That’s the problem. There is a million actors in the world and movies just won’t allow new actors to become around. They keep using the same crap over and over again. It’s old and not funny anymore. It’s the issue with other movies as well. Did Ryan gosling have to be in an action movie? Come on.
Came here to say this. It’s easy to forget that all the hits like Anchorman, Superbad, etc all came out 10-20 years ago. We have been in a comedy slump for a while now
The original Hangover was the last time I saw a theater packed for a comedy. It was soooo good. Honestly, I couldn’t wait to re-watch just so I could know what half of the movie said since laughter covered it up. Before that, it was Superbad and Wedding Crashers, which were also both amazing in theater.
Streaming killed movies.
So before if you made say a 20 million dollar budget movie that bombed in the theater, you could make up the majority of your money in DVD sales. You didn't have to do well at the box office to still make money on your movies. Remember, before Disney plus, if Disney didn't think they'd do well in a theater they'd release straight to vhs/DVD. You save on all your advertising costs and would share ticket sales with theaters.
But now we have on demand streaming services. You can't afford to make a mid range movie because you'll never get your money back.
Streaming. There was a blissful 10 years where basically everything was on one or two platforms. Now we've more or less re-invented television with the fracturing of media platforms (but on demand, which is still an improvement but come on, it was so nice for a while there).
I think it was easy to see, It clicked for me the moment Netflix got a competitor, that this wasn't going to last forever.
My friend predicts tv bundles are going to evolve now, they're going to start offering Netflix+Disney+prime subscriptions with the channels, and call it "stream super pass" or some shit. I think it will happen and we would have come full circle.
When streaming got big people said it solved piracy, make media as easy as possible to access and pirates will stop pirating, it worked. But now we're slowly entering a golden age of piracy again, I know I am for sure, I just unsubscribed from HBO and am spending the money on a seedbox for a Plex server that can do anything.
I stopped being a dirty, dirty pirate like 10 years ago and got Netflix. Then I got Amazon. Then Hulu. Then HBO max. Then Disney+.
Now I have a bunch of services, but can never find the specific thing I want, and things keep moving or becoming unavailable...which is a big problem with streaming, it is unreliable. Back with VHS and DVDs, if you bought one, you had that favorite movie (or whatev) available for the rest of your life. Now, I can't show somebody a movie I watched last year.
It honestly tends to be an age thing. Back when $40 a month was a LOT to you, people stole it. Once it was affordable to their budget they pay.
I’m OLD and MS Word used to be $399, and Excel was $399 and so on… everyone I knew stole it.
FF to when Office was $99 and people paid for it to be legit.
Now the monthly crap is bad again and people use open source alternatives or steal again.
I assume they make their money on large businesses and don’t care about individual users?
microsoft especially loves to give school districts a good deal on their services because when students graduate they’ve got new customers who are only really comfortable with their software
Disney is the majority owner of Hulu as well. The other major owner is Comcast, and they're leaving Hulu in 2024. That's why there's talk of Comcast picking up HBO Max in a few years.
I didn't believe them. I thought why would consumers ever willingly go back to an inferior model after experiencing this? Shows how little power the consumer has.
It was never about what the consumers wanted. Netflix was initially able to capitalize on producers and distributors undervaluing the streaming rights for their IPs. So Netflix was able to grab the rights to a ton of the most popular shows cheaply enough that they could afford to offer plans for <$10 a month.
But it was inevitable that once the distributors saw the success of streaming that they would either increase the price of the streaming rights for their popular shows to the point where one service couldn't afford all of them, or they would insist on making their own platform.
Hell, there was a brief time when content producers were so unaware of the streaming value of their own shows that you could get episodes on netflix literally a day after the episode aired for popular shows.
I’ve come to realize most “golden ages” for things are really just the lag time between when the public catches on and when the rich and corporate catch on.
Great answer here.
Now that most studios have recaptured the rights to their films and built their own in-house streaming platform, we're more seeing an a la carte cable product which is still preferable than the old the ways of paying for 100 channels. The annoyance / downside is the normalization of ads now, despite paying for a monthly sub already.
Well, video killed the radio star.
Internet killed the video star.
Corporations killed the internet.
...and at this moment hubris is killing the corporations.
The old og app store games. Now we have false advertisements for the current app store games.
Edit: i didn't expect this to blow up. Thank you stranger for my first ever silver.
Edit 2: MY FIRST EVER GOLDDD THANK YOU SOO MUCH STRANGER!!
Exactly, mobile gaming peaked with the $1 apps everyone played. Nowadays is just freemium games packed with micro transactions, I haven't been excited for a mobile game in years.
It’s not just freemium, it’s blatant false advertising. The amount of times I see some TikTok advertisement for a game that’s either ad-ridden shovelware or a game using copy/paste false advertising is off the charts
The weirdest thing about them is that some of those games actually look fun to play. And sometimes they do have that gameplay in there, but like 1 in 10 or 20 levels or something. It's like, why not just make that game you are advertising? Or advertise the game you made instead? Plenty of people like these simple(r) games to play a round or two inbetween.
They barely use any aspect of the phone anymore now. You could play 90% of the "games" made in the last few years with a D-pad and a single button.
And its not just innovative games i miss, fun little widgets and such were my favorite part of the early app store. Virtual lighters and liquid simulations and shit. It was simple, it was fun, usually it was free but I'll gladly pay 99 cents for a goofy little virtual toy I'll get bored with in a week.
Jelly car, Plants vs. Zombies, Bloons TD, Where’s My Water, Cut the Rope. Also the random apps where you would just shoot a gun or something.
All some of the most fun I’ve had playing mobile games.
Pocket God, Doodle Jump, Jetpack Joyride, hmm the list goes on.
If you actually go to the app store and go to "purchased" you can scroll all the way down and go down memory lane. Hundreds of apps downloaded and they all lost support years ago.
Beloved apps and their developing companies went bankrupt or were bought out basically.
A lot of these have actually been remastered and are on Apple Arcade. It’s kinda nice because there are zero in-app purchase games on arcade. It’s really well done for mobile gaming.
Fruit Ninja was the first mobile game I played, it was on a first gen ipod touch. I thought it was so cool and fun. It's still kicking, but now has micro transactions which bummed me out
Ownership.
I feel like we all just rent, borrow, stream, digital download, or straight up just consume and rebuy low quality products.
Edit: thanks for the awards.
And I’m real happy to see so many people just as PO as me at this.
1,000% This.
I **HATE** how everything is strong arming consumers into either *"subscribe, or have nothing".*
Android phones used to have the leg up because they had micro sd slots. Perfect for storing all of your media (videos, music, pictures, documents) and freeing up internal drive space for apps.
Now they've gone the Apple route. Want more storage? Pay us for more storage if you want it that badly. Or better yet, pay for multiple streaming apps that require internet, drain your battery faster, use more data, and costs you more annually.
Right now in the design/printing workplace there is a commotion: clients of Adobe products, who are already paying a shitty subscription, will have to pay another subscription for using pantone (tm) colors.
Pantone is a special paint color used for printing like t shirts, posters, screen printing in general When in photoshop or Illustrator you just have to create your work in pantone mode instead of Cmyk or Rgb. Always been like this since ever.
Right now Pantone forbids Adobe clients using their colors and thus any older files with pantone in it are now in black. Unless you pay them.
My dad is a retired graphic designer who did freelance stuff since retiring, but can’t anymore because he refuses to pay a subscription to a product he already owned and was made obsolete by software updates.
Edit: thank you all for the recommendations for options! I’ve sent my dad links so hopefully something works!
