Movie YouTube, by that I mean the collection of channels and videos on YouTube that focus on the review and analysis of movies, and often TV as well, is crap. But it wasn’t always. The same could be said for much of the internet. But rather than rant boomer-style about how everything stinks now, I thought it better to just focus on Movie YouTube.

Now, sit on grandpa’s lap and let me tell you a tale. Not too long ago, only a decade, Movie YouTube was made up of channels that were kind of like friends starting a business to talk about movies like Screen Junkies, Red Letter Media, Collider, and Schmoes Know. These channels were like start-up disruptor type businesses, they had staff and different branded shows on a regular schedule, but also seemed like friends who could argue or laugh and were having the time of their lives. They were often made of people who had at least some professional experience in the movie or entertainment industry, but were still relatively fringe. They would do reviews, discussions, often movie news about ‘the business’ like casting and upcoming projects.

There were also channels like Jeremy Jahns or Chris Stuckman, often revolving around straight at the camera reviews, low-budget production but with a personality or a signature style that made up for it, sometimes a spoiler free followed by a spoiler. These were often people who just liked movies and then turned on a camera one day and it caught on.

Finally, there were channels like Every Frame a Painting. The essayists, the heavily edited and tightly scripted videos where you often never even saw the face of the person making them. Sometimes there were reviews, but often not the timely type, more the long form in-depth analysis types. But topics in these videos were much more wide-ranging. Breaking down a type of shot, a director’s style, an era, a genre, any slice of a movie or movies. The videos were often examples directly from movies of what they were talking about. To me, these people seemed like the film students or the MFAs, and would occasionally make some 4^th wall breaking reference confirming as much.

Now, what has happened to this golden age generation of Movie YouTubers? Well, much of the first group is gone. Many acquired by private equity or some larger media company, some passed around multiple times. The brand attained some value, so it gets acquired but then the people within gradually leave. Screen Junkies basically just does their ‘Honest Trailer’ videos but have abandoned most other forms of content. Collider basically just posts junket interviews. Movie Fights, Schmoedown, panel discussions are gone or less relevant, the companies streamlined to milk its biggest product until it is dry. Where once they were brands composed of people, fans could name half a dozen employees from each at least, it is now purely an algorithm chasing profit maximizing venture, which ironically makes both brands practically invisible and irrelevant. Red Letter Media somehow survives as this bizarre relic, like Always Sunny or Lebron James.

The straight to camera guys are still around, and they’ve been joined by many more like them. Once there was a time where picking up a digital camera and either reading a memorized scripted movie review or rambling and editing it together later was an odd thought. Now it’s like, why not give it a shot? Some of the legacy guys are still around, a loyal enough following, inspired by movie critics, but there are many more, the new ones, inspired by social media personalities. There’s a lot more memes peppered in to the edit too.

Finally, many of the essayists have transitioned/given up. The amount of effort required for their videos was significant, and though they did well on an individual basis, they didn’t come out frequently or with any consistency. They didn’t chase the algorithm at all. The money was walk-away-fromable I suppose, and as I said, these were bright and thoughtful people, they probably were capable of getting decent paying enough jobs that they didn’t have the time or need to script and edit a 45-minute video about the history of fisheye lenses. Not to mention, these guys are the most likely to be hit with copyright issues. The first two groups can get away with showing trailers parts, if that. The essayists needed to show you what they were talking about, and that’s risky. Look no further than the saga of Totally Not Mark, a YouTuber who got 150 videos removed and demonetized over copyright issues.

So what do we have now? We have the infection that has spread through every corner of the internet: algorithm chasing. Not unlike every element of technology, from video games to smartphones to tv shows even, there has been a transition from people with vision who want to change the world, hired or paid by profit maximizers, to just profit maximizers. Literal venture capitalists and private equity have been buying up YouTube channels like BlackRock does real estate. The results have been equally as disgusting and degenerative as it has been with all the other elements of entertainment or internet. Just another iteration of enshitification.

