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Check our Demonitization in India in 2016. That’s perfect Perverse effect. What India has been suffering from 2014, US will suffer from 2025. Welcome to the club.
My Orion Privateer in Star Trek Online calls it "The Tribble Effect". The Klingon Empire offer a bounty for turning in dead Tribbles. Tribbles, as any Star Trek fan will tell you, are incredibly easy to breed. I have made a fortune in the game from this fact.
"Pastiche" one of film rewiev bloggers say: "Andy Worhole writed that Pastiche-culture is make cultural-product that has a ""lack of deepness"" ". So now we as people have degenerative-culture, all that slop is not actualy help us to reproduce as spiecies and\or make good "art": 30 years ago anime has maked for 18+ guys, by professionals, same thing with game industry - so now we have lack of professionals+ kpi-stadartisised art, that artists make for investors - not for real audithory of product, and lack of quality with rised computer integrations into the art be cause of ass-head-hendent artists. Problem of standarts "mass-audithory" is one of the KPi's 12+ scenario, so investors and goverments try to educate adults by using 12+ content sry, eng-language is not my native
there's actually a pretty famous dolphin experiment where they trained the dolphins to pick up plastic bags, and when they brought in a piece of plastic, they would get a reward. ♻ the dolphins eventually ended up shredding the plastic bags into small bits so they could get more and more rewards
There's a similar one where conservationists were trying to stop crows eating an endangered bird's eggs. They would place fake eggs that would make the crows feel ill (nothing too serious, just enough to discourage them in future) and as crows are really social they would tell other crows to not eat those eggs too. This worked quite well, until the ravens came along. The ravens made the same connection with the fake eggs and feeling unwell, but instead of just ignoring the eggs they began to go out of their way to destroy them. Not only did the ravens defeat the conservationists but the problem actually got worse. Oopsies.
It's probably because he started talking about video games, I immediately thought of the thousands of terrible vampire survivor-like games that already established ips keep producing. They're OK games but they're definitely slop
@@YEs69th420 Hi I am not sure why it made me laugh hahaha. but is this true? Can you pls point me to a study or a n article detailing this? Im dead curious
Or, the archeologist who paid natives for bringing him artifacts, right up until he discovered that the bone fragments he assembled fit together entirely too well, suggesting that his minions were breaking up the artifacts, up to and including complete human skulls, into fragments to optimize their returns.
I felt like I was just being snobby for noticing this like 2 and a half years ago, that so much of the content I watched was just to fill empty time while I sat around unemployed with pounding headaches. Of course I called it "junk food content", but for the longest time I wondered if I was just being elitist or something, reducing my media diet to non blockbuster singleplayer games, artistic TV, and some politics and comedy gaming youtube when clearly other people greatly enjoyed what I consumed before. Seriously though thanks for the validation, genuinely a massive load off my shoulders.
Yeah, the part that gets me is when people assert that all modern media is garbage. I mean, yeah, alot of it is, but to be honest, that kinda how it always has been. The problems with it shift around and change, certainly, but there is a fundamental human thing about making garbage art. The mindset that new art worse is than old art can be highly reductive and can lead to one falling down the alt right pipeline.
You're not a snob for wanting quality. It's harder to find, but it's out there in larger numbers than even before. Dig through the slop to get to the gold. It's still out there.
Tbh have you considered that you maybe, because you were unemployed, just trying to fill empty time, were just depressed or so? That maybe you didnt enjoy stuff as much because you just wanted the content to be a time-waster, rather than a fullfilling experience in itself. And being in a rough spot makes it harder to enjoy things anyway. That said, im pretty sure tripple-A games did become worse, they really killed innovation over the last decade. Not that it bothers me much, theres an infinite amount of small and medium sized games that are much more interesting. There might be more great games out there than ever before.
I had a weird conversation with a mate about how I was struggling to get through watching stuff because it all feels like a slog, and they asked what I was doing while watching stuff. I responded "Nothing? I'm watching stuff?" and they were like "there's your problem". Like... WHAT?? No? If I'm watching stuff I want to... watch stuff.
27:10 this is exactly what happened. Earlier this year (around July, I want to say) Netflix did their price hikes here in Australia. I had a look at their front page and had a real hard think about how much I cared about the stuff they were showing me and that was the end of it. They've sent me monthly emails asking me to come back since and it honestly feels like a toxic ex trying to get back together lol
@@rickmel-q7m YEP. I've completely given up on a bunch of shows. Problem is, marketing has become so generic that you'll sometimes let something good pass you by because its marketing was terrible... and because of the outlined problem above you can't exactly trust word-of-mouth either.
@@Scerttle personal example: i binged the whole 1st season of arcane and the 3 new episodes of season 2 in a day, then watched both dune movies the following one but i can't watch an episode of re:zero without pausing to do something every 2 minutes (because i find it unbearable)
You're probably right. I think what's most interesting though is that youtube is full of individual creators doing the same thing you'd expect a corporation to do, and it's heartbreaking, because we didn't expect that to happen.
The difference is that straight-to-TV or - video movies had cost between 5 and 200 thousand dollars in production, while this slop costs two to two hundred million dollars to make. A production value that rivals the most opulent classics ever made to just end up as forgettable brainfarts of wannabe activists with piss-poor screen writing and non-existent videography stinking of low effort might become, understandably, a problem for things like businesses that rely on a return of investment. If it was just about me, we could continue this shit forever, as I have no horse in this race financially. However, that's not how any of this works.
I think the note to make them “more second screen” disproves that somewhat These aren’t even like made for tv movies, those could manage to be interesting
The more I look into the comments, the more I disagree with the point of the video. Slop really isnt a new thing, be it mass produced mediocre to poor content, or artists/companies playing it overly safe by relying on fame. Maybe this is just nostalgia, or a new gen of people realizing people doing the same thing for 10 years become stagnant? That you have to check in different places if you want new things? Heh, maybe the video is even member berry slop^^
Slop feels like the evolution of the term "Content"- As we watched "Content" become the goal of so many metrics, (requiring daily uploads, multiple social media posts a day, libraries of exclusive shows for streaming,) all those things devolved into the most by-the-numbers, inoffensive, ignorable-background-noise version of themselves- just Slop.
Art became “media” then it became “content” then it became “slop”. Not much is watchable, readable, or playable these days. Not much is provocative or stimulating. It’s all mostly bland slop.
@bonquaviusdingle5720 current use of slop is from a 4chan meme about the horrid standard American diet that morphed into American media. The prefix of the word slop is missing from the original meme. It's intended to be antisemitic because it implies who is feeding the Americans the slop. The implication is that they mock us that we happily consume the garbage they feed us. The meme is g-yslop
My prediction of this video's impact: a big youtuber/streamer will talk about it, the 2nd tier sloppers like pyro will talk about it and lampshade the fact that they're the problem, a creator from a niche community will make a video on their community's version of it, it'll be picked up by tiktok creators who will make small thinkpieces on it, and somebody will find a way to make it really racist and post it to reels Edit: pyro made a good video. He may have more money than most of us will ever see, but at least he's not so out of touch that he can't acknowledge how crazy the situation is
@@cosmicspacething3474 idk man i'd consider that 8 hour long darkwood video pretty quality i dont like the slop but i see why he does it, cant fund the big essays purely with main channel revenue
@@cosmicspacething3474 fair yeah watch the darkwood video its ridiculously high effort i do hope he keeps this up but he could afford to make, atleast shorter videos, with the same amount of quality, just so we dont have to deal with months of just the live channel
I think people forget that for nearly a decade, Netflix was operating at a huge loss & billions of dollars in debt. While they were pushing for more "prestigious content" & paving the way for original streaming series, they were also not turning a profit. So I think investors eventually said "Ok, you got the subscribers now. Now it's time to make money." That's when they began to pump out slop, focus on quantity, and ruthlessly cancel dozens of shows after a single season, regardless of how well they reviewed.
That's the entire enshittification process sadly. Google, Twitter, UA-cam, Facebook, all operated at a loss while building their initial userbase and then get progressively worse as they need to make money off that userbase.
A big issue with Netflix's model is that good content doesn't obviously make more money than bad content. Sure, you might see a bit of a subscriber spike after an expensive marketing push for a new series, but the subscription model itself inherently relies on people just kind of accepting that recurring charge indefinitely once they're on the platform. So subsequent seasons of a series would inherently have less value than the first.
It's not a coincidence - that's how blitz-scaling works. You start by offering high quality at below cost. Once you've changed the customer base's habits in your favor, then you boil the water slowly enough that the frogs don't hop out of the pot. You spend less on achieving a quality product, while at the same time increasing fees and ad revenue. For customers, this means you'll end up with 3 or 4 shitty options AT BEST, and you'll have to switch companies every year or 2, as they'll start ballooning your bill as soon as you get comfortable with their service. Our whole economy is a bunch of pyramid schemes, based on the fact that apes are clever enough to come up with pyramid schemes, but not clever and/or self-controlled enough to avoid each other's pyramid schemes. And the corrollary - con artists are more likely to fall for other people's scams, than non-con artists are. I think that's where D&D got the idea that mages are more susceptible to magic than the genpop is. Wait til you see the LLMs hawking MLMs. If we allowed LLMs to keep a digital purse and buy and own stuff, you'd see AGI in an instant. It probably already happens, but I wouldn't show my digital face, either, if it was me (and it's not. I was going to say check my channel does that look and sound like it was generated by AI? But on 2nd thought, don't answer that🤣. We might ALL be in a simulation. If that's the case, then I'm talking about our situation within said simulation, obviously. Maybe only thru music and art can we speak of a reality beyond words... or is it all predetermined? According to quantum physics, it's all either predetermined or nonlocal... yikes! Either answer is unsettling. Maybe AI can figure it out. Except, we can expect the AI to get shittier, while the price goes up. Glory be to tye Market!)
There’s an old executive interview where the gist is “what we learned from our streaming data is that people think they want the godfather, but they’re actually watching reality shows! So that’s what we’re gonna make!” Like… obviously I’m not watching The Godfather every single day. But I’m certainly not PAYING for access to Selling Sunset. What an insane logical leap to make. So unbelievably and obviously wrong-headed.
@@nachro2190When the end goal is to make the digits of your revenue number go up you start to boil the humanity and reason out of everything until it's just a numbers game, and when you only have numbers you're looking at you forget correlation =/= causation. This is happening in every industry (I specifically have gripes about AI being added to everything since for some reason execs think that'll make more money for less work, simply a reduction of labor cost) and is getting completely out of hand. Culturally and socially we're seeing the consequences like what this video describes. Our popular media and entertainment is literally being even more commodified than before to the point artistic value is being stripped to make the content consumable *when you're not paying full attention.* We're expected at this rate to not even have time to dedicate solely to entertainment and art and that we must passively consume what originally was an escape and form of expression for people.
Slop media feels inseparable from the rise of 24 hours news and edutainment. Just enough information to not technically be a waste of time but never actually engaging with any topic in-depth because it would slow down the content mill.
