which phenomenally popular american entertainment institution would you most like to see come to a sudden end by 2023

The MCU is the hardest to ignore.

Of the first bad five.

You left off Youtube.

easily social media, just because i have that terrible thing where i hate what i'm closest to

feel free to roll in youtube to streaming video or social media as you believe it best slots

easily social media
easily social media
easily social media

NFL - as an englisher i dgaf about this but also i know it's bad
Marvel Cinematic Universe - happy for other people to enjoy this but while it's at the centre of our cultural life it's also bad
Broadway Musical Theater - not for me, easily ignored
True Crime Podcasts - as somebody who makes something that is technically a podcast, 95% of these can fuck right off
Social Media: Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc - well yes, of course
Streaming Video: Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/etc - i don't sign up for any of these, if they keep producing content I can torrent then idk
Streaming Music: Spotify/Apple/Amazon/etc - can see the point of this more than most of the others, but it all needs to be burnt to the ground asap.

i really should have left off social media, it's hardly fair

Probably could have augmented the MCU w/Disney everything.

Broadway Musical Theater - not for me, easily ignored

otm - even when i lived somewhat near this, i never even noticed it

I'm know I'd feel much differently if I were a musician, but I wouldn't want YouTube to go away.

i’m voting for the nfl. write-in vote for the wwe :)

Youtube is so essential to my son with autism and I imagine many others like him. It's his only media really and he's got very good at narrowing his account down to his interests and navigating through it without being able to type anything in the search.

voted MCU because it's fucking shite!

I hate football, and I don’t give a shit about Marvel movies, but they seem to make lots of people happy, so I’m content to just write off both as “not for me.” Social media actively makes the world a worse place, though, so that’s the obvious choice here.

Had it been an option, cable news might have gotten my vote.

Closing down the NFL would mean directly saving a relatively small group of people from repeated brain damage and a terrible early death. Closing down social media would probably prevent harm to a lot more people but in a more indirect way that's harder to estimate. Difficult choice.

The NFL has direct physical harm along with a military fetish, and racists love the game but hate it when the players get "uppity".

That's most American team sports tho.

It might be a silly question from a foreigner but why NFL and not MLB and NBA ?

And isn’t Spotify swedish ?

XP There's been a recent controversy about Racism and the cover-up of in the NFL, with the Vegas coach resigning over language in leaked emails which apparently are the tip of the iceberg and could theoretically bring down many others on the business side of things.

Also: Kaepernick

Aside from one bad concussion every few years, the long-term physical and mental damage of baseball and basketball are pretty much nonexistent in comparison to football.

A catcher with a long career might need a hip replacement down the line but he'll still remember his kids' names.

I was just writing the same thing:

Football causes a lot more physical harm than baseball or basketball; you're basically watching people get brain-damaged for your amusement, so there's a gladiatorial element to it that isn't present in other sports.

I'd say yer mixed martial arts stuff and pro wrestling can be lumped into shameful pile with the NFL. Both of them have the equal mix of exploitation and rightwing BS tied all up in their culture. And I say this as a lifetime fan of football and someone that grew up playing the game.

Baseball is a f'n mess culturally in many ways, but the actual game is pretty nice if slow to modern fans. It's probably becoming more of an archaic sport at this point and the current product kinda sucks. Basketball seems to be the US sport that I think will probably culturally ride shotgun to 'football' with a foot around the world.

Of course, the Euros also have F1 and UEFA both of which seem to be pretty much organized crime on par with the Olympic committee. So really f' all pro sports to an extent.

It's been much easier to cut out MMA and boxing than football (I grew up playing too so it's just so comfortably familiar).

Streaming music going away would be very fun but obviously social media has had enough toxic real world consequences for me to see it’s truly a net negative

So for you people voting for streaming music is it you object to the whole concept or just certain aspects as it is currently constituted, like the compensation methods? I just don't see how streaming music is harmful in and of itself.

I think the entire enterprise has made songs and albums ephemeral and made narratives disappear and ruined physical media and made everything an exhausting game of 24-hour lifespans and made sound quality shitty, and destroyed the monoculture and hollowed out the entire middle class and pays people dogshit, and created all kinds of false binaries, all of which have made music less fun in general