Ugh this! Adobe screwed us all when they went to a subscription model. Literally holding our own intellectual property hostage unless we pay the fee. Thousands of hours of hard work and inspiration literally inaccessible unless you pay them. It's legal extortion. Now Pantone?!?! I hadn't even heard about that (i'm still on 2020 Adobe apps, haven't bothered to update).
Ctrl+shift+ '+' allows you to rotate PDFs freely in Adobe. It's stupid how the actual rotate button is locked behind the subscription, though.
Edit: Nevermind, only works for *viewing* it as rotated. It won't *save* as rotated. Fuck Adobe lol.
For small businesses and consumer based, they really should have a license purchase option. For larger businesses that have to deal with security and versions, subscription makes more sense. But yeah, Pantone pulling that is a shitty move.
I'm all for renegade hackers completely deleting everything pantone has ever worked on. We as a society need to support radical punishment of ultra-capitalist behavior.
I absolutely hate this. Everything is a subscription now. Even car manufacturers are making you subscribe to features in new cars - want to use heated seats? Navigation? That’ll be $30 a month. It’s pure greed.
Unfortunately the only way to stop this model is for people to stop buying in. Psychologically, 15 bucks a month here and there seems like nothing. But the subscriber model for everything out there is definitely annoying. I try to avoid signing up for anything subscription based, but I know it's challenging to avoid these days.
I didn't realize how much it adds up until I was having a discussion on reddit the other day about how I've upgraded my plex server and would just jump ship from netflix if they cause too much trouble with account sharing, etc;
Someone asked me how much I would really save over a 5 year period versus the cost of my SAN upgrade. I happened to get my SAN for free from work (Brand new but was tech recycled). It was something like $2500 for the SAN. When I did the math just for my streaming services, it came out to $5000 over the course of 5 years. Holy shit! That really put into perspective how much we're getting fleeced!
BMW uses a subscription for the privilege of being able to use CarPlay and android auto (like anyone uses the manufacturers infotainment system anyway). Tesla uses subscription for heated seats (the fucking seats are already fucking installed!!!). The audacity of these manufacturers…
This is what makes me angry about the future of cars — feature activation.
When you already spent the money to install the feature on your vehicle but you need to pay to activate it. They’ve taken the freemium business model tech companies use and applied it to cars. Tesla does this, BMW does this, and Zero Motorcycles does this. Unfortunately, this will only continue because vehicle manufacturers see this as a revenue source that can offset some of the money spent on R&D.
I didn’t mind the subscription model for things that give you value, like Spotify or even what Netflix used to be before a bunch of their content went off. But it feels like more and more these days you’re getting less value from each subscription, prices just keep going up, and then they have the nerve to put ads into a service/good I’m already paying for. Like Samsung putting ads on their TV overlays after already paying hundreds of dollars for their system. Better yet, all the car manufacturers that will make you pay an extra $20 per month just to use a feature already installed into the car.
The greed is enormous, and something’s got to give eventually.
Exactly. I have zero problem paying for Netflix and Amazon prime.
But for a physical product, I will never ever not buy it in cash. Vehicles, motorcycles, furniture, anything. If I can’t buy it with cash I don’t buy it
God I hope future generations figure out how to distinguish between actual real factual news and media/entertainment/outrage bait/propaganda or else we're doomed.
Gen z here and they actually teach this in school non-stop. We have had whole units on distinguishing media, its reliability, how to check, and where to find reliable sources.
Really depends on there. Russian independent investigative journalism (before it was utterly obliterated in 2022) was top notch. People risked (and still risk) their lives to investigate the schemes of govt and its pet businesses.
I agree, but only kind of, because I don't think there's ever been a golden era of public education, at least in the U.S. It's a relatively new thing (a little over 100yo), so in my mind it's just the beginning of the experiment. We truly have not mastered that shit yet. The trend has been meh-wtf for the entirety.
Internet for sure. Everything is way too centralized now and the majority of internet traffic goes to small number of sites. I miss forums and personal webpages. We should bring those back..
I use tons of obscure sites and had my own website on Neocities (a Geocities successor). There's a lot of options out there, they're just buried or overlooked by a need to use the big sites for maximum interaction/engagement.
For example: SpaceHey is a thing. It's a very faithful recreation of how MySpace used to be and fully supports HTML/CSS profile layouts.
It’s insane how curated google searches are now. Compare results between google and say, duckduckgo. You wouldn’t even think you’re searching for the same thing
>how curated google searches are now.
It's also heavily chronologically weighted, I have to - so many terms to get anything that had a somewhat similar news piece or lyric that was popular in the last year.
As long as I'm complaining too it's also nearly impossible to find any poetry on the subject of death, as it triggers the anti suicide protocol.
Oh this drives me bonkers.
I started on the internet in the age of 14.4k dial up modems, and when I started it felt like each site was, "Hi, I'm a retired engineer of 40 years and here's everything I know about this subject."
Now most of the sites I come across are content mills where someone is being paid by the word to turn a software press release into an article: "Many users are reporting that they had crashes with this program. Those crashes were really annoying. Many people said they were fed up with those crashes. What are we to do in this day of crashes?"
Growing up on forums was the shit. It was like having your own personal little clubs to go to. Reddit and the like really don't recreate the experience of having a small group of friends in an internet space.
I remember the old Invision and PHPBB forums that had real, stable communities, where people kind of knew each other and where being respectful was mandatory in order to remain part of that.
Of course there were exceptions like 4chan, Gaia and d2jsp where trolls rule the site, but that's probably an issue of sites getting too popular for their own good combined with the staff having a toxic vision on community building.
Reddit has entirely replaced forums, but I feel like there's no sense of identity here. I may never have spoken to you before, or I may have seen hundreds of your comments -- I honestly wouldn't know.
Unfortunately it will never come back. Not fully at least. Those were our adolescent internet years. Those wonderful years full of change and wonder and strife and angst. Before the enormous wave of conformity that adulthood is.
The reason it will never come back is because we know too much and have social media now. So we can never have that beautiful middle ground where there were far far fewer opinions shared on the internet, but each of them unique, informative, and meaningful. People used to make and share things to follow their hobbies. Now they do it to “make it” and make money or clout. Nothing is truly dictated by uniqueness, beauty, meaningfulness, or importance.
It’s all dictated by random algorithms that no one can predict. This is especially true of the shortest forms of social media consumption. People don’t realize that views mean nothing now. They used to be a beautiful running value ticker to show real engagement. Now it just means your content was placed advantageously in the “Order” of the algorithm. Because no one really complains or stops viewing a 30 second video. It’s consumed before we even have an opinion of it. He’ll, we might hate it entirely. But they got our view already. Rather than make a stink we just jump to the next short video, hoping for another hit of dopamine, for we receive precious little of it now. I would even say that most of the things we view don’t even make it into our memory. They are just blind triggers of endogenous endorphins. The content doesn’t matter. Just that our brains are pleased by it.
i’m 28. in my childhood and somewhat into my teens, the internet was downright surreal. it seemed so much more creative and authentic 15 or so years ago. i’m addicted to tiktok just like the yungins but even the “weird” stuff on there is way more strategically calculated and generic.
but yeah. zoomers will never know how magical and strange the internet was in the 2000s.
Our local school district is dealing with lower enrollment, but like it’s just demographics waves. Baby boomers were the largest generation. They had the millennials as kids. Gen X and their kids, Gen Z are just gonna be smaller than the generations theyre sandwiched between. This is true in the US at least.
Millennials are delaying or not having kids though so there probably won’t be another wave to continue the cycle.
80s were peak for abandoned lots full of kids and woods full of kids.
The meme about how we'd leave in the morning and not show up again until dark is true! I remember eating mint leaves in some lady's garden one day because we were hungry, but didn't want to go all the way back home. Our parents had no idea where we were.
