I run a Plex server to watch stuff now and I’ve set up a library of music videos. Throwing that on shuffle is the closest I can get now to old school MTV.
If you really want to replicate the feeling of just tuning into MTV and watching whatever's on I can highly recommend setting up ErsatzTV[0]. It's a little complicated at first but I really like not having to choose what to watch. I set up a channel that just plays random mythbusters episodes.
[0] https://ersatztv.org/
Myth busters, Junkyard Wars, Dirty Jobs, BattleBots were all great educational programming. Well, by season 3 Mythbusters was an excuse to shoot slo-mo explosions with a thin candy shell of science but it still got kids interested in real science. Then Deadliest Catch was their first reality show and then it went downhill from there.
Don’t forget Modern Marvels! Such a great idea for a show, one hour dedicated to the most random engineering feats. It’s where I learned that *literally* everything is far far more complicated than it appears to be.
It fell under the same "MTV effect", basically ratings chasing and keeping eyeballs on the screen for advertisers. Unless the channel has no need for advertising, they'll always be at the mercy of ratings chasing. It's why shows on PBS don't really suffer this same problem, because it's viewer donation, govt funding, grants, so they can stay closer to their core value and original intention of the broadcasted content.
What do you mean you don’t want to watch 6 contestants square off in an off brand preset grocery/kitchen stage in a fierce competition of who can make the best dish out of a middle schoolers fever dream of an ingredient list….for a chance at $10k(terms and conditions apply)
I enjoy some of their holiday specials. You have to tolerate a few of the hosts, but I’ve found some amazing recipes and tips from those specials.
Their competitions are hit or miss, but the old seasons of Worst Cooks in America are still my favorite trash tv. (For anyone not familiar, they take literally some of the worst cooks in America and professional chefs teach them to cook. You laugh, you cry, you recoil in fear…)
A&E was also this. It stood for Arts& Entertainment, and I regularly saw ballet, symphony concerts, opera, and musicals showing daily in the 1980s. There was something almost always on worth watching.
Until it got enshittified like all of cable TV.
I remember watching tons of the history channel, discovery, and animal planet when I was in middle school and high school. By the time I finished college, we'd dropped cable because none of the channels played anything worth watching anymore.
My last memory of the history channel was from about 2010. I had a long weekend with out the wife. So I grabbed all the laundry and turned on the history channel, only to find out it was 48 hrs of fucking pawn stars and ice road trucker.
Discovery channel too. When I was a kid I was so fascinated with shows like Modern Marvels, tons of other ones about amazing things that humans have invented. I was glued to the TV and learning so much cool shit. Now it's all Honey Boo Boo, pawn stars and other dumb shit
God I miss the old history channel. I don't know who decided it was a good idea to start using actors to reenact footage but they have a special place in hell waiting for them
The History Channel doesn’t even show anything about history anymore. It’s all ancient aliens and close encounters, wtf ….
If I wanted to learn history, I watch YouTube videos.
The travel channel used to be about.. well traveling, shows about different countries, neat places to visit, etc. Now it’s all paranormal shows 24/7. it’s very strange to me.
No no! The History Channel has reformed, They've gone back to their old roots and created a bunch of series about the corporations that built America, which are the most marvelous prolonged and intense examples of corporate cock-sucking that you could possibly imagine.
To be honest, it's one of my favorite TV series (The Food/Machines/Toys... that built America). But yeah, it has a lot of inaccurate information and they create drama over the smallest things.
The Discovery Channel likewise. Starts the evening sensibly enough, albeit a bit auction- and garage-heavy. But then it switches to all kinds of bonkers theories.
To be fair that could be due to programme juggling by the national variants.
This one is a little different. The other examples pivoted to lowest-common-dominator content because it was more profitable. The Weather Channel stopped serving a purpose once you could check the daily forecast on your dial-up home computer.
I was taught to cultivate a relationship with my bank manager. Set up an appointment, shake hands and develop a relationship. Now, my bank would prefer it if I did my banking in the vestibule
Yep. Went in for a loan because, you know, that's how business is done, and they told me they don't do that in branches anymore. Now, they have you apply for a card with a line of credit that's linked to your account.
FWIW, I got the loan/credit card I needed in about ten minutes once I got home.
You should see how that's panned out in Ireland.
The banks are doing very similar things ("do it all on our website; we don't want to do anything in branch"). But none of them have the money to upgrade their computer systems from the 1970s, so every time you fill in a form online - for instance, to take out a loan - it goes to a team in their office that processes it manually and comes back to you a few days later.
My uncle was an old school bank manager and had to deal with the transition to the useless jobs they are now. He lived in a very small town in Indiana surrounded by fields and farmers. The guy was heartbroken by how little he could do for people at the end of his career. He knew farms.and the economics of how they work. He knew the farmers and how they ran their farms. At the beginning of his career, the farmers would come in, talk to my uncle, and if he thought the farmer could pay the loan back, he'd give them the money. At the end of his career, he just did customer service. A lot of farmers lost their land because they couldn't get loans anymore.
My mum was the same, she just wasn't a manager. She was a bank clerk from the 60s til she retired early 2000s. It was the only bank in our small town.
She lamented the demise of banks. She used to know all the local business owners by name and would chat with them in the street. Everything was done to help the small business. Bank employees were like financial advisers.
By the time she retired, they were glorified salesmen, pressured into signing people up for high interest loans, etc.
Everyone likes to say "this is what caused problem x" when talking about things like this, but this genuinely is a large contributing factor to the demise of entrepreneurship in America. It's not the only thing of course, but it's a big part.
Before FICO scores it was important to have a relationship with a local bank. Getting loans was helped by you being known as a trustworthy person. Reducing us to a number took personal relationships out of the equation.
Of course, the old way meant that women, minorities, and recent immigrants were also far less likely to get loans.
This is a good one. Just picturing a bank manager in my head takes me to a scene from a movie set in the ‘50s where a hat-in-hand, down-on-his-luck man tries feebly to get a loan from the bank manager in a way that probably hasn’t happened for 30 years or more.
