When did you start to feel "modern media sucks?"

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strumpets exeunt dijo:
Terminator: Dark Fate - 2019
I refuse to type anything other than "fuck this movie," because that's exactly the way the movie feels about me as the viewer.
Movies' message: We hate you in particular.
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It was a special kind of We hate you in particular message. It's message is that AI that wants to exterminate humanity is inevitable no matter how much you try to stop it and any action of good robots is inevitably pointless. That everyone is replaceable and disposable including the most important person in the world and when you die your own mother will grow to resent that she had you and will no longer love you despite once sacrificing everything to take care for you. How dare America have border security and a foreigner can easily replace your role on this planet.
 
There are different eras when the rot began to set in. Each sector of entertainment falling one after the other.

You could feel a shift post 2008 in a lot of media. Everything began to be toned down from the previous decade's raunchiness. Superhero movies were beginning to take hold. But hadn't degraded to the Marvel slop we all know and loathe today. Prestige tv carried the early 2010s but post Trump they all quickly went to shit. Movies fell soon after that....like maybe a week.

Publishing has been going to hell for about 15 years. Look in a Barnes and Noble and look how much of those stores has been turned into knick knacks. There used to be a market for casual reader novels, or 'Dad' novels like Tom Clancy books. Now you go in and it's a sea of slop. Most publishers have admitted they live off their back catalogues and very few new novels earn out.

AAA gaming went off a cliff in 2018 and now everything is an open world world movie game featuring a 'strong' female lead that is also a lesbian.

I'm gonna say it is when Millennials started getting writing gigs. My generation has been putting out slop for nearly two decades at this point. Millennial writing is garbage.
 
OutInTheRain dijo:
I'm gonna say it is when Millennials started getting writing gigs. My generation has been putting out slop for nearly two decades at this point. Millennial writing is garbage.
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That is a large part of it, with the faux deep, forced quirkiness/4th wall breaking, unsubtled political leanings placed into the mouths of characters.

The writing, along with the rise of social media, the decentralization of media consumption, and the HR-ification of games and anime is why the mid 2010s was when I started to think that modern media sucks.
 
Old King Koaleamos dijo:
I've seen some niggers whining about how City Pop took off due to youtube algorithms and they think it's unfair that it hasn't magically made everyone love urban nigger music.
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Well, City Pop definitely qualifies as oldies that feel new because they weren't played in America. Rap is so astroturfed and is a musical mess. It's yet another case of 20th century music mogging 21th century music. We're a quarter of a way through this century; it should have its own musical identity by now. This is not to devalue the works of modern composers and arrangers, but I don't look in the West for a strong, healthy music scene.

Anyways, movies started to suck around 2009. Abrams Trek was the start of me questioning the quality of movies and that skepticism was proven right by Into Darkness, Total Recall Remake, and Robocop 2014. Now, movies weren't exactly woke at that time, but they were pale imitations of greater movies that inspired them. They lacked inspiration or a willingness to follow through on the story premises it introduced. Into Darkness could have been a decent, gritty war movie like Yesterday's Enterprise or Space Battleship Yamato if they were written by adults who knew how to write characters and plots. Instead, it was incomprehensible garbage. Woke brought its own brand of insanity to already ailing movies and made them unwatchable by 2016.

Games have fared the best out of them because Woke has a hard time penetrating video games. There are many reasons why this is the case, so I will state that games are more like exercises in programming and psychology while movies require English and the language arts. One is an applied form of a social science while the other is about generating BS. So, its decline is localized to the Western industry while it's got to compete with Korea, Japan, and China. There's too much market competition in gaming that wokeness gets punished before it can even take off. I'd put it at around 2017 when bad video games became more noticeable.
 
I'm not really able to put a date to it, but media started to become truly terrible around when producers decided they wanted bigger and bigger audiences at the cost of everything else.