So what do we have now? How has the algorithm manifest? Let’s walk through some examples. Now, do not mistake the following for a listicle. It’s a listicle that turns into a deep dive, a listicle that becomes self-aware halfway through. Bear with me.

Now, in the interest of not platforming or driving traffic to the worst people in the world, I’m going to not directly link to the channels I’m talking about, so I’m going to lean into talking broadly and referencing things that could easily be found with just a simple YouTube search, such as:

“Honest” Reviews

What does this mean? I don’t know. I don’t know if the people making the videos even know. But there are an insane amount of reviews that want to tell you in the title or thumbnail that they’re ‘honest.’ Why?

Well I suppose it may have something to do with the fact that reviews used to be in newspapers, you had to read them. Now anyone with ears or eyes can experience a film review. The hurdle that was reading was removed. Maybe people who can’t read can also not comprehend anyone disagreeing with them. A lot of the lower levels of movie YouTube, and comments sections and other various places where films are discussed like twitter, you’ll find people accusing various reviewers they don’t like of being shills, of being paid off or trading good reviews for special access or some theory that suggests they are compromised in some way, and therefore their reviews are not “honest”. There are also always people accusing a Rotten Tomatoes of being flawed in its formula or selective in its sample when the critic reviews are good for a movie they don’t like. Box office results are questioned when they don’t fit the narrative. Multiple dorks for multiple movies have even suggested movies that did well at the box office had anecdotal third hand evidence of theatres being empty that were supposedly sold out, friend of a friend told them, implying that the movie studios or some interested illuminati connected third party was buying tickets and flushing them down the toilet.

So, I suppose maybe labelling your review as “honest” is preempting any knuckle-draggers from thinking you’re on the take or part of the grand conspiracy to trick someone who hates a movie into thinking other people liked and watched that movie, someone who is apparently intellectually incapable of just feeling differently about something than most people or considering if maybe they’re missing something.

What “Hollywood” can learn and/or doesn’t understand

Oh boy, there are a lot of videos telling you what Hollywood doesn’t get, often contrasting it with what does get whatever it is that needs gotten. What is Hollywood you might ask? Well, I might ask that too, but answer it I cannot, because the videos don’t make that clear. Often, the thing that they’re claiming does get it, the thing that ‘Hollywood’ doesn’t get, is also Hollywood. They’re seemingly just calling everything they don’t like “Hollywood” and then everything they do like is not Hollywood, even if it stars famous actors, has SGA, DGA, all the guilds involved, appears in movie theaters or major streaming services, it’s not Hollywood, because the person describing it likes it.

There seems to be an endless appetite for criticisms of “Hollywood” regardless of what that means. Usually, it means a handful of cherry picked scenes from cherry picked movies, that everyone agrees are not good or where something was not done well, that they show you and tell you are bad. Is that the entirety of what “Hollywood” has produced? Even recently? Is it even representative of it? Well funny you should ask because here comes a recent movie that is good, not from Bollywood or Korea, but probably made by Hollywood, only the maker of the video doesn’t seem to think it counts as Hollywood due to some arbitrary reason, or no stated reason at all, but seemingly simply because they like it.

Wait, wait, wait…

Let’s elevate this listicle. Are you noticing a pattern? The pattern is patterns. There’s a real change in Movie YouTube that made it feel less appropriate to categorize it by format, and more by the content, specifically the narrative or angel they seem to be pushing, often at the exclusion of some potential audience. There was a trend in media, realizing the impact of the internet, of changing the goal from being something everyone could like, to be somebody’s favorite thing. The goal became not width, but depth. That is why you see these patterns that seem corny at a distance, but to the person that content is for, they’ll sign up for the Patreon. Ok, enough fun, let’s put a narrative together.

