Come lament about modern society. Yearn for the "good old days".

oh, this is gonna go reeeeeaaaaaaaaallll well

I want to fight anyone that doesn't like Led Zeppelin. I dont care how old (or young?) they are!

Neither did Jimmy Page

The 5 second video app is absolute shit. It must be avoided, no matter what. Forms of social media, favored by the old, however, such as Facebook, are also extremely shit(though that one has some possible use.

Do I dislike "modern music?" I dislike what is currently, popular, in my country.

But...come to think of it, if I think of an era, in the past, when there was popular music, that happens to be something I liked, there was also a bunch of lame shit.

Don't get me wrong. When I see someone younger than me, having fun, or, even worse, more fun than I did, at that age, or just having a good life, at all(because, back then, I never had it that good!), it instinctively makes me angry. But I hate the stupid, more than I actually have any hatred for the young. I think, that is shitty internet things, or trends, are the enemy, then it's usually better, to convince people of it, with positivity.

MySpace was way more fun than Facebook and TikTok. At least I could customize my account with my own unique (and eye pain-causing) style.
Discord? Pfft, IRC and AIM all the way baby.

Only things I liked as a teenager were good, dammit.

Seriously though, I miss when forums (like this!) were relevant. It's easier to have in depth discussions on them than on Discord or Reddit.

The only real rant I have about any of this has nothing to do with a specific age group. It's just how badly ALL of our attention spans have been affected. I even see it in my (almost) 70 year old parents. If I am watching the ball game with one of my parents, the instant there is a lapse in the action (replay, commercial, whistle/stoppage) they reach for their phones and start scrolling.

I try REALLY hard to not do this, but even for someone trying to be super cautious of it, I still find myself doing things like taking my phone out and checking my iMessages while walking when I get to a red light.

One of the craziest things for me, personally, is as someone that works in film, realizing just how short-of-a-period-of-time you have to rope someone in. As someone that isn't exactly established in the industry, it's hard to get people scrolling on instagram or TikTok to stop for even 30 seconds to watch a trailer.

My colleague and I experimented with making 60 second short films, shot in 9:16, specifically to be watched on phones, and we had SO many more views than we had for 3 minute shorts we had to embed a youtube link in. If people have to click through to see something, they more than likely will not do it.

Wild times.

I can definitely agree with you on that one. I think this has to do with the way the media we consume in entertainment has gotten shorter. Whether it be people not wanting to listen to any song longer than 4 minutes or feel concerned about a movie that's longer than 1 hour and 30 minutes, people seemed more skewed towards the shorter stuff. I have a bad feeling that our future generations are gonna miss out on listening to Pink Floyd's "Echoes" or watching The Godfather simply because they're too long.

I wonder if it's not that our attention spans have been affected, but that this is how the average human brain has always worked. When we're given the opportunity to shift our attention to something that's possibly more interesting we'll just do it. And in this modern age there's a whole lot of possibly interesting things.

I think our attention spans are still fine when we find something we genuinely like more than other options.

Shorts are definitely the way to go. YouTube even has a built in shorts feature now, cause they always get more views.

Postal rates were a hell of a lot cheaper back in the 90s and early 00s. The 00s was the best era for mail-order (I guess mail-ordering CDs is pretty much dinosaur-ish now). In hindsight, I consider the 00s to be the best decade overall. Pity I was too drunk and depressed to appreciate it at the time.

This is probably among the only two or three good takes that can come out of this thread.

too lazy to type stuff so here's a video:

Well, there is a certain amount of satisfaction when you had to put effort to get some things done. Nowadays, all information is overflooding your attention and your private space and time, leaving you bombarded with tons and tons of (mostly meaningless) information. It seems that people today don't have any kind of private time, all life is exposed and open to digital interaction. I believe that constant exposure is the basis of becoming nervous and less attentive. Back in the day, you had the privilege to choose and to look for any needed information, and that process itself was kind of rewarding in its own way. Now, the whole "process phase" is left out, and people are directly heading for a goal, whichever it is.