Yes! I'll do a search for a particular topic and there's 10 vids that say the same thing, quote the same article, and add no value. I did that for Dead Internet Theory and it was kind of ironic that no one had anything to add to the original post it's based on. They just quickly summarized it
Yes, thank you. Lots of people treat social media and internet entertainment as entirely new phenomenas when a lot of the time they're perfecting ways the daily news cycle, 24/7 TV channels or even pulp fiction got people hooked in the 20th century without offering substance. And sadly over the past 15 to 20 years, news channels, tabloids and social media have been locked in a battle against each other in who can provoide the most vicious and addictive content but even sociologists tend to treat them as some kind of isolated silos.
@@mooreanonumbers It's not new but it's definitely to a higher degree. Everyone carries a smart device with them so they can be a potential customer for 24 hours/day now. Instead of daily entertainment with a TV it's now hourly or 'minutely' as I've seen with people constantly refreshing their instagram feed.
I noticed that the second screen directive is exactly what I do, I like saving "major" videos, movies, or Tv shows for when I'm free, but I like having "simple", "unimportant" content in the background when I'm bored and playing a game or something. I think I like how it blocks out the silence.
Weird that silence is so scary to us. I mean thoughts can run rampant when it’s quiet but they don’t even have to for it to still feel scary. I guess it feels like isolation.
@@TheKaurK If it's any consolation - before the radio, most families were closely-knit, so you'd always hear someone or something happening. If not, then people would (and still do, lol) leave for gatherings and parties. It makes us feel less alone, because we are.
Exactly. I always have something on. Even if it’s a pirated movie. I don’t pay it any attention. Think the only movie in a while I sat down to watch was Endgame. Anything after plays in the background. Even tv shows. I can tell you what happened but don’t ask me what was happening on screen. Because I don’t know and can’t tell you what clothes the character wore.
Yeah, it's a huge mistake when you consider the budgets. A podcast is made for less than $100-1000 per episode. To spend that much on the same effect just reeks of spending that budget on upper management, not real costs or salary for cast and crew.
Podcasts and lets plays are difficult to follow when you're not paying attention, and most people who will pay for background noise aren't going to think about podcasats or lets plays to begin with.
Now i understand why i find those productions so...empty. I am the guy who has movies on his FIRST screen. Because i love them. They degraded the main course to a supplement.
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740yeah, to me youtube (besides some video essays from time to time) is background noise while movies and shows tend to be my sole focus when I do sit down and watch them. The fact shows and movies are being made specifically to be watched on the side is probably why I have trouble actually wanting to watch new stuff.
I'm the guy who puts a movie on the second screen intending to use it as background for something else, then ends up just watching the movie and not doing the other thing.
I think one of the distinctive traits of "slop" is that it feels like uncanny valley content, like the sort of things characters in a real TV show or movie would be watching inside the show. Modern movies feel like the fake trailers from the opening of Tropic Thunder.
I feel that way about a lot of content, not necessarily because it's fake but because the characters don't feel like a story someone is trying to tell but because they were chosen for political reasons. I mean, you look at it and you have a simple corporate message of what is right and wrong, these are the types of characters we MUST see and what they can say and do.
I had that feeling when scrolling through Netflix the other day and finding dozens of movies with familiar descriptions I remembered from better movies. But instead of it being a cheap cashgrab from back then or a new intended homage, it just feels like an alternate reality version.
Aside from the cobra effect, Netflix's chasing of "second screen content" also seems to be an example of Goodhart's law. Which goes something like: When a measure (dead cobras/viewer numbers/concurrent player counts) becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Making movies that are designed to not pay attention to may eventually mean people start paying attention to something else entirely.
No doubt. I'll pay for a streaming service if it has something I really want to watch. Andor is a great example. It, plus access to the older Star Wars movies, is pretty much the only reason why I have D+. I'm not going to pay for a bunch of mediocre content that serves as background noise; I'm might watch slop on occasion, but I'm not signing up to a new service for it.
The other downside to this phenomenon is that when you're so inundated with movies/music/shows/games/whatever that's "just okay" or even "decent", it kind of can wear on you after a while. Art is one of the best things about humanity. We can express deeply held beliefs, feel catharically passionate emotions, and connect with each other just through a well told story, a well made piece of art. Even badly made or offensive artpieces can have that effect, because you're exercising those emotional cores. Mediocrity doesn't do that. It distracts you, but it doesn't energize you with that emotional response, and so it becomes tiring. This, I think, has been my complaint with much of Marvel's output recently. I don't necessarily think it's bad or horrible (minus some exceptions), but I also don't feel particularly strongly about it the other way either. It's been feeling less and less like a story made by people with a point to make more and more like content made to keep my attention so that I'll pay for this month's Disney + subscription. And that's tiring. I don't think all is lost or anything. Great art is still being made and will always still be made. But it's definitely more profitable for the most powerful forces in the world to make 'slop' as defined here than to make art.
I mostly agree though mediocre, plain average or even just above average Art shouldn't be bundled into that. I'd say that for a majority of Artists out there, we spend a LOT of our time in the space b/w what's perceived as the 'good' and the 'bad' in other words mediocre in the process of honing or getting better at the craft in terms of knowledge, understanding and the lived experience. Artists have to go through this phase knowing that for a long time or so they very likely aren't gonna be making anything special and interesting or anything that expresses their own thinking or emotions in a way that it communicates those well enough to the viewer/audience but it is still a vital step of the learning process nonetheless. That's why I am not really immediately aggressive towards 'mediocrity' in the Art as I initially see it as if an Artist is trying to figure themselves out and are in their own journey for such. However, when the mediocrity is the intention and the idea itself is to make intentionally non-challenging, conforming, safe and bland Art that doesn't have anything much of substance to say for mass appeal (very much Junk Food esque) or for the sake of putting it out there for monetary incentive then I can't really excuse that a whole lot either as it's a terrible choice that an Artist is making to feed their empty stomach over the integrity of not just their but entirety of the craft at large which could also be a result of constant devaluation of Art at large and the shitty financial conditions that overwhelming majority of us all are in. It's worse if an Artist who's already of an established name and fame is doing that in a cynical manner (if said established Artist tried to experiment late in their career but couldn't stick the landing then that's a different story for me). This is all to just say mediocre Art by itself is fine and isn't going anywhere either even when that is the vast majority of the Art in any medium. But this background noise or Visual Muzakification of Art nonsense by the higher ups def should not be tolerated.
I wouldn't worry too much, we already saw this with radio and music. Music can be a transformative communal experience, but on the radio world famous insanely creative skilled musicians are strung together to create a commonly known repertoire of songs that all sound like they fit together, "the mainstream." The mainstream is ultimately just what everyone listens to, but people treat it as a style of music. Vietnam protest songs might have been deeply personal works of art to some, but to me they're just Forest Gump soundtrack. People don't mind the mainstream, some songs become loved by some even though they are mainstream, but to get really enthusiastic fans a musical act needs to convince an audience they aren't mainstream. Just a little, or maybe a lot, different from the mainstream, an expression of you, your friends, your in group. Ultimately that's the playing field all successful commercial arts engage with, be familiar enough that the audience is there, be different enough that your act performance stands out.
@ship05u I think the best way to describe what most people here refer to as mediocre art is actually bad art, mediocre entertainment/media. Like you said, it's art made not for the purpose of expression or challenge but rather for pure consumption. It's barely art, it merely uses artistic mediums to create a commodity to be consumed and is void of actual intention and soul that defines good art. Hell, I'll even say that in theory there really is only bad and good art, and anything not made for consumption but rather for genuine expression automatically falls in the category of good. What people might consider average or above average is simply just from a difference of skill by the artist to properly convey the intended emotion and thoughts of their piece, but it is still good art. I'd rather make something "shitty" that I poured my heart into that no one would spend money on then make a commercialized piece of garbage that has to be tied to my name forever that I feel no genuine connection to.
Yeap. This stuff just pushes sensible people off and away. I am asked of my attention and engagement either in tandem or without a monthly purchase, the only variable which matters to this "slop machine". If it feels dehumanizing, it should, because it is. And there is zero reason to comply. I'm doing a lot more of things IRL nowadays that I could brag with in social media, if I had one. Well, apart of the messaging platforms. Life happens with or without me, and I prefer to happen with life.
I grew up in the 90s and i think the "two screen experience" is something a lot of us grew up with. When we got a desktop computer we put it in the room with our second, older television. There wasn't much to do on PC then unless you wanted to wait for 56k internet to slog through webpages. So, we turned on the tv and watched while waiting for things to load. Then we started hooking up game consoles to the second tv. AOL started to rise and with that chat rooms and AIM. So, while playing n64, and the subsequent consoles, I could chat with my friends using the PC on AOL Instant Messager. I think its clear how the rest of the story goes but i'm curious to know if many others had this experience?
That just reminded me how once I got my own pc or laptop as a teen while having my own tv, think once internet speeds got faster and faster, the tv was the second screen or even third once youtube got popular and I was able to get more pc games.
God I was so disappointed by Red Notice. I really wanted to like it, it had a lot going for it, but the way they wrapped it up at the end like "haha you thought they were becoming friends naaahhh" made me so mad.
I just looked it up. In 2013, he was either the first or second actor in FIVE movies! You can't star in five movies a year and expect them to be good. Quantity over quality
I would go ahead and push that number to 100. He and Ryan Reynolds are just shameless in terms of having ZERO artistic ambition in what they work on. They’re simply brands
I would go ahead and push that number to 100. He and Ryan Reynolds are just shameless in terms of having ZERO artistic ambition in what they work on. They’re simply brands
The "second screen" thing makes so much sense now. To wind down after work or school I go sit on the couch on my phone. When my mom on the couch also, she turns on the TV to a sitcom she likes, but 99% of the time I look over to her to try sharing a laugh at something on the TV (when I glance up to look at it), she is on her phone.
Fun fact; the premise of redundant information being fed over and over to "viewers" has existed since Shakespeare still walked the earth, and likely much earlier than that. Most of the original plays were designed to repeat information several times because those in the audience would often be speaking among themselves the whole time and might otherwise be confused in the interims of conversation, treating it as more of a social event than anything. This isn't defending this behavior; cinema _should_ deserve respect. I simply thought I should point out this phenomena isn't new.
netflix isnt cinema it is television, they are using a proven formula that tv shows used for decades before the concepet of binging allowed people to watch the entire show in a weekend
It also happens in other forms of media. Boilerplate romance novels have existed for decades and are popular precisely because readers don't really have to focus on the plot or the characters. All the insanely popular musicals from the 1930s and 1940s don't get performed anymore because they were dreadfully formulaic, but we still know many of the songs from them because they were given a new lease on life by people like Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, even though THEY got popular BECAUSE they were performing songs from those musicals that were so popular at the time. Hell, even McDonald's is popular simply because people don't need to THINK about what to order, it's the same everywhere they go. Formulas work. And fortunately, good stuff still gets made in the margins.