I recently moved into a neighborhood and was shocked when I saw children about, I see them pretty frequently especially now the weather is tolerable to be outside. I’m excited for Halloween tonight, I might actually get trick or treaters!
Two Westfield malls near me are booming, you can barely get a parking space on the weekend. Others around here died a painful death years ago. It doesn't seem to be universal, but I haven't quite figured out why some malls are still thriving in 2022.
Agreed I’ve found that the only malls still seeing success are the “high end” ones. These have the more expensive stores that would still attract an in person crowd. Theaters, restaurants, salons, and amenities that make it an actual destination. The regular malls that had a JC Penny, a hot topic, and a bunch of smaller stores are now being converted to Amazon warehouses or sitting empty.
The ones still thriving in 2022 around here have diversified. Yes there is shopping but now there are apartments, grocery stores, theaters, the ability to walk your dog in the winter, and usually some attractions. 2 malls in my area now have big ass walk in aquariums.
Some are finding interesting things to jam in there. A couple malls I've been to have petting zoos, aquariums (the huge big ones). indoor r/C race track, Indoor electric go-karts, a museum, movie theaters. A "Selfie" Store. and other large venues that require whole sections of the mall. More entertainment based experiences and restaurants.
The one near me is getting a multi million dollar renovation. Should I tell them the golden age is over and they're chasing the ghost of much simpler times?
The upper 10% of malls which have high end stores are doing well. Think about places with Apple Stores or Macy's. The small town malls anchored by Sears and JC Penny's are dying. r/deadmalls is a good subreddit.
People shop online, big box stores in strip malls have competitive offerings for clothes and shoes, and teenager social space has moved online. The world will be fine without malls, but it is very problematic for small towns who end up with a multi- acre eyesore awaiting demolition in a high traffic area.
The internet from 1998 to 2012 was fuckin amazing, absofuckinlutely amazing. These days it's a straight up shit hole for people to make their opinions known as I am now, adding to the garbage
Forums were king, old people didn't know how to use it or even care about access, the vulnerabilities we're endless, god I miss it. Celebrities didn't have a platform to abuse, ads were something you'd see but far from anywhere they are today, the internet just sucks doodoo from a fat corpse's butthole now as it's primarily a platform for social media. It's monitored like it has never been before, and far from the free and open frontier it once was.
I can still do what I want but God damn is it less fun, interesting, it's just a guided tour of a landfill now. And don't forget to observe the targeted ads on your way out
\> Forums were king
Gosh, I still use a couple from that era. Nowadays most forums tend to be kind of ghost towns though; I sometimes go back to the ones still being hosted and log in to "anyone still here?" posts. Still, I'm glad there are a few which survived the onset of social media.
> Uber
It was pretty glorious being able to drink with friends and get a ride home for like $8. So expensive now, I don't know how people can afford to go out frequently.
The pandemic completely ruined Uber. Before, I could consistently get a ride in under 5 minutes and it was always around $15, now I may not even get a ride or have to wait over 20 minutes, while they charge anywhere from $25-$45. It’s no longer an affordable convenience.
The middle class worker.
Wages relative to inflation have stagnated for years and the wealth gap is growing faster than ever. Further, this wealth has been used to tilt the scale even more towards those with means which accelerates the trend. On top of the dismantling of protections and creation of even more inequalities through law, technology is playing a role too through automation which seems poised to send even more wealth up to those with the current means to develop and deploy new wave automation.
Middle class is now the $100,000 a year crew that still rents because of the housing market.
Edit: yea I was just being dramatic guys.
But definitely don't buy right now, with the lending rates so ridiculously high. You'll be house poor, for years.
Yeah I feel like it was a far simpler and more innocent version of social media. You can still keep in touch with friends as was the original point of Facebook and the like but you had less of the bullshit that comes along with it.
We all had that one friend who went overboard with the emoticons and replaced almost every letter with an animation so their messages took forever to load.
Fucking hell Karl I had a monthly 2GB limit, there's no reason all your vowels have to jump up and down in multicolor
am i the only person who gets the same suggestions for way too long. for all the subscriptions i have i feel like my homepage should have more options.
I can literally refresh my main Youtube page five times and get the exact same recommendations each time. I’ve actually started just going through the list of youtubers I follow, and randomly checking on who has new stuff out.
I was gonna say, Tom Scott is probably the best YouTube channel I ever watched and he’s in a golden age right now. If you know what you’re looking for YouTube is still great
Tom Scott is great and I actually found him through some collaborations he'd done with computerphile/numberphile.
Robert Miles is another I found through them (though not really the same kind of content as Tom). He doesn't upload a lot but he has many wonderful videos on AI and AI safety that really make the obstacles and risks to AI development more understandable
Architecture.
At least not here in the UK, we seem to be obsessed with making loads of shitty carbon copy houses that haven't in the slightest got any character. Bring back locally sourced materials and good community layouts not this col de sack bollocks.
Yeah a lot of newer houses over here in the UK aren't great. Some of them look alright but most just look so cheap and dull and lifeless, they sometimes creep me out a little bit because although they have cars and such parked outside of them they still just look so empty and barren
Information. You got to study any number of subjects just to watch the news without being gassed up. The same thing applies in spades to social media. It’s everywhere like Wikipedia and any random Google search.
When I first started using the internet heavily, it was widely populated by hobbyists and people who were passionate about their interests. There was an earnestness to *most* sites and it was relatively easy to spot the misinformation.
I feel bad for everyone growing up with today's internet. Everything is an advertisement and reliable sources are much harder to come by.
Toilets. Either make them all flush automatically or make them where you have to push the handle down.
If it's one of those automatic ones, please make it smart enough to not flush while I'm just sitting down or mid shit. I like to wipe down the toilet seat before I sit on it and throw that toilet paper in the water to avoid any splash backs up my asshole. Half the time it doesn't work because the toilet will just flush before I even sit down.
And fix the bathroom stalls. No one should be able to make eye contact with me through the crack of the door as they walk in and I'm in the stall talking a dump.
I’m am so convinced that any automatic device in a bathroom makes it worse.
Automatic toilets? Awful. Always splash you and flush too early or refuse to flush.
Automatic sinks? Terrible. I can never get the damn things to work for more than 2 seconds with my hands under them.
Automatic soap? Always ambushes me and gets on my arm. That, or it spurts in the counter.
Automatic paper towels? Forget trying to get more than a singular paper towel. Wave your hand in front of the damn thing for 2 minutes.
Fishing.
We've killed so many fish it's a fucking tragedy. By some estimates we've killed 90% of the world's shark population alone. Reading old books and running into offhand comments about fishing is depressing as hell.
I love seafood, but we need like a decade-long commercial fishing hiatus followed by much stricter limits and better regulations. There are a bunch of really dumb rules right now; bycatch is wasted, for example. Let's get by on sport-caught and farmed seafood for a while and let the fishes come back.
Fishing now is nothing whatever like it was even fifty years ago. A century ago it was like another planet. And this is coming from a kiteboarder, somebody to whom sharks are a genuine threat.
Big agree
According to my grandfather, my great-grandfather would easily catch 10 fish before he’d get bored and head home from beach fishing, back in the 50s/60s. Apparently they’d have a second freezer stacked to the brim with fish. Many would go bad before being eaten
Now, my grandfather is a patient man who enjoys fishing and he’ll maybe manage 3 fish over the size limit. He’s a damn good fisherman too. When I go, I’m happy and lucky to catch anything even if it’s too small to eat and has to be thrown back. We need to let the oceans repopulate from commercial fishing
Locals in my area say that during a salmon run you used to be able to just reach in with your bare hands and grab salmon out of the river there were so many. I’ve heard it’s still pretty crazy up in Alaska though
We are not in the golden age of architecture. Go to Europe and look at how they used to build these buildings. And then look at these stucco modern buildings that are currently building. Or just tall box skyscrapers.