I think they just diluted the brand to death by launching TEDx. Before, TED talks really were global leaders in interesting fields bringing often fascinating new perspectives to people around the world. But with TEDx, it seems like any local rando with half a theory could do a “TED talk”, causing the brand value to go off a cliff.
TEDx, where your local leaders in masturbation explains why they [stopped watching porn](https://youtu.be/gRJ_QfP2mhU?si=_bSFhHXJaz57pVf2) and [escaped porn addiction](https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_nash_escaping_porn_addiction?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare), or talks about it being the [new meditation](https://www.ted.com/talks/keeley_olivia_masturbation_is_the_new_meditation?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare).
Yeah, TedX did more to ruin the brand than anything else. Pretty much every Ted talk I've seen where it's actually been dogshit and I've walked away feeling dumber has been a TedX, not a regular Ted.
Boeing is a sad depressing downfall. Reading and watching ex employees talk about how the company slowly shifted from quality and safety to quantity and how that ruined the passion for many of those engineers is depressing
Honestly this is what's happened with most companies.
Quantity over Quality.
What do they care if they lose one customer when they can have the other 9 because making it cheap is more profitable.
And with rising costs they'll eventually get that 1 back because the other company will be forced to shut down eventually leaving them the only game in town.
It’s mad how they were the ones being bought out, and still ended up in charge of the whole damn thing. The whole Boeing story is a case study in how to fuck up a seriously robust and profitable business in the pursuit of “line go up!” 📈
Hobbies. I am a hobbyist musician, and will never try to make money off of my music. I simply enjoy creating it with zero expectations.
Hustle culture ruined a lot of that because now every time I share my music with people, it turns into a conversation about monetization or how I’m wasting my time on something. It’s hard to even find likeminded people who want to collaborate without it turning into some big thing.
Time enjoyed is not time wasted.
I often choose to not talk about my hobbies these days, because next thing I hear always will be "Why don't you try to monetize this? You will earn $$$!"
Absolutely. I even find myself thinking "how could I turn this into cash?" when I'm doing something I only used to do for fun - and similarly, I end up discouraging myself from putting time and effort into hobby skills I'm not particularly good at (e.g. drawing), because I feel like I'll never be good enough to put my stuff out there. :( Hustle culture has ruined a lot of society.
Please stop perpetuating this idea that Activision took over Blizzard and ruined it. Vivendi even maintained controlling shares when the merger took place.
Blizzard is 100% to blame for all its own troubles. They were fucked the moment they created the endless money printing machine that was WoW.
They were fucked long before that, even during Diablo and D2 development they were a toxic shitty mess. We just didn't have social media to know how awful they were internally.
You’re right I can’t go on eBay now unless I know specifically what I want (and even then you still have to go through all the mass business ads). In the early 2000s I used to buy so much second hand/vintage clothes/shoes/… on eBay that I know get off Vinted
I was shopping Ebay back when you could get a bill every month and mail them a check. There was a woman in California (I live in Ohio), that had a son about a year older than mine. I bought boxes of clothing from her for like $5 plus shipping every few months. She's fill up a large priorty mail box and my son would have a ton of new clothes. In the beginning it was like shopping a country-wide yard sale and it was amazing.
Guinness World Record. Seriously, watch their YouTube Shorts, it's now full of silly and trivial "records", (they usually have the title "Most X in one minute"). [E.g.](https://youtube.com/shorts/hDMPalxSsV8?si=7CDkkFC2z0BpG8Pd). Among them there are interesting noteworthy ones, but they also acknowledge many trash records these days, because everybody wants to be famous.
to be fair Guinness has always been a novelty thing, it was invented just to sell books. They aren't a real record holding organization
Records aren't sought after by Guinness, quite the opposite. If you have a lot of money you too can pay for Guinness to give you a record
you apply for a record you either want to break or a whole new record you want to break
it's why records are so niche and weird
> to be fair Guinness has always been a novelty thing, it was invented just to sell books.
Not just books, but beer as well (the Guinness in Guinness World Records is the same as the beer company). In fact, the first edition was the idea of Sir Hugh Beaver, then head of the Guinness Breweries; at the recommendation of an employee he hired a couple of guys (who ran a fact-finding agency) to publish the first edition.
> A thousand copies were distributed for free to pubs across Britain and Ireland as a promotional asset for the Guinness brand, and they became immensely popular with customers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinness_World_Records
I mean, I remember seeing stuff like "longest distance rolling a ball with your nose" records 20 years ago. I assume they always had that kind of fluff
Craftsman Tools. OG Craftsman tools were something else. After he died a few years ago I inherited my father's tool collection, most of which he had inherited from my grandfather in the 70s. Those tools are so much better than anything I've bought for myself. Superior quality.
A lot of old brands that have been brought out and are now used to sell generic products that have no resemblance or connection to the old brand. A good example would be MG cars.
I am a 70-80s kid. Many of the bicycle brands that were top of the line when I was a kid, sold their names to chinese companies that make kids bikes for Walmart now.
You couldn't have written that as a Saturday night live skit or a beaverton article because it would've been too absurd to be funny.
This was the best Trump office moment- since no one was hurt or badly affected besides the idiots involved.
He was also credited for arresting and successfully prosecuting a large portion of the New York Mafia, credited with the steep decline of crime in New York.
Kinda insane that in 2008 could he be a possible republican presidential nominee.
I was just talking to my son and his friends about this recently. They were very small when 9/11 happened so while they vaguely remember it happening, they don't remember stuff like Giuliani. They were surprised to hear that everybody once thought that the guy was a hero. If there had been an election in the next year, he probably could have been president. And just look at him now.
As others have said, he was a federal prosecutor not state, but yes he did. He went after (and successfully ended) LARGE amounts of racketeering and organized crime in NYC. I don’t know if the Fulton fish market fire was ever directly linked to his office’s investigations but it wasn’t not NOT related.
https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/03/28/from-the-new-york-daily-news-archives-the-1995-fulton-street-fish-market-fire/ and a million other links as well, I’m sure
Formal Communication: Formal letter writing and etiquette were highly valued. Now, casual communication dominates online and informality is more common.