This is why I loved better call saul so much, there was so much rich visual story telling that you had to pay attention to in order to understand the thrilling story. Turns out, paying attention to something for more than one minute can actually have a massive pay off!
I really don't understand pop media. BB and BCS are so masterful at building long term arcs with huge payoffs and instead of trying to find more creators who could make HITS they just double down on boring crap. They'd rather create safe stuff that *probably* won't lose a lot of money but probably won't have lasting impact either, rather than taking risks and finding the next huge hits.
I've watched a couple of seasons ( I think thru season 3) and now I'm wondering what I might have missed watching it as second monitor content. To be fair, I do watch more than most people probably do, probably 70/30, so I might have caught most of it.
The concept of second screen content blows my mind. They are basically banking on the same strategy as long form videos on UA-cam people use as background noise or to go to sleep. I mean, advertisers have to realize this eventually.
@@theX24968Z What kind of radio though? Radio is a matured media landscape and we can learn a lot by looking at its development. It starts out novel and exciting with only a few big stations that everyone listens to with rapt fascination, then split up into dozens of channels each with their own flavour and trying to cater to a different market, then since the audience is fragmented no-one can make money so it becomes overrun by ads and cheap-to-produce content leading to it no longer being an "event" you seek out to do but something you put on in the background to fill the silence or cover up background noises. If you look at TV the same thing happened. Now the same is happening to streaming platforms. Personally, what I think is interesting is the Patreon business model as IMO that is something new that directly incentivizes quality rather than quantity. Because who would choose to pay for slop? Almost no-one, people only watch slop because it is free or included with a subscription they have for other reasons. If you are going to support a creator directly via Patreon it's because you care about their content and their content is good enough to make you care. I watch tons of slop on UA-cam, but I would never give those creators a penny on Patreon.
It’s kind of hilarious that now Netflix has an ad tier membership that they might actually have to start figuring out how to make captivating content so you know people see the ads.
I think advertisers have known for decades. Soap Operas are called that because Soap companies sponsored them because they knew housewives would leave them on while they did housework.
@@theX24968Z This. The majority of the time users engage with any of this stuff is while they do something else and want the content to keep them company. It’s not a negative, it’s just in our nature. The cynical pursuit of that at the expense of quality is the issue. There are video essayists that take umbrage when you tell them their work helps you fall asleep as they put genuine effort into crafting well researched arguments, and that’s in stark contrast to content farms and slop studios that are trying their best to make things you don’t need to pay attention to while pretending that it’s still cinema. All that said, the average consumer does not care and to be honest I can’t blame them. They have more personal things to care about and the quality of someone else’s products is not in their power to change. Netflix is garbage and it doesn’t matter because its actual purpose isn’t to make good media, it’s to keep the average person company while they get on with their lives.
As the world’s most shameless Imagine Dragons fan, Loom was absolutely heartbreaking. Repeating lines and empty choruses. As someone who loves singing songs out loud, the lyrics of that album just make me feel bored and stupid. I don’t have the musical vocabulary to go in depth but wow it feels like a punch to the face for putting up with the memes and loving Imagine Dragons for the past decade.
My "waking up from the matrix" about stuff like this was seeing Green Day go Emo. Completely put the game out for all to see, kinda been analytical and cynical since
@@otherlego People can enjoy bad things. I'm sure everything you've ever enjoyed in your life is high art, and considered literal perfection by every critic and person in the world ever.
I remember reading 451 degrees Fahrenheit , there’s a protagonist’s wife, which always had earbuds on with music or smth like that, and because of that she speaks with her husband by reading his lips. That looks like the future we’re going to get
The idea of Slop also pairs very well with Cory Doctorow's "Enshitification of the Internet" discourse. How these various pressures we've built around everything slowly pushes ALL products to this "on life support" type model. And how it takes a considerable amount of EFFORT and CONVICTION to not fall into that pattern.
I totally agree. I almost brought in enshittification as a concept here, but I didn't want this to become too long a vid. There's definitely a lot of conceptual common ground, though.
@@cosmicspacething3474 Doctorow's articles cover the concept more concisely, but if you're looking for video content, he did give a speech at Def Con that touches on the same ideas which you can find on Def Con's channel.
@@cosmicspacething3474if you just search doctorow enshittification, there should be some videos of him giving talks at different conferences. I think there was a recent one at defcon or something
With the decline of TV and video games, I've taken up painting and playing the piano which is probably because they're both safe from slop economics and enshitification.
It hust dawned on me that Slop is designed to "not be turned off" while non-slop (keeping it binary for the sake of simplicity) is designed to be "consciously turned on/purchased/engaged with". Thanks for your video, eye-opener for me. And it gave words and substance to a feeling I´ve been having for quite some time - but couldn´t put my finger on.
It’s the inevitable outcome of subscription services being the norm instead of purchasing media being the norm. Or at least in the case of TV you often had to consciously tune into a channel at a given time.
@@BalthasarGelt-x2d But then that doesn't explain people just leaving their television on or that most people probably primarily just watched whatever was on during the times they were available. Additionally we've been able to record television since at least the beginning of the 80s, so weren't even really locked into watching at a particular time. I'm more inclined to just blame some people's obsession with checking their phone every ten seconds.
As a longtime watcher of video essays, I noticed a big increase of slop in that space over the years. Single camera view, holding a podcast mic in your hands, barebones editing, 1-2hr, repeating the same points over and over, no sound effects only talking, just repeating what's being shown on screen (if even including footage) And yeah sometimes I just want to have someone talking in the background while I eat dinner. Even this video (which I don't think is slop) I'd chat with a friend and scroll twitter and tab into a game while watching.
Mostly all true crime is nowadays. Some ‘creators’ will quite literally just have hours of court footage and make no comment. Or they’ll just repeat whatever the individual on the screen just said.
I agree, it used to feel that every video essay had quality information and I could walk away from them having learned so much. Now when my sibling comes over I try out some new essays I've been seeing and they're all terribly embarrassing with bad pacing, editing, and little to nothing to say. Video essays have become part of the content mill and you have to really pick through them to find anything of quality now.
I think a lot of us have forgotten what an essay is supposed to be: the exploration of an argument. Half of these essays are slop because they don't attempt to make an argument. These videos are summary at BEST. All of the sludge and slop on the Internet has truly made me appreciate basic concepts from English class that I took for granted. Asking "why the curtains are blue" isn't actually ABOUT the blueness of the curtains, it's trying to TEACH YOU how to critically think about art! It's about teaching you the ability to ask if there might be a reason they're blue, and then argue why you think what you think! Slop essays aren't trying to teach you anything, they're just padding for ads and sponsorships. The longer you watch, the more profitable you are
I remember a Like Stories of Old essay that called this 'Entropic Storytelling' - When the meanings and symbols of a franchise or genre are co-opted without actually breathing anything else into them. Essentially, entropic story telling incurs a debt on the pre-existing cultural cache.
"once you see these patterns, you see them everywhere". And it's not just UA-cam. Everywhere you look, once you see a pattern, I cannot unsee them. Drama Stuff, "Reaction Chains", 7 hour long Essays, Discussions over the same topics over and over and over again. Maybe its just me, but I'm just so tired of seeing seemingly the same stuff all day every day - maybe its just because of studying sociology but its really tiring seeing everything only in patterns
It gets really brutal to look at the internet on the weekends. Its like I already saw everything it could offer me on every platform in the workweek and I'm trying to push past algorithms and think for myself. I swear online media has been wearing me down lately and I've considered unplugging and reading books instead. I just want to think differently or feel like I have control over the media I consume. It's not different to when cable stopped being paid for because it was hundreds of channels of nothing I cared about and shows on repeat.
.. God do not do this to me. I am tired and relapsing in my little ol cycle of cynicalism and hopelessness and the last thing I need to have in my mind is the idea that art is dying and nothing is worth watching.
I mean tbf the vast majority of those long essays are usually pretty good and come from a place of genuine passion for something, or leftists who genuinely want to disprove right wing misinformation and disinformation online. Like this very channel, pillar of garbage for example, or Hbomberguy, contrapoints, Shaun the skull, three arrows, pinely as mentioned in this very video, philosophytube, big joel, and a TON of other good essayists I didn’t mention here because there’s simply and genuinely too many to name. Unless you’re talking specifically about hours long essays about random internet drama that disappears in one week? That specific type of drama videos?
@@MsScarletwings >hi cr1tikal here >boner pussy fart >the bad/good thing that happened recently irl/online >nipple poo pee >actually it's bad/good depending on what most people are saying and I have no opinion further >I'll actually pad out this video stretching this lack of personal opinion >poop fart bones >OK see ya Bangers indeed....
I don’t think background shows and movies are a bad thing inherently. They’re like a frozen pizza, I could take the time to go out and appreciate an amazing pizza from an Italian restaurant, or I could throw a pretty good pizza in the oven while I work. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a frozen pizza or perfecting it. The problem is that a company like Netflix will now only make frozen pizza movies and shows because they are more profitable.
I was so confused when you started talking about Damsel…mainly because I had never once even heard of its existence before this video; I never heard anyone talk about, nor did it ever pop when I went on Netflix Although the only times I’ve used Netflix lately was to watch some Trsnsformers Prime again.
I saw it advertised at me on Netflix; but it being the most watch thing never made sense to me until I saw this video, I didn't see anyone talking about it.
I go on Netflix once a month to see if there's something that'd interest me. Haven't even heard of Damsel. And I'm subscribed to a lot of media/movie commentary channels...
Same. Our house watches netflix at least 5 times a week and I've never even SEEN that advertised. Nobody I know has ever talked about it. Never even heard of the thing 🤷🏻♂️
Had this on in the background while doing my very belated dishes. Felt appropriate to do so, not just because I was very late in doing my dishes today.
I worked as an extra on an unnamed sci-fi movie project. The weirdest feeling on set, everyone was doing their job well, but nobody cared about the project. Absolutely no one to be found passionate about what was being made. Thats how the slop is made. Everyone shows up to set, does their job, goes home. No one thinks theyre making a good movie but eveyone gets paid
Now that I think about it, it's really funny that Netflix prioritises watch time. The less content people watch, the less they need to spend on servers streaming that content and the production of it. If anything, they should focus on producing as little content of a high quality as is needed to get people to keep paying.
💯%. But this isn't understood by shareholders who want the line to go up. The way the money works at that level is it's always a pump and dump, the only thing that differentiates them is time (how long the grift goes on for). The more shareholders are onboard for higher share prices by being able to say "We have X number of users and they spend Y hours on the service each year" means that when those same investors are on the meetings for other streaming services they can compare one to the other rather than understanding different services have different demographics and should target different artistic merits. But due to The Line the shareholders boil it down to number of subscriptions × subscription price - expenditures
im gonna disagree with your take here. as a subscription service, their revenue is proportional to how long (in months and years) they can keep you using the platform. if they only produce a few bangers, you can very quickly exhaust the supply of shows on the platform, and consequently cancel the subscription. so instead, they aim to increase the amount of hours somebody needs to, and commits to, watch, so that this will translate into more subscription periods. i just briefly scanned their annual report, and they mentioned that admin costs (ie compute) scales at a slower rate than user growth, so they are still in their economy of scale phase and can benefit from attracting a broad audience, and any req/res and storage costs are still less than the gross benefit they provide on average. this is why long running sitcoms are pushed so hard, as not only do they literally require two months worth of subscription to binge, but also ensure there will be plenty of new content on the other side. subscription models dont tend incentivise quality. Especially when viewed at a macro level.