Generation X here and my woman's a millienial. She keeps dragging me into the modern world and admittedly a lot of it is better. I'm old though and can't really imagine what it's like to grow up on the internet or to have nasty throat fucker gang bangs on your phone at an early age These are the things I worry about a bit when it comes to the young grasshoppers. More people also seem to be medicated.

Back in the day when we felt sad, for example when your new Voivod vinyl came without the lyric insert, we didn't quickly download it in our underpants, we walked miles through mud and ice to steal an insert from the store.

This is surely a complex topic, and I lack the expertise to say anything credible on it, but I've mused that there's a two-fold trend:
- Disabilities are recognised, diagnosed, and treated at much better rates than ever before, and more and more people who suffer from conditions like ADHD are getting help, whereas before similar problems were ignored, and more people suffering from them were excluded from society or coped in unhealthy ways.
- The society is placing heavier and heavier demands on people, especially those who are in professions that require high amounts of cognitive work, and the intensification of this trend has probably lead to the medicalisation of cognitive differences in people that are completely bening, but flare out as problems due to increasingly unrealistic requirements.

And that's not even getting into the amount of anxiety and depression that people are increasingly suffering from, and how it relates to the gloomy futures that younger generations are realistically expecting for themselves, as well as existential threats like environmental collapse and nuclear war, as well as environmental effects like pollution.

I find I'm never just doing one thing anymore, I watch TV on my laptop while playing a game - meaning I usually just watch stuff I've seen before, and play a game where I can constantly take breaks, I play stuff like cricket, the sims or football manager instead of anything I actually get immersed in. I need to work on that.

I like to read, and this isn't me trying to brag but last year I read over 100 books (this year's 7 so far so I'm back to a normal rate), even then I always have music, or something on the telly (asmr, nature or train journeys or something) or even both. I never JUST sit and read, but I still manage to get through a lot of books. God forbid I need to look up a word, name, idea or translation though (I'll sound like a dick but I mostly read highbrow literature or non-fiction), I'll look it up on my phone, then get distracted by a notification and before you know it I've spent 20 minutes on FB, news, sports and IG. Another thing is recently because I listen to music when working or reading I don't really put on full albums very often (6 full albums and 2 greatest hits in the last week out of hours a day with music on), I just make playlists of genres or bands I'm currently into and shuffle them more of the time.

It's got to be a combination of too many choices ruining my attention span, and living and working from home, all on my own for two years. I go into the office a day a week now, but sometimes I go weeks at a time without seeing or talking to anyone in person, I guess part of it is a subconscious need for some facsimile of attention or socialization or what have you.

I'm not gonna shit on the new versions of social media even if they have no appeal to me, they can't be anymore toxic than facebook. Music neither, there's good and bad popular stuff, good and bad underground stuff and that's never gonna change.

I have the ability to read a book in silence, or sit and watch a whole movie, or play a video game for hours, without doing anything else. That said, that's not all the time, and sometimes I can't do something in isolation. I often go for my phone instinctively when I've got a minute of doing nothing, like if I'm in an elevator or sitting waiting for an appointment.

My parents are in their mid-60's. My dad especially has the ability to sit and do nothing, and can delay gratification better than most. I guess that's what happens when you grow up in the 60's and 70's.

I think social media has a lot to answer for with this stuff. At the same time, if younger kids are finding new ways to entertain themselves in small snippets of things, such as TikTok or YouTube Shorts or similar, then good on them. People like what they like. Things change over time. There's still going to be a place for long movies and long albums and things like that.

I fucking HATE fast food music culture. Services like Spotify and Apple Music have turned music from being something special and dedicated and turned it to background music and soulless pop singles that 13 year old girls can rave about on twitter. I know I sound old and out of touch, but I feel like the fast food way of consuming music removes alot of music of it's mystery and intrigue.