Fandom Wars

This one has lost its spark ever since Infinity War. The fandom wars never quite peaked again the way it did for Marvel vs DC. This one has devolved somewhat where fandoms have even developed internal factions, the Gunn DC fans vs the Snyder DC fans. IP has been milked so long people have loyalties toward who is milking them.  I don’t know what it is, I suppose fandoms hate themselves so much, the thing they’re fans of so much, they don’t have any energy left to hate each other. A sad state.

This represents sort of a transitional period though, when the previous elements of Movie YouTube, especially the movie news crews and the straight to camera people, started to really chase the algorithm. This is when YouTubers stopped being like “I’m going to do something and see if people like it” and started going “I’m going to see what people like and do that.” This was the height of the franchise, when everyone was chasing a shared universe, some with more success than others. The IPs ruled, superheroes and spaceships and reboots. This was big money. A rising tide lifts all boats. And Movie YouTube saw that and embraced it.

It’s simple evolution. The videos talking about Marvel or DC or Star Wars did better. So make more of those. Everyone wanted the podcast where everyone speculated about casting and story and what was coming next and how awesome it was going to be. Celebrating a thing became celebrating the celebration of a thing. And the franchises did movies and tv and comics and books. There was as much to discuss as you could, and with things like ‘Who’s Snoke’ and other such mystery box BS and the post-credits scene along with the mid-credit scene of course, as much to speculate on too.

Good times, people getting paid to just obsess about something they loved. “Nerd culture” they called it. But there was a way to put some extra flavor in this views buffet: drama. The Marvel vs DC thing was the best example. DC would accuse Marvel of being for babies, being immature and full of corny jokes. Marvel would accuse DC movies of being bad, hopeless, visually dark, and badly written. Then everyone would show up for the bickering and add their 2 cents in the comments section. As everyone has learned, negativity and drama sell and increase engagement.

It was truly an orgy of content, still relatively friendly and normal. Yeah, it was a good time. But so is a crystal meth addiction. Neither are sustainable. The high couldn’t last forever, and what would we do to chase it? Those sweet clicks, those views, the engagement, the checks from boner pill and gambling companies for the ads, the Patreon subscribers. This was a bull market, but when the crash came, how could you keep that high?

The Last Jedi, Endgame, and the Pandemic

The Last Jedi, the movie that broke Movie YouTube. The Last Jedi came out in 2017, almost a decade ago. You can find YouTube videos, made by guys way too old to have opinions that strong about a PG franchise whose creator says is “for 12 year olds”, that are over an hour long, that came out within the last 6 months. Do you understand that? Middle-aged men are still so angry about a nearly decade old movie for children, that they’re spending hours putting together a long video breaking down their tired, corny, rehashed-a-million-times critiques about The Last Jedi, a movie with a huge box office and a great rotten tomatoes score, and followed by a worse film.

But why pick on these losers? Why turn over a rock and shine a light on these clearly mentally disturbed individuals? Well, these videos have hundreds of thousands of views. And I don’t mean the ones from 2017. I’m saying if you put out a YouTube video over an hour long about how Kathleen Kennedy and Rian Johnson “RUINED” Star Wars and “FAILED”, you could easily get hundreds of thousands of views. You don’t need anything original. You don’t even really need to repeat anything insightful. You don’t need to be skilled at editing or have a professional mic. Just make a bunch of bland observations, claim there are ‘plotholes’, claim there is no ‘character development’. Just use buzzwords you’ve heard in other reviews. But then also mix in subjective meaningless words like it wasn’t ‘engaging’ or ‘satisfying’, without any seeming awareness that they’re just meaningless without more context. All you have to do is hate something, doesn’t matter if it isn’t even authentic or interesting or original, there is an audience for your hate. The algorithm says this makes money, go get it.

This is when movie YouTube realized: yes, you can get views by loving something, and you can get more if you hate a different thing and make it a contest or a battle, but hell, circle around and hate the things that you like, just put that tail right in the snakes mouth and you’ll eat forever. This was the stealing money out of your mom’s purse to get your fix moment. Where it got cynical, transparent. Again, not because some people didn’t like the movie, but because some people realized this hate was a bottomless money pit you could mine for a decade. You could make videos about every actor and production person, not just the movie itself, you could make a video about every tweet they make. Didn’t matter how frequent, or how lazy, how unoriginal or uninsightful, or how much time had gone by, just keep producing content that checks the boxes.