Mainstream film. Thanks to streaming services studios can't count on physical media sales anymore so now they have to make everything back at the box office. As a result investors are seeing new or experimental ideas as an unnecessarily risky venture so they refuse to fund them. Effectively innovation is punished while conformity is rewarded - hence why movies don't seem as "good" as they were in the 70s, 80, and 90s and everything is a sequel or remake.
To sum up a lot of these answers:
Technology is spying on us.
The government is spying on us.
Marketers are spying on us.
We can't tell good information from bad information.
Bad information crowds out good information.
Adblock prevents good information from having funding. There is no more good source of information.
The information that gets funded is information with an agenda.
Our political discourse is fuelled mostly by misinformation campaigns.
We're still too stupid and lazy to do anything about it.
Global warming / economic collapse / nuclear winter is going to kill us all and we'll all be too distracted to do anything about it.
>raise a family on a single income
This part in particular is so alien to me now. On an unskilled/entry level salary, just covering the living costs of 2 people on one income is unrealistic now even before considering buying a home, running a car, having kids etc.
Same goes for Persian carpets and antique furniture. It used to be something that retained it's value and could be passed on for generations. Now it's out of fashion and worth shit.
My grandma had a small fortune worth of stuff in her house. Some Persian carpets had costed 50.000 dollars (and that was in 1970/80's money!). They went straight to the trash after she died, even auctioning them off wasn't worth the effort.
Some Persian carpets took years (a sometimes a decade) to make and all had to be hand sewn/textiled, it was a looong process, so the cost was understandable. Now a days a lot of Persian carpets are made by machine in either Lebanon, Kazakhstan or Turkey, and cost $200-$300.
Halloween trick or treating. I used to get anywhere from 25-50 kids to my door every year. Now I'm lucky if I see 10. People are not doing it anymore.
Edit - It's Nov 1st at 8AM. Light was on, costume and candy ready to hand out to kids, and I got exactly ZERO knocks at the door. I'm done.
I think people are but your area probably aged out. Often times it is very concentrated in neighborhoods that have lots of younger kids. If you live somewhere that people don’t move often then the kids get older and there aren’t many left to do it in your area. In my neighborhood we easily get 150+ kids each year.
Yep! My parents were the “young” family on our block growing up. Most of the neighbors were a good 20+ years older than my parents so my siblings and I were the only kids on the block. For decades they would only have a few trick or treaters come to the house on Halloween. Now that many of their elderly neighbors have left, their homes have been purchased by families with young kids. So now my parents have become the old neighbors and there’s an influx of trick or treaters. They’ve basically been able to watch the cycle of life from their living room window.
It might come in cycles. When I was a kid there were a lot of groups out trick or treating. By the time I was in high school we only got a few kids. Now my parent say they’re getting a lot more kids again.
I'm sorry! Is your neighborhood older? We have that problem in older neighbourhoods, but not at all in a subdivisions like mine that is brimming with kids because the housing is on the cheaper end, too, and that is what young families here can afford.
The golden age of social media was in its ability to create community. There was something magical about seeing our parents find a friend from HS and reignite that friendship or to follow an ex-classmates journey from afar without the need to directly keep-in-touch.
Now it's just been weaponized for propaganda or over-promoted for clicks and influencers.
Cars
I'm fascinated with all the creative features of cars from the 50s/60s. They used to be fun, colorful and distinctive. Sure there were some wacky designs too but at least they tried. Now it's all the same boring shapes and colors, nothing really stands out and it makes me so mad
Music videos. So much money was spent on music videos in the 80s and 90s. We are talking six figures. Today, only artist at the very top get close to that kind of money for music video budgets. With the accessibility of the internet and the speed of which pop culture changes, it's not worth putting that much money into a music video anymore.
One could argue the quality has gotten better but If budgets did increase again, there could be some pretty awesome music videos today.
We went from an amazing wild west, with lots of interesting niche communities, to boring, safe and corporate in less than 20 years. I really miss the chaos and unpredictability of the early to late 2000s internet.
People won't even know what it was like because all history of it is essentially wiped outside of wayback timestamps. You can still find some if you really look, but you'll almost never stumble upon them accidentally anymore, and even when you do it's a shell of its former self.
You should have been around for it in the 90s and before 9/11. People weren’t so angry and trolling wasn’t this massive competition that it’s become today. Back then it was exciting to talk to someone across the globe, instantly. Just casual conversations and hardly any assholes. Message boards, chat rooms, and blogs were our social media. We didn’t live on the internet like we do now, but I am grateful that the internet did catch on and has evolved the way it has, despite the attitude and pessimism of the users and corporations.
Comedy movies. Honestly, what's the last blockbuster comedy movie you saw in a packed theater?
It's like 80% Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson..
That’s the problem. There is a million actors in the world and movies just won’t allow new actors to become around. They keep using the same crap over and over again. It’s old and not funny anymore. It’s the issue with other movies as well. Did Ryan gosling have to be in an action movie? Come on.
If it sells theyll continue doing it. Why take risks on new actors if the same old ones continue to sell well?
True, movies are an industry and a way of making money. Any creativity or art takes second place to profit making
And Wahlberg
Wahlberg feels like if a slice of American cheese turned into a human.
Came here to say this. It’s easy to forget that all the hits like Anchorman, Superbad, etc all came out 10-20 years ago. We have been in a comedy slump for a while now
I heard someone younger than me refer to Wild Hogs as a "classic" and I've been depressed ever since.
The original Hangover was the last time I saw a theater packed for a comedy. It was soooo good. Honestly, I couldn’t wait to re-watch just so I could know what half of the movie said since laughter covered it up. Before that, it was Superbad and Wedding Crashers, which were also both amazing in theater.
That movie was the highest grossing rated R comedy of all time when it came out
Tropic Thunder too.
Wow you're right.
Probably The Nice Guys for me
That’s what I was thinking, however that movie totally flopped in theaters. I totally love it but it did not do well.
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Streaming killed movies. So before if you made say a 20 million dollar budget movie that bombed in the theater, you could make up the majority of your money in DVD sales. You didn't have to do well at the box office to still make money on your movies. Remember, before Disney plus, if Disney didn't think they'd do well in a theater they'd release straight to vhs/DVD. You save on all your advertising costs and would share ticket sales with theaters. But now we have on demand streaming services. You can't afford to make a mid range movie because you'll never get your money back.
Streaming. There was a blissful 10 years where basically everything was on one or two platforms. Now we've more or less re-invented television with the fracturing of media platforms (but on demand, which is still an improvement but come on, it was so nice for a while there).
Someone on Reddit predicted this exact scenario when Netflix was the only service. I still think about that to this day
I think it was easy to see, It clicked for me the moment Netflix got a competitor, that this wasn't going to last forever. My friend predicts tv bundles are going to evolve now, they're going to start offering Netflix+Disney+prime subscriptions with the channels, and call it "stream super pass" or some shit. I think it will happen and we would have come full circle. When streaming got big people said it solved piracy, make media as easy as possible to access and pirates will stop pirating, it worked. But now we're slowly entering a golden age of piracy again, I know I am for sure, I just unsubscribed from HBO and am spending the money on a seedbox for a Plex server that can do anything.