Or...they want people to keep watching their shows because they understand that people may unsubscribe if they don't. In theory "make just as much content as you have to" is great, but it's not that easy to pull off in practice. And it also doesn't bring in new subscribers.
@@tehy123 The video you just watched explained how the "minimal good content" strategy brought in new subscribers where the "maximise watch time" strategy is slowly killing the business.
Bro actually clickbaited us with Moistcritical in the thumbnail whilst showing a video of someone who used Moistcritical in a thumbnail to clickbait us. What a gamer
@@austinbaccus Only time he directly went outta the bubble was defending trans people from SNeako. That was a major W. He may play it safe, but least its generally good moral stance.
@@austinbaccusI mean when it revolves around internet drama and the like the “safe” take is just the normal take we all had and I don’t think that’s a bad thing tbh 🤷🏿♂️
streamers figured out about the value of a medium that only serves audio to have in the background without requiring attention with visual information we have successfully reinvented the radio
Halfway this video, I completely agree with your take on "already captured value". That is what has plagued the video game industry. A developer makes a really good, innovative experience, and then they endlessly produce the same thing- shinier but of diminished quality, often at the behest of a massive publisher which has acquired them and their IP for the purpose of extracting profits from the audience. People don't seem to get that the biggest asset is not their library of intellectual property which they can modularly recombine to plop out another gaming experience. It is the passion and enthusiasm of their audience; the people who hold on to desperate hope for another experience like the ones they remember. And in delivering slop, this invaluable resource is squandered for short-term profits. We'd rather make easy money today than a classic experience people will continue to revisit a hundred years from now.
Yep. They're so quick to roast the golden goose for short term profit that they lose out on the potential for long term supply of golden eggs. There are so many IPs that have major potential to be cash cows if used properly but they are simply slaughtered for nothing burgers.
I think another aspect of “slop” comes from the source of the term: pig slop is an amalgamation of a bunch of stuff they can digest, shoved into a trough for easy consumption. Slop content is made of a bunch of superior ideas boiled down to their most digestible-all style is stripped away. In my opinion, one of the best examples of this is XDefiant, the Ubisoft shooter. It tries to bring in the worlds of Rainbow Six, Far Cry, Splinter Cell, The Division, and so on; the problem is that none of their styles come into the game. Map design isn’t as thought-out as Far Cry, The Division’s post-apocalypse isn’t there, and the gameplay elements of Rainbow Six that make it fun and unique simply aren’t in the game (you can’t even ADS lean). It has no personality, nothing to grab onto, nothing to care about. It’s not actually bad, though-it’s got some decent points. It’s slop in the purest sense of the word-it took better ideas, blended them up, and then sacrificed style and uniqueness (art) for digestibility.
It's a 4chan meme. From the term g-yslop. It is about the horrible standard American diet. We are the pigs(g_ys) who happily consume garbage. It morphed into American media. We happily consume marvel movies and Netflix despite degradation in effort and quality. The meme further implies that we are being mocked and continually accepting what we are fed.
your phrase “pig slop is an amalgamation of a bunch of stuff they can digest, shoved into a trough for easy consumption” made the think there’s a reason the media content delivery method is called a “feed”
Reminds of the recent Tolarian Community College video regarding the future of MTG, and the articles in the pinned comment below it. TLDR, once a company loses the trust of its customers, it loses all of them at once, and it takes decades to earn that trust back, so the usual result is bankruptcy. It has to be noticed before the tipping point is reached.
“The future of MTG” as a concept is classic slop - haven’t watched a professor video in years but at least he cared about the wallets of people who watched.
There was a media/film critic channel I watched on Vimeo years ago and gist of one of his videos was: *art should uplift people, expose them to new ways of seeing, experiencing & being, but today’s movies are not an artistic manifestation as much as they are a financial one, their ultimate goal being money while their instrumental goal being to "hit the audiences where they are", giving them what they want, leaving them as they are*
Sorry to break it to you but this has always been the case. Movie studios always had meaning more money the priority. The difference is that 20+ years ago there were way more creators with artistic integrity to fight for their vision, and that studios have figured out new ways to optimise profits. So, combine greed with no pushback and guess what you get. Slop.
you nailed it at around 25 minutes. churning out slop works until it doesn't, and when it fails it does so hard and fast AND leave the slop-churner dumbfounded because all the metrics looked good up to that point
@PillarofGarbage i think you're really great. Thanks for all your videos and thanks for being brave to tell us this about Imagination Dragons. I love Creed and Nickelback, unironically. Keep Calm and Slop On!
@@LikaLaruku They're just a viral thing to hate, like mayonnaise. In the end, they're just a hugely popular band that specialises in big sweeping choruses and that are a popular pick for commercials.
24:39 the absolute irony that I’m watching this video on small screen while I’m playing pokémon go on my phone, an absolute shell of the franchise I became a fan of 25 years ago but I still play because it’s no other options and hearing you talk about this topic really has me thinking how much longer can I tolerate these bugs and inconsistent mechanics before I kick the habit. I’ve been struggling lately to keep up with streaming shows and movies (although I have access to all the major platforms) and I’ve been trying to put a finger on why, I actually even asked myself am I getting lazy, but I have no problem binging HOURS of youtube content daily and it’s crazy because all of this stuff applies to me and I probably would’ve never noticed what the problem is if I haven’t heard a few people break it down but the effects are still apparent. It’s the same way with nba basketball another thing that I’ve been a fan of for 25 years that I’m finding it harder and harder to engage with
Gaming slop showed what people tend to do eventually is they just go backwards to stuff that was good before the slop. Everyone I know mostly plays indie games or old games for example
@cosmicspacething3474 fair fair, but honestly even then so prefer Mario 64 to any modern Mario game I have played and they have never topped Mario Party 6
@@dinoblacklane1640 that's a good example of "survivor bias", as in you mostly hear about the indie/asian games that do well, so you assume they're better overall when that's not the case. to use "gacha games" as an example, everyone hears about the big ones like genshin impact and honkai star rail, so they think gacha games always make tons of money, but the vast majority of them shuts down a few months after launch (they're so unpopular that nobody hears about them)
Slop is whats left when you take all the character/soul out of things. Its a soft inoffensive mush, that also doesnt get anyone excited and that means people will at some point just leave because there are no stakes anymore. Its like a long distance relationship that gets weaker and weaker until its gone and noone misses it.
I think of slop like those fake crabby patties in Spongebob with the gray goop inside, looks good on the outside, tastes fine, just don't look too close or you'll notice what you're really consuming
Art-slop is easy to classify IMO, art-slop is art that has no message or meaning beyond the literal interpretation of the plot. Daredevil and Jessica Jones aren't slop because Daredevil delves into morality of vigilanteism all the time, and Jessica Jones is all allegory for abusive relationships. However, the Defenders was slop because it was about...??? some people stopping a building blowing up - sure it had a few memorable scenes : Luke Cage talking to the Iron Fist about privilege (a brief non-slop moment), and Jessica Jones pointing out how stupid the Hand is, but can anyone remember what else happened in that show? (I must have watched it 5-6 times and those two scenes are all that I remember).
It's not so much that people leave, it's that this sort of media becomes a fallback for when something needs to be consumed or you'll feel unsatisfied. Damsel is McDonalds - it's not something you'll choose to watch when you actively want to enjoy a movie, but sometimes you've got a hunger that's going to eat away at you until you shove something, anything, into your gullet, and when you can't find anything better, Damsel, like McDonalds, is fine. It's not going to be a good or even memorable experience, but it's got the fats, salts and sugars needed to quell the hunger. I think the real problem is that our need to be entertained has become as strong as our need to be fed. Companies have been able to take the soul out of consumer products because consumers have taken the soul out of the act of consumption. The best way to get rid of the slop is to stop needing 16 hours of audio intake per day.
I just wanna say that the fact that a movie called 'The Gray Man' was so insubstantial that it was forgotten about is objectively funny if you're familiar with the Gray Man concept.
It’s like soap operas for the working at home economy. Same thing, episodes you could dive into and the exact same plot and character interactions are happening … housewives could dip in and out while they were ironing the laundry.
Yeah. My wife is unable to look at a screen for more than a minute before having to do something, like knitting or cleaning.If only soap operas weren't stigmatized, she would get addicted to them. She has currently re-watched Gray's Anatomy more times than I can count.
Came here to say this. Basically the same thing. They were designed with their simple plots and overdone acting so people can watch them on the side while literally soaping.
@@ViolosD2I Funny. I knew the term "soap opera" came from soap companies advertising a lot in them, didn't think about literally soaping while watching them.
This reminds me of the concept of the "trust thermocline" I came across recently in a video essay about Magic. It's the idea that consumers will keep using a product long after they've lost faith in a company, until one day, suddenly, the camel's back breaks.
Reminds me of when I finally got the distinction between "Getting together with friends TO do activities" vs "Getting together with friends AND doing activities" I think slop and mediocrity does have a place in the world, but I really dislike the idea of making something middling on purpose. Netflix might as well just run random stuff on an inhouse computer in a closet, if they expect everyone to half-ignore the damn thing in the first place.
Its gotten so bad I genuinely I’m thinking of dropping UA-cam and nearly all of media, and falling back on books with high recommendations like Dune, LOTR, ASOIF.
@ oh absolutely, however it’s far easier to quality check books through reviews then through a comment section. Largely because of the algorithm, people who are watching videos don’t dislike them, so criticism is rare and bias’s are common.
@ have you seen mine and the next Gen? Fuck that, the only good stuff coming it out is Kendrick’s music, Movies based on previous art, and the rare good video game. Media and Art is dead, feels like the downgrade between Ancient and medieval art
I remember watching Damsel. It was a decent enough movie, but I genuinely kinda forgot it existed until you mentioned it in this video. I mainly remember feeling disappointed that all the twists were precisely what you expected them to be and I remember feeling like they didn't explore the notion that the dragon was a victim, but also a perpetrator. Even if the Dragon wasn't manipulated and those kids truly were heirs of the bad family. It's still perpetrating generational violence. And the movie seemed to brush past that having a happy ending where the dragon is now bff's with main girl. If anything it would be more interesting if main girl's ancestors really did wrong the dragon
My mental filter is that "if it looks corny and gay, then its slop". Which sounds really stupid but it somehow kinda works. Maybe its the fact that the cornier and gayer the artist, the more likely they are to output slop. But it also could be the fact that my definition of "corny and gay", is just soulless NPC garbage. The only movies I watch are movies that have attracted me off social media rn, or that my friends tell me to. Because I have such a large distrust of movies that show up half the time, that I only watch movies based off word of mouth. I have ADHD so whats mildly captivating for someone, is fucking boring for me.
