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Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

> The pedagogical level is far higher than what seems common today.

This is a growing pet peeve of mine. I used to think that advancing media formats and productions tools would generally make conveying knowledge faster, better and deeper. Instead, we see most media intentionally engaging in overall 'dumbification'. It's not just more content being shorter or more summarized, as I'm trying to compare 'apples to apples' here in terms of content targeting, length etc.

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Does survivor bias account for this? Only the best/most worthwhile videos from the "old times" are archived.

Right now, we see every piece of crap uploaded to YouTube. No doubt there's awesome video content being created today - Smarter Every Day by Destin Sandlin seems to fit - but it's surrounded by junk.

No, almost every piece of non-live media that was produced from the 1940s onwards went into huge broadcast archives. Some of the media it was stored on was destroyed, or otherwise reused for newer broadcasts, but much of what survived wasn't due to the inherent quality of the content and we have vast amounts of it remaining. Take this compilation of 1960s commercials from the Prelinger archives [0]. These obviously weren't produced to the same quality as the Chevrolet videos, but it's also not drastically different from contemporaneous syndicated content. The pacing is slower than modern ads, most include practical demonstrations of why the product is better/necessary, and there's just less optimization towards the visual frenzy we see today.

[0] https://youtu.be/EGUuyewrNNo

What’s interesting is you also see the is was sponsored by Chevrolet (on the title screen), so it seems monetization-wise, it’s no different than today when YouTubers have a sponsor read at the start of a video. I just wonder if then it’s simply a matter of more creators competing for less ad-money-per-person, which leads to the kind of “optimized” content we see today.

It’s the algorithm. You’re playing a different game when your content has to compete with and grab attention on its own vs when a gatekeeper decides to broadcast you at 3pm to every TV.

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