Just for napkin math, if there're a total of 10 million horror fans, making a horror movie has a pretty stiff upper limit of how much money it can make with a little margin for error in people trying out something new or whatever. But wait, if we add some political thriller elements, we've just grown the potential audience by another 10 million. Let's have the writer for a hit modern TV show do the script, and now we're getting their audience of 20 million too. This is a can't lose proposition, we're going to buy entirely new mansions just to store the pallets of cash we're going to make with this.

But then that ignores how the original audience is driven away, and even if the math proves to be correct it's the kind of trick that you can only perform once; everything is too spread thin to really retain an audience or gather than kind of elusive long tail word of mouth campaign.

And it feels like this kind of thinking really went into overdrive within the last ten or twenty years; first with trying to get into the Chinese market so now everything has to be edited and censored to please chinks, and then with the huge diversity push to similarly try to pick up the urban market. The natural identity for a lot of movies is whittled down further and further; a new horror movie comes out, do I as a horror fan want to see it? Probably not until viewer reviews are in and I know whether it's a horror movie or an action movie with jumpscares or if they cut out all the ghosts in editing because Chang is more superstitious than a 1920s pickaninny.

It happens in other forms of media, too. If audiences for country music are shrinking, is it worth considering that audiences naturally grow and shrink over time and this is a period for tightening the belt and finding other ways to boost engagement or revenue? Absolutely not, it's time to autotune the fuck out of the music until it sounds like a guitar delivery accidentally got dropped off at Bad Boy Records studio.
 
Drag-on Knight 91873 dijo:
Robocop 2014. Now, movies weren't exactly woke at that time, but they were pale imitations of greater movies that inspired them. T
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I was very disappointed in Rubbercup when they had the easy joke set up of "nobody using our service has died" and they didn't notify them of termination of service immediately before their deaths
 
OutInTheRain dijo:
I'm gonna say it is when Millennials started getting writing gigs. My generation has been putting out slop for nearly two decades at this point. Millennial writing is garbage.
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I keep saying it, but I really should look into Buffy and Scream sometime. Buffy especially being patient zero for what would become millennial writing.

Illumithotty dijo:
But then that ignores how the original audience is driven away, and even if the math proves to be correct it's the kind of trick that you can only perform once; everything is too spread thin to really retain an audience or gather than kind of elusive long tail word of mouth campaign.
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Sorry if I repeat myself, a few topics recently had overlapping answers.

For me, it was Fuse and Dead Space 3. Fuse was originally a pixar inspired action comedy game, but was focus tested into a bland gears of war/call of duty clone. Dead Space 3 took a horror game, and made it into a co-op action game with pay 2 win. It wasn't a natural growth like Resident Evil either. It was a cynical attempt to make Dead Space into a mainstream action game like Halo and Gears of War.
 
The Xbox 360/PS3 era killed my interest in AAA games. This was the first generation of gaming where arcade games had close to 0 influence on game design, and it shows. No more snappy movement, no juicy sound effects, no more effort put into amazing physics, and no consideration of "how can we make the gameplay loop more fun?" outside of rewards based meta progression. This is the true beginning of graphics taking precedence over everything else. This is also when you see the end of games massively influenced by real artistic movements IRL, so no more character designers like Tetsuya Nomura who are obsessed with fashion IRL and design characters based off Shibuya street fashion, and no more composers like Soichi Terada who are actually part of an interesting music scene and give the games that flair. Games were increasingly designed top-down by execs and unique artistic decisions were verboten. DLC and microtransactions goes without saying. There's not going to be a huge wave of late 2000's gaming nostalgia because those games were mediocre compared to Y2K.
 
One thing I'm gonna add is that for me, the Cutoff Date is different for each form of media.

Literature, for example--it can depend on genre, but this is a case where most books were bad before I ever began reading, and I only found this out retroactively. Basically, any novels of the 1990s are likely a huge step down from the 1980s, which just in my experience are a huge step down from the novels of prior decades--with 20s to 60s being perhaps the high point.

I already talked about video games, altho I do still find occasional good ones.