:)

i would hardly blame streaming alone for a lot of those things

mcu, the rest are good

Love Broadway, hate social media, never encounter the others

the nfl is not good it’s a hateful org and sport, sorry

i know i love wrestling which makes me a hypocrite in these matters

climate change ruined physical music media for me personally

i’m not personally into football, musical theatre, or podcasts, but i am basically indifferent to them and don’t feel the need to take the pleasure away from people who like them. for some reason marvel i just wish it didn’t exist and i want the ppl who like it to suffer. not sure why

streaming music is obviously good, just an insane luxury and convenience to virtually all of recorded music on your phone for $10 per month. if musicians all unionized and raised the price to $20 and got fair compensation it would still be a steal

i still torrent a lot of stuff but movie streaming infinitely preferable to going to the movie store and renting out your little dvd

it’s painful to imagine how much harder the pandemic would have been without social media

my main issue with streaming music is that with this technology literally nothing should be out of print or unavailable but for a whole host of reasons that boil down to “capitalism” that is not the case

i don’t watch football but idk i feel like it’s not hard to be aware of how much it sucks

just watch basketball which rules

my main issue with streaming music is that with this technology literally nothing should be out of print or unavailable but for a whole host of reasons that boil down to “capitalism” that is not the case

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Saturday, October 16, 2021 7:05 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i begrudgingly respect musicians’ rights to withhold their music from some platforms/formats, even if it frustrates me as a fan and objectively makes the world a worse place. like for a while you just couldn’t listen to prince on youtube. imagine how many impromptu living room youtube queue dance parties would have been improved if prince hadn’t scrubbed every second of his music off of it.

i was recently trying to listen to some music by wendy carlos but because she is a principled luddite/curmudgeon the only way to do that legally is on CD

oh i totally respect musicians who don’t want their work on streaming, makes a ton of sense to me, still boils down to crapitalism tho

No pro sport is close to as bad as the WWE

THANK you

everything on the list boils down to capitalism

facebook and instagram are repellent to me, but I would be sad to see twitter go away, so I can't vote for social media. the NFL promotes a toxic culture and is a candidate for worst

have to vote for MCU. the dominance of MCU and blockbuster sequels has been such a dumbing-down of cinema. 90% of theaters are now only showing that shit. we don't have to cater only to the tastes of 14 year old boys

i feel like capitalism still existed and was bad before streaming and social media tho

think the point was it's the reason why those things are bad, not the other way around

so capitalism makes streaming music bad, in a way that it didn’t make physical media music bad?

the ways in which streaming is worse than physical media (worse business model is the big one) is due to the effects of capitalism & not inherent to the technology

I thought Whiney's point that it was inherent in the technology was good

sorry for flattening things out with “capitalism,” but obv it affects all things not equally but individually

and obv there’s a level on which “streaming music” is unenvisionable without capitalism so

world sucks and is a trap

xps ufo - is there something intrinsic to the technology that made the business model bad? maybe capitalism just got worse, and the business model would have devolved to a similar point under physical media. it seems like the period pre-streaming but post-peak of physical media, when file-sharing trashed revenues, was also a bad business model. idk, i just don’t see how having to manufacture a bunch of jewel cases improves the business model from an artists’ pov

now that we’ve invented the technology of streaming music, i don’t think we’re going to like, forget how to do it. if the world transitioned to communism, streaming music would probably remain. it would be funny if the new communist leaders were like “ok folks, we’re going back to turntables and cassingles ONLY” tho

yes that’s exactly what i imagine would happen in this thought experiment no one was participating in

I feel like streaming music would have a place in our Communist future. It's a great cultural resource and archive for the masses.

I'm thinking more in a high culture context-- I feel like the early Soviets would have killed to have multiple versions of every Beethoven symphony at one's fingertips for little or no cost to the recipient. I was just watching last night Soviet-made 1970s short films of Pushkin's poetry no available on YouTube for the enlighteenment of new generations of the Masses.

a lot of classical music on streaming was transferred at a pitifully low quality bc…… well i don’t wanna say it

there is a lot of amazing experimental music that is not on streaming

there is a lot of amazing experimental music that is not on streaming

shifts in technology provided an opportunity for the business model to get worse, certainly, but the current worse business model of streaming is surely not the only one possible for it, just one encouraged by capitalism etc.

i don't really agree with whiney's other points about why streaming is bad though, "pays people dogshit" is the only real complaint i have about it.

a lot of classical music on streaming was transferred at a pitifully low quality bc…… well i don’t wanna say it

Good riddance to the monoculture.

xp re: Whiney's post, I thought the other points he had were most important

Also: There's also the infamous "digital watermark" Universal Classics (DG and Decca) put on their digital releases until a few years ago.
― Typo? Negative! (Boring, Maryland), Saturday, October 16, 2021 5:14 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that’s what i was referring to! did they correct this across the board

i don't really agree with whiney's other points about why streaming is bad though, "pays people dogshit" is the only real complaint i have about it.

― ufo, Saturday, October 16, 2021

really?