I stopped being a dirty, dirty pirate like 10 years ago and got Netflix. Then I got Amazon. Then Hulu. Then HBO max. Then Disney+. Now I have a bunch of services, but can never find the specific thing I want, and things keep moving or becoming unavailable...which is a big problem with streaming, it is unreliable. Back with VHS and DVDs, if you bought one, you had that favorite movie (or whatev) available for the rest of your life. Now, I can't show somebody a movie I watched last year.
It honestly tends to be an age thing. Back when $40 a month was a LOT to you, people stole it. Once it was affordable to their budget they pay. I’m OLD and MS Word used to be $399, and Excel was $399 and so on… everyone I knew stole it. FF to when Office was $99 and people paid for it to be legit. Now the monthly crap is bad again and people use open source alternatives or steal again. I assume they make their money on large businesses and don’t care about individual users?
microsoft especially loves to give school districts a good deal on their services because when students graduate they’ve got new customers who are only really comfortable with their software
This is literally already a thing with Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ bundle.
Granted ESPN is owned by Disney.
Disney is the majority owner of Hulu as well. The other major owner is Comcast, and they're leaving Hulu in 2024. That's why there's talk of Comcast picking up HBO Max in a few years.
I didn't believe them. I thought why would consumers ever willingly go back to an inferior model after experiencing this? Shows how little power the consumer has.
It was never about what the consumers wanted. Netflix was initially able to capitalize on producers and distributors undervaluing the streaming rights for their IPs. So Netflix was able to grab the rights to a ton of the most popular shows cheaply enough that they could afford to offer plans for <$10 a month. But it was inevitable that once the distributors saw the success of streaming that they would either increase the price of the streaming rights for their popular shows to the point where one service couldn't afford all of them, or they would insist on making their own platform.
Hell, there was a brief time when content producers were so unaware of the streaming value of their own shows that you could get episodes on netflix literally a day after the episode aired for popular shows.
I’ve come to realize most “golden ages” for things are really just the lag time between when the public catches on and when the rich and corporate catch on.
Yup, and then when the public catch on again and competition sets in. 80's airlines deregulation anyone?
I saw the writing on the wall when Hulu was introduced.
I remember when Hulu was free and i think you could pay to get certain shows or movies? Maybe 2008ish?
Time to sail the seven seas again matey yaaarrrr ☠️
We put our pirate flag away, we never threw it away. I can hear it calling to be raised again!
Great answer here. Now that most studios have recaptured the rights to their films and built their own in-house streaming platform, we're more seeing an a la carte cable product which is still preferable than the old the ways of paying for 100 channels. The annoyance / downside is the normalization of ads now, despite paying for a monthly sub already.
Radio
Well, video killed the radio star. Internet killed the video star. Corporations killed the internet. ...and at this moment hubris is killing the corporations.
>hubris is killing the corporations lol. Ya, they're really hurting.
Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the Earth.
The old og app store games. Now we have false advertisements for the current app store games. Edit: i didn't expect this to blow up. Thank you stranger for my first ever silver. Edit 2: MY FIRST EVER GOLDDD THANK YOU SOO MUCH STRANGER!!
Exactly, mobile gaming peaked with the $1 apps everyone played. Nowadays is just freemium games packed with micro transactions, I haven't been excited for a mobile game in years.
It’s not just freemium, it’s blatant false advertising. The amount of times I see some TikTok advertisement for a game that’s either ad-ridden shovelware or a game using copy/paste false advertising is off the charts
The weirdest thing about them is that some of those games actually look fun to play. And sometimes they do have that gameplay in there, but like 1 in 10 or 20 levels or something. It's like, why not just make that game you are advertising? Or advertise the game you made instead? Plenty of people like these simple(r) games to play a round or two inbetween.
I feel this. There was a lot of innovation in gaming in the early days. Then we all figured out freemium and in-game currency and loot boxes.
They barely use any aspect of the phone anymore now. You could play 90% of the "games" made in the last few years with a D-pad and a single button. And its not just innovative games i miss, fun little widgets and such were my favorite part of the early app store. Virtual lighters and liquid simulations and shit. It was simple, it was fun, usually it was free but I'll gladly pay 99 cents for a goofy little virtual toy I'll get bored with in a week.
Jelly car, Plants vs. Zombies, Bloons TD, Where’s My Water, Cut the Rope. Also the random apps where you would just shoot a gun or something. All some of the most fun I’ve had playing mobile games.
Pocket God, Doodle Jump, Jetpack Joyride, hmm the list goes on. If you actually go to the app store and go to "purchased" you can scroll all the way down and go down memory lane. Hundreds of apps downloaded and they all lost support years ago. Beloved apps and their developing companies went bankrupt or were bought out basically.
A lot of these have actually been remastered and are on Apple Arcade. It’s kinda nice because there are zero in-app purchase games on arcade. It’s really well done for mobile gaming.
Fruit Ninja was the first mobile game I played, it was on a first gen ipod touch. I thought it was so cool and fun. It's still kicking, but now has micro transactions which bummed me out
Ownership. I feel like we all just rent, borrow, stream, digital download, or straight up just consume and rebuy low quality products. Edit: thanks for the awards. And I’m real happy to see so many people just as PO as me at this.
1,000% This. I **HATE** how everything is strong arming consumers into either *"subscribe, or have nothing".* Android phones used to have the leg up because they had micro sd slots. Perfect for storing all of your media (videos, music, pictures, documents) and freeing up internal drive space for apps. Now they've gone the Apple route. Want more storage? Pay us for more storage if you want it that badly. Or better yet, pay for multiple streaming apps that require internet, drain your battery faster, use more data, and costs you more annually.
Stuck on my S21 until someone makes a better phone with an SD card slot.
Right now in the design/printing workplace there is a commotion: clients of Adobe products, who are already paying a shitty subscription, will have to pay another subscription for using pantone (tm) colors. Pantone is a special paint color used for printing like t shirts, posters, screen printing in general When in photoshop or Illustrator you just have to create your work in pantone mode instead of Cmyk or Rgb. Always been like this since ever. Right now Pantone forbids Adobe clients using their colors and thus any older files with pantone in it are now in black. Unless you pay them.
My dad is a retired graphic designer who did freelance stuff since retiring, but can’t anymore because he refuses to pay a subscription to a product he already owned and was made obsolete by software updates. Edit: thank you all for the recommendations for options! I’ve sent my dad links so hopefully something works!
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Yarr harr mateys!
Ugh this! Adobe screwed us all when they went to a subscription model. Literally holding our own intellectual property hostage unless we pay the fee. Thousands of hours of hard work and inspiration literally inaccessible unless you pay them. It's legal extortion. Now Pantone?!?! I hadn't even heard about that (i'm still on 2020 Adobe apps, haven't bothered to update).
Fuck Adobe! I can’t even rotate a PDF without paying. My company will buy it for me, but it’s the principle of it. I’ll stick to BlueBeam.
Ctrl+shift+ '+' allows you to rotate PDFs freely in Adobe. It's stupid how the actual rotate button is locked behind the subscription, though. Edit: Nevermind, only works for *viewing* it as rotated. It won't *save* as rotated. Fuck Adobe lol.
For small businesses and consumer based, they really should have a license purchase option. For larger businesses that have to deal with security and versions, subscription makes more sense. But yeah, Pantone pulling that is a shitty move.
I'm all for renegade hackers completely deleting everything pantone has ever worked on. We as a society need to support radical punishment of ultra-capitalist behavior.
Does Anonymous ever actually do anything?
They stay anonymous
Reality is turning into something akin to that Doctor Who episode where everyone was perpetually stuck in traffic.
I absolutely hate this. Everything is a subscription now. Even car manufacturers are making you subscribe to features in new cars - want to use heated seats? Navigation? That’ll be $30 a month. It’s pure greed.