Then came Avengers: Endgame. Between The Last Jedi and Endgame, there became this thing where Movie YouTubers would kind of fight eachother. If you liked a movie, you were a “shill”, a word that was used quite a lot at the time. So the fandom wars started to be between the people who hated everything and the people who liked anything. These aren’t hipsters who like indie films, they only talk about fandom content. People who were just nakedly chasing money by hating everything would spin everyone else as the sellouts. The others would sometimes try to ignore them, and sometimes try to push back, but pushing back just led to more. Not unlike someone like Joe Rogan, the people who seemed the most powerful, the most influential, the most willing to do or say anything for money and influence, were still somehow perceiving themselves as the outsiders, the “Honest”, as opposed to “Hollywood”.

But the reason Endgame is so important is because it was generally well liked, but that was the high-water mark for that part of the movie industry, and that part of Movie YouTube, the “nerds” were done. Endgame was the culmination of something that began before everything got so cynical. People saw Iron Man 2 and just went, “Meh, wasn’t as good as the first” and moved on with their lives. People’s livelihoods didn’t depend on producing content about how Iron Man was “RUINED” or how it “FAILED” yet. Endgame carried some of that goodwill forward from the beforetime. There’s a Joe Biden analogy in there somewhere. But once Endgame’s credits wrapped, that goodwill wouldn’t carry over to Marvel’s next phase.

But this wasn’t enough, there was one more thing needed to really destroy Movie YouTube and turn it into a transparently cynical mound of BS whose stench was a horrific mix of nerdhate overcome only by whatever not wanting to get a real job smells like.

That’s right, you can’t talk about how awful modern life is, every single element, without talking about the pandemic. The pandemic reduced the number of movies and the people going to them. How do you make content about movies if nobody is making movies? And then the movies that do come out, nobody goes to them. This burned off much of what was left of any part of Movie YouTube that wasn’t just chasing algorithms. You can’t talk about movie news when there’s no movie news. But you can revisit why you hate The Last Jedi. But is that enough? When movies are dead how can you keep cynically chasing algorithms on your movie channel? If only there was something, full of hate and fury, where people are always desperate to hear someone who shares their opinion, even an absolute moron, that wasn’t diminished or put out of focus because of the pandemic, but even that was emphasized, made more loud, more a constant irritating part of our lives. There was, it was politics.

This was around when Movie YouTube became just a culture war proxy, or as the cash register says: Ch-ching. Yeah, it’s easy to have integrity when your D23 breakdown video gets half a million views. But when you’re starving, compromises get made. If they aren’t made, you struggle, and you might get replaced by someone who couldn’t wait to make those compromises. And Movie YouTube, not unlike the NRA or Christianity, got absorbed and coopted by culture war BS, and like everything the culture war BS touches, it became dumb and boring and mean and something to be avoided.

On a Scale of 1-10, How Woke Was It?

This is the final form, the great dumb@$$ butterfly that emerged to fly off with all our fun. These are the people who feel personally attacked at the sight of non-white people, LGBTQ people, non-christian people, and women in non-romantic roles. I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about.

Now, keep in mind, this doesn’t have anything to do with the particular politics of YouTubers, this is about Movie YouTube making everything about their particular politics. As I mentioned earlier, these sellouts tend to accuse everyone else of selling out. Well, similarly, these people who project their politics onto everything, also always accuse everyone else of making things “political”. “Political” of course might mean actually having a specific political message, but could also mean just having a bland, previously universally agreed upon, political message like how Star Wars makes imperialism or Indiana Jones makes Nazis the bad guys, and it could also just mean making them look at someone who isn’t a white guy for too long. Often, it’s just that and then cutesy pretzeling rationalizations about how it’s more than that or different than that, when it really seems like it’s just about that.