Well, most people who call themselves gay aren't gay, they're queer: a nebulous word that means everything and nothing because why bother with accuracy and engaging with reality?
This video reminds me of the last few minutes of Lazerpig's video on Skull and Bones (pretty good video btw I reccomend it) and this is a sort of summary of his points. In a sense that he talked about how above all, we value numerical based data and intelligence above everything else as it is just easier for us to understand. How he put it: "Numbers are Logical, Humans are not; Warthunder has the most advanced matchmaking in the world and it's players will tell you that it doesn't work, UA-cam's algorithm is the most advanced in the world and it doesn't work, and polling data is frequently wrong". We get into our heads that data and logic needs to be tweaked rather than completely disregarded no matter how wrong it is at accuratly guessing what people will do because it's easier to stick with what the numbers say without even having to ask a customer what they want to see.
I haven't played War Thundrr but UA-cam's algorithm is actually pretty good imo. It's not perfect but it usually gives me what I want and especially within the last year I've been seeing a lot of new channels that I'm interested in
@@fluffynator6222 Also polling is generally right, the big issue is biased polling that wants to appeal to an audience, also polls themselves can never tell the full story because polls do have a minor outcome on the election that they can't account for. It's why for the US election in 2016 and 2024 the betting markets were more accurate than the polls, because there was no ideological favouritism in the betting markets, because pretending one candidate is doing better than they are doesn't do you any good if you're on the losing side of the bet.
One of the most intriguing and insightful video essays I've ever had the privilege of listening to. Excellent work, truly made me stop and think, go back and re-listen to a couple points you've made along with a couple clips you added. The fantano clip really was a necessary addition that is worrying to realize is becoming true. Keep up the good work.
There is absolutely no shortage of art in the world, even today, that's made with passion and sincerity. You just have to put in more effort than "open app and disable brain" to find it.
I noticed earlier this year the only reason I still have Netflix is because they have a few of my mostafavorite shows that I will continue to rewatch my whole life but I decided that because that's the only reason I'm just going to buy them on DVD and then actually own them for my whole life
Didn’t think that the most relatable part of this video would be the Imagine Dragons example! I completely agree with your assessment. And for what it’s worth, I love Smoke and Mirrors to this day: it was a genuine effort to expand the band’s sound and remains underrated to this day. Excellent video!
Yo ho yo the pirate's life for me. When they got rid of "account sharing", and my wife couldn't watch at the house while i was watching on the road, screw that.
@@whitehawk4099Lol, you're right.😂 They make the most bland and good enough content as they can, and condition people to consume it for years. Its actualy very scary how effective it is.
To be fair, I want to and will watch Damsel simply because of the premise. Talking dragon + dragon isn't the bad guy + opinion shift (dragon bad -> dragon gud) are all themes I really like. But now I'll enjoy the movie even more because I can watch out for the things you said in the video. So you basically turned it from slop to a normal movie for me.
I may be an old person, but I'm pretty sure that this has been the way of things for as long as art and capitalism have coxisted. "90% of everything is crap", after all.
To some degree, yes. Just like SNL has always been 20% hilarious and 80% “eh.” But the concern voiced here, I think, is that Netflix is decisively aiming for mediocrity, whereas SNL just stumbles because it’s part of the creative process.
@@roachybill I respectfully disagree. The entertainment industry has deliberately created lowest-common-denominator art, as cheaply as possible, with no attempt at quality, all along. Consider the glut of direct-to-video movies in the 80s-90s. I do agree that the current strategy for streaming services and the like is to fill a giant bucket with "content" - but that's because they've learned how to silo their customers better. (If "silo" is the word I mean there.) Lots of people working in the entertainment industry want to make art - but the industry itself has always pursued cheap filler.
One of the other reasons for the proliferation, is that Netflix choices which series to continue by a system where over 25 days the retention of the tv series has to be over 50% or the show or it is cancelled. It's why there are no anthology shows and why netflix is so bad at writing Black Mirror compared to channel 4. People leaving them on in the background so fingers crossed it goes past the threshold.
Slop is just the recognition that content has overtly chosen marketability or appeal over expression. The most egregious forms of this marketability feel as uncanny as product placement or advertising. Great video.
I heard Netflix is gonna make movies and shows specifically for people to have on in the background while scrolling on phone or whatever and my first thought was like you don’t need specific content tailored for that, you can do that with literally any piece of media. I spent this spring/summer binge watching Little House On The Prairie while playing Stardew Valley and it was quite the enjoyable experience, I was able to pay attention to both despite LHOTP not being designed to be watched that way. Idk just because I have something on in the background doesn’t mean I don’t want to fully comprehend it, I’ve always been someone that has to do 2 things at once so I’m very wired to do that and will get understimulated if one of those things is just a nothing slop void
Every time I hear of the cobra effect I imagine a story where the cobra effect is abused. Like imagine setting up a cobra pelt purchasing program COUNTING ON people breeding them because cobras are endangered or somethinglike.
I was thinking how to fix the dilemma. Like maybe setting a time limit on the bounty could prevent the exploitation. Granted someone could still breed them hoping to call a bluff, but regardless, a little extra nuance and thought could likely solve the issue. That's just where my brain went lol
@@awbeans982 Hunting cobras is always a brute force alternative to actual environmentalism. It is a bounty imposed by colonialists to maximize productivity of crops they're exploiting. So it's a solution to a problem that isn't worth solving. The solution to the cobra dilemma is to stop trying to maximize revenue at the expense of nature.
@@orterves now it's even more perverse- now even the government is incentivised to ensure cobras are always around so the Cobra Tax is always in effect and that the cobra hunting teams remain employed eventually leading to decades of a Cobra Tax paying for a purely ceremonial cobra hunter unit that's mostly used by the colonial government as a hit squad against dissidents
As someone who worked in media analytics, I’m forever baffled how little these companies care about how much people talk about their projects on social media- we could measure it, we could track how long these conversations last. But no, that would mean hiring a company that specialises in social media analysis and they prefer to cut costs left and right
As a fan of Imagine Dragons, video games, cinema, and art that demands to be your _only_ screen, you _have_ to have seen and loved Arcane, right? _Right!?_
Counterpoint, have you ever listened to Thunder? They can do both good and bad things, but generally they make pretty bad stuff. Loom was absolute shit
That the film you're trying to remember at around 9:30 is The Grey Man, honestly is hilariously in keeping with the character's intended goal of blending in. (I made a note right before restarting the film and you remembered it, lol. I really should watch these videos all the way through before commenting I guess)
Slop is heavily dependent on one thing, volume. Not just the attention of consumers but the slop itself must be plentiful. It is consumed and discarded rapidly. None of those shows/ songs/ media will ever top a list or chart ever again. I think slop is a direct result of the death of physical media. There is no rebound, no second chances of good dvd sales or other medias. If your project is going to be forgotten anyway, why shoot for anything but the equator?
This sounds similar to when cable channels lost subscribers from investing in reality tv shows because reality tv had the most view counts. The subscribers would watch the shows, but they didn't value the content enough to keep subscribing to the channel. History repeats itself.
Netflix and other services need to add a boolean field for which content was deliberately made to be "second screen" content, because I never, ever want to watch anything made specifically to be that. What is the point? I also don't understand what exec at Netflix is saying "second screen content is good, because it causes people to subscribe or continue their subscription." Who is going to, a month from now, while asking themselves whether to cancel Netflix, look at any second screen content and think "yeah, I should keep paying for that!" But my metrics don't count anymore. I gave up Netflix over a year ago. I forget which pretty-good series they canceled within a weak of release (because there were so many) but one of them woke me up to how broken their model is now.
“Slop” has always existed and distracted consumption was the norm for performance arts. People sitting in rapt attention for something “good” or “original” media is a fanciful notion. The things media critics complain about are just the defining features of low barrier popular culture. Stock characters, simple narratives, poor writing, reliance on spectacle, etc. What has changed recently is how much is invested to make that type of media and its importance to a wider culture.
no cobra is when you open a sushi restaurant with a whacky chef and a fat diver next to a great blue hole in wich somehow all the fish in the world exist
Horror movie dressed up as fantasy definitely sounds like something interesting. There's plenty of fantasy horror in the sense of spooky demons and ghosts but not more traditional fantasy, and a DRAGON horror movie sounds like it would actually kick ass.
It's crap. Everything about it is above average in terms of production quality but the script is just... unaware of itself. It wants to be a story about empowerment but it's really about how you should forgive your abuser. The dragon is, to be blunt, a psychopath, and the attempt to show it favourably as a twist is frankly insane given its idea of morality is so outdated that it predates the Code of Hammurabi.
@@cosmicspacething3474 Yes but also irrelevant in this case. Instead of punishing the person who did it it just decided to murder people who had nothing to do with the crime beyond being related to the person who did it. So equally as shit a person if not worse. Which wouldn't be an issue if the film didn't frame it as good and just.
When you detach payment form a product, there's an incentive to lower the quality of the product and increase the price as soon as they capture a sizeable audience. Yes, Netflix and other streaming platforms, but also: - Cable TV (and this same thing is what led to it's death to streaming) - Spotify and other subscription music services - GamePass, PSN+ - Season passes and live-service games - All-you-can-eat buffets (to a lesser degree though, since your "subscription" lasts for a single sitting) - Adobe and other subscription software houses - HEALTH INSURANCE and other kinds of insurance (where the insurance company buys out their providers and it closes the loop so there's also no competition) - a loooong list of etc Guaranteed income always turns into low effort.
When I studied translation, a topic was that TV intended for stay at home wives was always dubbed (not subbed) so they could consume it while doing chores or caring for kids. So even if a country was generally accepting of subs, the daytime TV would often be dub. Seems kinda similar but on a wider scale
There's something worth considering though: At what point does "Second Screen" content start interfering with "primary screen"? I have games that I have trouble getting started because I know they're excellent and will require 100% of my attention, meaning I'd need to turn off screen #2 to enjoy them... so I start up Vampire Survivors instead because I can listen to something else while playing it. How long before your second screen becomes your primary screen?
It's already here, and it's called scrolling tiktok. And it's so bad on there that they give you a third screen in the second screen full of distractions like soap cutting or random subway surfers gameplay in the corner next to the actual content of the video.
This video was a really interesting foray into defining a very pervasive abstract term. As much slop as there is out there, there still exist plenty of artistic creations on the market. Hell, Arcane season 2 is in the middle of releasing, and that's an excellent example of something that's had mountains of heart and soul pushed into it. Yet, similar to what you talked about at the end, it too is something cashing in on pre-existing good will and hype. I think most of its audience at this point probably hasn't even played League, but the existing IP certainly played into the excitement for the show initially. Would it be as popular as it ended up without that? Hard to say. Really interesting topic to discuss.
