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Comment by foepys | Hacker News Reader

That's mostly American television. I cannot watch American documentaries because everything is being hyped as largest, heaviest, most expensive, deadliest, etc. and is being narrated in the same sensationalist tone. I cannot convey the tone by text but you certainly know what I mean. The interesting details always get lost because the hype must be there to keep people watching after the next ad break.

European documentaries usually simply follow the process and neutrally explain what is happening.

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Not sure if I agree. European YouTube channels are doing the same. It’s a general trend, not specific to American productions. The real reason is the incentives that content producers are subjected to. Notice how YouTube algorithms have promoted thumbnails to include faces. TV, documentaries and the likes are subjected to viewership and engagement metrics. Things have gotten worse over the years.

There are still a lot of great YouTube channels - Applied Science, Tech Ingredients and such. Nationality has nothing to do with this. 1970’s American television was amazing. Watch some Bell Labs videos or how Saul Bass did branding.

I think the opposite is true. There are so many interesting YouTube channels today, it's "quality documentaries" that were unthinkable in my childhood in the 90s.

Technology Connections, Numberphile, 3blue1brown, NativLang, Ben Eater, VSauce, Tom Scott etc.

As a teenager I could watch NatGeo and perhaps another similar channel with 2 hour dragged out documentaries with talking heads edited and narrated by people who don't love the topic the way these YouTubers do.

I think the Internet is still great if you curate what you watch and read, it's better than ever. But perhaps it's worse on the average. The junk is more potent and the intellectual poison is dosed higher than even the worst reality shows used to be on TV.

Both of these can be true at the same time.

Also, you're watching this 1937 docu on YouTube, not on Discovery Channel on TV.

> I think the opposite is true.

Not sure if there is any disagreement, you're resonating with what I said. Both are true - there is some shitty stuff and there are some great channels. Cherry picking examples doesn't actually drive my point so let me try again - It's not so much about specific channels/documentaries, but whether nationality has anything to do with it. I just don't think Americans produce content that's any different than Europeans. That was the point I was trying to convey.

I think the over-the-top style and "dumbing down" is an American influence. Many European countries have or used to have many tax paid productions on public channels, where they didn't have a business mindset at all. Especially before ~2000 in my post-communist country, documentaries were not optimized for engagement, partially because the people making it were not skilled in marketing and just didn't think that way.

Those productions are often actually really boring though. For all the bad stuff we say about History Channel and alien documentaries, it was torture to watch some boring history docus in school history class about some medieval battles with a dry voice detailing the dates and the names etc.

Sure there's a space in between, I just mean that the very commercial-focused documentaries are more an American thing and arrived along with American style cable TV to Europe.

BBC documentaries (especially the nature ones) do a lot of obnoxious foley work.

Also, a very dangerous drinking game is to watch BBC's Planet Earth and have a drink every time they use a superlative ("most," "biggest," "fastest," etc). So that is also definitely not an exclusively American phenomenon.

I've been watching the Free Documentary (I think that's their name) channel on Youtube. They're all European documentaries. They over hype stuff and design around commercial breaks too.

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