Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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When guys brag to me about the speed they listen to podcasts and youtube videos, I think of the Woody Allen joke: I took a course in speed reading and I got so good I read War and Peace in two hours. It's about Russia.
When you say that you are confident that quality is down across the board, have you tried watching some real trash from the past? Marathon The Nanny or Yes, Dear (as a very tired and pregnant Mrs. FiveHour has recently), listen to the top-40 straight through from a few random weeks in the 80s and 90s, drive a Ford Taurus and a Chevy Cavalier from 1998, and tell me again how everything is getting worse.
I think what's breaking down is less that things are worse, as that the selection channels and mechanisms we used to use are getting worse. You talk about Steam search being useless, I think that's become a problem across domains. Quality clothing has never been cheaper or easier to find, but it's also the case that you can't just rely on spending money anymore, buying high cost brands does not guarantee anything anymore. Netflix and HBO used to exclusively produce good stuff, every time they made an original it was something I wanted to watch, now they mostly make trash.
There was lots of trash in the past, but it used to be easier to find the good stuff. Or maybe I've lost the plot and can't find it.
When stimulants (coffee, energy drinks, etc) kick in, I can do x3-4 times speed if the speaker is clear enough in their pronounciation and I'm already somewhat familiar with the topic. But Tiktok kids can also focus at animations which would give adults headaches, so I've likely just conditioned myself into needing external stimulation.
I remember the past well enough. There's a strong.. Concensus I supposed you'd call it, that our view of the past is warped by nostalgia and selection effects, role-tinted glasses, and biases. I have to disagree as I was there. It was a pretty big deal with DLCs started becoming a thing, people considered downloadable content which cost money to be unacceptable unless it gave as much content as an entire expansion pack. Now we've lowered our standards, so we think things like "Well, 500$ microtransactions are fine, as long as the pay-to-win isn't too strong, and as long as the base game is free".
I don't know what is causing people to retroactively project their current views onto the past and act like nothing changed. The people who go around being offended by calling things "lame", "gay" or "retarded" used these words in the past themselves when it was considered acceptable, and they don't even acknowledge it. That seems like another topic, but I think it shows that the human brain has a way to force a consistent self-image which then warps the past to fit, or something akin to that.
By getting worse, I mean like how Homer Simpson was considered comically obese originally. Now he's quite average, and the frogs boiling in the pot do not consider anything wrong, they don't even notice. You're absolutely correct that the past had poor content as well, but I think our standards are falling in many ways. Perhaps it falling in some dimentions and rising in others, but I think it averages out to "falling".
Search being bad has indeed become a problem in general. Algorithms are not made to give people what they ask for. And even so-called intelligent people make stupid design decisions with their voting system. For instance, even lesswrong defaults to showing users the most popular content, and since it's the most popular content, it also gets the most votes, meaning that it becomes even more popular. This self-reinforcing effect is what creates the phenomenon of "viral content". The systems created to help users find "better content, faster" created metrics which could be exploited with ease. For instance, websites which also allows for "subscribers" will have their users get notified when new content is created. The algorithm then sees "This new content has only existed for 5 minutes but 20 people have already seen it, it must be high quality" and then it promotes it, and it goes viral. Other people learn of these 'tricks' and then it becomes a competition in gaming metrics, rather than a competition in providing quality.
I have limited knowledge on the topic, but I believe that most new clothing (and shoes too) are made of plastic. But the point you might be making, and I think this one is true, is that there's less outliers in both directions now. Everything is becoming more average.
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