"made songs and albums ephemeral and made narratives disappear and ruined physical media and made everything an exhausting game of 24-hour lifespans and made sound quality shitty, and destroyed the monoculture"

i don’t really think it made narratives disappear

Also: There's also the infamous "digital watermark" Universal Classics (DG and Decca) put on their digital releases until a few years ago.
― Typo? Negative! (Boring, Maryland), Saturday, October 16, 2021 5:14 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that’s what i was referring to! did they correct this across the board

“made sound quality shitty” reminds me of ppl complaining about radio

yes that’s exactly what i imagine would happen in this thought experiment no one was participating in

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Saturday, October 16, 2021 8:06 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i was just replying to you saying an end to capitalism is unenvisionable without an end to music streaming. personally, i can envision one without the other. they don’t seem that related

i didn’t say such a thing!

streaming does seem to make all songs and albums ephemeral

NFL: definitely; brain damage for the participants (and the fans, ha ha), plus it's owned/run by psychotic bigots, plus there's the whole economy of stadiums
Marvel Cinematic Universe: definitely; has poisoned the brains of an entire generation (though this goes hand in hand with social media, TBF)
Broadway Musical Theater: definitely; since I live in the NY media market I see a seemingly endless amount of media coverage of this shit, including local news stories, it's a nightmare
True Crime Podcasts: have never listened, never will, so...don't care
Streaming Music: I don't use it that much, but I do use it for research (Spotify, occasionally YouTube), and it helps me to share music with people who might buy it - as far as "destroyed the monoculture," good fucking riddance
Streaming Video: I don't expect to ever go to a movie theater again, so if I want to see a movie it's gonna be on Amazon Prime or Hulu or HBO Max

maybe i misunderstood

obv there’s a level on which “streaming music” is unenvisionable without capitalism so’

isn’t there a stanislaw lem short story where he invents music streaming?

i'm young enough that i was only ever buying cds in my teens and i don't miss physical media at all. most of the other complaints (e.g. death of the monoculture) seem more attributable to the internet than streaming directly & often somewhat predate streaming's prominence? would also completely disagree with 'making narratives disappear', don't really understand the sound quality complaint either, both spotify & apple music are high enough bitrate to be basically indistinguishable from cd quality and even spotify's free tier is surprisingly difficult to notice issues with. it's obviously good to have flacs available but they're not at all necessary for most purposes.

my actual pick is social media bc the mild fondness i have for twitter is drastically outweighed by the incredible harm fb does

lol could be

i wasn’t making a bigger point other than “the technologies that we know of prob wouldn’t exist without capitalism so me blaming capitalism for an issue with a technology is sort of a catch-22” etc.

did i malaprop catch-22 there, i haven’t read the book

xp

monoculture didn’t even die, look at the fucking articles

it's diminished though so i can at least understand what people mean when they complain about 'death of the monoculture'

also wouldn’t monoculture dying be

a good thing

or at least not an unequivocally bad thing

yet literally everywhere you go, ppl are talking about the same shit everywhere

The monoculture is dead, you have the option of being a MCU fan or a Synderverse fan.

adele album’s gonna save the monoculture

i'm far too young to be able to know exactly how things were pre-internet but yeah it doesn't exactly seem like the diminishing of the monoculture was close to a bad thing

The non-royalty streaming music complaints come down to the misery of choice - not having the curated new release rack of a good record shop (or even MP3 blog) and being able to afford one album a week to keep you from being overwhelmed.

Streaming video (and the blockbuster reign over theaters) has a similar problem. The 'golden age of TV' could be the golden age because there was one great show for everyone to watch and talk about every week and now it's a hassle trying to keep up with individual series and what service they're on.

i think whiney’s point was that it makes it harder to be a music critic when there are no narratives and no monoculture. streaming “hollowed out the middle class” of music critics

man the thing that depressed me most about getting hired as a music critic was being required to write about the big names all the time, fuck that

I read that as hollowed out the middle class of musicians.

burden of choice is a myth imo. having choices is nice

The two ideas aren't mutually exclusive.

narratives… still exist, idk, though i think as a failed critic who doesn’t want to write about most narratives i feel like i’m the wrong person to take this temperature

streaming “hollowed out the middle class” of music critics

― flopson, Saturday, October 16, 2021 5:51 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

also, i gotta say, something has been happening at the publications themselves that caused this at least as much as if not more than streaming music

Having access to (almost) all of history's music is great but it does devalue the finds and make the average listener work less hard at appreciating an album when they have nothing invested in it/it's easier to move on.