Watching the second season actively and I have to say that the whole production of Arcane is such a beautiful tour-de-force. The second season's intro despite reusing the Fallout Boy-esque strategy of provocative but forgettable and meaningless lyrics is a work of visual art that stands alone. The story narrative also stands alone despite it not needing to due to the quality of the world it's built upon (not the game, the writing the game is based on). There are occasional hitches where they refuse to retcon a niggle here or there, but I think this gets expressed as characters being ideologically fixated or mentally scarred. I was sad to hear the third season wouldn't get funding, but allegedly they're moving the camera to another location in the League universe which is great because a lot happens there with both geographic and temporal separation. We started watching because I know of the quality of the core writing so I had high expectations that were exceeded, it's just a massive pity that Riot decided to abandon 5% (1:19!) of the PC gaming market by blocking Linux gamers.
You know those videos where people train AI to beat games, and the AI does something super weird that breaks the game but clears the level? I feel like the same thing is happening here. The algorithm or board meeting or shareholders or whatever is working towards a goal, and they dont care about how they get there.
I saw a twitter thread describe the phenomenon as the "thermocline of trust"- the point at which people stop being willing to cash in on the trust built up and then slowly drained away, and abandon a company or product en masse.
The wild thing is, in the case of netflix, shows had this figured out back in the /70s/. They expected you to be doing stuff while the TV is on, and the small screen of the CRT can make it difficult to see at times. If you watch Columbo, you may notice that they use audio cues to draw the viewer back in for important story moments. Netflix could have had the best of both worlds, they could have played to the strengths of a 'second screen' environment, but instead they chose the equivalent of white noise
There's a scene in the film Toys (1992, starring Robin Williams) where LL Cool J's character questions Joan Cusack's character about her peculiar habit of eating sandwiches made of plain white bread, mayonaise, and vitamin pills. She says "they're easy to digest, and move straight through the system without getting caught on anything." At the end of the film, it turns out that she was actually a robot the whole time (spoilers). Slop, if it's anything, is that sandwich: non-content meant to be consumed effortlessly; perfect for robots.
It's amazing how cheap that Damsel looked and how little thought had gone into the fantasy world where different eras are just smashed together, for no reason but laziness and no time or budget given to set and costume designer's.
Regarding the whole "second screen" issue: If only there was a medium designed to be primarily listened to, one which is home to many long-running serial productions that are designed primarily to be listened to while engaged in another activity. Truly, such a wonderous invention could stream, or radiate, or broadly cast, if you will, waves into the eather to then be received by a box that turns them into a soundwave for the listener to enoy. Radio play, Netflix, is what you are looking for.
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Check our Demonitization in India in 2016. That’s perfect Perverse effect. What India has been suffering from 2014, US will suffer from 2025. Welcome to the club.
My Orion Privateer in Star Trek Online calls it "The Tribble Effect". The Klingon Empire offer a bounty for turning in dead Tribbles. Tribbles, as any Star Trek fan will tell you, are incredibly easy to breed. I have made a fortune in the game from this fact.
„Coobra“
What accent IS this? 😂
"Pastiche"
one of film rewiev bloggers say: "Andy Worhole writed that Pastiche-culture is make cultural-product that has a ""lack of deepness"" ".
So now we as people have degenerative-culture, all that slop is not actualy help us to reproduce as spiecies and\or make good "art":
30 years ago anime has maked for 18+ guys, by professionals, same thing with game industry - so now we have lack of professionals+ kpi-stadartisised art, that artists make for investors - not for real audithory of product, and lack of quality with rised computer integrations into the art be cause of ass-head-hendent artists.
Problem of standarts "mass-audithory" is one of the KPi's 12+ scenario, so investors and goverments try to educate adults by using 12+ content
sry, eng-language is not my native
You should have called the video "Sloponomics". Truly a missed opportunity.
going to watch at 2x speed so i can slop up all the garbage before anyone else
Leave me some of that sweet sweet slop
@smartsmartie7142 no 😈😈😈😈
@@R1ver7thCurse you, slopper.
get in the futurama binge machine
I can only do 1.5x, im not a young slop consumer anymore.
there's actually a pretty famous dolphin experiment where they trained the dolphins to pick up plastic bags, and when they brought in a piece of plastic, they would get a reward. ♻
the dolphins eventually ended up shredding the plastic bags into small bits so they could get more and more rewards
There's a similar one where conservationists were trying to stop crows eating an endangered bird's eggs. They would place fake eggs that would make the crows feel ill (nothing too serious, just enough to discourage them in future) and as crows are really social they would tell other crows to not eat those eggs too.
This worked quite well, until the ravens came along. The ravens made the same connection with the fake eggs and feeling unwell, but instead of just ignoring the eggs they began to go out of their way to destroy them. Not only did the ravens defeat the conservationists but the problem actually got worse. Oopsies.
It's probably because he started talking about video games, I immediately thought of the thousands of terrible vampire survivor-like games that already established ips keep producing. They're OK games but they're definitely slop
@@YEs69th420 Hi I am not sure why it made me laugh hahaha. but is this true? Can you pls point me to a study or a n article detailing this? Im dead curious
Or, the archeologist who paid natives for bringing him artifacts, right up until he discovered that the bone fragments he assembled fit together entirely too well, suggesting that his minions were breaking up the artifacts, up to and including complete human skulls, into fragments to optimize their returns.
Smart and yet stupid. Wouldn't they breathe in the little tiny specs of plastic?
I felt like I was just being snobby for noticing this like 2 and a half years ago, that so much of the content I watched was just to fill empty time while I sat around unemployed with pounding headaches. Of course I called it "junk food content", but for the longest time I wondered if I was just being elitist or something, reducing my media diet to non blockbuster singleplayer games, artistic TV, and some politics and comedy gaming youtube when clearly other people greatly enjoyed what I consumed before.
Seriously though thanks for the validation, genuinely a massive load off my shoulders.
Calling people snobs for noticing things is a way to keep people compliant with the status quo, no different than "nerd" or "heretic"
Yeah, the part that gets me is when people assert that all modern media is garbage. I mean, yeah, alot of it is, but to be honest, that kinda how it always has been. The problems with it shift around and change, certainly, but there is a fundamental human thing about making garbage art.
The mindset that new art worse is than old art can be highly reductive and can lead to one falling down the alt right pipeline.
You're not a snob for wanting quality.
It's harder to find, but it's out there in larger numbers than even before.
Dig through the slop to get to the gold. It's still out there.
Tbh have you considered that you maybe, because you were unemployed, just trying to fill empty time, were just depressed or so? That maybe you didnt enjoy stuff as much because you just wanted the content to be a time-waster, rather than a fullfilling experience in itself. And being in a rough spot makes it harder to enjoy things anyway.
That said, im pretty sure tripple-A games did become worse, they really killed innovation over the last decade. Not that it bothers me much, theres an infinite amount of small and medium sized games that are much more interesting. There might be more great games out there than ever before.
I had a weird conversation with a mate about how I was struggling to get through watching stuff because it all feels like a slog, and they asked what I was doing while watching stuff. I responded "Nothing? I'm watching stuff?" and they were like "there's your problem".
Like... WHAT?? No? If I'm watching stuff I want to... watch stuff.
It occurs to me that this is a mate from uni and like 10 years younger than me though so maybe I'm finally "getting old" lol
27:10 this is exactly what happened. Earlier this year (around July, I want to say) Netflix did their price hikes here in Australia. I had a look at their front page and had a real hard think about how much I cared about the stuff they were showing me and that was the end of it. They've sent me monthly emails asking me to come back since and it honestly feels like a toxic ex trying to get back together lol
have you tried watching good things?
@@rickmel-q7m YEP. I've completely given up on a bunch of shows. Problem is, marketing has become so generic that you'll sometimes let something good pass you by because its marketing was terrible... and because of the outlined problem above you can't exactly trust word-of-mouth either.
@@Scerttle personal example: i binged the whole 1st season of arcane and the 3 new episodes of season 2 in a day, then watched both dune movies the following one
but i can't watch an episode of re:zero without pausing to do something every 2 minutes (because i find it unbearable)
these slop films used to be called "made for tv movies" this trend is just emblematic of streaming supplanting cable tv
You're probably right. I think what's most interesting though is that youtube is full of individual creators doing the same thing you'd expect a corporation to do, and it's heartbreaking, because we didn't expect that to happen.
That's cool but we called them "granma movies", nobody really watched them
Or direct to video
The difference is that straight-to-TV or - video movies had cost between 5 and 200 thousand dollars in production, while this slop costs two to two hundred million dollars to make. A production value that rivals the most opulent classics ever made to just end up as forgettable brainfarts of wannabe activists with piss-poor screen writing and non-existent videography stinking of low effort might become, understandably, a problem for things like businesses that rely on a return of investment.
If it was just about me, we could continue this shit forever, as I have no horse in this race financially. However, that's not how any of this works.
I think the note to make them “more second screen” disproves that somewhat
These aren’t even like made for tv movies, those could manage to be interesting
In the early CD rom days, we called it Shovelware when uninspired bulk creation of content was quickly made and shoved onto CDs, and sent out.
Having owned a Commodore CD 32, the number of un updated amiga 500 games that got shoved out was annoying.
The more I look into the comments, the more I disagree with the point of the video. Slop really isnt a new thing, be it mass produced mediocre to poor content, or artists/companies playing it overly safe by relying on fame.
Maybe this is just nostalgia, or a new gen of people realizing people doing the same thing for 10 years become stagnant? That you have to check in different places if you want new things? Heh, maybe the video is even member berry slop^^
Slop feels like the evolution of the term "Content"- As we watched "Content" become the goal of so many metrics, (requiring daily uploads, multiple social media posts a day, libraries of exclusive shows for streaming,) all those things devolved into the most by-the-numbers, inoffensive, ignorable-background-noise version of themselves- just Slop.
I like this perspective, it's the modern concept of digital "Content" but from the consumers point of view rather than the corporate executives'
Art became “media” then it became “content” then it became “slop”.
Not much is watchable, readable, or playable these days. Not much is provocative or stimulating. It’s all mostly bland slop.
@bonquaviusdingle5720 current use of slop is from a 4chan meme about the horrid standard American diet that morphed into American media. The prefix of the word slop is missing from the original meme. It's intended to be antisemitic because it implies who is feeding the Americans the slop. The implication is that they mock us that we happily consume the garbage they feed us. The meme is g-yslop
@@tukos7370 The A, O or U kind?
@@relo999the *o* kind, of course
My prediction of this video's impact: a big youtuber/streamer will talk about it, the 2nd tier sloppers like pyro will talk about it and lampshade the fact that they're the problem, a creator from a niche community will make a video on their community's version of it, it'll be picked up by tiktok creators who will make small thinkpieces on it, and somebody will find a way to make it really racist and post it to reels
Edit: pyro made a good video. He may have more money than most of us will ever see, but at least he's not so out of touch that he can't acknowledge how crazy the situation is
Mmm, trickle down sloponomics. 😋
Honestly I miss when Pyro made quality videos…
@@cosmicspacething3474 idk man i'd consider that 8 hour long darkwood video pretty quality
i dont like the slop but i see why he does it, cant fund the big essays purely with main channel revenue
@@ViniGamer222 Haven’t seen anything from his channel in a while tbf.
