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Comment by amscanne | Hacker News Reader

Are you being objective or just romanticizing the past?

Just to use your example: YouTube is filled with talented writers and storytellers, who would have never been able to share their content in the past. *And* the traditional media complex is richer than ever.

I don’t think average quality matters. Just what you want to consume.

If anything, I’d be more open to the opposite argument. Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too high!

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Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too high!

I am not sure it's the quality, it's more that it's optimized for dopamine shots. Heroine is highly addictive, but I think that few people would argue it's a quality drug.

Recently there was a TV item that was filmed (in NL) just before the broad adoption of mobile phones (not smartphones). People looked so much more relaxed and more oriented towards others. I am happy that until my 18th or so mobile phones were not really a thing and that smartphones were not a really a thing until I was 25-27. I was an early adopter of smartphones, but I don't think we realized how addictive and destructive social media + smartphones would become.

The early internet was very cool though. Lots of info to be found. A high percentage of users had their own web page. A lot of it was pretty whacky/playful. Addictive timelines etc. had not been invented yet.

Does the answer to "is the average person better off" have a lot to do with "how many TV shows are out there"...

or does it have to do with:

- how often their boss bugs them after hours

- how much their boss uses technology to keep an eye on them, their friends, their political views

- how often random strangers might get mad at them and SWAT them, make false claims to their employers, etc

- how often their neighbors are radicalized into shooting up a school

- how hard they find it to talk to a real person to resolve an issue with a company or government service vs being stuck on hold because of downsizing real support staff relative to population size, or with an ai chatbot?

etc?

How about “how often a sibling dies because the local medical people don’t have access to all of the world’s medical information instantly”.

Most of the world is not rich people getting swatted by teenagers they’re playing call of duty with.

I was trying to be objective which is why I didn’t try to compare individual shows.

Thus average production quality seems like a useful metric. There’s currently a handful of “traditional media/streaming” shows with absolutely crazy budgets today and if you happen to like them then that’s great. However, if you don’t things quickly fall off a cliff in terms of production quality.

The same is true of YouTube. The quality of 50,000 one man operations is irrelevant if you happen to like MrBeast, but if you don’t like MrBeast budgets drop off fast. A reasonable argument is you and everyone else may prefer a specific YouTube cooking show over Baking with Julia or other 90’s show with a much her budget, but there where several options to chose from.

Thus purely objectively even if 90’s TV had lower maximum budgets the floor being relatively high is worth taking into consideration.

It's worth noting that due to advances in technology, it is possible to deliver the same show for less money and time.

The average "how to cook on a food network" show was, ultimately, one person in the kitchen of a large home cooking for the camera, produced once a week. There are plenty of people delivering that style of cooking show with high production quality today. Obviously it's not the same because some things are less deliverable with smaller or one-person teams (Miss Piggy is not going to visit some Youtube show the way she visited Martha Stewart) but there are people making this content ranging from big shops like NYT Cooking to smaller outfits like Binging with Babish, Glen and Friends Cooking, etc. and there are even outfits like this dedicated to more niche topics like Tasting History or Emmymade.

A wide range of things have gotten dramatically cheaper, but that only goes so far.

Many YouTube channels make great use of Zoom calls for example. It’s still generally a compromise vs an actual face to face conversation.

Safety is another real concern. People have died doing stuff solo that wouldn’t have been particularly dangerous with minimal supervision.

I mean as far as this goes

> Many YouTube channels make great use of Zoom calls for example. It’s still generally a compromise vs an actual face to face conversation.

A lot of today's news footage with experts etc. these days is also not shot from studios but from online calls. Actually flying somebody out onto location is pretty uncommon; and I would say with the rise of filmed podcasting, that podcasters are more likely to have people on set than television news is.

Daily TV News is limited by travel times. If some story breaks finding the right person and getting them on an airplane and then into a studio can be impractical.

I just think if both are using zoom calls it's a bit unfair to make youtube the bad guy for also doing so.

> it is possible to deliver the same show for less money and time

Do we, though?

I recently learned about the controversial scene "Baby, It's Cold Outside".

Ignoring the content of the scene for a moment, the quality of the choreography stood out to me as something you would never see in a movie today. Certainly not in one take.

I would say that has more to do with the decline in musicals involving small numbers of people doing choreography, and the current movie system de-prioritizing dance as an important skill. The highest grossing musical movie happened in 2024 with Wicked, and the second half of that movie is probably going to do the same thing next year.

I’m also a fan of Tasting History. Highly recommended.

You could afford a house in 90s, with a 9-5 job. Today, you would see housing crisis in major metros.

Youtube has some marginal value, but I'm not sure "storytellers" bring a materially positive impact (and I reject the "richer" aspect outright). We had libraries in the 90s and they didn't force you to watch ads.

That’s my point. We still have libraries! And most have online lending programs, so you can access way more ad-free books than you ever could have in 90s. How is this not richer?

Media is rich but not in proportion of the thousands of new creators doing very well. An extreme example is playboy vs only fans creators

show business and things like it are famously pyramidal in shape. there are decades' worth of people who couldn't make it in previous generations in Los Angeles and New York.

i think what is relatively new is the unaffordability crisis making it so doing such pursuits and not being that successful is no longer a way to make a living on its own.

It's really not though. There are a few high quality individual creators, but not many.

I wish this argument would die. We're asking for a better future among futures, not a better future compared to the past.

It's like buying a car, receiving a bike, and then being told, "A bike is great because you don't have to walk anymore." If you feel like that's unfair and the response misses the point, that's how that lands. I don't know who, when hearing that, feels better. It feels out of touch and dismissive.

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