Here’s an example. I saw a YouTube video about the Netflix show, One Piece, the live action one. Now, I know this is a tv show based on Japanese anime based on a Japanese manga, but that doesn’t matter, because movies don’t matter anymore, it’s no longer about movies. It’s about a review that asks “How woke was it?”

Now, this reviewer liked the One Piece show. Not coincidentally, he decided it was not “woke”, and furthermore, “Hollywood” could learn something from this not woke show that costs millions of dollars per episode and is made by Netflix. If you haven’t seen One Piece, nobody in its main cast is an American white man. The lead actor can barely speak English. If you know anything about the One Piece cartoon or manga, it has maybe more trans representation than any piece of fiction ever written. It’s what a moron might call…woke.

So, this review didn’t need to include the phrase “woke” at all. He just crowbarred it in there. He did that because that’s how you chase views. He didn’t have any strong take on its wokeness. He just mentioned it like it was a requirement to do so, like it was some category by which you evaluate fiction.

If you need further evidence that this is disingenuous, look no further than recent grifting about the Odyssey. This one really brought every grifter in Movie YouTube, from the racist to the homophobic, a rainbow coalition of irrational hatred, to the table. They were mad about the prospect of having to look at black women and a trans person. Of course, they dressed that up about ‘history’. When people pointed out that the Odyssey is not history but fiction, and it wasn’t even written in the bronze age, so the source material isn’t even historically accurate, they acted like that was trivial, reality is apparently a minor consideration to people who are claiming they’re motivated not by bigotry but by reality. Ok. So then, do you think they were upset by Matt Damon and Jon Bernthal, an Irishman and a Jew, playing Greeks? Well, my friend, the answer is no.

Why did these people, obsessed with “historical accuracy” and how it required there to be no black women or trans actors on screen, not have any issue with the fact that nobody spoke Greek at all? Well, maybe, because the culture wars don’t care about the ethnic and culture differences among straight white people. And so, we can conclude then, that because they seemingly cherry picked what to demand historical accuracy from, and those happened to be the same category of things that, not movie criticism demands movies meet but, culture war dorks are told on twitter to care about, that this isn’t movie criticism at all.

The internet has plenty of people dunking on Odyssey grifters following its big box office and huge critical reception, and likely Oscars as of some time after this article posts. This isn’t about their transparent grift, their hypocrisy, or their politics. This about something that used to be organic, that used to be genuine movie critiques, that evolved in its understanding of how an online business works, and chasing the money, ultimately lead to the degradation of Movie YouTube, its quality and its influence.

The viewers of these channels are now largely no longer people who just like movies, looking to get a sense of what is worth seeing. They’re not looking for anything at all. They’re just being fed what they want to eat. That’s why there’s this cynical attempt to do this cutesy anti-“woke” routine all over any movie, but even more subtle things like putting “honest” in your review or “Hollywood” in your essay. These are signals to people that you will feed them what they want to eat. If you’re incapable of comprehending people having different opinions of you and you imagine conspiracies to explain that you have bad opinions, click on the “honest” review. They will tell you the audience score on rotten tomatoes is the real deal, not the critic score. And honesty is not important, being told the audience score is the real deal on rotten tomatoes, not the critic score, by someone who has probably participated in review-bombing an audience score, is what is important.

Fighting the Future

What I’m getting at is not totally unique to Movie YouTube, but media in general and the impact of the internet on it. For better or worse, you no longer need to be capable of mass appeal. The goal is to be as hyper-niche as possible. Where once there were only so many options, so you had to be reasonably enjoyable and interesting to everyone, now you really need to be a few people’s favorite thing ever, and unknown to everyone else, or even better if you’re hated by a few people too. It’s no longer the time of monoculture or sitcoms with tens of millions of viewers. It’s the time of Patreon, where a few people like your stuff so much they pay you for it, even though they can get it for free.

