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Comment by jasonwatkinspdx | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, if your goal is to find adventurous content in the avant garde sense there's no question the internet has enabled far, far, more than what existed on tv in the 70s.

Also it's just incomparable how quality vs price has changed in camera equipment and related. You can put together a setup that rivals broadcast quality for about the price of an economy car. We live in a golden age of independent productions being much more affordable.

So celebrate the Moog dancers if you like, but I think this subtext that we've lost something or become less adventurous totally preposterous.

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With all due respect to the Moog Dancers--It's interesting that some people still think of culture as expressed by things that large numbers of people were forced to watch, on account of there being nothing else good on.

I think the point is that creative experimentation has really been pushed to the far edges. You would never see something so daringly unusual on broadcast television these days. What’s left of broadcast television, anyway.

Broad media consumption all just formulaic and uninspired.

The 60s and 70s were just full of weird, exploratory, boundary-bending shit, which is what makes them a time of such progress.

It may seem that way to you now, but they were just expressing the pop culture of the time. The Moog dancers were not that different from the dance numbers of the musicals in the 50s, just updated to what was then modern sensibilities and dance on television was pretty common back then.

> subtext that we've lost something or become less adventurous totally preposterous

This was shown where everyone might stumble across it. That's completely unlike today's insular interest bubbles. The unspoken bubbles are a loss for the larger group. The bubbles make us less adventurous.

> We live in a golden age of independent productions being much more affordable.

I'm torn on this. I suppose it's a beautiful thing to enable more creators but we are also awash in garbage content with BS at scale.

Only online. If you prefer to leave curation to others then you still have TV

I think you're missing the point that it's much harder to find anything weird on TV than it used to be. There's too much money involved so its all marketing, syndication or franchises now.

Back when I had cable, all I needed to do to see weird shit was turn on the local public access channel.

In that case there's gap for curated non TV weird. Could be filled by blogs, sub Reddits ? This is where I'd expect to find self funded stuff that only circulated on Vimeo or YouTube.

Streaming is still I think going to be the middle ground that can deliver somewhat weird but with a good production budget.

TV isn’t where you look for weird, though. ;)

Risk is inherent to adventurous content.

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