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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3365 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 1, 2023

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Interestingly enough I ran across discussion about this phenomenon just the other day. I sometimes watch a youtuber called Todd in the Shadows who talks about pop music (usually through a negative lens because most of anything is bad, but he appreciates good pop music). Every year he releases his "top 10 worst songs of the year" and he began this year's video with a diversion about how critic culture has morphed into fan culture. The discussion on reddit (on a similarly very "poptimist" subreddit) agreed how the culture of positivity is utterly cloying and suffocating. Specifically the genre of "self-empowerment/positivity" is called out as fake and saccharine.

I'm not really hooked into social media so I don't really have much else to add. I do know that RottenTomatoes and other kind of review sites have become utterly worthless as metrics of quality because big companies have realized how important internet cachet has become as an advertising mechanism, and the inevitable tyranny of Goodhart's Law follows. You do have to wonder how much of this endless positivity you talk about is organic. I don't think it's necessarily that all the comments are AI-generated or bots or whatever, but there's obviously corporate fingers tipping the scale. A simple example is youtube removing the dislike button so that the hoi polloi can't show their disdain.

A tangent:

I do know that RottenTomatoes and other kind of review sites have become utterly worthless as metrics of quality because big companies have realized how important internet cachet has become as an advertising mechanism, and the inevitable tyranny of Goodhart's Law follows.

Find a cinephile or three to follow on Letterboxd who’s taste you respect. You don’t even have to sign up for an account or visit the website as Letterboxd provides an RSS feed for each user account.

Is it possible to rate stuff and then get matched with someone like-minded?

That I don’t know. I’ve got three acquaintances I follow on there via their RSS feeds who are all cinephiles. I’ve not signed up for an account, myself, per my personal no social media policy.

I was going to mention the same video as a welcome change from the Pollyanna-isms.

I'm only a casual Youtube user but it's clear that they set up an aggressive automod for comments a few years ago and I assume people have begun conforming to the unwritten rules in order to have their comments posted instead of being shadow-banned. I suppose it was necessary and probably a net improvement, it gets a bit uncanny though when I watch the videos from SoftWhiteUnderbelly interviewing the by turns desperate and criminal denizens of LA's Skid Row and then read the comments and see they're full of glib praise and hollow platitudes for pimps, addicts and proud gang bangers (in both senses of the term).

I run a youtube channel just for fun with small viewership (~ 1k subscribers). I can tell you that even I (with no youtube partnership or monetization) have a whole bunch of automod options to filter out negative/aggressive comments. I imagine a lot of channels have this on by default, and have even more powerful options at their disposal

Wouldn't surprise me because I can remember when Youtube comments were, as mentioned, a cesspit.

But Youtube has just gone so far in the other directly, including removing the dislike count to prevent negative views/opinions becoming visible that people have adapted by becoming so aggressively positive that you'd think it was sarcasm.

I remember watching years ago on a guy who reviewed each episode of My Little Pony complaining that his videos that were positive always got a way better reception than his videos that were negative, regardless of the actual quality of the episode. He was pretty deeply upset it seemed that he couldn't honestly review shows, which his channel was supposed to be about, without crippling his channel.

At the same time "hate channels", whose purpose is to shit on stuff seem to do very well.

Yeah, I think in this case the novelty of a grown man liking MLP may have something to do with things.

I had some thoughts about how both the major films being produced, themselves, seem to play into this and as indicated the average mainstream critic seems to think their job is to validate whatever product is currently supposed to become the latest hit and look for any reason people should enjoy it rather than making an honest assessment of quality.

Critics finding as many reasons as they can to 'like' a work and downplaying obvious flaws seems like a far cry from the days of Siskel and Ebert.

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