I don't get why Discord is so popular, whenever I join a server I never feel like I can just... Jump into a conversation, unless I was there when the convo began. The metal-archives server is a little better cause it's a sort of everyone-knows-everyone type place, but still.

This is extremely well articulated. It shows the double-edged sword of medicating and awareness.

I'm glad that there's more awareness of mental illness and hopefully the stigma towards it is decreasing (of that I'll be eternally skeptical though). There's still a long way to go though. With access to all this information and online resources comes the nasty trend of self-diagnosis, misappropriation of psychological terms, and armchair psychology ("diagnosing" others). Its pretty sad when people on Tiktok are self-diagnosing themselves with an extremely painful and self-destructive condition like BPD - I wouldn't wish that disease on my worst enemy.

But I guess with an overtaxed mental health system (understaffed, overpriced, and at times, incompetent), some people may be forced to go online and search for help. And with this pandemic, this is only going to get worse.

There's just access to too much information these days (and with that comes misinformation, but I guess that's a completely different topic).

@hakarl

Quoted the wrong post by mistake.

My girlfriend was diagnosed with ADHD. Made me understand and adjust to some aspects of her personality better. E.g. she gets pissed off sometimes rather quickly, which can be part of ADHD.

Well some people are just not as into music as others and just like playing a couple songs while doing housework or before going out, and there's nothing wrong with that, pop music caters to those people just fine and doesn't take away any of the music you do like (as annoying as it can be to live with people who listen to nothing but the charts though). And spotify has nothing to do with kids getting obsessed with pop singles, that's been going on for DECADES. Streaming won't have changed anything a great deal for the casual music listener, it will just be listening to spotify playlists and youtube videos instead of music channels, radio, or downloading individual tracks, and before that burning mix cds/tapes.

You're definitely right in one respect though - I'd say habits have changed much more for huge music fans who now have the instant availability of almost everything and don't want to miss out on anything, listening to tons and tons of albums once or twice and moving on to the next thing instead of having to buy them and then listening to them ten plus times even if they're crap. There are so many good albums (not all 10/10s but at least good) that come out in a year nowadays there's definitely an element of FOMO, I stopped trying to listen to like 50 plus new albums a year about 5 years ago, and I miss out on a ton from the end of year polls on here, and god knows how many albums end up being posted in the "worthwhile releases from 20xx threads" - but trying to listen to that much new music enough times to get into it, AND have time for all your favourites as well is just exhausting. So yeah any sort of "mystery and intrigue" is largely gone, but if I can stream the new DSO whenever that comes out instead of having to save up and buy it its made MY life easier.

Yeah its so easy for boomers to say "there weren't any autistic, mentally ill, gay or transgender people in MY day" or whatever it is they're railing against, and it just makes you mad when they were there, and it's so clearly down to the lack of knowledge of the former and the stigma towards the latter just meant people didn't have any help or diagnosis and had to suffer in silence.

“Fast food” consumption of music is awful. But it was existed before, it was radio. There probably isn’t a dedicated metal station, near you, but turn on the hard rock/classic rock station, and what do you get?

The local NHL team’s station, around me, plays journey, and other stuff, that doesn’t rock very hard. Someone I know, who actually listens to radio, because he has a long commute to work, told me that he hears “highway star” once, every few years. It’s just 1-3 hit singles, and a limited variety of bands, with some lame DJs telling you what rock is supposed to be. They have to be making money, advertisers have to be buying ads, which means that someone’s listening, even though it’s so lame.

Was listening to whole albums more common, before the internet? I can’t say. But I don’t think that streaming is decreasing the amount of people, who take music seriously. I think that if they didn’t have that, they’d have radio, and just buy singles, or skip songs on albums.

If there were no social media, I think that people who waste their lives on it would be watching shitty reality shows, or, huffing lead paint and watching conspiracies on public access TV.

You know how people get fixated on music from their youth, and refuse to listen to new music? I guess that the difference is that now, you can make your own “station,” for overplayed hits.

