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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   34788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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I just don't understand how it still works despite what I assume is a substantial number of people who are sick of it. I have for years absolutely refused to ever click on any video with one of those fucking thumbnails. Same with clickbait titles. I will not do it. I can't be the only one.

I also don't watch advertisements, actively avoid products I see in ads, actively avoid believing any implicit claims in ads like 'wow thats a cool rugged truck', and am not interested in almost all advertised products anyway for various practical reasons. But ads still work for most people, who don't do any of that.

You aren't the only one, but you're a minority! Similar to tiktok - it's uniformly useless garbage, despite me exploring a lot of niches for a few hours out of morbid interest (there's a few ways to ignore the algorithm and just watch a roughly global-view-biased feed), but lots of even very smart and successful older people I know love watching the cat videos or humor videos or whatever.

Same here, but presumably there's not nearly enough of us to significantly affect anything. I think it mostly targets children; they don't run ad blockers to the same extent as other groups, they often spend a large amount of time on youtube, and are more perhaps more easily influenced by advertising itself.

For the same reason people may be "tired" of the Marvel formula, but those movies still make hundreds of millions, because there are millions of literal children/teenagers and also, millions of non-English speaking people globally who have basically teenage minds when it comes to Western entertainment, such as YT videos or blockbuster movies.

In the 70's and 80's, not only did those in charge of making entertainment were largely from the entertainment business, but since you didn't really know why a movie made a lot of money, you could make it a little smarter or whatever. Now, in a world where every script has been thrown into a computer to analyze for best performance, and the guy writing the checks used to run the theme park division of the same corporation six months ago, there's going to be nobody who cares about appealing to more than the median consumer, and the sad reality, is a lot of even successful movies from the 70's and 80's and 90's could've been even more successful if they were a little dumber - the rest of the audience were basically paying a tax to appease smarter viewers because those people were in charge.

Now, they're not.

But, to circle back to the topic of YouTube, new-media creators have the opportunity (modulo sufficient resources) to make things that put the traditional entertainent industry to shame, stuff that has more niche focus.

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