Do you feel you have outgrown media sources or discontinued them for other reasons?
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Traditional news ironically. It seems to be the “adult” thing to watch the news but it’s just gloomy and controlling. Just wanna claw my eyes out every time I hear them exclaim “X is outrageous!” “The West has fallen.” “We live in a third world country!” “Migrants are destroying America!”. Pisses me off so much. It’s entirely irrelevant whether or not I agree, but it’s how they try to force you to think or feel a certain way, treating us like children. Just tell me the facts like an adult so I can decide for myself.
“News as entertainment” I believe they call it. Total trash IMO.
This one hits home, but because it feels like I’ve lost my parent to the 24 hour news cycle. They also had motorcycle accident around a decade ago that might have caused some brain damage. If there was damage, it was never formally identified by a medical professional.
I’ve watched them become more angry at and scared of the world as they grow older. I don’t fully agree with their beliefs on various topics, but always try to listen and understand why they feel the way they do.
It’s so frustrating to watch someone you care about ruin themselves trying to stay “informed” while surrounding themselves with others that contribute to confirmation bias.
If you’re looking for a good show, Sorkin made “The Newsroom” on HBO a few years back. Very good take on what happened with the news and flips it around.
But I’ll warn you that you’ll get angry, because what they accomplish there will not happen in our timeline.
Traditional news ironically.
Rolf Dobelli wrote a good essay about that some years ago:
Cable TV for over 10 yrs now. I‘m not blasting my brain with ads and doom news.
Game consoles since after ps3, I was thinking about ps5 in 2020 but I didnt want to buy a small car so now I‘m not interested anymore.
I have t had commercial TV since 2005. It’s media with ads, isn’t on-demand, and doesn’t have the stuff I want—even dumber if a paid service. That stopped being an option a generation ago.
The only time I turn the tv on is when my niece is around and wants to see bluey. For streaming I’ll use my computer or phone because I like to wach with headphones
Online Multiplayer. I used to love to connect with people, friends and strangers and play games. Now I just want to play alone on my terms and find it super annoying when games introduce online stuff into the single player mode, like raids.
I still enjoy the occasional couch co-op though.
Television in general. Video in general. A movie is nice now and then, but I almost never seek it out.
I can relate to this. I feel like if a medium relies on getting as many eyes as possible, be it from the studios or even the creators themselves, they aren’t as engaging, since I’ve seen the same thing over and over. I sort of understand, though. Any time-based visual media can spend a lot for its production, so you gotta take in as much as possible to make up for it. Nowadays I read books that don’t have as much pressure or certain movies, but that’s it.
I literally stopped watching movies, especially Bollywood and Hollywood movies. Somewhere along the line, I just decided to consume almost exclusively Japanese media, particularly anime. The simple reason is that anime tells some really amazing stories that most Hollywood movies don’t hold a candle against. Think Attack on Titan or FMA. I am not saying that all Japanese media is great, no it’s not. But, the variety there is pretty amazing.
I kinda went the other direction where I had to cut out all anime. Too many fascist undertones and sexualizing children for it to be comfortable to watch for me.
Obviously not all shows/movies from anime do those but it’s difficult to really know until you’ve already started watching and so it’s safer to just cut it out.
I do like some of it, but far too often the story is going along fine and then it’s like SURPRISE HAREM! SURPRISE SLAVERY (and the main character is fine with that). Too bad Crunchyroll doesn’t have a tag for “not creepy”.
I take extra care to avoid harem anime. I hate them too. Eventually, you learn to identify them from a distance. Harem anime tend to have a pretty identifiable look.
Hollywood is too formulaic, at least when you shake it up with foreign media you dont really know where its going to go.
I enjoyed Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon quite a bit. It’s not exceptional or great, but good. It certainly tells a unique story.
Comedy news shows. They can be funny, but the more I learn about topics in depth the more I realize how much biased the shows are. A segment that might have previously left me feeling better informed might instead make me feel like someone is trying to fool me or tell a one sided story.
In one episode of last week tonight, John Oliver was roasting Boris Johnson for mumbling the poem ‘Road to Mandalay’ while visiting Myanmar. Calling the act, absolutely offensive or something. Now, not a whole lot of Myanmar people here don’t know the poem. And among those who know, the poem is either fairly well regarded or they hold no such feelings like taking offense. Atleast among the people I know. Boris Johnson’s an absolute clown, but you can definitely sense the bias there.
Bingo. John Oliver is one of the worst offenders here, I think. He has a slick, humorous presentation style and a lot of his material is genuinely informative. At the same time, as you note he’ll throw in something that is either horribly cherry picked or has a bad misinterpretation.
I stopped watching “last week tonight” after seeing some episodes about topics I was already informed about. I realized that the amount of truth-bending was borderline malicious.
I’ve watched “some more news” a couple of times, I found them pretty alright. They’re pretty clearly biased, they’re just biased in a direction that I tend to like more than others. Still kind of, full of stupid skits though, and for the comedy, ymmv, certainly, it doesn’t really land for me at all. Quality of the information is kind of. Iffy, it would seem like, but I haven’t looked into it that hard.
