My desire to polish off personal artistic musical expression into forms aesthetic enough for others to pay attention too is largely gone, I think people are far more interested right now in broken visions of human art thrown into a woodchipper and disfigured into lifeless forms on demand than humans making art. Obviously not everyone, but materially I think society is now very hostile to artists for a variety of reasons (largely cost of living increases).
Game development is even worse than music, it has become an extremely toxic, brutal industry and I don’t recommend to anyone even though I love videogames (and music).
Only a small blow in a big battle, but one suggestion: Put active effort into your searches for positive content on something rather than negative.
Don’t watch 8 videos about how Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 sucks, and it’s over for Activision. Do a search for videos highlighting 10 great indie games that deserve your attention. YouTube even has an “AI search” that, while it is tools of the enemy, may let you be more explicit about what you’re looking for.
The secondary benefit of finding these videos is that anyone putting them out is probably aware negativity and outrage manufactures more views, and is instead choosing to better their content for its own sake.
Some other search options to curate your feed: Animations by hobbyists and college students, zoologists giving introductions to animals together with their name/location (NOT out-of-context 5 second clips of funny animals stolen without permission), any decent animations in Garry’s Mod / SFM, Machinima…
Heck, if someone wants a specific pointer and has a spare day, look up the Clear Skies trilogy. Yes…trilogy
I don’t think there’s less stuff. I think there’s more slop and trash, so the percent of good stuff is lower.
Last week I found a YouTube video about making flags in PowerPoint. There are still great vids out there, but they getting rarer.
Oh yeah, that vid got posted here (in one community or another) and downvoted to oblivion. Any idea what the deal is with that? It’s in my “watch with dinner” playlist, but I haven’t gotten there yet.
A coworker showed me a quote from this guy, Steve Magness (https://www.stevemagness.com/) that sums it up really well - When we’re constantly ‘killing time’ on our phones/screens in every waking moment that our attention isn’t otherwise required, we suck up the space that was once reserved for creativity and fill it with garbage instead. We fragment our attention and rarely get lost in our thoughts or follow up on cool ideas. Creativity is dying first before it’s born because we don’t just sit and engage with our own ideas like we did once…we just scroll.
The second factor is the giant, impossibly sophisticated psychological rat’s maze the internet has become for content… we are fed much more than we truly discover, and every day 100k tons more AI shit is shoveled over real, genuine ideas… and it’s that bullshit the algorithm will serve you. You have a lot less agency and exposure online than you THINK you do… and that is by design. If you have been on the internet for more than 10 years, then you remember when that was very much not the case and feel the difference.
Hang out with local, creative people in person, ask them what they’re into. Stare out a window and think thoughts, shut your phone off and read books. The good news is that there is SO MUCH good shit in the world already that the decline of our civilization and its creative output isn’t so bad, if you just get some distance from it.
When we’re constantly ‘killing time’ on our phones/screens
Reminded me of that quote from House of Leaves
Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.
Delete your YouTube history, retrain the algo. My tip is female exercise videos work the same muscles but don’t put you on the incel algorithm.
Tool reviews are another area dripping in incel content. I installed a 3rd party blocker to keep that shit at bay.
The
Not InterestedandDon't Recommend Channelbuttons work surprisingly well for this. I am very protective of my algorithm so I try to avoid videos that I think will open up the flood gates for shitty content but in the event that it does, a few choice clicks of those two buttons usually has things bavk under control pretty quick.They don’t. I kept getting recs from channels I tried that with. Altright/manosphere shit.
They definitely do because my recommendations are squeaky clean 98% of the time and those buttons, along with not clicking on shit that I think will poison my feed are the main tools I use to keep things clean.
One thing to keep in mind is that YT makes changes to their algorithm every once in a while. For me, that typically manifests as sports channels, especially the NFL, or political stuff making their way into my feed. A few clicks of those buttons and I’m back to normal.
I’ve repeatedly gotten recommended the same channel I told it I wasn’t interested in.
I’ll have to start searching for “M12 milwaukee crown stapler female user”.
Is there a manosphere specific content blocker?
I use BlockTube for Firefox to manually block videos and channels. I don’t know if there’s a premade list or anything.
I think there’s more good stuff out there than ever, but:
- We don’t have a good search engine to locate it.