Being, generationally, on the cusp between "you get to listen to what the one good record store in town stocks and maybe two hours a week of decent college radio" and shifting into that universal access was great, being on either side of that divide permanently would have been much worse.

not having the curated new release rack of a good record shop (or even MP3 blog) and being able to afford one album a week to keep you from being overwhelmed.

i don’t relate to this at all. when i bought cds and records, the number of albums I bought were limited by my being poor, and were far below an amount that would have “overwhelmed” me. it was even below the amount that satisfied me. i think that feeling is mostly misplaced nostalgia. now i use streaming for most listening, i still don’t feel overwhelmed. i just listen to the music i feel like at the given moment

but there just doesn't seem to be much passion about anything anymore

xp Right, free streaming is the 'be overwhelmed' part there because you're no longer limited by the supply chain or poverty. This makes cycles shorter (for individuals and culturally, I thinks humans derived a lot of meaning from cycle syncing with others), which arguably makes music cheaper emotionally.

but… why would i want to be limited by the supply chain or poverty

You probably wouldn't? The idea is that the current situation has drawbacks just like the old. Unlimited choice is not an unfettered good.

i get the logic of abundance devaluing music on an abstract level but in my experience it was the opposite. the limewire/napster and especially soulseek era really cracked the wide world of music open for me when i was young in a way that made me value it more. when i discovered ilx i think at 17-18, i would download the albums being discussed on all the active ilm threads and have my mind blown

No ILX option?

Xp I still do

easily the NFL

but it depends on how exactly it would end, and i cannot predict where its fans/bettors would redirect their energy

xxxp I'm from an earlier period. I just remember being restricted in the 80s by student poverty, eagerly listening to KUSF and trying to choose between LPs by US bands I loved and bands from the UK that were intriguing to me. That made the whole experience of discovery exciting

again, i was hoping streaming music would end artificial scarcity

discovery is still exciting to me having nearly the entire history of music readily available idk

For sure. Everyday.

there is always going to be scarcity in streaming as far as a lot music is concerned - modern classical (cage, feldman, rzewski, pisaro, so many others), experimental, erstwhile electroacoustic music, japanese deconstructed blues etc

easily the NFL

but it depends on how exactly it would end, and i cannot predict where its fans/bettors would redirect their energy

― mookieproof, Sunday, October 17, 2021 2:24 AM (twenty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah, like, for the amount of violent energy it generates it seems at least a little contained?

re: music, not having to work to discover it anymore and having everything at my fingertips has made it all seem slightly less interesting somehow

the music that i’m into that has retained some aspect of scarcity is house/techno. where like, i’m constantly listening to mixes and trying to find a track but there’s no track list, or it’s a white-label or vinyl-only release, or more often it’s unreleased or just secret. i can see it being fun for some types of ppl, the challenge to ID a track. but it kinda annoys and discourages me, and i resign myself to ‘oh well i should just appreciate the ephemeral connection between me and this song and not covet it’. also it takes a lot longer for that stuff to end up on streaming (and plenty of it never shows up) so i still occasionally buy or slsk stuff

secrets are cool i just hate when they cost money

I sat in the front row with my 11-year old niece at a Broadway performance of Mamma Mia. One of the performers coasted on his knees up to the front of the stage and sang directly to her at one point, so I can't hate Broadway Musical Theater

ppl hate broadway only bc they are secondhand or firsthand embarrassed about it. i feel this way but i do not think it should die bc of it

i think all true crime media should stop on principle bc it feeds a really strange cultural desire, and like many ppl i hate my favorite murder, but also… i’m not like aggro about how it’s evil and should end

i don’t even like horror movies that are based on true stories

NFL option seems kind of random
Also isn’t theatre a UK thing originally

When I complain about the death of the monoculture and narratives, I'm not, like yearning for "Achy Breaky Heart" and like three major labels in bed with the radio stations so they make sure every Mariah Carey song is number one. I'm yearning for the days when popular music was — for better of worse — unavoidable and therefore somewhat of a trans-demographic shared experience. In 1984, everyone heard Kenny Loggins and Rockwell and Nena and Lionel Ritchie and Cory Hart and Julio Iglesias.

In 2021, I would be willing to bet hard money that there are grown adults on this website full of absolute music freaks have never **heard** billion selling monster successes like BTS and Bad Bunny and Lil Durk and Wizkid. Instead of one "music scene," its now 5000 competing stan armies and a whole insular, micro-targeted bubbles that never touch.

As far a narratives go, again, its like 5 artists who are followed like the royal family and then everything else seems to be either projection or guessing or clout-chasing or playing catch-up. Twitter is a tiny slice of the universe that offers little more than absolutely blinkered insanity (YEPPERS YEPPERS CARLY RAE JEPPERS) and total myopia to how everything functions outside of it (cf. XXXTentacion) and is also basically 5000 competing stan armies and insular bubbles that never touch.