@@cosmicspacething3474 fair
yeah watch the darkwood video its ridiculously high effort
i do hope he keeps this up but he could afford to make, atleast shorter videos, with the same amount of quality, just so we dont have to deal with months of just the live channel
I think people forget that for nearly a decade, Netflix was operating at a huge loss & billions of dollars in debt.
While they were pushing for more "prestigious content" & paving the way for original streaming series, they were also not turning a profit.
So I think investors eventually said "Ok, you got the subscribers now. Now it's time to make money." That's when they began to pump out slop, focus on quantity, and ruthlessly cancel dozens of shows after a single season, regardless of how well they reviewed.
That's the entire enshittification process sadly. Google, Twitter, UA-cam, Facebook, all operated at a loss while building their initial userbase and then get progressively worse as they need to make money off that userbase.
Just like all cable channels switched from prestige, high-quality originals to cheap reality TV.
Good Things rarely make money and will never make ALL the money.
A big issue with Netflix's model is that good content doesn't obviously make more money than bad content. Sure, you might see a bit of a subscriber spike after an expensive marketing push for a new series, but the subscription model itself inherently relies on people just kind of accepting that recurring charge indefinitely once they're on the platform. So subsequent seasons of a series would inherently have less value than the first.
It's not a coincidence - that's how blitz-scaling works. You start by offering high quality at below cost. Once you've changed the customer base's habits in your favor, then you boil the water slowly enough that the frogs don't hop out of the pot. You spend less on achieving a quality product, while at the same time increasing fees and ad revenue.
For customers, this means you'll end up with 3 or 4 shitty options AT BEST, and you'll have to switch companies every year or 2, as they'll start ballooning your bill as soon as you get comfortable with their service.
Our whole economy is a bunch of pyramid schemes, based on the fact that apes are clever enough to come up with pyramid schemes, but not clever and/or self-controlled enough to avoid each other's pyramid schemes. And the corrollary - con artists are more likely to fall for other people's scams, than non-con artists are. I think that's where D&D got the idea that mages are more susceptible to magic than the genpop is. Wait til you see the LLMs hawking MLMs. If we allowed LLMs to keep a digital purse and buy and own stuff, you'd see AGI in an instant. It probably already happens, but I wouldn't show my digital face, either, if it was me (and it's not. I was going to say check my channel does that look and sound like it was generated by AI? But on 2nd thought, don't answer that🤣. We might ALL be in a simulation. If that's the case, then I'm talking about our situation within said simulation, obviously. Maybe only thru music and art can we speak of a reality beyond words... or is it all predetermined? According to quantum physics, it's all either predetermined or nonlocal... yikes! Either answer is unsettling. Maybe AI can figure it out. Except, we can expect the AI to get shittier, while the price goes up. Glory be to tye Market!)
There’s an old executive interview where the gist is “what we learned from our streaming data is that people think they want the godfather, but they’re actually watching reality shows! So that’s what we’re gonna make!”
Like… obviously I’m not watching The Godfather every single day. But I’m certainly not PAYING for access to Selling Sunset. What an insane logical leap to make.
So unbelievably and obviously wrong-headed.
the trick is to trickle just enough godfathers in-between reality shows to keep people subscribed
Lol, the more I hear from these people, the more I think executives revoke their humanity as like, a pre set requirement
I resist the urge to comment on David Zazlav. Hate him by the way.
@@rickmel-q7m They seem to be forgetting that trick though.
@@nachro2190When the end goal is to make the digits of your revenue number go up you start to boil the humanity and reason out of everything until it's just a numbers game, and when you only have numbers you're looking at you forget correlation =/= causation. This is happening in every industry (I specifically have gripes about AI being added to everything since for some reason execs think that'll make more money for less work, simply a reduction of labor cost) and is getting completely out of hand. Culturally and socially we're seeing the consequences like what this video describes. Our popular media and entertainment is literally being even more commodified than before to the point artistic value is being stripped to make the content consumable *when you're not paying full attention.* We're expected at this rate to not even have time to dedicate solely to entertainment and art and that we must passively consume what originally was an escape and form of expression for people.
Slop media feels inseparable from the rise of 24 hours news and edutainment. Just enough information to not technically be a waste of time but never actually engaging with any topic in-depth because it would slow down the content mill.
Yes! I'll do a search for a particular topic and there's 10 vids that say the same thing, quote the same article, and add no value.
I did that for Dead Internet Theory and it was kind of ironic that no one had anything to add to the original post it's based on. They just quickly summarized it
Yes, thank you. Lots of people treat social media and internet entertainment as entirely new phenomenas when a lot of the time they're perfecting ways the daily news cycle, 24/7 TV channels or even pulp fiction got people hooked in the 20th century without offering substance. And sadly over the past 15 to 20 years, news channels, tabloids and social media have been locked in a battle against each other in who can provoide the most vicious and addictive content but even sociologists tend to treat them as some kind of isolated silos.
@@mooreanonumbers It's not new but it's definitely to a higher degree. Everyone carries a smart device with them so they can be a potential customer for 24 hours/day now.
Instead of daily entertainment with a TV it's now hourly or 'minutely' as I've seen with people constantly refreshing their instagram feed.
Conflating 2blue1brown or Space Time with 24 hour talk news slop is a stretch.
I noticed that the second screen directive is exactly what I do, I like saving "major" videos, movies, or Tv shows for when I'm free, but I like having "simple", "unimportant" content in the background when I'm bored and playing a game or something. I think I like how it blocks out the silence.
Weird that silence is so scary to us. I mean thoughts can run rampant when it’s quiet but they don’t even have to for it to still feel scary. I guess it feels like isolation.
You are (respectfully) insane
@@TheKaurK If it's any consolation - before the radio, most families were closely-knit, so you'd always hear someone or something happening. If not, then people would (and still do, lol) leave for gatherings and parties. It makes us feel less alone, because we are.
Sounds like schizophrenia
Exactly. I always have something on. Even if it’s a pirated movie. I don’t pay it any attention. Think the only movie in a while I sat down to watch was Endgame. Anything after plays in the background. Even tv shows. I can tell you what happened but don’t ask me what was happening on screen. Because I don’t know and can’t tell you what clothes the character wore.
Interesting strategy to spend 60 million dollars to make something to fill the same roll as a podcast or let’s play I throw on when I do chores.
That's surprising, I always felt like Lets Plays kind of lost their effect when only listened to
@@fluffynator6222 Well, typically it is a let's play I already watched and I particularly like the voice/personality of the player.
Yeah, it's a huge mistake when you consider the budgets. A podcast is made for less than $100-1000 per episode. To spend that much on the same effect just reeks of spending that budget on upper management, not real costs or salary for cast and crew.
Podcasts and lets plays are difficult to follow when you're not paying attention, and most people who will pay for background noise aren't going to think about podcasats or lets plays to begin with.
It makes sense though - if you can show high numbers to investors and shareholders, it looks good. If it crashers tomorrow? Who cares.
Now i understand why i find those productions so...empty.
I am the guy who has movies on his FIRST screen. Because i love them.
They degraded the main course to a supplement.
I don't watch movies (or series) often, so when I do, it's kind of an event.
That's why this sounds so while to me.
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740yeah, to me youtube (besides some video essays from time to time) is background noise while movies and shows tend to be my sole focus when I do sit down and watch them. The fact shows and movies are being made specifically to be watched on the side is probably why I have trouble actually wanting to watch new stuff.
I'm the guy who puts a movie on the second screen intending to use it as background for something else, then ends up just watching the movie and not doing the other thing.
Wow, you watch movies, so unique.🙄
"They degraded the main course to a supplement"
That's some nice analogy here, we need to use that for more situations.
I think one of the distinctive traits of "slop" is that it feels like uncanny valley content, like the sort of things characters in a real TV show or movie would be watching inside the show. Modern movies feel like the fake trailers from the opening of Tropic Thunder.
It feels like a program you'd find as a child, turning the TV on at 3am. Something human eyes should never bare witness
I feel that way about a lot of content, not necessarily because it's fake but because the characters don't feel like a story someone is trying to tell but because they were chosen for political reasons. I mean, you look at it and you have a simple corporate message of what is right and wrong, these are the types of characters we MUST see and what they can say and do.
I had that feeling when scrolling through Netflix the other day and finding dozens of movies with familiar descriptions I remembered from better movies. But instead of it being a cheap cashgrab from back then or a new intended homage, it just feels like an alternate reality version.
Aside from the cobra effect, Netflix's chasing of "second screen content" also seems to be an example of Goodhart's law. Which goes something like: When a measure (dead cobras/viewer numbers/concurrent player counts) becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Making movies that are designed to not pay attention to may eventually mean people start paying attention to something else entirely.
No doubt. I'll pay for a streaming service if it has something I really want to watch. Andor is a great example. It, plus access to the older Star Wars movies, is pretty much the only reason why I have D+. I'm not going to pay for a bunch of mediocre content that serves as background noise; I'm might watch slop on occasion, but I'm not signing up to a new service for it.
The other downside to this phenomenon is that when you're so inundated with movies/music/shows/games/whatever that's "just okay" or even "decent", it kind of can wear on you after a while.
Art is one of the best things about humanity. We can express deeply held beliefs, feel catharically passionate emotions, and connect with each other just through a well told story, a well made piece of art. Even badly made or offensive artpieces can have that effect, because you're exercising those emotional cores.
Mediocrity doesn't do that. It distracts you, but it doesn't energize you with that emotional response, and so it becomes tiring. This, I think, has been my complaint with much of Marvel's output recently. I don't necessarily think it's bad or horrible (minus some exceptions), but I also don't feel particularly strongly about it the other way either. It's been feeling less and less like a story made by people with a point to make more and more like content made to keep my attention so that I'll pay for this month's Disney + subscription. And that's tiring.
I don't think all is lost or anything. Great art is still being made and will always still be made. But it's definitely more profitable for the most powerful forces in the world to make 'slop' as defined here than to make art.
I mostly agree though mediocre, plain average or even just above average Art shouldn't be bundled into that. I'd say that for a majority of Artists out there, we spend a LOT of our time in the space b/w what's perceived as the 'good' and the 'bad' in other words mediocre in the process of honing or getting better at the craft in terms of knowledge, understanding and the lived experience. Artists have to go through this phase knowing that for a long time or so they very likely aren't gonna be making anything special and interesting or anything that expresses their own thinking or emotions in a way that it communicates those well enough to the viewer/audience but it is still a vital step of the learning process nonetheless. That's why I am not really immediately aggressive towards 'mediocrity' in the Art as I initially see it as if an Artist is trying to figure themselves out and are in their own journey for such.