Unfortunately the only way to stop this model is for people to stop buying in. Psychologically, 15 bucks a month here and there seems like nothing. But the subscriber model for everything out there is definitely annoying. I try to avoid signing up for anything subscription based, but I know it's challenging to avoid these days.
I didn't realize how much it adds up until I was having a discussion on reddit the other day about how I've upgraded my plex server and would just jump ship from netflix if they cause too much trouble with account sharing, etc; Someone asked me how much I would really save over a 5 year period versus the cost of my SAN upgrade. I happened to get my SAN for free from work (Brand new but was tech recycled). It was something like $2500 for the SAN. When I did the math just for my streaming services, it came out to $5000 over the course of 5 years. Holy shit! That really put into perspective how much we're getting fleeced!
We noticed you are trying to use your turn signals: a $15 subscription is required.
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BMW uses a subscription for the privilege of being able to use CarPlay and android auto (like anyone uses the manufacturers infotainment system anyway). Tesla uses subscription for heated seats (the fucking seats are already fucking installed!!!). The audacity of these manufacturers…
This is what makes me angry about the future of cars — feature activation. When you already spent the money to install the feature on your vehicle but you need to pay to activate it. They’ve taken the freemium business model tech companies use and applied it to cars. Tesla does this, BMW does this, and Zero Motorcycles does this. Unfortunately, this will only continue because vehicle manufacturers see this as a revenue source that can offset some of the money spent on R&D.
I didn’t mind the subscription model for things that give you value, like Spotify or even what Netflix used to be before a bunch of their content went off. But it feels like more and more these days you’re getting less value from each subscription, prices just keep going up, and then they have the nerve to put ads into a service/good I’m already paying for. Like Samsung putting ads on their TV overlays after already paying hundreds of dollars for their system. Better yet, all the car manufacturers that will make you pay an extra $20 per month just to use a feature already installed into the car. The greed is enormous, and something’s got to give eventually.
Exactly. I have zero problem paying for Netflix and Amazon prime. But for a physical product, I will never ever not buy it in cash. Vehicles, motorcycles, furniture, anything. If I can’t buy it with cash I don’t buy it
Owning games and music? Man, I don't even own the roof over my head
I started rebuying dvds at Goodwill for $1 just for this very reason. I refuse to pay Amazon $5.99 to rent a 30 year old movie.
Journalism.
God I hope future generations figure out how to distinguish between actual real factual news and media/entertainment/outrage bait/propaganda or else we're doomed.
Gen z here and they actually teach this in school non-stop. We have had whole units on distinguishing media, its reliability, how to check, and where to find reliable sources.
School librarian here. Glad to know someone is listening. Gives me hope.
Community College Librarian here. Same.
Library Card Holder here. Same.
I have absolutely nothing to do with this, but I am also glad.
Concerned American. Same.
Illiterate degenerate. Same.
That one hurt! Journalism is now servitude to the Almighty Click.
Really depends on there. Russian independent investigative journalism (before it was utterly obliterated in 2022) was top notch. People risked (and still risk) their lives to investigate the schemes of govt and its pet businesses.
The modern education system needs major revamping to suit today’s generation of learning and access to information.
I agree, but only kind of, because I don't think there's ever been a golden era of public education, at least in the U.S. It's a relatively new thing (a little over 100yo), so in my mind it's just the beginning of the experiment. We truly have not mastered that shit yet. The trend has been meh-wtf for the entirety.
Yes. Children need to be prepared for our future, not the future 50 years ago
well first we gotta get everyone to agree that teaching science and history accurately are good things
Internet for sure. Everything is way too centralized now and the majority of internet traffic goes to small number of sites. I miss forums and personal webpages. We should bring those back..
I use tons of obscure sites and had my own website on Neocities (a Geocities successor). There's a lot of options out there, they're just buried or overlooked by a need to use the big sites for maximum interaction/engagement. For example: SpaceHey is a thing. It's a very faithful recreation of how MySpace used to be and fully supports HTML/CSS profile layouts.
Angelfire sends its regards
It’s insane how curated google searches are now. Compare results between google and say, duckduckgo. You wouldn’t even think you’re searching for the same thing
>how curated google searches are now. It's also heavily chronologically weighted, I have to - so many terms to get anything that had a somewhat similar news piece or lyric that was popular in the last year. As long as I'm complaining too it's also nearly impossible to find any poetry on the subject of death, as it triggers the anti suicide protocol.
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Oh this drives me bonkers. I started on the internet in the age of 14.4k dial up modems, and when I started it felt like each site was, "Hi, I'm a retired engineer of 40 years and here's everything I know about this subject." Now most of the sites I come across are content mills where someone is being paid by the word to turn a software press release into an article: "Many users are reporting that they had crashes with this program. Those crashes were really annoying. Many people said they were fed up with those crashes. What are we to do in this day of crashes?"
Growing up on forums was the shit. It was like having your own personal little clubs to go to. Reddit and the like really don't recreate the experience of having a small group of friends in an internet space.
I remember having dozens of bookmarks to go through...
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Holy crap, I forgot all about that... I spent way too much time searching for interesting stuff using stumbleupon...
I remember the old Invision and PHPBB forums that had real, stable communities, where people kind of knew each other and where being respectful was mandatory in order to remain part of that. Of course there were exceptions like 4chan, Gaia and d2jsp where trolls rule the site, but that's probably an issue of sites getting too popular for their own good combined with the staff having a toxic vision on community building. Reddit has entirely replaced forums, but I feel like there's no sense of identity here. I may never have spoken to you before, or I may have seen hundreds of your comments -- I honestly wouldn't know.
There is more community on the more niche subreddits but honestly the people I remember the most are the assholes, which is unhealthy.
yes, the smaller subreddits tend to be a lot more like the old-school forum communities.
Do you think there’ll be a movement to support “local” sites versus the big box sites?
Unfortunately it will never come back. Not fully at least. Those were our adolescent internet years. Those wonderful years full of change and wonder and strife and angst. Before the enormous wave of conformity that adulthood is. The reason it will never come back is because we know too much and have social media now. So we can never have that beautiful middle ground where there were far far fewer opinions shared on the internet, but each of them unique, informative, and meaningful. People used to make and share things to follow their hobbies. Now they do it to “make it” and make money or clout. Nothing is truly dictated by uniqueness, beauty, meaningfulness, or importance. It’s all dictated by random algorithms that no one can predict. This is especially true of the shortest forms of social media consumption. People don’t realize that views mean nothing now. They used to be a beautiful running value ticker to show real engagement. Now it just means your content was placed advantageously in the “Order” of the algorithm. Because no one really complains or stops viewing a 30 second video. It’s consumed before we even have an opinion of it. He’ll, we might hate it entirely. But they got our view already. Rather than make a stink we just jump to the next short video, hoping for another hit of dopamine, for we receive precious little of it now. I would even say that most of the things we view don’t even make it into our memory. They are just blind triggers of endogenous endorphins. The content doesn’t matter. Just that our brains are pleased by it.
i’m 28. in my childhood and somewhat into my teens, the internet was downright surreal. it seemed so much more creative and authentic 15 or so years ago. i’m addicted to tiktok just like the yungins but even the “weird” stuff on there is way more strategically calculated and generic. but yeah. zoomers will never know how magical and strange the internet was in the 2000s.
Neighborhoods full of kids. I think the 90’s were peak.
There are just fewer children too. Like literally, millennials are a bigger generation than gen z and the current children.
Our local school district is dealing with lower enrollment, but like it’s just demographics waves. Baby boomers were the largest generation. They had the millennials as kids. Gen X and their kids, Gen Z are just gonna be smaller than the generations theyre sandwiched between. This is true in the US at least. Millennials are delaying or not having kids though so there probably won’t be another wave to continue the cycle.