Obviously there's clearly a lot WRONG and BAD with getting Smash Mouth or whoever shoved up your ass three times a day, but as someone who likes to think about music, its just a loser's game trying to keep up with everything. It becomes homework and it's not fun. The narratives we get are basically about who is woke and who is cancelled, and that, again, only affects Twitter users and has little to no effect on the other 90% of the population.

It was just ... more fun ... when you could follow this shit like sports and talk to your grandma about Boy George. Whether that is good or bad for art and commerce is for everyone to decide on their own, but that aspect of culture is dead, never to return, and I miss it!

SNL

YEPPERS YEPPERS CARLY RAE JEPPERS is an instant classic

thank you for expanding whiney as i agree with most of that

the other side of that is that none out of BTS, Bad Bunny, Lil Durk and Wizkid would likely have the same level of monster success without that shift

its just a loser's game trying to keep up with everything. It becomes homework and it's not fun.

In 2021, I would be willing to bet hard money that there are grown adults on this website full of absolute music freaks have never **heard** billion selling monster successes like BTS and Bad Bunny and Lil Durk and Wizkid.

I used to spend a significant amount of my time and money in pursuit of new music, did college radio for years, Napstered and Limewired the shit out of stuff, took road trips just to hit record stores, etc.

Now I'm 47 and have heard BTS because my 6 year old loved them for a bit, have heard of Bad Bunny but don't know if it's a band or a person and no idea what type of music it would be, and have never heard of the last two.

I like this and I like that, when it’s cold I wear a hat

--Carly Rae Jeppers

Never heard of those four (thank god) and I only recognize bts

i can definitely understand missing the mass culture aspect, certainly something i was never around for

"there's too much to keep up with" is true but i don't really feel like it's a problem

music obsessives not keeping up with what's new & popular as they get older surely isn't anything though certainly it's even easier to be in your own out-of-touch bubble now than before

xps to whiney: the funny thing is that you listen to more music than i do and likely know more about music than i do so it's strange to me that you find a roving ear a "losers game". I am pretty sure that's just self loathing.

forks you are a born content absorber

Ha, yeah, how is this possible?

i “keep up” but devote more and more time to my own personal deep listening projects and never write about new music anymore wonder why

xp multiple ply

For me, MCU is a far bigger blight than any of these others, and I like a lot of the movies! It's just that it crowds out everything else to such a degree that most cinema is rapidly dying off.

Though Whiney did listen through the whole John Zorn catalog, so that's no small potatoes.

BTS only makes me think of the BTK serial killer. Get a new name guys!

I don't think the fracturing of the monoculture can be attributed to streaming, though; it started in the Soundscan era, when we first learned what records people were actually buying. Pantera fans generally didn't give a shit about Garth Brooks, and vice versa, but both hit #1.

Personally, I hate generalist music criticism — glib fuckers pretending they know something about everything. I'm glad to see that kind of thing dying out. It's much better to have a galaxy of specialists out there. If I want to really learn something about electronic music, there are three or four writers I know I can read. If I want to really learn something about metal, same deal. If I want to learn something about country...well, that will never happen, but you get the idea.

Voted NFL. It is not the one that creates the most harm (that would be social media.) Like social media, the harms it imposes (not just to NFL players but to many, many more younger people who aspire to the NFL or just love playing football in a way that NFL as popular entertainment institution inspires and encourages) are combined with goods (people like and enjoy and draw authentic meaning from following football teams over the years and decades.) But I think the good that the NFL offers is more easily substituted for than the good that social media offers. Obviously there is room for disagreement here but I think NBA, MLB, etc. can largely fill in the psychic gap that would be left if football were no more. I'm a baseball guy and yes it would be keenly sad for me if baseball went away but I truly believe that my other sports fandoms would expand to fill the empty space in a modest amount of time.

BTS only makes me think of the BTK serial killer. Get a new name guys!

― Typo? Negative! (Boring, Maryland), Sunday, October 17, 2021 12:47 AM (seventeen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm glad someone finally said it

As a lifelong Miami Dolphins fan I’m leaning towards NFL

MCU probably annoys me the most out of these but the idea of social media going away actually feels EXCITING in an almost sci-fi way, like, it's honestly difficult to imagine what life would be like even tho I lived through several decades of it. And without it I mostly wouldn't have to listen to what MCU fans have to say so all I'd have to do would be not go to the fucking movies and I'd be golden.