I think I already mentioned I started hating Western Animation around 2000 and Anime around 2010 (tho I can still find anime that doesn't suck. I can't say the same for western animation except for maybe Asterix movies).

(And even though it should be clear since I said "western animation" I mean the animated Asterix movies--I haven't even bothered watching the live-action ones).
 
skykiii dijo:
Literature, for example--it can depend on genre, but this is a case where most books were bad before I ever began reading, and I only found this out retroactively. Basically, any novels of the 1990s are likely a huge step down from the 1980s, which just in my experience are a huge step down from the novels of prior decades--with 20s to 60s being perhaps the high point.
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I feel like once the older generations of writers just started dying off and retiring, the genres seem to kinda stall. Especially with the fading away of those who were professional writers for entertainment (I.E. mass market paperbacks, the late 20th century equivalent to pulps). For SF, it's been spiraling down a drain. Crime seems to stick around due to the plethora of writers. Don't know much about fantasy, but with Gaiman being "unpersoned" and Martin being old and obese, there's not too much hope left. Sanderson sold out. It seems the great hopes of normal genre fiction rest on a handful of passionate and skilled writers that should get attention before all the remaining older mainstays die off. It seems traditional publishing is fucking dying due to incompetence.

The good news is that there's always a burgeoning indie scene full of passion. The issue is wrangling such a scene.

For comics, I'm putting my death knell cutoff with the early 2010s. It was already on a decline, but DC's New 52 and Disney-Marvel's buffoonery with AvX just killed so much potential. We still had potential, but it seemed to get strangled in the crib.
 
One other thing that comes to mind, although it's not media, is that I also noticed that cars started to get suckier in the mid-to-late 2010s. The mid 2010s is when the crossover boom started, which lead to sedans, wagons, and vans being phased out. Cars were also being built on "modular platforms" to cut costs, but made them more generic. Car exterior designs became more bloblike for aerodynamic purposes to improve MPGs. Powertrains also began to suck when they started to go to downsized 4-cylinder (or even 3-cylinder) Turbo engines with additional annoying tech like Continously Variable Transmissions (drive a Nissan car and you'll understand why CVTs are a plague in the auto industry and suck), cylinder deactivation, and Auto Start-Stop.

The other notable jump in cars sucking was when the Chinese brands started popping up to make shitty ass EVs in the 2020s, shortly after Tesla opened up a Superfactory in China. They are mostly rip-offs of Teslas, with the same bloblike exteriors, and minimalist interiors with a screen as the gauge cluster, a GIANT ASS INFOTAINMENT SCREEN in the center, and very few physical controls. The fact that almost EVERY NEW CHINESE CAR BEING MADE today has this same interior setup is absolutely dystopian, and there are people outside of China that actually WANT these:

Buick Electra L7
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NIO ES8
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Huawei (yes, the phone company) Aito M7
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XPeng P7
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Xiaomi (yes, this phone company too) SU7 Ultra
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In addition, Chinese EVs have had numerous incidents of catching fire, their autopilot systems suck, they cost much more to insure than ICE cars, and sometimes you can't even get service for them.
 
It all went downhill when papyrus was invented and replaced our good old stone tablets. I knew back then that this was a bad idea but no one listened.
 
What about Andy Weir? He seems to be the only writer I hear about these days since The Martian exploded.

Old King Koaleamos dijo:
Especially with the fading away of those who were professional writers for entertainment (I.E. mass market paperbacks, the late 20th century equivalent to pulps).
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I'm still convinced that YA fiction being popular with over 30s during the 10s was because of this. I'm told that there's no shortage of such material, but when I ask, I get blank stares and maybe a vague gesture towards 40k. I assume women are well served because the old ladies I know always seem to be trading books around.

Thiletonomics dijo:
GIANT ASS INFOTAINMENT SCREEN
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It always baffles me that the Citron Ami, a car that was meant to be the affordable EV for the masses, put a glass roof and a massive infotainment system in. The car was so minimal that it had no interior door handles, just straps. I've been told that noone wants an affordable runabout, but I call bullshit. The huge uptick in 125 scooters shows that there's young people who need a cheap runabout for work.