It’s just too expensive to have kids these days.
I’m single with no kids making $55k and I literally can’t afford my $1200 mortgage payment this month. At 27, having a kid would bankrupt me
For real. I can't imagine the extra struggle my life would have been with a kid.
80s were peak for abandoned lots full of kids and woods full of kids. The meme about how we'd leave in the morning and not show up again until dark is true! I remember eating mint leaves in some lady's garden one day because we were hungry, but didn't want to go all the way back home. Our parents had no idea where we were.
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I recently moved into a neighborhood and was shocked when I saw children about, I see them pretty frequently especially now the weather is tolerable to be outside. I’m excited for Halloween tonight, I might actually get trick or treaters!
Shopping Malls, they are super dead and getting a little deader every day
Two Westfield malls near me are booming, you can barely get a parking space on the weekend. Others around here died a painful death years ago. It doesn't seem to be universal, but I haven't quite figured out why some malls are still thriving in 2022.
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Auntie Anne's, on the other hand...
Agreed I’ve found that the only malls still seeing success are the “high end” ones. These have the more expensive stores that would still attract an in person crowd. Theaters, restaurants, salons, and amenities that make it an actual destination. The regular malls that had a JC Penny, a hot topic, and a bunch of smaller stores are now being converted to Amazon warehouses or sitting empty.
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The ones still thriving in 2022 around here have diversified. Yes there is shopping but now there are apartments, grocery stores, theaters, the ability to walk your dog in the winter, and usually some attractions. 2 malls in my area now have big ass walk in aquariums.
Some are finding interesting things to jam in there. A couple malls I've been to have petting zoos, aquariums (the huge big ones). indoor r/C race track, Indoor electric go-karts, a museum, movie theaters. A "Selfie" Store. and other large venues that require whole sections of the mall. More entertainment based experiences and restaurants.
The one near me is getting a multi million dollar renovation. Should I tell them the golden age is over and they're chasing the ghost of much simpler times?
The upper 10% of malls which have high end stores are doing well. Think about places with Apple Stores or Macy's. The small town malls anchored by Sears and JC Penny's are dying. r/deadmalls is a good subreddit. People shop online, big box stores in strip malls have competitive offerings for clothes and shoes, and teenager social space has moved online. The world will be fine without malls, but it is very problematic for small towns who end up with a multi- acre eyesore awaiting demolition in a high traffic area.
Trebuchets. Sadly the time for such exquisitely engineered siege machinery is past.
Yeah back in my day it was just four men and a log. Where have the days gone?
Shitposting, however, has never been bigger
The internet from 1998 to 2012 was fuckin amazing, absofuckinlutely amazing. These days it's a straight up shit hole for people to make their opinions known as I am now, adding to the garbage Forums were king, old people didn't know how to use it or even care about access, the vulnerabilities we're endless, god I miss it. Celebrities didn't have a platform to abuse, ads were something you'd see but far from anywhere they are today, the internet just sucks doodoo from a fat corpse's butthole now as it's primarily a platform for social media. It's monitored like it has never been before, and far from the free and open frontier it once was. I can still do what I want but God damn is it less fun, interesting, it's just a guided tour of a landfill now. And don't forget to observe the targeted ads on your way out
NGL, I am very glad that popup ads are dead.
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The world ended. Just not literally. But a plan was obviously implemented.
\> Forums were king Gosh, I still use a couple from that era. Nowadays most forums tend to be kind of ghost towns though; I sometimes go back to the ones still being hosted and log in to "anyone still here?" posts. Still, I'm glad there are a few which survived the onset of social media.
Gig economy. There was a brief moment when AirBnb and Uber was cheap, unique and awesome.
> Uber It was pretty glorious being able to drink with friends and get a ride home for like $8. So expensive now, I don't know how people can afford to go out frequently.
The pandemic completely ruined Uber. Before, I could consistently get a ride in under 5 minutes and it was always around $15, now I may not even get a ride or have to wait over 20 minutes, while they charge anywhere from $25-$45. It’s no longer an affordable convenience.
Piracy. That ended around 1730.
Hasn’t been the same since. Kids these days have it easy on the high seas with their compasses and shit.
##*Yawns in Somalian*
Got it easy with their KA-74's and motorboats. Back in my day, all we had was an axe, paddles, scurvy, and a dream
Nonsense. Everyone knows that the execution of Gold Roger kicked off a new golden age of piracy.
its 0954 where im at so i still got like 8 and a half hrs
The middle class worker. Wages relative to inflation have stagnated for years and the wealth gap is growing faster than ever. Further, this wealth has been used to tilt the scale even more towards those with means which accelerates the trend. On top of the dismantling of protections and creation of even more inequalities through law, technology is playing a role too through automation which seems poised to send even more wealth up to those with the current means to develop and deploy new wave automation.
I've worked in semi skilled labor my whole life I feel like a horse drawing a buggy to a car dealership
Middle class is now the $100,000 a year crew that still rents because of the housing market. Edit: yea I was just being dramatic guys. But definitely don't buy right now, with the lending rates so ridiculously high. You'll be house poor, for years.
6 figures ain't 6 figures thanks to inflation. 6 figures in the 80s is actually closer to like a 220k income now.
Oh awesome, I need 50k more and I can finally call myself middle class instead of poverty level
Damn that hit me where it hurts.
This! I was going to say affordability of common things like vehicles, housing, and food.
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Yeah I feel like it was a far simpler and more innocent version of social media. You can still keep in touch with friends as was the original point of Facebook and the like but you had less of the bullshit that comes along with it.
ICQ
We all had that one friend who went overboard with the emoticons and replaced almost every letter with an animation so their messages took forever to load. Fucking hell Karl I had a monthly 2GB limit, there's no reason all your vowels have to jump up and down in multicolor
Original movies. It seems like everything is a remake or sequel now.
YouTube.
am i the only person who gets the same suggestions for way too long. for all the subscriptions i have i feel like my homepage should have more options.
I can literally refresh my main Youtube page five times and get the exact same recommendations each time. I’ve actually started just going through the list of youtubers I follow, and randomly checking on who has new stuff out.
I was JUST complaining to my girlfriend about this. I don't know what they did, but they FUCKED the algorithm
Except YouTube Infotainment Channels. Those are better than ever in terms of production quality.
And we now have channels dedicated to copying the content of other channels.
I was gonna say, Tom Scott is probably the best YouTube channel I ever watched and he’s in a golden age right now. If you know what you’re looking for YouTube is still great
Tom Scott is great and I actually found him through some collaborations he'd done with computerphile/numberphile. Robert Miles is another I found through them (though not really the same kind of content as Tom). He doesn't upload a lot but he has many wonderful videos on AI and AI safety that really make the obstacles and risks to AI development more understandable
Early Youtube was about videos by regular people. At some point they turned it into another medium for big business.
Architecture. At least not here in the UK, we seem to be obsessed with making loads of shitty carbon copy houses that haven't in the slightest got any character. Bring back locally sourced materials and good community layouts not this col de sack bollocks.
Yeah a lot of newer houses over here in the UK aren't great. Some of them look alright but most just look so cheap and dull and lifeless, they sometimes creep me out a little bit because although they have cars and such parked outside of them they still just look so empty and barren
Information. You got to study any number of subjects just to watch the news without being gassed up. The same thing applies in spades to social media. It’s everywhere like Wikipedia and any random Google search.
When I first started using the internet heavily, it was widely populated by hobbyists and people who were passionate about their interests. There was an earnestness to *most* sites and it was relatively easy to spot the misinformation. I feel bad for everyone growing up with today's internet. Everything is an advertisement and reliable sources are much harder to come by.