The success of the MCU is such a poisoned well. I wish I could just enjoy some fun superhero trash without every dummy in the world feeling the need to have An Opinion about it (apologies to dummies itt).

Social media obviously the worst thing to happen to humanity in some time, not really even a contest. Maybe less so if it had been introduced at some point in the far future where the surviving humans' brains had evolved sufficiently to handle it without it turning them into frothing hate mongers who would gleefully immolate their entire family just to own someone who disagrees with them.

Write-in for SNL. Pass away peacefully in your sleep, please, it is time now.

I'm a fully convicted professional sports abolitionist, but even I was briefly tempted by the Marvel option.

i'm not sure SNL is really a phenomenally popular american entertainment institution, even in comparison to broadway

How is it still alive then, how

time slot no one cares about

snl is extremely popular (5+ million linear viewers per week on a weekend night plus 1.5+ billion youtube views on sketches from last season) and i’ll add a write-in to that pile.

i'm not saying it's not popular, i'm saying in comparison to Marvel or NFL and Netflix and Facebook it's not at the same weight
you could argue that SNL is as/more popular as the true crime podcast genre but that's another poll

SNL is a true crime

The success of the MCU is such a poisoned well. I wish I could just enjoy some fun superhero trash without every dummy in the world feeling the need to have An Opinion about it (apologies to dummies itt).

This is my take as well, the movies are mostly fine and I like watching them. Let's all just stop talking about them so much. Ideally we reduce the discussion to me and my son discussing them for 10 minutes every time we watch a new movie or episode.

dont really care about the mcu but i would vote for disney as a whole

i'm not saying it's not popular, i'm saying in comparison to Marvel or NFL and Netflix and Facebook it's not at the same weight

I think that opinion is complete and total nonsense given the absolute glut of SNL alumni across popular media since its inception, including:

Jimmy Fallon
Will Ferrell
Adam Sandler
Robert Downey, Jr
Aidy Bryant
Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Tina Fey
Amy Poehler
Andy Samberg
Jason Sudeikis
Seth Meyers
Kristin Wiig
Kate McKinnon
Kenan Thompson
Pete Davidson
Sarah Silverman
Ben Stiller
Fred Armisen
Tim Robinson
Nasim Pedrad
Jenny Slate
Cecily Strong
Molly Shannon
Will Forte
Chris Rock
Chris Parnell
Bill Murray
Jane Curtin
Mike Myers
Vanessa Bayer
Janeane Garofalo
Ana Gasteyer
Leslie Jones
Eddie Murphy
John Belushi
Dan Ackroyd
Al Franken
Gilbert Gottfried
Chris Elliott
Joan Cusack
Chevy Chase
Jim Belushi
Gilda Radner
Randy Quaid
Dennis Miller
Jay Mohr
Kevin Nealon
Rob Schneider
Chris Farley
David Spade
Rob Riggle
Christine Ebersole

And that's not including ringers like Christopher Guest, Mark McKinney, Billy Crystal, or Martin Short

In order to stop talking about MCU, we would need to shut down all social media plus Disney's marketing department. So yeah, sounds good, let's do it.

I mean I get why everyone has an opinion about the MCU and I get the criticism (particularly in terms of its negative impact upon the medium), I just wish that when they finally got around to making a superhero franchise I actually like that it had only wound up being just successful enough to perpetuate itself without becoming so ubiquitous as to prompt a hot take from every disinterested party under the sun.

here's the thing about social media going away - I wish only 'parts' would go away.

The parts I wish would stay:

-being able to keep in touch with people who live out of state/say hello
-being able to keep tabs on family
-being able to post statuses on what you're doing that nobody can respond to

the parts I wish would go away:

-Messenger, so I don't have people msging me all day and acting funny if they don't get an immediate reply (which never happened w/ texting for me)

-Political GIF memes

-all of the toxicity

-the ability for two friends who don't know each other to tell each other joining a political thread, then saying they hope the other dies in a car accident

so in conclusion I changed my mind, get rid of social media

I thought the first Avengers movie was one of the most overhyped movies ever made, it was like 2 1/2 hours of a strobe light going off in your face. admittedly the other ones I've seen have been pretty good

that said both MCU and the modern radio scene kinda suffer from the same bullshit where making a hit involves pooling together as many famous people as possible. when you put on pop radio everything is like Adam Levine ft. Cardi B ft. BTS & Nicki Minaj or whatever. every Katy Perry video now has like cameos from Rebecca Black or some other niche celebrity. which leads to stuff like Ready Player One & Free Guy getting greenlit and making tons of money and now that's all pop culture is