Of course, biased in a direction that you like is the most hazardous to keeping a clear view of a situation. That’s the easiest way to slip by your guard.
Yeah, but I’m conscious of it. I’ve kind of thrown out conceptions of unbiased news as being something that even exists in the first place anyways, so I’d rather at least have something that sort of, is given from a perspective I understand, and which conforms to whatever my standards for information are, rather than just having like, unbiased reporting on events.
The decision of what events to cover isn’t necessarily going to be unbiased, the decision of what language to use when covering those events isn’t necessarily unbiased, the decision of which sources the “unbiased” news trusts for their reporting isn’t necessarily unbiased. I would kind of rather just have a news source that I can sort of, trust to do it’s job, and present me with information that I can understand, and know what to do with, rather than a news source where I have to do my own journalism to find out whether or not their story really means anything as a whole.
If you understand and can more thoroughly comprehend the bias of the news you’re given, it’s easier to kind of push it through the framework and turn it into easy to consume gelatinous news paste.
Television. Can’t remember the last time I turned my TV on to actually watch TV. It’s mostly for streaming, but even that’s getting harder to keep up with. It just feels like there are too many services and shows to keep track of. If I sit down and watch a show then I really need to want to watch it. More and more I’ve been listening to podcasts or treating Youtube videos like podcasts. It lets me multitask in a way that sitting down and trying to watch something just doesn’t.
More and more I’ve been listening to podcasts or treating Youtube videos like podcasts. It lets me multitask in a way that sitting down and trying to watch something just doesn’t.
How much of them do you catch as you’re multitasking? Any time I try this I’m astounded at my unwitting ability to almost entirely tune out whatever they’re talking about, defeating any point to playing the podcast outside of giving myself some background noise.
It miiiiight be an ADHD thing as the only people I’ve been known to actually retain info while doing this are all diagnosed, including me
Or at least more commonly possible in ND brains like that
I personally only find myself rewinding my audiobooks when either:
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Something weirdly worded or confusing happens. Going through discworld right now and I had to repeat a lot of Pratchetts descriptions of people, for example
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I need to read something in the language the book is in. IE, english Text that’s actual words that have meaning, but not numbers or acronyms or other non-sentence English, if that makes sense
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Its a trainable skill. Ive got it to the point where my boss doesnt give me shit about listening to audiobooks while I work because I’m faster when I do.
Gaming - too much hassle for me, and I just wasn’t even using my PS4 much. I don’t know if I’d call it outgrowing it exactly though… this one is borderline to me.
What I have outgrown is cable news like CNN etc. Or they went way to clickbait for me. Maybe both happened. Similar with the NYT, they keep getting things wrong that they just shouldn’t and then the more history I read the less I really trust their reporting. The more boring the news source, like AP, the more likely it is to be accurate from what I can tell.
Similar things happened with certain influencers / podcasters. As I learned more I just found they were continually making the same mistakes on things that they should have known better / learned better by now. Sam Harris was a big one, and I narrowly avoided the beginnings of Brett Weinsteins Dark Horse and now it’s completely off the rails.
Certain “nonfiction” authors followed the same path - as I got older I realized how made up the Ancient Aliens thing was, I think I bought in hard in my late teen years and then when I was 25 I had an epiphany that it just has to be crap or more people would believe it, and when I re looked at the “evidence” I was like - oh, well if you just go by the book, sure it sounds compelling - but if you search alternative explanations all of a sudden you’re like, oh yea, that is far more plausible.
Consumer Reports happened about a decade ago. The reason was I always was a little annoyed by their biases that they didn’t really make clear. What really killed it for me though was comparing laptops primarily on screen size. Looking back now, it’s a little less ridiculous than I initially thought, but to not have separate Mac and Windows categories let to the Mac winning over the windows competitor when the Mac was like 3x the price. This all seemed like a crazy result to anyone who knew anything about computers, especially like in 2014 when for something like 95% of the population, the Mac would not run 99% of the software they could possibly want to run, or know about. A great build quality, performance and size doesn’t matter if the computer doesn’t do the computation you need.
In the last 3 years non anime TV shows - mostly because of a mix of already been done better, no FOMO with streaming, and because of all the channels etc no water cooler talk about the 3 shows that were on last night / this week / whatever dragging me to be up to date. Now that there’s so many choices, I don’t have to take “mildly entertaining” as my bar for watching a show, it’s way way higher now. And as the individual shows get longer on streaming for many - it’s harder to set aside 55-90 minutes depending on show. Even 42 minutes is harder as more is going on now for me. I think the only reason I do more Anime is it’s ~20 minute chunks, and I have less experience with it (for half my life I didn’t know it existed, and for the next quarter it was kind of hard to come by) so I am just starting to get more picky about the shows and the “this was done better before”. Konosuba for instance is IMHO a worse version of Slayers series in a lot of ways.
Magazines - I just got tired of both trying to keep up, the rising costs, and then the increase in ads so there was so little there there, along with what to do when I was done with the weeks / months issue? I get a lot of that kind of content now from online anyway.