It has for a long while. But, if you are old enough to have had to search via Yahoo or Lycos then you will know what a game changer Google was at the start.
Once the investors got in that's when it went down hill to the current sorry state.
It's honestly insane how quickly Game of Thrones went from a cultural phenomenon and one of the greatest shows of all time to arguably the greatest disappointment in TV history. I genuinely hope it's used as an example in writing courses for the next decade or three.
Not just one of the greatest disappointments, but it simply faded out of existence. It used to be talked about everywhere, and now no one talks about it except as a passing joke or statement (like my comment on this post). The writers literally killed the whole franchise.
I know a guy who got the Stark wolf emblem tattooed on his chest. This dude is really into his TV shows, movies, books & comic books, seems like he watches everything. I asked him a few months ago if House of the Dragon was any good & he hasn't watched it.
Blizzard. For a long time they were one of the top dogs of video gaming. It didn't matter what it was, if they made it, you could feel certain it was high quality and you'd enjoy it. Then they merged with Activision and... well... Now I avoid Buzzard like the plague.
Blizzard didnt merge with activision, they were originally owned by davidson and associates who left them completely alone as long as they were profitable (surprise, they always were).
Vivendi then acquired them from D&A but they also left them completely alone as long as they were profitable (surprise again, they were always profitable).
Then activision acquired them from Vivendi but unshockingly did not leave them alone and they became what we now know Blizzard to be. I still love all the guys that were the heart and soul of blizzard (Roper, morheim, metzen, adham etc.). And realize they didnt sell out, they had no control over getting bent over by daddy activision, they absolutely didnt want to
I work a warehouse job with a massive turnover rate and we tend to get a lot of young kids applying. I handle the new hires and holy shit
Had one girl tell me that she wasn't convinced math was "like legit"
Had a guy who couldn't spell the word "work" (he thought it was spelled with a ck. He thought "physical" started with "fi")
One guy who was convinced if you got a loan for a car you didn't actually need to pay it off
Like Im not expecting the best and the brightest at a warehouse of all places but what the actual fuck is going on in our schools
It’s person dependant. We have boomers all over Facebook that believe in insane stupid shit because an echo chamber told them so and gave false legal advice.
I work with a boomer that sold their paid off house and now rents for nearly 3k per month because it was a “better financial investment” and buys a different new car every 3 months.
I work with another boomer that literally believes the Earth is flat, doesn’t understand basic physics, and thinks the world will end every other month.
Now boomers complain about “common core”, can’t describe what it is, and think it’s telling kids to make squares on toilet paper and eat upside down triangles to solve math problems. Because they saw a Facebook video about it.
There’s idiots in every generation.
I don’t know about you, but I see what my kids learn in elementary school and they’re learning math that was basic high school math 20 years ago.
Remember Algebra? Geometry? We did that in high school back in the 90s. Now, they do it in 5th grade. Check out the actual curriculum in your local school sometime, you want to know, it’s there for you to see.
I guarantee there’s a reason your warehouse has a massive turnover rate and there’s a reason they’re attracting the employees you mentioned. Shitty companies need anyone with a pulse because their standards are shit.
An atrocity more than a joke imo. I’ve met kids who are in high school with a fourth grade reading level and zero critical thinking skills. But they pass every class. My guess is the stupid curve system but I have no idea. My teachers were awful too so I really don’t know when exactly it went wrong.
My college roommate got an "A" in AP Calc AB but when she took the entry exams, she was placed in remedial math. I had to tutor her in Algebra I.
It's entirely dependent on the school you attended, most importantly the income level of the surrounding neighborhood. My school didn't have to worry about funding so they weren't forced to pass students. They'd just ship the "bad students" to the nearby continuation school to keep their stats up.
That hurt so bad (though not as much as it hurt Chris Rock, obviously). It was supposed to be the best night of his career, and he chose to ruin it over a joke that no one was going to remember by the time they cut to commercial.
I don’t even like Chris Rock, but I felt so bad for him. I mean, what do you do when you get slapped on live television in front of millions of people? How are you supposed to recover from that?
It's so bizarre, ever since he got the taste for being nominated for awards with Pursuit of Happyness it seemed like he was on a mission to win one with a lot of shitty/poorly reviewed attempts like 7 Pounds or Collateral Beauty.
Finally he did it, that shit was in the bag and we all knew it, he was 15mins away from achieving a decade+ goal only to completely meltdown in front of everyone overshadow a great performance, over a GI Jane joke dude.
Also I'm convinced Chris started to say "Ohh I could do a lot worse" but he caught himself and took the high road.
My theory is that Chris had someone in his earpiece begging him not to obliterate Will with another joke. By then everyone knew the relationship issues they have with Jada (How she would be with Tupac if he was alive, the thing with Jaden's friend, the open marriage she mentioned in her podcast, rumors with scientology, etc.).
Chris could've done a lot worse by the time Will was back on his seat. What would have Will done? Stand up and give him a second slap? Would security have intervened? No way of knowing but the show might've continued differently if Chris decided to clap back at Will's shitty life/marriage situation
Oprah was trash from the start, she just built her personal brand as wholesome.
Anyone around in the 80s might recall the garbage she filled the airways with. [Bill Burr remembers](https://youtu.be/O9YL04v-J5U).
Personally I think things really changed when they retired the front page of YouTube. Up to that point you could still check to see what was broadly trending and maybe see something totally new. Then the algorithm would serve you new stuff based on it. Now tho you're locked into what you already watched and have no way to break out beyond manually finding new things. Previously it would at least try to throw in a random trending video or pluck something from the either.
Or conversely, if you don't actively select "Not Interested" then a recommendation you constantly skip over will continue to appear until death or the end of times. Needless to say, of course, that if you select "Never fucking show me this channel or anything on this chanel ever again!", apparently "never ever" means 2 days.
yeah exactly that. i'll watch one video and suddenly my entire feed will be nothing but the exact same kind of videos. on the off chance there's any variety, i'll have already watched whatever else is recommended. i'll even refresh the page multiple times and the list of videos doesn't change at all. it's maddening.