Now, there’s a balance of course, but we may have sailed past the sweet spot. It moved past “democratized” or “decentralized” and has kind of turned into a machine designed to endlessly create the thing you already like and think and feel and want. The irony though is that there is something repellant about that. If variety is the spice of life, have we not taken that part of life away? Have we not made things just so transparently cynical, just so base as to degrade ourselves to dogs begging for treats? It’s this weird utopia problem we’ve created. We can eat our favorite food every day, but would anyone not get sick of that?

I’ve seen videos from DC Gunn fans, calling out commenters and specific twitter accounts for DC Snyder fans who wanted Superman to fail. The conversations have gotten hyper-niche here. Andor had an assault scene and the conversation became as much about that scene as one specific YouTuber who insisted “Vader would never allow that” and making fun of him for apparently holding himself out as an authority on Star Wars, while having some level of knowledge about trivia but failing to understand one of the core and least subtle messages of Star Wars: fascism is bad. Vader literally kills children. But the point is, this is not even trying to be for a broad audience who just wants to hear a conversation about movies on their lunchbreak. It’s about feeding the slop to people who are entrenched, who have an agenda, who’ve been on the battlefield and are looking to celebrate any irrelevant advance against their perceived enemies, who like and comment and watch most or all of your redundant stuff, unless you deviate from the formula, even if they don’t watch the whole thing, they might even comment on the videos of your enemies, knowing it helps the engagement but still unable to help themselves.

So, why is this so unsatisfying? If people have discovered what we like and are stumbling over themselves to give us what we want, why is this grubby stampede to shove what I want into my face and validate all my feelings so miserable? I alluded to this before with my ‘variety is the spice of life’ comment, but there’s a point at which things lose their romance, where you start to feel like a chicken on a factory farm broken down to your base needs, delivered in order to extract from you whatever it is that is needed from you. It makes you feel like you’re in one of those tubes in the Matrix, shaved down and filled with tubes in turn. Sure, you can use this as an analogy for many elements of capitalism or commerce, but when it crosses a line and starts to feel less like an analogy and more literal, that’s not something any advertising exec would put in a commercial, whatever you’re selling becomes tainted with the knowledge that the people making it see you so transactionally, as a button to push that spits out money for them.

Let’s say you like taco bell. You go there for lunch. You go there every day for lunch and get the same thing. Eventually, no matter how much you like tacos, you’re going to cross a threshold beyond which you no longer taste tacos. You will taste the sandy beef, the rubbery tortilla, the dry cheese strands, the tomato cubes, and the lettuce rectangles. You will feel the component parts bouncing around in your mouth and you’ll think of the employee you see there every day, the soda fountain that doesn’t have ice. You’ll think of the idiot that owns the franchise and throws his weight around at the country club. You’ll wonder what kind of machine cuts tomatoes into cubes or what kind of lettuce can be cut into rectangles and what third world country it is grown in by what underpaid population before being swept up in an epic globalized sterilized refrigerated perfect supply chain to make sure your lunch tastes the exact same every day. You’ll wonder a lot of things, and eventually, you’ll wonder if there’s more to life than tacos.

The whole point of film criticism is to get a sense of how good something is with as much objectivity as possible, so you can determine if you want to see it, or simply to get some insights into a movie you’re interested in and have seen. Being fed the same opinions about the same movies over and over, even if you like those opinions, is not consistent with either of those purposes.

