Hacker News Reader

Comment by lawrenceyan | Hacker News Reader

It's honestly been amazing to see the utter decimation traditional television/media has encountered over the last decade.

An entire generation of kids is growing up without ever having watched TV thanks to Youtube and Twitch.

View on HN

To be fair, there were only ever like 4 generations in the history of the world that grew up watching TV. Interesting to think about!

For most things, appointment media is going back to where it was prior to the 20th Century: Live performances, including sports, where seeing it with a crowd is part of the appeal. Scheduling your day to catch a program, be it "Fibber McGee and Molly" or "Leave It To Beaver" or "Cheers" or "Friends", will seem as bizarre to someone in 2050 as it might have to someone in 1850.

YouTube does occasional appointment media. Early in the pandemic, they did a global showing of Yellow Submarine that required watching at a specific time on a Saturday. It was my kids' introduction to the movie.

And cable television as we know it has only existed since the 90's, generously since the 1980's

Not generously. It was very much a thing in the 80s and most of the channels of the 80s are still strong although there is the ineluctable transition of all basic cables towards showing nothing but Law and Order reruns.

An actual conversation with my son a few years ago:

  Son: Dad you said you've never lied to me...
  Me: I don't believe I have.
  Son: You told me you loved Looney Tunes when you were my age, but you also told me that YouTube didn't exist when you were my age. So how could you have loved Looney Tunes when you were my age?

Tell me this is not true......

All true. I should add he is on the high functioning end of the autism spectrum, but still I remember my shock when I found out that my mum had to watch TV in black and white...

The screen is the thing. Broadcast TV to CRT displays was never important; the human eye and ear glued to a glowing rectangle of changing light and sound, that was the thing. Now, the screens are everywhere, on the wall, in our pockets, and can show us anything anytime. It has revolutionized entertainment to the point where each individual can mine his or her own seem of addictive content that shuts off the critical mind, to provide respite from an unfriendly world occupied by humans zombified as they descend into the mindless void of the screenhole.

So, yes, the economics of it is fascinating, and horrifying, as billion dollar companies exist to create the artificial scarcity information requires to monetize. But the side effect should always take center stage: we relegate each other and ourselves to staring into the glowing abyss in our pockets, each compulsive viewing rightly characterized as a suicide in miniature.

Broadcast vs on-demand is crucial. There’s a huge difference between having a captive audience that has no choice and producing content people choose to consume.

You can sort-of achieve a poor man's "on-demand" by providing bazillion cable channels, but real on-demand delivers a qualitative difference: you no longer schedule your life around your TV, but watch at your convenience.

I think that's less of a huge difference when a small number of platforms dominate online media and aggressively use algorithms to determine or strongly influence what content people see. Yes, you can still absolutely find beautiful niche content on YouTube, and I value that a ton, but YouTube still has immense control over people's viewing in aggregate. It's a little bit like traditional broadcast TV if there were a billion channels but after every 3 minutes of viewing the TV chose which channel to flip you to unless you were constantly diligent about manually choosing what you want to watch.

Crucial to what? To making content "better", meaning more potent, more addictive, more alluring than real life?

I'd argue that broadcast TV was an okay middle ground, because if you were addicted you were a couch potato. Now, we are all couch potatoes but without the couch, and without the social opprobrium, or even the opposite!, the world is a generally worse place. I mean, I love 3blue1brown, but is he worth the societal cost?

I mean, Plato did always complain that writing makes people stupid and kids these days are ruining society because they can’t speak well or remember anything.

And I think books were ruining kids these days in the 1600’s

In 1800’s it was populist flashy newspapers with clickbait headlines

1900’s was radio

1950’s was TV

Now it’s social media

There’s always something. People who want to escape their lives will find a way. The solution is to make the world better, not to gripe about coping strategies.

You're right. But I don't think it means what you think it means. Consider the problem of gluttony, which has always been a human problem, but which has grown far worse with the advent of industrialized food processing. The feedback loop is very similar, in fact, to the entertainment/information feedback loop that began with the invention of writing. Plato wasn't wrong in kind, only in degree.

Yes... over the weekend I discovered that my kids (ages 5 and 7) did not know what a "channel" is.

Huh. Good point. If ever I have to explain it to my daughter (age 1.5) at some point, I'll probably have to say that a channel is like an unending YouTube livestream with pre-planned content...

I'm not sure if my 11 year old knows what a channel is now. A couple of years ago I remember having to explain what a landline phone was.

YouTube channel?

Yup. I became a father in 2015. Bought a TV in 2019. Never got a cable connection. Just bought a FireTV stick and have never ever felt that I was missing something. My kid loves to speak to the remote and watch youtube cartoons.

My wife is into regional language soaps and there are a myriad of apps that stream them. I have Amazon Prime for my Seinfeld binges. Some movies that I ahem get from the interwebs, I stream from my PC using VLC player app.

And all this in India, with a capped (200 GB a month) broadband connection. Never once experienced delays / lagging / buffering. And the base cost is Amazon Prime (15 USD per year, plus it has Prime benefits, Prime music, etc), internet (12 USD per month), misc apps (30 USD per year).

On average, that is about 20 USD per month (but that includes cost for Internet that I would pay for anyway, so actual incremental cost is 5 USD per month), for almost unlimited content.

A standard Cable connection would alone cost me about 10 USD a month.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com