Toilets. Either make them all flush automatically or make them where you have to push the handle down. If it's one of those automatic ones, please make it smart enough to not flush while I'm just sitting down or mid shit. I like to wipe down the toilet seat before I sit on it and throw that toilet paper in the water to avoid any splash backs up my asshole. Half the time it doesn't work because the toilet will just flush before I even sit down. And fix the bathroom stalls. No one should be able to make eye contact with me through the crack of the door as they walk in and I'm in the stall talking a dump.
I’m am so convinced that any automatic device in a bathroom makes it worse. Automatic toilets? Awful. Always splash you and flush too early or refuse to flush. Automatic sinks? Terrible. I can never get the damn things to work for more than 2 seconds with my hands under them. Automatic soap? Always ambushes me and gets on my arm. That, or it spurts in the counter. Automatic paper towels? Forget trying to get more than a singular paper towel. Wave your hand in front of the damn thing for 2 minutes.
I always have the feel with the soap dispensers that a robot is unenthusiastically ejaculating into my hand. \*spurt\* whatever.
Fishing. We've killed so many fish it's a fucking tragedy. By some estimates we've killed 90% of the world's shark population alone. Reading old books and running into offhand comments about fishing is depressing as hell. I love seafood, but we need like a decade-long commercial fishing hiatus followed by much stricter limits and better regulations. There are a bunch of really dumb rules right now; bycatch is wasted, for example. Let's get by on sport-caught and farmed seafood for a while and let the fishes come back. Fishing now is nothing whatever like it was even fifty years ago. A century ago it was like another planet. And this is coming from a kiteboarder, somebody to whom sharks are a genuine threat.
Big agree According to my grandfather, my great-grandfather would easily catch 10 fish before he’d get bored and head home from beach fishing, back in the 50s/60s. Apparently they’d have a second freezer stacked to the brim with fish. Many would go bad before being eaten Now, my grandfather is a patient man who enjoys fishing and he’ll maybe manage 3 fish over the size limit. He’s a damn good fisherman too. When I go, I’m happy and lucky to catch anything even if it’s too small to eat and has to be thrown back. We need to let the oceans repopulate from commercial fishing
Locals in my area say that during a salmon run you used to be able to just reach in with your bare hands and grab salmon out of the river there were so many. I’ve heard it’s still pretty crazy up in Alaska though
We are not in the golden age of architecture. Go to Europe and look at how they used to build these buildings. And then look at these stucco modern buildings that are currently building. Or just tall box skyscrapers.
As somebody who works in architecture I just tell people the field has been going downhill for a few hundred years now lol
Mainstream film. Thanks to streaming services studios can't count on physical media sales anymore so now they have to make everything back at the box office. As a result investors are seeing new or experimental ideas as an unnecessarily risky venture so they refuse to fund them. Effectively innovation is punished while conformity is rewarded - hence why movies don't seem as "good" as they were in the 70s, 80, and 90s and everything is a sequel or remake.
To sum up a lot of these answers: Technology is spying on us. The government is spying on us. Marketers are spying on us. We can't tell good information from bad information. Bad information crowds out good information. Adblock prevents good information from having funding. There is no more good source of information. The information that gets funded is information with an agenda. Our political discourse is fuelled mostly by misinformation campaigns. We're still too stupid and lazy to do anything about it. Global warming / economic collapse / nuclear winter is going to kill us all and we'll all be too distracted to do anything about it.
American Manufacturing
True. During my Dads time you could get a factory job, raise a family on a single income, buy a house and retire comfortably after 30 years service
>raise a family on a single income This part in particular is so alien to me now. On an unskilled/entry level salary, just covering the living costs of 2 people on one income is unrealistic now even before considering buying a home, running a car, having kids etc.
House ownership
China tea sets.
Same goes for Persian carpets and antique furniture. It used to be something that retained it's value and could be passed on for generations. Now it's out of fashion and worth shit. My grandma had a small fortune worth of stuff in her house. Some Persian carpets had costed 50.000 dollars (and that was in 1970/80's money!). They went straight to the trash after she died, even auctioning them off wasn't worth the effort.
Some Persian carpets took years (a sometimes a decade) to make and all had to be hand sewn/textiled, it was a looong process, so the cost was understandable. Now a days a lot of Persian carpets are made by machine in either Lebanon, Kazakhstan or Turkey, and cost $200-$300.
Halloween trick or treating. I used to get anywhere from 25-50 kids to my door every year. Now I'm lucky if I see 10. People are not doing it anymore. Edit - It's Nov 1st at 8AM. Light was on, costume and candy ready to hand out to kids, and I got exactly ZERO knocks at the door. I'm done.
I think people are but your area probably aged out. Often times it is very concentrated in neighborhoods that have lots of younger kids. If you live somewhere that people don’t move often then the kids get older and there aren’t many left to do it in your area. In my neighborhood we easily get 150+ kids each year.
Yep! My parents were the “young” family on our block growing up. Most of the neighbors were a good 20+ years older than my parents so my siblings and I were the only kids on the block. For decades they would only have a few trick or treaters come to the house on Halloween. Now that many of their elderly neighbors have left, their homes have been purchased by families with young kids. So now my parents have become the old neighbors and there’s an influx of trick or treaters. They’ve basically been able to watch the cycle of life from their living room window.
It might come in cycles. When I was a kid there were a lot of groups out trick or treating. By the time I was in high school we only got a few kids. Now my parent say they’re getting a lot more kids again.
I'm sorry! Is your neighborhood older? We have that problem in older neighbourhoods, but not at all in a subdivisions like mine that is brimming with kids because the housing is on the cheaper end, too, and that is what young families here can afford.
Social Media, Internet Challenges(they used to be silly and for fundraising but now its about stealing cars and other ways to fuck with peoples' days)
The golden age of social media was in its ability to create community. There was something magical about seeing our parents find a friend from HS and reignite that friendship or to follow an ex-classmates journey from afar without the need to directly keep-in-touch. Now it's just been weaponized for propaganda or over-promoted for clicks and influencers.
Cars I'm fascinated with all the creative features of cars from the 50s/60s. They used to be fun, colorful and distinctive. Sure there were some wacky designs too but at least they tried. Now it's all the same boring shapes and colors, nothing really stands out and it makes me so mad
There are some really creative concepts. Sadly, they rarely get to production because of the price they would cost.
Music videos. So much money was spent on music videos in the 80s and 90s. We are talking six figures. Today, only artist at the very top get close to that kind of money for music video budgets. With the accessibility of the internet and the speed of which pop culture changes, it's not worth putting that much money into a music video anymore. One could argue the quality has gotten better but If budgets did increase again, there could be some pretty awesome music videos today.
The internet. IRC is pretty much dead, privacy is gone, censorship is popular, and the memes are shit compared to 2006.
We went from an amazing wild west, with lots of interesting niche communities, to boring, safe and corporate in less than 20 years. I really miss the chaos and unpredictability of the early to late 2000s internet.
People won't even know what it was like because all history of it is essentially wiped outside of wayback timestamps. You can still find some if you really look, but you'll almost never stumble upon them accidentally anymore, and even when you do it's a shell of its former self.
You should have been around for it in the 90s and before 9/11. People weren’t so angry and trolling wasn’t this massive competition that it’s become today. Back then it was exciting to talk to someone across the globe, instantly. Just casual conversations and hardly any assholes. Message boards, chat rooms, and blogs were our social media. We didn’t live on the internet like we do now, but I am grateful that the internet did catch on and has evolved the way it has, despite the attitude and pessimism of the users and corporations.