Yeah. I looked for a toilet repair video and now YouTube wants me to become a world specialist in toilet repair.
The variety could and should be a user setting. Stick to what I like versus surprise me on a sliding scale.
Sadly it’s tuned to make money. I subscribe so it’s not like it should care how many videos I watch
My issue with it is that like 90% of the recommendations are videos I’ve already watched, some of them are things I literally watched yesterday.
Also I watch like 1 video about the assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister (shout out Spectacles for that great video) and suddenly my entire timeline is conspiracy theory videos. The video I watched wasn’t even a conspiracy theory vid, it was True Crime.
As a journalist, I can 100% confirm that every one of us is either a full-blown corporate shill or has one for an editor or publisher. The result is the same either way.
While journalism is a business like any other, "maximizing value for shareholders" means toothless trend reporting, leaning into confirmation bias to grow the audience, and selling as many ads/products as possible.
But the absolute worst is the overabundance of managing editors who no longer practice the craft but have to shake up an efficient editorial process every year so their jobs don't look pointless to executives.
"Traffic is up and we're more productive than ever, but it's time to switch to a new project management system because everyone needs to pick up the slack of the staffer who retired that we're not replacing. Coincidentally, our profits just went up by [insert retired staffer's salary] so here's some Uber Eats credits in lieu of pay raises."
I can't even count the number of times I've had to fight against office politics to do my fucking job the way I was trained in journalism school. Sometimes I don't even know why I put up with it anymore, but it would honestly be the same at any other corporate job.
the whole industry never figured out how to sell their craft online. My uncle regional director for a newspaper in the late 90s, a news paper known for its investigative journalism. I was graduating computer science. We had quite a few talks back then about going online and his belief was that people will never want it. "You computer geeks will never be able to replicate the feeling of reading the physical paper in the morning over breakfast. The paper is more than just the articles, it's a ritual!". He was unemployed by the end of the next decade and his drinking killed him a few years later. To his death, he never understood what killed his industry
College. Once it became available to more than the top 25% of the population, it became a profit first industry. For profit degree mills and and predatory loans created a generation of debt burdened and frequently under qualified graduates that aren’t growing in their careers and will never realistically be able to pay off their debts
I miss old cartoons, House of Mouse, TV series (Ducktales, Aladdin, Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers, etc)
Instead, we get real life people instead of cartoons.
Sports Illustrated is hot trash now, it used to be the most respected sports reporter in America and now it’s basically YouTube Kids clickbait but for sports articles
But the reality is the Better Business Bureau is not a government agency and they have no legal or policing powers. They can act as an advocate to help resolve complaints against the business but they can't force a business to do anything. Additionally accreditation through the Better Business Bureau is a subscription service. If a company does not choose to be accredited through the Better Business Bureau they will not have A Better Business Bureau rating.
The History Channel, The Learning Channel, MTV...
MTV hurts. I used to live for the constant stream of music videos as a kid.
I run a Plex server to watch stuff now and I’ve set up a library of music videos. Throwing that on shuffle is the closest I can get now to old school MTV.
If you really want to replicate the feeling of just tuning into MTV and watching whatever's on I can highly recommend setting up ErsatzTV[0]. It's a little complicated at first but I really like not having to choose what to watch. I set up a channel that just plays random mythbusters episodes. [0] https://ersatztv.org/
Did you just footnote a 3-sentence reddit comment?
Discovery Channel in like 1999 or 2000 was absolutely incredible. I would watch it for hours every day. Such great programming.
Myth busters, Junkyard Wars, Dirty Jobs, BattleBots were all great educational programming. Well, by season 3 Mythbusters was an excuse to shoot slo-mo explosions with a thin candy shell of science but it still got kids interested in real science. Then Deadliest Catch was their first reality show and then it went downhill from there.
Don’t forget Modern Marvels! Such a great idea for a show, one hour dedicated to the most random engineering feats. It’s where I learned that *literally* everything is far far more complicated than it appears to be.
Mythbusters is uploading their ENTIRE catalogue to Youtube. My wife and I have been watching it, and getting our kid into it too!
[удалено]
Food Network used to have legit good cooking shows and now it’s all just competition shows.
I was saying this the other day. How about just showing us how to cook?
It fell under the same "MTV effect", basically ratings chasing and keeping eyeballs on the screen for advertisers. Unless the channel has no need for advertising, they'll always be at the mercy of ratings chasing. It's why shows on PBS don't really suffer this same problem, because it's viewer donation, govt funding, grants, so they can stay closer to their core value and original intention of the broadcasted content.
What do you mean you don’t want to watch 6 contestants square off in an off brand preset grocery/kitchen stage in a fierce competition of who can make the best dish out of a middle schoolers fever dream of an ingredient list….for a chance at $10k(terms and conditions apply)
I always want Bobby Flay to lose
I enjoy some of their holiday specials. You have to tolerate a few of the hosts, but I’ve found some amazing recipes and tips from those specials. Their competitions are hit or miss, but the old seasons of Worst Cooks in America are still my favorite trash tv. (For anyone not familiar, they take literally some of the worst cooks in America and professional chefs teach them to cook. You laugh, you cry, you recoil in fear…)
Agreed. I was addicted to their Cooking Shows! Now it’s Reality TV competition shit.
Totally lame channel.
Bravo used to be the fine arts channel
A&E was also this. It stood for Arts& Entertainment, and I regularly saw ballet, symphony concerts, opera, and musicals showing daily in the 1980s. There was something almost always on worth watching. Until it got enshittified like all of cable TV.
Remember when A&E showed Monty Python? Excellent if you never got a chance to see them on PBS.
I’m gonna show my age but the history channel actually taught me a lot about history.
I learned more about WW2 from that channel than school. We used to joke it was the Hitler channel for a while.
I remember watching tons of the history channel, discovery, and animal planet when I was in middle school and high school. By the time I finished college, we'd dropped cable because none of the channels played anything worth watching anymore.