- It’s easier than ever to put stuff out there, so it’s lower quality on average.
- People hide their stuff inside discord servers and, increasingly, behind paywalls.
Right! It’s not that there’s less. It’s that there’s a discoverability issue, and on top of that more stuff means less cultural relevance for any given work.
less cultural relevance for any given work.
This is what hurts the most tbh. Miss the days when all your friends were playing the same handful of games, everyone was talking about the same handful of movies and TV shows, etc. Of course variety is great and being able to choose where to invest your time is better than being locked in to a small pool of choices, but it sucks when you feel like you’ve stumbled upon a masterpiece, and nobody cares about it.
I dunno, i have teenage nephews… they all play the same games, watch the same movies, and watch the same shows.
but they are teenagers. their world horizon is very limited.
It only feels that way because one doesn’t explore.
On a creative standpoint, the well of originality is drying up quickly.
exploring is legitimately harder than it used to be, at least via the internet.
There’s more, but it feels less because it’s quantity over quality. There’s so much more content but the quality has degraded that finding something of good quality in a sea of crap and slop is becoming a challenge.
I think companies have gotten more aggressive with theirs algorithms shoveling people towards content that gets companies the most money.
I try hard to block out right-wing crap (U.S.) on YouTube. I’m talking blocking channels liberally and going into my history to delete a watch if I find a video is spreading misinformation. I still get so much of it recommended. And anecdotally, it’s gotten worse this year. Not sure if there’s hard data available out there to prove it but I agree with you, OP, it sure feels like it.
Spotify is obvious. They dumped a ton of money into Rogan so push his podcast shamelessly to ensure maximum return on their investment, despite Rogan being a piece of shit.
I highly recommend to everyone just turning off your watch history on YouTube. You will not be given recommendations and you have to make a search for something in order to get anything at all to watch. Only works on desktop/laptop though. I successfully kept my parents away from all these destructive algorithms (I managed to keep them totally off Facebook, et al), but YouTube got them because you cannot turn off recommendations when using YouTube apps on phones/tablets/TVs - and it single-handedly turned them into right wing sycophants over about a four year period (to be fair, they were already the religious type).
I don’t keep an account at all for YouTube, history off, no app, so I have to use YouTube through Firefox on my phone. I have to seek out what I am looking for. Absolutely love how impossible it is to get on with the mindless scroll this way. I’m so over algorithms force feeding bullshit.
Report misinformation. The other day I reported a comment and got a message back saying “this account has been banned for repeatedly spreading misinformation.” The one I reported was about the lady who got severely injured by hot coffee.
i dont log in, as soon as i see the right wing content i click away, or close and reopen the browser.
Algorithm doesn’t have an incentive to shiw anything good, only engaging content. Which is usually trash
you have always had to filter good art (literally all media, really…filter for quality or go insane) from bad art, there’s just a lot more shit to go through now with ai content.
Well I can’t answer the other parts, but for games: The games industry has been going through a massive upheaval from ~2022-2025 has seen a staggering number of layoffs, games being canceled, and studios being shuttered. We’d be seeing a lot more games right now if they hadn’t been axed over the years.
In the indie game dev side, its sort of* an indiepocalypse where battling for a smidgen of spotlight on Steam is brutal - and even financial “success” doesn’t mean you’ll have enough to follow up with another game. Also because of the above publishers aren’t funding many AA games so its hard to get those going to.
*Its a little different for niches and certain genres so this is a generalization.
it’s harder to find than it used to be due to the algorithms.
YouTube is useless now for discovering new stuff. It’s all top 10 lists with AI voices reading AI text that vaguely aligns with your interests but is designed to farm engagement.
You like watches? Here are the top 10 reasons why Rolex sucks now.
Interested in history? These are the 7 dumbest military leaders of all time.
The only way to get anything out of it is to watch videos from creators you already know.I don’t run into any of that shit on YouTube.
That’s because of what you normally watch on it. I’ve never seen any of that stuff.
Because in the case of YT, Google incentivizes slop farms, or at least they used to, supposedly they’re cracking down on slop farms now, but I don’t believe for a second that it’s for a good reason, instead why I think Google is allegedly cracking down on slop farms is to eliminate competition for their homegrown Veo 3 slop.