I think that opinion is complete and total nonsense

endless guest spots in pop music is indeed another thing I'd like to see go away

presenting a list of people who've been on SNL and saying that everything they've ever done thereafter is an extension of SNL is like saying that stan lee created the Marvel Cinematic Universe

I don't think you understand the way people categorize things

snl does blanket culture beyond the show itself, i’m sympathetic to djp’s point

it is also popular way out of proportion with its quality. i at least *understand* why these other things are popular

Like although I loved it for most of my life, I readily acknowledge that SNL has always been bad. But every time I see some random clip from its current incarnation, it is a level of bad that easily outdoes the general level of badness in the past. I'll accept that some degree of its perceived badness is because I am now an old with the perspective and opinions of an old, but that surely can't account for all of the badness.

i at least *understand* why these other things are popular

SNL's popularity doesn't strike me as much of a mystery? People like celebrities and they like being able to talk about stuff w/ their work colleagues. It doesn't really have to go any deeper than that.

sketches are also easier and quicker to digest, it's easy to pull up your phone and show your friend a 5 minute sketch they haven't seen then to force them to watch a 30 minute show or 2 hour movie.

every thread ultimately turning into a discussion about SNL is some sort of manifestation of godwin's law

SNL, Not See teevee

poster dressed as ned raggett in cold open to thread live! from new answers!

people loving to watch torturously unfunny comedy shows is a mystery to me every time

in the MCU, dr strange scans an incomprehensibly large number of possible futures for music consumption, desperately searching for timelines that restrain Hot Hot Heat to obscurity -- there's only one.

Need a choice for "all of the above" but nuke the NFL once and for all.

It's really easy for me to ignore all of these completely except social media and streaming music, and streaming music adds value to my life. I guess social media occasionally does too but also a lot of misery for that little bit of value.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Well I guess I know how Elon voted

This is very much the NFL or social media

Missing out on megachurches here.

I still wish to write-in cable news.

NFL easily

the absolute glut of SNL alumni across popular media since its inception

Absolute glut? I dunno. Popular media burns through talent like India burns coal. In the 48 years since SNL started that list of about fifty actors is just a tiny group among the five thousand or so entertainers who had media careers during that time that were at least as successful as, oh, Jenny Slate, Chris Elliot, Ana Gasteyer, Kevin Nealon or Christine Ebersole. As for the A-listers like Julia Louis-Dreyfus or Tina Fey, their talent more than justifies their high profile careers.

Write-in for SNL. Pass away peacefully in your sleep, please, it is time now.

― Gimme some skin! Because I don't have any skin. (Old Lunch), Monday, October 18, 2021

SNL is fine!

Reality TV on the other hand has encouraged spoiled bad behavior, unhealthy relationships, mindless scene-following, and worship of a lowest common-denominator aesthetic, and elevated a game show host to president

It's easily one of the first two, and since most of the people in my circle successfully ignore the NFL, it's for sure MCU

Wound up voting for the MCU, but I am very curious to see what's gonna happen if/when social media (read: Facebook and Twitter) melt down and disappear. People have built entire lives, and entire ecosystems and ways of running businesses, on those two platforms. The ripple effects are going to be massive.

Someone said the idea of social media going away was exciting and I agree, at this point it would be satisfying in the way it would be to idk watch Lumen Corp get destroyed in the series finale of severance. Like just such an awful thing in life emphasizing the worst aspects of people. My friends I keep in touch with there, well I’d keep in touch with them anyway and probably keep in touch with them better, and the rest are the ones who in earlier times wouldn’t have been crawling out of the woodwork with friend requests, they were meant to naturally fade away and be forgotten. Which is just how life works. Or how it did work.

adele album’s gonna save the monoculture

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Saturday, October 16, 2021 10:14 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

let's reflect a moment

podcasts... this option has to be far less of a thing than the others, right? amirong?

From what I read here and in the press, Twitter seems capable of becoming so crippled by Musk's clueless management that its investors decide to mercy kill it rather than pouring good money after bad. otoh, the Facebook-dependent small business ecosystem is why FB won't melt down and disappear with anything like the speed that Twitter could fold up its tent. Meta's decline is going to be more gradual as FB slides into revenue stagnation and then negative growth and Meta can't prop up all the money-losing spin-offs Zuckerberg is trying to pump artificial life into. It feels like it is headed into a long slide into the marginal relevance.

Undated article from a site I never heard of really puts things in perspective

https://musicwithflavor.com/adeles-worst-selling-album/

Amazed no-one has suggested The Simpsons (I'm an agnostic, haven't seen an episode since the 90s). Maybe it's so diminished now no-one thinks of it as major?

yeah it's been pretty easy to ignore for 20+ years e.g. none of the many popular memes its generated seem to come from that time period

I was going to counter with old man yells at cloud but it's from fucking 2002 and that's probably the newest

This is very much the NFL or social media

― castanuts (DJP), Thursday, December 29, 2022

I find these all pretty inoffensive at worst. I suppose I'll vote for musical theater, since it seems to have crowded out any other sort of theater.