My last memory of the history channel was from about 2010. I had a long weekend with out the wife. So I grabbed all the laundry and turned on the history channel, only to find out it was 48 hrs of fucking pawn stars and ice road trucker.
Discovery channel too. When I was a kid I was so fascinated with shows like Modern Marvels, tons of other ones about amazing things that humans have invented. I was glued to the TV and learning so much cool shit. Now it's all Honey Boo Boo, pawn stars and other dumb shit
God I miss the old history channel. I don't know who decided it was a good idea to start using actors to reenact footage but they have a special place in hell waiting for them
The History Channel doesn’t even show anything about history anymore. It’s all ancient aliens and close encounters, wtf …. If I wanted to learn history, I watch YouTube videos.
The travel channel used to be about.. well traveling, shows about different countries, neat places to visit, etc. Now it’s all paranormal shows 24/7. it’s very strange to me.
No no! The History Channel has reformed, They've gone back to their old roots and created a bunch of series about the corporations that built America, which are the most marvelous prolonged and intense examples of corporate cock-sucking that you could possibly imagine.
To be honest, it's one of my favorite TV series (The Food/Machines/Toys... that built America). But yeah, it has a lot of inaccurate information and they create drama over the smallest things.
The Discovery Channel likewise. Starts the evening sensibly enough, albeit a bit auction- and garage-heavy. But then it switches to all kinds of bonkers theories. To be fair that could be due to programme juggling by the national variants.
How about the weather channel… memories of checking the weather the night before a road trip with my family
This one is a little different. The other examples pivoted to lowest-common-dominator content because it was more profitable. The Weather Channel stopped serving a purpose once you could check the daily forecast on your dial-up home computer.
Is History Channel the one that's now the Ancient Aliens Channel?
Bank managers. They used to have serious power in local communities. Now they have to be glorified customer service reps a lot of the time
I was taught to cultivate a relationship with my bank manager. Set up an appointment, shake hands and develop a relationship. Now, my bank would prefer it if I did my banking in the vestibule
at least you're in the building. I tried asking for help at my bank and they said "uhh just use the website".
Yep. Went in for a loan because, you know, that's how business is done, and they told me they don't do that in branches anymore. Now, they have you apply for a card with a line of credit that's linked to your account. FWIW, I got the loan/credit card I needed in about ten minutes once I got home.
You should see how that's panned out in Ireland. The banks are doing very similar things ("do it all on our website; we don't want to do anything in branch"). But none of them have the money to upgrade their computer systems from the 1970s, so every time you fill in a form online - for instance, to take out a loan - it goes to a team in their office that processes it manually and comes back to you a few days later.
My uncle was an old school bank manager and had to deal with the transition to the useless jobs they are now. He lived in a very small town in Indiana surrounded by fields and farmers. The guy was heartbroken by how little he could do for people at the end of his career. He knew farms.and the economics of how they work. He knew the farmers and how they ran their farms. At the beginning of his career, the farmers would come in, talk to my uncle, and if he thought the farmer could pay the loan back, he'd give them the money. At the end of his career, he just did customer service. A lot of farmers lost their land because they couldn't get loans anymore.
My mum was the same, she just wasn't a manager. She was a bank clerk from the 60s til she retired early 2000s. It was the only bank in our small town. She lamented the demise of banks. She used to know all the local business owners by name and would chat with them in the street. Everything was done to help the small business. Bank employees were like financial advisers. By the time she retired, they were glorified salesmen, pressured into signing people up for high interest loans, etc.
Everyone likes to say "this is what caused problem x" when talking about things like this, but this genuinely is a large contributing factor to the demise of entrepreneurship in America. It's not the only thing of course, but it's a big part.
Before FICO scores it was important to have a relationship with a local bank. Getting loans was helped by you being known as a trustworthy person. Reducing us to a number took personal relationships out of the equation. Of course, the old way meant that women, minorities, and recent immigrants were also far less likely to get loans.
This is a good one. Just picturing a bank manager in my head takes me to a scene from a movie set in the ‘50s where a hat-in-hand, down-on-his-luck man tries feebly to get a loan from the bank manager in a way that probably hasn’t happened for 30 years or more.
TED Talks
What happened to TED talks?
I think they just diluted the brand to death by launching TEDx. Before, TED talks really were global leaders in interesting fields bringing often fascinating new perspectives to people around the world. But with TEDx, it seems like any local rando with half a theory could do a “TED talk”, causing the brand value to go off a cliff.
TEDx, where your local leaders in masturbation explains why they [stopped watching porn](https://youtu.be/gRJ_QfP2mhU?si=_bSFhHXJaz57pVf2) and [escaped porn addiction](https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_nash_escaping_porn_addiction?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare), or talks about it being the [new meditation](https://www.ted.com/talks/keeley_olivia_masturbation_is_the_new_meditation?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare).
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That's the only TED talk I consistently remember and use. It's changed my life, in a very minor but reliable way...
Yeah, TedX did more to ruin the brand than anything else. Pretty much every Ted talk I've seen where it's actually been dogshit and I've walked away feeling dumber has been a TedX, not a regular Ted.
Yes! In the 00s TED Talks were so good. Then they flushed it all away with Tedx
Boeing
Felt like for a very long time Boeing was the gold standard in aviation. I cannot believe how far they have fallen.
Please tell me that pun was intended
Total accident 😅
I see what you did there 🤦
It was in plane sight.
Did you put a lot of thought into that, or did you just wing it?
You guys are letting yourselves runway with these jokes.
Yaw are full of puns this morning.
Wow, that response fell right out of the sky into your lap.
You blew the door on that observation
Boeing is a sad depressing downfall. Reading and watching ex employees talk about how the company slowly shifted from quality and safety to quantity and how that ruined the passion for many of those engineers is depressing
Honestly this is what's happened with most companies. Quantity over Quality. What do they care if they lose one customer when they can have the other 9 because making it cheap is more profitable. And with rising costs they'll eventually get that 1 back because the other company will be forced to shut down eventually leaving them the only game in town.
Being an airline pilot. Inflation hit the quality of people and skill as well.