Last.fm sure in the hell isn't what it used to be. I'm amazed that site is still going.

Seriously. I miss the groups, journals, and being able to have a bio that's not so damn limited. I also miss being able to have what I'm listening to in my forum signatures via their widgets. It was so damn cool back in the mid/late 00s.

BOOOOOOOOOM!!!!
(mic drops like the Hammer of the Gods from Immigrant Song)

It's still useful for the recommendations page but other than that there's not much to it anymore. Still like checking who I'm listening to most though

I miss alot of the wackier, weirder, and more interesting websites from days-gone-by. I don't miss alot of the blatant racism/general bigotry of the early internet, but I feel like as we've progressed and made alot of websites more simplified and "modern", something was lost.

I kind of agree with the idea that the internet and the content on it has taken a turn for the worse. Earlier sites feel more "real" to me; old forums like this site, random blogs and fan sites, even just browsing through bandcamp, they feel less corporate and more human. Everything is so streamlined and simplified on the internet now, more shallow. But I don't think it's because young people are stupid or whatever; it's kind of the inevitable, right? Something becomes widely used, it's going to be appealing to corporations and people looking to turn a profit. The modern internet is just taking advantage of the way our brains have always worked.

I do kind of worry for children raised in this digital era, though. It's convenient to have quick access to so much content and information, but I can also see that backfiring for people who basically grow up on the internet. What kind of stresses and trauma could we see in children who are constantly exposed to every tragedy and horrible thing and world issue? What kind of psychological effects could brain-grabbing, addicting social media have on children who use it from a young age? I'm less worried about art being worse, and more about how our growing reliance on the internet will affect people.

In terms of modern music though... It's not "worse", it's just different. Does it often appeal less to my personal tastes? Yes. But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't as creative or musically deep as older music. And there's plenty of stuff that does suck, but... mainstream music has always had its fair share of garbage. And there is so so much wonderful music being independently published on the internet... why would you want to go back to everything being controlled by record labels?

If you listen to AC/DC, you have no right to complain about modern music being too simple.

One big difference I see from the internet now is all the people desperately attempting to make a living off videos/whatever instead of making them out of enjoyment.

Youtube puts ads on a video when the person who creates the video makes the decision to monetize their video and now youtube is almost 100% commercials and people pathetically begging for others to "like and subscribe!!!!!!".

That's because the economy is such a hellish shithole that this is all they can do to afford rent or basic stuff I'm guessing. I don't like it either but working a shitty desk job isn't any more dignified frankly.



This is a good one - I think it's just a natural byproduct of how the tech evolves, but yes, certainly there's a predilection towards shorter, more minuscule content now. I don't really go for it, I don't mind longer articles, long movies and books, etc. And that's what I want to do creatively, write full books and stories. Nothing I do is really geared for bite-sized consumption. But I don't like the sense of bitching about "times changing" - I also think there wasn't really a point in the past where that many more people had huge attention spans. Like the people who won't watch The Godfather now wouldn't have done it back in the 80s either, they would've just gone and done other stuff then too.

Food and cat pictures were basically unheard of in the good old days.

If you wanted to be rude to people you had to do it face to face. At very least you had to make prank calls and speak to a person. Guess you could have send anonymous postcards but you get the idea, no easy underpants trolling from your mum's basement on the other side of the planet.

I'm not a fan of what Youtube has turned into. I'm not gonna argue the economy isn't a hellish shithole. It's been this way for who knows how long now.

The endless begging for subscribers will always be pathetic in my eyes.

I'm also not a fan of the begging for subscribers, but accept that it's become people's lifeline and income, and that's YouTube's bottom line.

Some people have made it work and that's amazing for them.

I like this idea, our attention spans are probably what they've always been. After all, we're animals with instincts, except modern society offers infinitely more stimuli to those monkey brain instincts. You can still question how healthy all of it is, this constant access to fast and cheap entertainment. Probably unhealthy in too large doses, in the long run.