You’ll catch a lot of Uncs these days extolling the virtues of channel surfing. the buffet style restaurant of entertainment that exists now mostly in motels. Choice alone has value. Randomness alone has value. Variety alone has value. The excitement that comes with hearing a new idea or a new thing. There is depth to be gained even from experiencing something you think was done badly, it helps you understand yourself and the thing in general better. There is value in discovering something, and in feeling like you found it, when something is yours. At 2am, finding a music video on MTV2, of a band you never heard of singing a song that you can barely comprehend but need to understand because something about it scratches an itch you didn’t know you had. With the algorithm driven hyper-niche world we live in now, those itches remain unscratched and even unknown. So no matter how sick you get of this taco bell, you’re stuck with it, you can’t just change your mind, or change the channel, you have to change the algorithm, where even choice has been taken away from you. The awareness of the algorithm itself is an insult, even more than the algorithm alone is an insult, because when it’s so obvious it feels a little less like someone making fun of you behind your back, and more to your face, which adds the fact that this person insulting you also thinks that they can insult you to your face without consequence, that you’ll just take it, which makes it harder to do so.

So, what can we do? Am I just complaining? How can we fix society? Well, think of it like the environment. To really solve the issue would take action on a large scale, difficult and even beyond our control. We can push for it, whatever form that might be, from corporations or regulatory bodies. But on an individual level, you can save yourself even if not society. Simply, don’t engage with the crappiest elements, we know the signs, avoid the grifters, not just the ones you don’t like, but also, even especially, the ones you do. This is not to say people can’t have opinions, but opinions are different than agendas. You can also seek variety, rather than letting the homepage feed dictate what you see, search for a movie name and the word review, watch some randomly. Look for lists of movies, opinion aggregators, those can help cut through blind spots. Just don’t be lazy, you can figure it out, it’s more will than skill. Instead of holding out your hand and grabbing what is put in it, even if you like it, force yourself to look around and grab something yourself, maybe you’ll still pick what you like, but the simple act of looking around will expose you to everything else.

I’ll leave you with this. I know someone who often complains to me about how to get news. He senses that all these streamers and YouTubers and channels are pushing agendas, very transparently, cynically (word I’ve used often). He also senses that the product is degraded, mechanical, flavorless, empty, that it’s not really substantive, and its not. I explained to him that there’s a reporter who finds the story or a journalist who puts that in a newspaper, then that gets picked up by the evening news, then that makes the round on cable news in the daytime shows, and then the evening shows on cable news, then political YouTubers react to that and then talk about that, and then the streamers react to that. By the time this person watches a streamer talk about the news, they are not only listening to a moron, but something that has been filtered through half a dozen morons. So, where can you get news? Well, have you tried the news? The news still exists. And sure, the ‘mainstream media’ is bad, right? That’s what the YouTubers and Streamers tell you, but aren’t they a little biased? When is the last time they, or you, read a newspaper?

Cable, magazines, newspapers, they all still exist. Maybe if you think news is boring in those forms, then maybe you don’t actually care about the news that much, maybe you don’t like movies that much. If you need to receive information or entertainment in such a way it becomes shallow and stupid, and you recognize that to be the case, but you can’t engage with it any other way, then maybe you don’t actually like it that much. You don’t have to have opinions on movie or news or medicine or whatever it is. If you do like it, then you should probably be able to muster up interest in something that’s a little more dry maybe, but with a lot more substance.

You don’t have to go back to the old ways. You don’t need to call up Time-Warner Cable. You can approximate them however. Search for topics, not angles. Don’t be loyal to specific channels, especially if they push certain angles. Recognize the patterns, the buzzwords. You can find anything with that search bar, grab that steering wheel yourself. Follow the bland and the boring as well. Give the algorithm a nice base. Follow the bland, straight news, anything with a minimum level of quality control or professionalism. Teach the algorithm that you’re interested in topics, not agendas, in opinions, not an opinion. The algorithm will give you the angles and agendas, don’t worry about that, you’re never going to lose that, just make sure that’s not all you get. You can figure it out. Recognize your enemy and fight it. If enough of us do so, who knows, maybe quality will overcome volume once again and we’ll incentivize quality, but until then, we’ll have to fight for it, and what quality is you’ll only find by searching, even after you think you’ve found it.

More of a pep talk than a solution you might say, but if there was an algorithm for authenticity, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation, now would we?

by Zack Goncz

Read more at Substack or Medium