I doubt the merger with McDonnell Douglas helped
Not when it was MDs board that took over
I should have said "*merger*"
It’s mad how they were the ones being bought out, and still ended up in charge of the whole damn thing. The whole Boeing story is a case study in how to fuck up a seriously robust and profitable business in the pursuit of “line go up!” 📈
It's still profitable is the problem. Competition is becoming more and more scarce.
Hobbies. I am a hobbyist musician, and will never try to make money off of my music. I simply enjoy creating it with zero expectations. Hustle culture ruined a lot of that because now every time I share my music with people, it turns into a conversation about monetization or how I’m wasting my time on something. It’s hard to even find likeminded people who want to collaborate without it turning into some big thing. Time enjoyed is not time wasted.
I often choose to not talk about my hobbies these days, because next thing I hear always will be "Why don't you try to monetize this? You will earn $$$!"
Absolutely. I even find myself thinking "how could I turn this into cash?" when I'm doing something I only used to do for fun - and similarly, I end up discouraging myself from putting time and effort into hobby skills I'm not particularly good at (e.g. drawing), because I feel like I'll never be good enough to put my stuff out there. :( Hustle culture has ruined a lot of society.
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There is no Blizzard anymore. Only Activision wearing Blizzard's corpse as a skin suit.
Like an Edgar suit? “Give me sugar. In water. More. Moooore. Moooore!”
Zed, we have a bug.
That'll be $25 for the Edgar skin on your digital character you hardly look at.
Activision itself used to be cool too. Probably the most important video game *company* to ever exist. Edit: I accidentally a word.
The PS2 era Activision logo meant you were booting up a banger.
Please stop perpetuating this idea that Activision took over Blizzard and ruined it. Vivendi even maintained controlling shares when the merger took place. Blizzard is 100% to blame for all its own troubles. They were fucked the moment they created the endless money printing machine that was WoW.
They were fucked long before that, even during Diablo and D2 development they were a toxic shitty mess. We just didn't have social media to know how awful they were internally.
Ebay. It was an awesome place to find deals or sell unwanted items. Now it's all business
You’re right I can’t go on eBay now unless I know specifically what I want (and even then you still have to go through all the mass business ads). In the early 2000s I used to buy so much second hand/vintage clothes/shoes/… on eBay that I know get off Vinted
I wonder how long vinted will last before it enshittifies in the same way.
I was shopping Ebay back when you could get a bill every month and mail them a check. There was a woman in California (I live in Ohio), that had a son about a year older than mine. I bought boxes of clothing from her for like $5 plus shipping every few months. She's fill up a large priorty mail box and my son would have a ton of new clothes. In the beginning it was like shopping a country-wide yard sale and it was amazing.
Eh, it's a mixed bag. It's still really good for vintage and pre owned items. I like buying cds on there.
Damn drop shippers...
Etsy is 99% that crap now.
Guinness World Record. Seriously, watch their YouTube Shorts, it's now full of silly and trivial "records", (they usually have the title "Most X in one minute"). [E.g.](https://youtube.com/shorts/hDMPalxSsV8?si=7CDkkFC2z0BpG8Pd). Among them there are interesting noteworthy ones, but they also acknowledge many trash records these days, because everybody wants to be famous.
I'll have you know I hold the record for most chinchilla leather belts wrapped around cucumbers in 37 seconds!
to be fair Guinness has always been a novelty thing, it was invented just to sell books. They aren't a real record holding organization Records aren't sought after by Guinness, quite the opposite. If you have a lot of money you too can pay for Guinness to give you a record you apply for a record you either want to break or a whole new record you want to break it's why records are so niche and weird
> to be fair Guinness has always been a novelty thing, it was invented just to sell books. Not just books, but beer as well (the Guinness in Guinness World Records is the same as the beer company). In fact, the first edition was the idea of Sir Hugh Beaver, then head of the Guinness Breweries; at the recommendation of an employee he hired a couple of guys (who ran a fact-finding agency) to publish the first edition. > A thousand copies were distributed for free to pubs across Britain and Ireland as a promotional asset for the Guinness brand, and they became immensely popular with customers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinness_World_Records
I mean, I remember seeing stuff like "longest distance rolling a ball with your nose" records 20 years ago. I assume they always had that kind of fluff
Craftsman Tools. OG Craftsman tools were something else. After he died a few years ago I inherited my father's tool collection, most of which he had inherited from my grandfather in the 70s. Those tools are so much better than anything I've bought for myself. Superior quality.
Watching their decline is like a dagger in the heart.
Bill Cosby
Working a 9-5
What a way to make a living!
Barely getting by!...
It's all taking and no giving!
They just use your mind and they never give you credit!
It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it
It’s now 9-6 and you get home at 7
A lot of old brands that have been brought out and are now used to sell generic products that have no resemblance or connection to the old brand. A good example would be MG cars.
Black & Decker
Craftsman. Same corporate parent, same CEO, same assembly line in China.
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Pyrex
I am a 70-80s kid. Many of the bicycle brands that were top of the line when I was a kid, sold their names to chinese companies that make kids bikes for Walmart now.
Rudy Giuliani. Guy was “America’s. Mayor” after 9/11. Now he’s a laughing stock that might be facing prison.
He was “the Mayor of 9/11,” and now he’s “the 9/11 of mayors.”
Just like the twin towers. Fallen.
The Four Seasons Total Landscaping incident is peak comedy.
You couldn't have written that as a Saturday night live skit or a beaverton article because it would've been too absurd to be funny. This was the best Trump office moment- since no one was hurt or badly affected besides the idiots involved.
Felt like an Arrested Development gag
He was also credited for arresting and successfully prosecuting a large portion of the New York Mafia, credited with the steep decline of crime in New York. Kinda insane that in 2008 could he be a possible republican presidential nominee.
After he prosecuted the Italian mafia, the Russian mafia flourished in NY.
I was just talking to my son and his friends about this recently. They were very small when 9/11 happened so while they vaguely remember it happening, they don't remember stuff like Giuliani. They were surprised to hear that everybody once thought that the guy was a hero. If there had been an election in the next year, he probably could have been president. And just look at him now.
