calls. Actually flying somebody out onto location is pretty uncommon; and I would say with the rise of filmed podcasting, that podcasters are more likely to have people on set than television news is.
          • 1y ago
  • kelseyfrog 1y ago
    I wish this argument would die. We're asking for a better future among futures, not a better future compared to the past. It's like buying a car, receiving a bike, and then being told, "A bike is great because you don't have to walk anymore." If you feel like that's unfair and the response misses the point, that's how that lands. I don't know who, when hearing that, feels better. It feels out of touch and dismissive.
  • majormajor 1y ago
    Does the answer to "is the average person better off" have a lot to do with "how many TV shows are out there"... or does it have to do with: - how often their boss bugs them after hours - how much their boss uses technology to keep an eye on them, their friends, their political views - how often random strangers might get mad at them and SWAT them, make false claims to their employers, etc - how often their neighbors are radicalized into shooting up a school - how hard they find it to talk to a real person to resolve an issue with a company or government service vs being stuck on hold because of downsizing real support staff relative to population size, or with an ai chatbot? etc?
    • brookst 1y ago
      How about “how often a sibling dies because the local medical people don’t have access to all of the world’s medical information instantly”. Most of the world is not rich people getting swatted by teenagers they’re playing call of duty with.
  • MangoToupe 1y ago
    Youtube has some marginal value, but I'm not sure "storytellers" bring a materially positive impact (and I reject the "richer" aspect outright). We had libraries in the 90s and they didn't force you to watch ads.
    • amscanne 1y ago
      That’s my point. We still have libraries! And most have online lending programs, so you can access way more ad-free books than you ever could have in 90s. How is this not richer?
  • aborsy 1y ago
    You could afford a house in 90s, with a 9-5 job. Today, you would see housing crisis in major metros.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • microtonal 1y ago
    Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too high! I am not sure it's the quality, it's more that it's optimized for dopamine shots. Heroine is highly addictive, but I think that few people would argue it's a quality drug. Recently there was a TV item that was filmed (in NL) just before the broad adoption of mobile phones (not smartphones). People looked so much more relaxed and more oriented towards others. I am happy that until my 18th or so mobile phones were not really a thing and that smartphones were not a really a thing until I was 25-27. I was an early adopter of smartphones, but I don't think we realized how addictive and destructive social media + smartphones would become. The early internet was very cool though. Lots of info to be found. A high percentage of users had their own web page. A lot of it was pretty whacky/playful. Addictive timelines etc. had not been invented yet.
  • WhyOhWhyQ 1y ago
    It's really not though. There are a few high quality individual creators, but not many.
• monero-xmr 1y ago
  Undeniably better off in every single way. Minimum is that the price of long distance phone calls is now zero, let alone video calls. Being able to speak to family and see them nonstop is incredible.
  • goalieca 1y ago
    And yet, when we are with family and friends, we’re on the damn phone!
    • ghaff 1y ago
      Do people actually visit family in-person at least less often? And to the degree they augment rare family in-person visits with a lot of phone calls and/or video calls. I can believe a lot of friend get togethers IRL have been replaced with video calls. There's a tradeoff. I have a group of older friends and we still get together in-person but Zoom calls are a nice adder. I'm in a few organizations where we also find Zoom a nice alternative to people schlepping somewhere for an hour meeting that mostly works as well online--and we still have a few physical get-togethers over the course of the year.
      • amrocha 1y ago
        Young people are forced to move to wherever job opportunities are due to how hyper optimized the economy has become, so I would say most people spend way less time with family than 30 years ago
        • ghaff 1y ago
          It's complicated and you can look at a lot of studies. People have always moved where opportunities existed--including across oceans pre-aircraft. Yes, when there were company towns, people moved less.
  • Mistletoe 1y ago
    Why are people much less happy then? https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-new-highs.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-n...
• UncleOxidant 1y ago
  The political instability that came with social media isn't great, either.
  • 7952 1y ago
    I think in the near term social media can actually have a stabilising effect just because of how much it paralyzes people. It takes emotion and redirects it into something with little real world effect. Whilst most actual power is exercised offline. This sometimes breaks down and the crazy escapes from the internet and reeks havoc. But mostly the geriatrics are left alone to pull the levers of power in relative peace.
  • TiredOfLife 1y ago
    Ah yes. The popular ~14000 year stable period disrupted by social media.
  • BirAdam 1y ago
    I question this narrative. While social media is certainly having a negative impact, most democratic societies have relatively short life spans historically speaking. There’s also a tendency for economies to falter, for irrationality to increase, for birth rates to drop, and so on. It would seem that the same trends (roughly) occur in every democracy as it starts to fail.
    • brookst 1y ago
      Yes. The meta problem is the trend toward “I dont’t like X, and I don’t like Y, therefore X is causing Y” thinking. It’s always been the reactionary’s argument: immigrants cause crime, inter-racial marriage causes poverty, etc, etc. The real collapse we’re seeing is the liberal / progressive adoption of these fallacies. Social media causes fascism (nevermind the absence of social media in previous collapses into fascism), etc. Many of the people rightfully dismayed by trends are unwittingly contributing to the changes they dislike. The correct answer to “I think social media leads to fascism” is not “let’s ban social media”. The correct answer is “let’s study the problem and see what science says”. Abandoning that is giving up.
• brookst 1y ago
  Expand the thinking to include impact on developing countries, the poor, minority groups who have few people like themselves in their local area, etc. I’ll grant that for comparatively wealthy, privileged people who were always going to have an easy time (which frankly include me), the internet has been a mixed bag. But for the kids growing up in comparatively poor countries, who can now access all of the world’s information, entertainment, and economy.. I think it’s a pretty clear win. I expect AI will be similar: perhaps not a huge boon to the best off, but a substantial improvement for most people in the world. Even if we can sit back and say “oh, but they also get misinformation and lower quality YouTube content”