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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

I wonder to the degree their effects are much worse than migraines. Perhaps irritability? Mental confusion? Anxiety? I'm spitballing here, but to be sure it seems like our world is somehow a place of more anxiety, irritation .... I would love for it to be something we could take control of.

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i doubt it's the light bulbs. I posited the other day, by assembling a few different ideas, that Trauma Based Entertainment is to blame for this. something like 2/3rds of all Television programing is law-enforcement adjacent. True Crime is super popular on TV, law and order, NCIS, FBI this-and-that. And what's one of the largest advertising cohorts?

Medicine for depression, anxiety, insomnia...

it's nearly a closed loop; something i intuitively realized shortly after 2001/09/11 - by the end of that year i decided i would no longer have a "Television" attached to CATV/SAT/ANT service.

I'm not sure if i am correct, i haven't really dedicated a lot of time to getting the exact numbers, talking to psychologists and sociologists and the like. But two people i know had "breakdowns" (grippy sock) in the last month and both of them always have true crime on TV in the background or listen to true crime podcasts. Shortly after that happened i was listening to the moe facts podcast where Moe used the term "trauma based entertainment" and something clicked - Moe didn't mention "it's because of pharma ads" - that's my own input after having worked for the largest television "broadcast" company in the world, just long enough to see the advertiser "dinner".

The only ones watching traditional OTA TV anymore are elders. That advertising cohort is why OTA TV ads are filled with pharmaceuticals and "you may be entitled to financial compensation" type ads, at least where I'm at. Traditional TV has been dying since Youtube and broadband. MTV plays Ridiculousness constantly because no one is actually watching it.

> it's nearly a closed loop; something i intuitively realized shortly after 2001/09/11 - by the end of that year i decided i would no longer have a "Television" attached to CATV/SAT/ANT service.

Curiously this is about the same time I decided to give up on TV and radio as well.

Utter nonsense.

Verifiable data. Nielson data has to be paid for, but Australia's is free and open. [0]

Over 75 year olds are the largest FTA cohort.

[0] https://www.acma.gov.au/publications/2024-12/report/communic...

... but the content on streaming services isn't much different.

I don't know the content breakdown of online videos, but i know that creators like audit the audit are in the algo; and that's trauma based entertainment as well. the "here's the story and police interview of so-and-so", plus the news stations that have youtube presence.

Movies are another one, and lots of people watch movies. If i go on hulu or netflix and start tallying the genres (either TBE or not-TBE), what do we figure it will be?

The person i heard use the phrase "Trauma Based Entertainment" used it to describe movies that "we were sat down to watch when we were 9-12." Unfortunately the podcast i mentioned isn't super-advanced on the backend so i am unsure how to share clips at this point. But i've heard before the claim "young women as a demographic listen to true crime" repeated as a truism. I know the women close to me listened to this sort of content in the past or currently. I'm not trying to generalize this to the entire cohort.

also i only think, myself, that it's harmful, TBE/true crime/etc; i'm not a sociologist or psychologist.

It's definitely long lost its crown as the main way to watch video, but linear TV does still have a role. Apparently there's still the odd broadcast in the UK that means the national grid has to work to keep the frequency stable when everyone goes to put their kettles on in the ad breaks.

Live sports. Latency is so much lower on OTA television that you can tell who is watching a football match on UHF, cable or multicast IPTV, satellite and through unicast internet.

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