And yes, every car seems to be the same SUV, but with a different badge. Okay, that's not true. There's also the drug dealers and indians who drive audi's. But those are basically 95% of cars I see now.
 
Judge Dredd dijo:
What about Andy Weir?
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The issue with Weir is he’s only put out like two books in over a decade, and the books he does put out are “it’s ‘hard-sci-fi because I googled the math formulas,” as opposed to the only modern alternatives of “sci-fi concept as a backdrop for awful character drama” or “fantasy with lasers.” The fucking dire state sci-fi is in post-Star Wars is depressing.
 
Not in a general sense per se, but i gave up on watching absolutely fucking anything from a streaming service because i got tired of this shit where showrunners use the whole first season of a show as setup, ending with an insulting cliffhanger insinuating that the shit you actually tuned in for will come out next year or later in later seasons.

I'm not a zoomer. I don't "binge". I don't put stuff on and watch it as "background noise" while multitasking. I like to sit down, immerse myself in whatever is playing, and i expect a consistent beginning, middle, and end to the flick or series i'm watching. If your show is called "Zombie Apocalypse", and your first season ends with the floodgates finally creaking open before abruptly cutting to black, i'm never watching your shit again. Fuck you.
 
Psyduck dijo:
i gave up on watching absolutely fucking anything from a streaming service
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Aside from "social justice" and that "brain rot" from "smartphones" with "social media", another way modern media sucks more is the move away from over-the-air broadcast and physical copies... and towards "DLC" this and "subscription" that and "streaming" this. Like back in the day, one could watch the newest Futurama on FOX, on broadcast TV. To see the latest episodes now, you gotta "subscribe to Hulu" or whatever, and watch it on a "smart TV" or a "smartphone" or something. And I doubt one can record what is seen.
 
I don’t personally think ALL modern media sucks now. But, in my eyes there was a noticeable paradigm shift around 2014. In 2014, we saw the rise of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu and such, but they hadn’t really taken over the entertainment industry completely. At the time there was just Netflix and Hulu that were the big ones and they had extensive libraries as well as a $7 a month price that was hard to beat. Movie theaters were still doing alright but the big studios saw the success of the MCU and tried to copy the winning formula to varying degrees of success. So, in turn the more modestly budgeted movies that were riskier began to fade out as companies started playing safe on well established IPs which would only worsen after the success of Star Wars episode 7 and jurrasic world came out the next year and the franchise soft reboots took over the big budget film industry. There were still some good movies being made but they could hardly compete with the big studios and just ended up going to streaming.

When looking at the video game industry, 2014 was the year gamergate happened and forever fucked the industry. Video games went from a fun hobby to a battleground of a retarded culture war with the effects still being felt today as I’m sure you all know. Even putting gamergate aside, after the Xbone and PS4 released the enshittification of AAA games ensued. Budgets ballooned, new releases slowed, exclusives (mostly on Xbox) tanked, AAA companies doubled down on the microtransactions, and more and more games were being released in an unfinished state to meet shareholder deadlines. Personally, I also started to notice around 2014 lobbies in COD and other games voice chatting became less common than in the peak days of early Xbox live and PSN. The old video game culture of trash talk can seem toxic to people today but I also made friends with complete strangers on those old cod and halo lobby voice chats. For every person calling you a nigger you also had the chance to meet someone cool.

I will say however, there are still great games and movies coming out but they tend to fly under the radar. Quality games are released by indie devs and AA studios like RGG studios that consistently make banger games year after year. American Hollywood studios are in a nasty rut but we’ve been seeing a huge rise in foreign films from Asian countries. I’d also argue the great films of old may not be new today but if you’re seeing them for the first time they’re new to you and totally worth exploring. I haven’t personally watched a big studio movie from Hollywood since i was dragged along to Spider-Man no way home with some friends. But, I’ve watched some amazing old movies from Japan, the USSR, France, Italy, and the UK.
 
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