I'm only aesthetically irked by the MCU whereas I'm kinda morally irked by the True Crime business

true crime podcasts seem the most insidious to me since the ones I hear ads for tend to brand themselves as feminist and social justice oriented while perpetuating stranger danger and other conservative bullshit, and people actually seem to take them seriously as guides for how-not-to-be-murdered which is fucked up in all sorts of ways

Mind you aesthetics is morality so lemme chew it over

xp I think maybe some of them might meet that description, Left, but there are others that take a much more thoughtful and nuanced approach. One of the OGs, "Criminal," comes to mind.

sure and not all westerns are manifest destiny apologism but you know

the NFL is indefensible but I still like it, so I can't vote for that

have no clue about True Crime or Broadway

social media is bad in a thousand ways but I admit I find Twitter to be incredibly amusing sometimes, and Facebook is legitimately useful for keeping up with old friends and family members if you are inclined to do so. I use Facebook Messenger a lot though I suppose that could be easily replaced

Streaming...idk why people would want to get rid of that. we're not going back to the era of DVDs and CDs. IMO it was a good thing before Disney and Paramount wanted to make their own exclusive services, which has basically put us back to the era of expensive cable packages.

I voted MCU, no real reason, but I think having a particular genre of very expensive blockbuster movie become this popular is really bad for the industry as a whole. I liken it a bit to Michael Jackson's Thriller, yeah it's a good album (and the MCU movies I've seen are pretty entertaining) but they did so well that it shaped the whole industry in a pretty negative way.

I was happier before social media allowed people to comment on your statuses.

I don't need my non-existent Aunt Ida's comments on why it's problematic that I listen to Bathtub Shitter or a cousin revealing to me that he supports National Burn a Koran day in response to me talking about the show Brooklyn 99

There are a lot of good true crime podcasts and books out there, but the ones that seem to view crime as pure entertainment fodder are not among those.

For example on the bad side of true crime is something like the subreddits that were devoted to the recent murders that took place in Moscow Idaho, and weeks were spent pointing the finger at various people and discussing conspiracy theories and it turned out of course everybody was wrong.

Fuck the NFL:

Pay to play: How 21 NFL stadiums have been financed

and

Taxpayers are paying billions for the renovations and construction of NFL stadiums. Here’s how

In 2022, the Tennessee Titans of the NFL unveiled their plans for a new stadium in the heart of Nashville. The 1.7 million-square-foot stadium can house 60,000 screaming football fans and is estimated to cost $2.1 billion.

The public would fund more than half of the stadium through a one-time contribution from the state of $500 million and $760 million through revenue bonds issued by Nashville’s Metropolitan Sports Authority.

Since 2000, public funds diverted to helping build professional sports stadiums and arenas have cost taxpayers $4.3 billion. While the NFL and team owners contend that building stadiums will provide economic growth for a city, economists and urban planners think otherwise.

The impact of a stadium can be something that leads to really great placemaking, and that is a catalyst for community gathering and other small businesses in a neighborhood. Yet a typical football stadium has a really different design, the impact on the surrounding community is really more just that the stadium is kind of like a big spaceship that is parked there.

The reason cities end up paying for stadiums begins with the issuance of tax-exempt bonds from state and local governments that the federal government has signed off on for decades.

These tax exemptions help lower the burden of high debt through low-interest municipal bonds used by cities and teams to pay for stadiums. Since 1913, municipal bonds have been a popular financing option for airports, roads, hospitals and schools. Private entities could still access these bonds but were subject to a volume cap limiting how many public bonds are issued annually.

As for stadiums, well, they weren’t subject to that cap. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 wanted to end the exemptions for private use, including stadiums. Instead, the bill inadvertently created a loophole allowing stadiums to be backed by tax-free public bonds.

The loophole works by creating an artificial financing structure through tax-exempt municipal bonds. To gain access to those bonds, private companies must fail one of two tests stipulated by the Tax Reform Bill of 1986.

The private use-case test states that a private entity can use no more than 10% of the money from a bond, a test that NFL teams will most certainly pass. Then there’s the private-payment test which states that no more than 10% of the bond’s debt service is backed by the stadium itself.

So if a state or local government is willing to finance at least 90% of the stadium’s cost, it fails the private-payment test — meaning the stadium will get tax-exempt financing through municipal bonds.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.