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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

When I was young(er) I remember the trope of old people complaining about how everything is getting worse and rolling my eyes, but as I get older...

I distinctly remember growing up and watching educational dinosaur documentaries on the science channel and cool Roman history on the history channel.

Couple decades later I check out those channels one is a hundred variants of "ancient aliens" and the other is... well I have no clue about the Science channel actual but the history channel definitely took a hard turn towards non-science based paranormal.

I imagine the history channel was never a non-profit educational endeavor but it sure was at least somewhat educational back in the day?

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For what it's worth, what happened is that it turns out people don't actually want to watch good, educational content. At least, not in the numbers required to sustain a cable tv channel.

On that note, I really wish YouTube would do more highlight its high quality channels. I'm sure I'm missing better examples, but creators like RealLifeLore, Tom Scott, and Weird History are finding success in making new informative video essays about historical subjects

Sustain the channel or maximize the channel's profit?

Sustain the channel, in this case.

Or we should pair domain experts with media students/freelancers to improve the production values and output of someone like this:

Benjamin Burger - Rocks of Utah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=molI4TlaF78

Give me a UBI-style stipend and I'd fly over there to help Burger make those videos!

People want to watch good educational content, but they don't want to pay for content. They may be willing to pay for convenience, but a cable channel no longer provides that.

People want to watch entertainment, when I was a kid watching the 100th documentary about egypt I wasn't thinking about getting educated, I was enjoying it because it was fun and interesting, and so was everyone else I knew. And if i'm honest they could be lying to me and I wouldn't have been able to tell, nor would I be bothered to go after archeology papers to fact check it.

I do lament the fall of the history channel because the documentaries were extremely fun, not really because I'm sad about missing the information on the mongols in the nth century. Hell the dragon: a fantasy made real doc in discovery channel was a blast, not really bothered it wasn't real, if anything it was a wake up call for people that believed everything they saw on there.

I remember history channel as the WWII channel.

Yeah… it certainly had a lot of that.

"All Hitler, all the time!"

Advertisers have a strong preference for the most gullible people, and know where to find them.

IIRC that had a lot to do with WWII footage being plentiful and either cheap or free.

And that literally a whole generation lived through it, and you could find plentiful interviewees to fill time with. I loved watching my grandfather's generation tell stories, because it felt like watching grandpa tell stories.

The pivot to ancient aliens is what the advertisers favor.

> I have no clue about the Science channel

I don't remember which channel it was specifically, but I happened to catch one of those style of documentaries (probably something about string theory because that's the only thing deep pop physics seems to want to cover). The basic style of the show was "commercials, recap of last segment, frame a question, have the expert talk about it for like 30 seconds, voiceover recap of that response, lofty question to leave you wanting to come back after the commercial break, commercial break" (rinse and repeat until hour timeslot is filled). And in one of those segments, the managed to have the leaving question ask the thing they just answered earlier that segment.

So don't hold your breath that the various science channels are doing much better.

It used to have connections, that show was awesome fun.

Bravo used to show ballets and operas.

Social media has taken the same slide from helping people communicate and find information to being skinner boxes that serve streams of addictive filler.

The pattern I keep seeing repeated is that things start out with positive intent but fine after a while discover that there is not only more money but more engagement and popularity to be had in making increasingly stupid and destructive material. We seem to consistently surprise ourselves with just how low our tastes actually are.

Like if you took me from the late 1990s (college years) and showed me todays TikTok or YouTube I’d have laughed and thought there’s no way anyone would want to spend much time watching that schlock. It’s so low effort, dumb, boring… but human beings really do seem to just want our minds numbed. Same thing drives the opioid epidemic I assume.

> there’s no way anyone would want to spend much time watching that schlock. It’s so low effort, dumb, boring… but human beings really do seem to just want our minds numbed.

We've been trained into that by desperation. Social connections and celebrity have become so vital to any chance of having a middle-class income that you can't blame zoomers slaving at a repetitive drone job for long hours and token pay for carefully poring over the output of people who have been successful at gathering attention and converting it to rent.

I distinctly recall seeing a documentary based on Chariots of the Gods on Discovery back in it's heyday. That was the great progenitor of all the phony archaeology industry.

History channel launched as a kicking-ass channel, with all kinds of good documentaries. Then it got a show about "what facts are around the UFO stuff", and suddenly it was all bullshit. It was an incredible trajectory. Everything changed in a single year.

But that doesn't mean that "everything is getting worse". It means that this one thing got worse. Plenty of other things appeared since then, some much better.

May want to try Discovery's streaming service.

A bit meta, but after having to repeatedly fight their login mechanism and ads suddenly appearing on our ad-free stream and... I'm personally done with Discovery+

Streaming was a great improvement over cable for awhile, but it currently seems determined to close that gap.

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