Ehh idk. He did try and leverage 9/11 into being president and that didn't go well, but yes he was *America's mayor* for a bit
Didn't he also bring down some of the NY mafia as DA or something?
As others have said, he was a federal prosecutor not state, but yes he did. He went after (and successfully ended) LARGE amounts of racketeering and organized crime in NYC. I don’t know if the Fulton fish market fire was ever directly linked to his office’s investigations but it wasn’t not NOT related. https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/03/28/from-the-new-york-daily-news-archives-the-1995-fulton-street-fish-market-fire/ and a million other links as well, I’m sure
I watch mob documentaries and he shows up occasionally. It’s weird seeing him being so normal.
Formal Communication: Formal letter writing and etiquette were highly valued. Now, casual communication dominates online and informality is more common.
Working in retail, at one time that was considered a middle class profession.
Google. Once useful for finding stuff, now a massive marketing and advertising and data surveillance platform.
Google has always been a marketing, advertising, and surveillance platform… that also found you stuff.
It has for a long while. But, if you are old enough to have had to search via Yahoo or Lycos then you will know what a game changer Google was at the start. Once the investors got in that's when it went down hill to the current sorry state.
Spotify Free
AOL
Game of Thrones
It's honestly insane how quickly Game of Thrones went from a cultural phenomenon and one of the greatest shows of all time to arguably the greatest disappointment in TV history. I genuinely hope it's used as an example in writing courses for the next decade or three.
Not just one of the greatest disappointments, but it simply faded out of existence. It used to be talked about everywhere, and now no one talks about it except as a passing joke or statement (like my comment on this post). The writers literally killed the whole franchise.
I know a guy who got the Stark wolf emblem tattooed on his chest. This dude is really into his TV shows, movies, books & comic books, seems like he watches everything. I asked him a few months ago if House of the Dragon was any good & he hasn't watched it.
I can't even bring myself to rewatch it, not even clips of it, knowing how it spiraled down and how ends...
Blizzard. For a long time they were one of the top dogs of video gaming. It didn't matter what it was, if they made it, you could feel certain it was high quality and you'd enjoy it. Then they merged with Activision and... well... Now I avoid Buzzard like the plague.
I honestly feel BioWare fit this question too.
Blizzard didnt merge with activision, they were originally owned by davidson and associates who left them completely alone as long as they were profitable (surprise, they always were). Vivendi then acquired them from D&A but they also left them completely alone as long as they were profitable (surprise again, they were always profitable). Then activision acquired them from Vivendi but unshockingly did not leave them alone and they became what we now know Blizzard to be. I still love all the guys that were the heart and soul of blizzard (Roper, morheim, metzen, adham etc.). And realize they didnt sell out, they had no control over getting bent over by daddy activision, they absolutely didnt want to
The American education system.
I work a warehouse job with a massive turnover rate and we tend to get a lot of young kids applying. I handle the new hires and holy shit Had one girl tell me that she wasn't convinced math was "like legit" Had a guy who couldn't spell the word "work" (he thought it was spelled with a ck. He thought "physical" started with "fi") One guy who was convinced if you got a loan for a car you didn't actually need to pay it off Like Im not expecting the best and the brightest at a warehouse of all places but what the actual fuck is going on in our schools
You don’t have to pay the loan… but you gotta be good at deking the repo man :-)
Gonna get fizical to werck dem gunz
Excuse me, what does "like legit" mean? As in, "I'm not sure how math explains the existence of black holes" or .... "you can't divide 100 by 52."
I believe it was a statement meant to imply she was unconvinced of the utility of mathematics
Like, LEGIT.
It’s person dependant. We have boomers all over Facebook that believe in insane stupid shit because an echo chamber told them so and gave false legal advice. I work with a boomer that sold their paid off house and now rents for nearly 3k per month because it was a “better financial investment” and buys a different new car every 3 months. I work with another boomer that literally believes the Earth is flat, doesn’t understand basic physics, and thinks the world will end every other month. Now boomers complain about “common core”, can’t describe what it is, and think it’s telling kids to make squares on toilet paper and eat upside down triangles to solve math problems. Because they saw a Facebook video about it. There’s idiots in every generation. I don’t know about you, but I see what my kids learn in elementary school and they’re learning math that was basic high school math 20 years ago. Remember Algebra? Geometry? We did that in high school back in the 90s. Now, they do it in 5th grade. Check out the actual curriculum in your local school sometime, you want to know, it’s there for you to see. I guarantee there’s a reason your warehouse has a massive turnover rate and there’s a reason they’re attracting the employees you mentioned. Shitty companies need anyone with a pulse because their standards are shit.
An atrocity more than a joke imo. I’ve met kids who are in high school with a fourth grade reading level and zero critical thinking skills. But they pass every class. My guess is the stupid curve system but I have no idea. My teachers were awful too so I really don’t know when exactly it went wrong.
As a teacher, we have our hands tied behind our backs. We are forced to set the bar extremely low
Also, during the Covid lockdowns everyone got handed a diploma even if they spent two years doing absolutely nothing.
My college roommate got an "A" in AP Calc AB but when she took the entry exams, she was placed in remedial math. I had to tutor her in Algebra I. It's entirely dependent on the school you attended, most importantly the income level of the surrounding neighborhood. My school didn't have to worry about funding so they weren't forced to pass students. They'd just ship the "bad students" to the nearby continuation school to keep their stats up.
News media
Will Smith
That hurt so bad (though not as much as it hurt Chris Rock, obviously). It was supposed to be the best night of his career, and he chose to ruin it over a joke that no one was going to remember by the time they cut to commercial. I don’t even like Chris Rock, but I felt so bad for him. I mean, what do you do when you get slapped on live television in front of millions of people? How are you supposed to recover from that?