Physical books - similar. Unless I want to get a collectors edition for the object, the content is much better as an e-book IMO, cheaper, less paper waste, less piles of stuff taking up space etc. I’ve really come back around on the novel contents though - lots of bang for you buck in time vs dollar spent, way more variety in stories than ever get made into TV shows, can be stored locally easily on the device so you’re not burning data like with streaming… Easy to keep place with a decent app, easy to read for 3 minutes or 3 hours.
Inb4 anyone says Reddit.
I mean, I didn’t outgrow reddit, I like the reddit platform, just not the guy running it
Well, if “media” is in general, I’d have to say television. I’ll watch some things once in a while, but for the most part, I have way too much anxiety from a bad marriage. Audio books, and certain Youtube channels can trigger it, too.
Bruh, this doesn’t sound healthy at all.
I don’t watch television, streaming shows, or movies for the most part for years now.
I’ve got podcasts, music, video games, and books left.
May I ask why? Just curious.
Watching something doesn’t really feel engaging anymore. With audio mediums I’m usually doing something else like walking or working.
Do you have any examples of shows or movies that you did find engaging before you stopped?
Bare with me I’m going on a timeline here of about 7 years.
I was into Game of Thrones before the seasons where they ran out of source material. I liked Owl House then Disney cratered it via scheduling. I was watching the Mandalorian, but after watching Book of Fett I realized Star Wars was never going to be coherent. I enjoyed watching Marvel movies until Dr. Strange showed previews then they died for me. Inside Job was ok on Netflix, but I never watched the second season (that was a thing right?). I used to watch some classic BBC shows like Cadfael and I,Claudius.
Can’t disagree with any of that. That was a good place to stop with GoT, I also made it about 2 ep into book of fett before not caring, and I haven’t watched any marvel movies since Thanos.
I think there are still some good shows worth watching, but 90% is crap. The best show I’ve watched recently is probably Barry. 4 quick seasons, 30m episodes, and the series has ended so no risk of a GoT situation.
Did you ever watch Breaking Bad?
Yes, I watched it when it was first coming out. I did not like it.
Ah dang. I think it really is a masterpiece. I think there’s a bit of a slump in s2, but by the time s3 gets underway, it’s easily up there with No Country for Old Men and Fargo, imo. All the characters are well written, intelligent, trying to out smart each other, but it never feels like they’re spoon feeding the audience to keep up. Great tension and the acting is 🤌. And it’s only 5 seasons, doesn’t feel dragged out.
But if you’re able to avoid constantly consuming entertainment in this day and age, more power to ya! 😁
Gaming consoles for me.
When the PS4 came out, I couldn’t justify spending that much for a device that doesn’t have the amount of utility as a PC, nor are the games retro compatible. I’m a PC gaming convert.
Eli the Computer Guy and Philip DeFranco. For much the same reason. They told me to leave, and I did.
DeFranco was truly biased but balanced news. And then came the US election before last and balance lost out. Trump won and DeFranco decided political influence was more important than unbiased reporting. Shortly after Biden won the last election, he streamed a response to criticisms of bias, and he flat out said “if you disagree with my politics, leave. I don’t need viewers like you.” Favoring neither is disagreement too. It was that easy. Last I checked his subscriber count was cut roughly in half.
Eli said “If you don’t want to see me study ‘What is a duck?’ Leave. No really, leave. Leave.” His subscribers vanished and he blamed the algorithm, or so I heard.
Removed by mod
Last I checked was several years ago, as the last US election was in 2019, I believe.
I was a daily viewer (on week days anyway) for a mighty grand stretch of time. I watched the occasional stream too. His view counts on every video, with few exceptions, were between 1 and 2.5 million and usually on the higher side around 1.6M views. Every day.
Then about 4 and a half to 5 years ago, his viewership dropped over a few months, and they started struggling to break the 1 million mark. 800k became the norm. My recollection is the same. He told anybody who wasn’t jazzed about his politics to leave, and I did.
If he’s doing well and managed to build himself back up, good for him. Maybe he had another growing up moment. I wish him the best, but I’ll continue to take my news from RSS now on.
Streaming.
It’s the new cable, in that it sells to customers based on intentional market fragmentation. It’s actually a worse, because anything you “buy” on a streaming platform is actually just leased.
Everything that is ad-supported.
Media funded by ads has a different objective than other media. I simply reject advertising in total.
I like that simple take. It is very succinct. It pairs well with: money spent on advertising, reflects a poor quality product.
I am aware of paid alternatives to ad-supported services like email, search, etc.
Even when considering media, music is something one can buy vinyls or use a streaming service that better(?) compensate the artist.
But movies and TV? Aren’t advertisements baked in to what most consume today, albeit at different levels? For instance, product placements in movies, ad-supported free streaming, paid streaming with ads, etc.
Unless we are talking about truly independent media which is either not easily accessible/discoverable to a layman like me, or isn’t as entertaining as the mainstream ones (highly debatable/subjective, as one hasn’t explored the offerings enough).
I would genuinely like to learn more about ad-independent media, and how you consume it.