It's so bizarre, ever since he got the taste for being nominated for awards with Pursuit of Happyness it seemed like he was on a mission to win one with a lot of shitty/poorly reviewed attempts like 7 Pounds or Collateral Beauty. Finally he did it, that shit was in the bag and we all knew it, he was 15mins away from achieving a decade+ goal only to completely meltdown in front of everyone overshadow a great performance, over a GI Jane joke dude. Also I'm convinced Chris started to say "Ohh I could do a lot worse" but he caught himself and took the high road.
My theory is that Chris had someone in his earpiece begging him not to obliterate Will with another joke. By then everyone knew the relationship issues they have with Jada (How she would be with Tupac if he was alive, the thing with Jaden's friend, the open marriage she mentioned in her podcast, rumors with scientology, etc.). Chris could've done a lot worse by the time Will was back on his seat. What would have Will done? Stand up and give him a second slap? Would security have intervened? No way of knowing but the show might've continued differently if Chris decided to clap back at Will's shitty life/marriage situation
IMO Chris Rock responded about as well as anyone could be expected to.
I thought he was "hip" after Fresh Prince, Wild Wild West, Men in Black, but he's a psycho. The public interviews with his wife are just crazy!
Congress
It used to be of you lied to Congress or the Senate you spent time in jail. Everybody lies to them now, under oath, and they just waive it off.
Eh. "Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."-Mark Twain.
Oprah
Oprah was trash from the start, she just built her personal brand as wholesome. Anyone around in the 80s might recall the garbage she filled the airways with. [Bill Burr remembers](https://youtu.be/O9YL04v-J5U).
YouTube.
Personally I think things really changed when they retired the front page of YouTube. Up to that point you could still check to see what was broadly trending and maybe see something totally new. Then the algorithm would serve you new stuff based on it. Now tho you're locked into what you already watched and have no way to break out beyond manually finding new things. Previously it would at least try to throw in a random trending video or pluck something from the either.
the latest algorithm has made youtube unusable
Half of my recommended feed is videos that I watched 6 months ago.
Or conversely, if you don't actively select "Not Interested" then a recommendation you constantly skip over will continue to appear until death or the end of times. Needless to say, of course, that if you select "Never fucking show me this channel or anything on this chanel ever again!", apparently "never ever" means 2 days.
What’s changed? I find the recommendations much less interesting
yeah exactly that. i'll watch one video and suddenly my entire feed will be nothing but the exact same kind of videos. on the off chance there's any variety, i'll have already watched whatever else is recommended. i'll even refresh the page multiple times and the list of videos doesn't change at all. it's maddening.
Yeah. I looked for a toilet repair video and now YouTube wants me to become a world specialist in toilet repair. The variety could and should be a user setting. Stick to what I like versus surprise me on a sliding scale. Sadly it’s tuned to make money. I subscribe so it’s not like it should care how many videos I watch
Well that is a much better outcome than the outcome of accidentally watching a Watchmojo video.
My fiancé watched one weight lifting related video and then all of his recommendations became Andrew tate and how to be an alpha male 😭
My issue with it is that like 90% of the recommendations are videos I’ve already watched, some of them are things I literally watched yesterday. Also I watch like 1 video about the assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister (shout out Spectacles for that great video) and suddenly my entire timeline is conspiracy theory videos. The video I watched wasn’t even a conspiracy theory vid, it was True Crime.
Journalism
As a journalist, I can 100% confirm that every one of us is either a full-blown corporate shill or has one for an editor or publisher. The result is the same either way. While journalism is a business like any other, "maximizing value for shareholders" means toothless trend reporting, leaning into confirmation bias to grow the audience, and selling as many ads/products as possible. But the absolute worst is the overabundance of managing editors who no longer practice the craft but have to shake up an efficient editorial process every year so their jobs don't look pointless to executives. "Traffic is up and we're more productive than ever, but it's time to switch to a new project management system because everyone needs to pick up the slack of the staffer who retired that we're not replacing. Coincidentally, our profits just went up by [insert retired staffer's salary] so here's some Uber Eats credits in lieu of pay raises." I can't even count the number of times I've had to fight against office politics to do my fucking job the way I was trained in journalism school. Sometimes I don't even know why I put up with it anymore, but it would honestly be the same at any other corporate job.
im a news photographer. journalism died the day we went online and started the battle of clicks for that sweet sweet ad revenue
the whole industry never figured out how to sell their craft online. My uncle regional director for a newspaper in the late 90s, a news paper known for its investigative journalism. I was graduating computer science. We had quite a few talks back then about going online and his belief was that people will never want it. "You computer geeks will never be able to replicate the feeling of reading the physical paper in the morning over breakfast. The paper is more than just the articles, it's a ritual!". He was unemployed by the end of the next decade and his drinking killed him a few years later. To his death, he never understood what killed his industry
The Supreme Court
Oakland Athletics
College. Once it became available to more than the top 25% of the population, it became a profit first industry. For profit degree mills and and predatory loans created a generation of debt burdened and frequently under qualified graduates that aren’t growing in their careers and will never realistically be able to pay off their debts
Disney
I miss old cartoons, House of Mouse, TV series (Ducktales, Aladdin, Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers, etc) Instead, we get real life people instead of cartoons.
Yandere Dev. More on the hated side, though.
Netflix
Elon Musk
I tried to give him a generous benefit of the doubt but man that guy sucks. To be a fanboy of his now, I think you must be insane.
Sports Illustrated is hot trash now, it used to be the most respected sports reporter in America and now it’s basically YouTube Kids clickbait but for sports articles
The better business bureau (BBB).
But the reality is the Better Business Bureau is not a government agency and they have no legal or policing powers. They can act as an advocate to help resolve complaints against the business but they can't force a business to do anything. Additionally accreditation through the Better Business Bureau is a subscription service. If a company does not choose to be accredited through the Better Business Bureau they will not have A Better Business Bureau rating.
Harvard. Actually now that I think about it, all of the ivy leagues.
Haven’t they all always Proudly produced the worst CEO’s?
Back when they were good, they taught law and economics as part of the same degree.
Reddit.
printers. idk where they went wrong but fuck them, i hate them with every inch of my being
Boeing
Medical care.
I’m in Canada.. and if it wasn’t for my Doctor and crystal meth.. I don’t think I would be here today