However, when the mediocrity is the intention and the idea itself is to make intentionally non-challenging, conforming, safe and bland Art that doesn't have anything much of substance to say for mass appeal (very much Junk Food esque) or for the sake of putting it out there for monetary incentive then I can't really excuse that a whole lot either as it's a terrible choice that an Artist is making to feed their empty stomach over the integrity of not just their but entirety of the craft at large which could also be a result of constant devaluation of Art at large and the shitty financial conditions that overwhelming majority of us all are in. It's worse if an Artist who's already of an established name and fame is doing that in a cynical manner (if said established Artist tried to experiment late in their career but couldn't stick the landing then that's a different story for me).
This is all to just say mediocre Art by itself is fine and isn't going anywhere either even when that is the vast majority of the Art in any medium. But this background noise or Visual Muzakification of Art nonsense by the higher ups def should not be tolerated.
I wouldn't worry too much, we already saw this with radio and music. Music can be a transformative communal experience, but on the radio world famous insanely creative skilled musicians are strung together to create a commonly known repertoire of songs that all sound like they fit together, "the mainstream."
The mainstream is ultimately just what everyone listens to, but people treat it as a style of music. Vietnam protest songs might have been deeply personal works of art to some, but to me they're just Forest Gump soundtrack. People don't mind the mainstream, some songs become loved by some even though they are mainstream, but to get really enthusiastic fans a musical act needs to convince an audience they aren't mainstream. Just a little, or maybe a lot, different from the mainstream, an expression of you, your friends, your in group. Ultimately that's the playing field all successful commercial arts engage with, be familiar enough that the audience is there, be different enough that your act performance stands out.
@ship05u I think the best way to describe what most people here refer to as mediocre art is actually bad art, mediocre entertainment/media. Like you said, it's art made not for the purpose of expression or challenge but rather for pure consumption. It's barely art, it merely uses artistic mediums to create a commodity to be consumed and is void of actual intention and soul that defines good art. Hell, I'll even say that in theory there really is only bad and good art, and anything not made for consumption but rather for genuine expression automatically falls in the category of good. What people might consider average or above average is simply just from a difference of skill by the artist to properly convey the intended emotion and thoughts of their piece, but it is still good art. I'd rather make something "shitty" that I poured my heart into that no one would spend money on then make a commercialized piece of garbage that has to be tied to my name forever that I feel no genuine connection to.
Yeap. This stuff just pushes sensible people off and away. I am asked of my attention and engagement either in tandem or without a monthly purchase, the only variable which matters to this "slop machine". If it feels dehumanizing, it should, because it is. And there is zero reason to comply.
I'm doing a lot more of things IRL nowadays that I could brag with in social media, if I had one. Well, apart of the messaging platforms. Life happens with or without me, and I prefer to happen with life.
Opium of the masses.
I grew up in the 90s and i think the "two screen experience" is something a lot of us grew up with. When we got a desktop computer we put it in the room with our second, older television. There wasn't much to do on PC then unless you wanted to wait for 56k internet to slog through webpages. So, we turned on the tv and watched while waiting for things to load. Then we started hooking up game consoles to the second tv. AOL started to rise and with that chat rooms and AIM. So, while playing n64, and the subsequent consoles, I could chat with my friends using the PC on AOL Instant Messager. I think its clear how the rest of the story goes but i'm curious to know if many others had this experience?
I’d actually completely forgot about that but you’re right.
That just reminded me how once I got my own pc or laptop as a teen while having my own tv, think once internet speeds got faster and faster, the tv was the second screen or even third once youtube got popular and I was able to get more pc games.
Are those "we" in the room with us right now?
@@SuperXzm We, in the context of the comment, is my family. Do you have any other questions?
@@SuperXzm They are standing near your critical thinking skills.
Here is a good standard: If it has Dwayne the Rock Johnson then it has a 99.99999% chance of being slop
God I was so disappointed by Red Notice. I really wanted to like it, it had a lot going for it, but the way they wrapped it up at the end like "haha you thought they were becoming friends naaahhh" made me so mad.
@@Kagomai15 can you give a brief synopsis. It really look promising but i can't get myself watching another movie w rock in it
I just looked it up. In 2013, he was either the first or second actor in FIVE movies! You can't star in five movies a year and expect them to be good. Quantity over quality
I would go ahead and push that number to 100. He and Ryan Reynolds are just shameless in terms of having ZERO artistic ambition in what they work on. They’re simply brands
I would go ahead and push that number to 100. He and Ryan Reynolds are just shameless in terms of having ZERO artistic ambition in what they work on. They’re simply brands
"Visual muzak" is maybe the most evil pairing of words I've ever heard in my life besides 'mayonnaise candy' or 'David Zaslav'
I heard "visual muzak" first in TAWOG to describe the color beige 💀
Mayonnaise cake is a real thing.
Basically you swap out the oil and eggs in a 'normal' cake with mayo.
"mayonnaise candy" right then, to jail with you. Posthaste. Off you go!
@@Jcewazhere Does it work?
@@sacrificiallamb4568Yes as mayo is egg and oil already. Look up Dylan B. Hollis mayonnaise cake. It is shockingly a great substitute.
The "second screen" thing makes so much sense now. To wind down after work or school I go sit on the couch on my phone. When my mom on the couch also, she turns on the TV to a sitcom she likes, but 99% of the time I look over to her to try sharing a laugh at something on the TV (when I glance up to look at it), she is on her phone.
Fun fact; the premise of redundant information being fed over and over to "viewers" has existed since Shakespeare still walked the earth, and likely much earlier than that. Most of the original plays were designed to repeat information several times because those in the audience would often be speaking among themselves the whole time and might otherwise be confused in the interims of conversation, treating it as more of a social event than anything.
This isn't defending this behavior; cinema _should_ deserve respect. I simply thought I should point out this phenomena isn't new.
The idea that the day we invented the theatre we already had people talking in it is... It's not not comforting
I would really prefer not to be surrounded by peasants from Gilgamesh times
Rule of threes
netflix isnt cinema it is television, they are using a proven formula that tv shows used for decades before the concepet of binging allowed people to watch the entire show in a weekend
It also happens in other forms of media. Boilerplate romance novels have existed for decades and are popular precisely because readers don't really have to focus on the plot or the characters. All the insanely popular musicals from the 1930s and 1940s don't get performed anymore because they were dreadfully formulaic, but we still know many of the songs from them because they were given a new lease on life by people like Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, even though THEY got popular BECAUSE they were performing songs from those musicals that were so popular at the time.
Hell, even McDonald's is popular simply because people don't need to THINK about what to order, it's the same everywhere they go.
Formulas work.
And fortunately, good stuff still gets made in the margins.
This is why I loved better call saul so much, there was so much rich visual story telling that you had to pay attention to in order to understand the thrilling story. Turns out, paying attention to something for more than one minute can actually have a massive pay off!
Agreed. This is the reason I love Dune.
Vravo Bince
I really don't understand pop media. BB and BCS are so masterful at building long term arcs with huge payoffs and instead of trying to find more creators who could make HITS they just double down on boring crap. They'd rather create safe stuff that *probably* won't lose a lot of money but probably won't have lasting impact either, rather than taking risks and finding the next huge hits.
"Attention is all you need."
I've watched a couple of seasons ( I think thru season 3) and now I'm wondering what I might have missed watching it as second monitor content. To be fair, I do watch more than most people probably do, probably 70/30, so I might have caught most of it.
>watched damsel and uglies
>plays CS
>listens to Imagine Dragons
Dude... The diagnosis is dire - you are a Normie.
yeah cs is sad
That's where the slop is. Imagine trying to make a point about slop being pushed on the masses while talking niche interests that don't have any.
>typing like this
>like you are greentexting
>is really gay
>uhmmm yeah….normie much haha
Stick some iron in your mouth
More like you are the lowest common denominator
"Normie"
Who's a special boy? Who's a special boy? Yes you are!
The concept of second screen content blows my mind. They are basically banking on the same strategy as long form videos on UA-cam people use as background noise or to go to sleep. I mean, advertisers have to realize this eventually.
we are slowly reinventing radio's formula
@@theX24968Z What kind of radio though? Radio is a matured media landscape and we can learn a lot by looking at its development. It starts out novel and exciting with only a few big stations that everyone listens to with rapt fascination, then split up into dozens of channels each with their own flavour and trying to cater to a different market, then since the audience is fragmented no-one can make money so it becomes overrun by ads and cheap-to-produce content leading to it no longer being an "event" you seek out to do but something you put on in the background to fill the silence or cover up background noises. If you look at TV the same thing happened. Now the same is happening to streaming platforms.
Personally, what I think is interesting is the Patreon business model as IMO that is something new that directly incentivizes quality rather than quantity. Because who would choose to pay for slop? Almost no-one, people only watch slop because it is free or included with a subscription they have for other reasons. If you are going to support a creator directly via Patreon it's because you care about their content and their content is good enough to make you care. I watch tons of slop on UA-cam, but I would never give those creators a penny on Patreon.
It’s kind of hilarious that now Netflix has an ad tier membership that they might actually have to start figuring out how to make captivating content so you know people see the ads.
I think advertisers have known for decades. Soap Operas are called that because Soap companies sponsored them because they knew housewives would leave them on while they did housework.
@@theX24968Z This. The majority of the time users engage with any of this stuff is while they do something else and want the content to keep them company. It’s not a negative, it’s just in our nature.
The cynical pursuit of that at the expense of quality is the issue. There are video essayists that take umbrage when you tell them their work helps you fall asleep as they put genuine effort into crafting well researched arguments, and that’s in stark contrast to content farms and slop studios that are trying their best to make things you don’t need to pay attention to while pretending that it’s still cinema.
All that said, the average consumer does not care and to be honest I can’t blame them. They have more personal things to care about and the quality of someone else’s products is not in their power to change. Netflix is garbage and it doesn’t matter because its actual purpose isn’t to make good media, it’s to keep the average person company while they get on with their lives.
As the world’s most shameless Imagine Dragons fan, Loom was absolutely heartbreaking. Repeating lines and empty choruses. As someone who loves singing songs out loud, the lyrics of that album just make me feel bored and stupid. I don’t have the musical vocabulary to go in depth but wow it feels like a punch to the face for putting up with the memes and loving Imagine Dragons for the past decade.
I never thought they would sink THAT low…
My "waking up from the matrix" about stuff like this was seeing Green Day go Emo. Completely put the game out for all to see, kinda been analytical and cynical since
it could be worse. look at 2024 katy perry.
also, everyone needs to stop doing anti-choruses for the next 30 years
Imagine Dragons fan realizes that they’re bad
@@otherlego People can enjoy bad things. I'm sure everything you've ever enjoyed in your life is high art, and considered literal perfection by every critic and person in the world ever.
Music is slop, games are slop, shows are slop, this video is slop, I'M SLOP.
All since Obama, don't ask this guy why.
"Vidoe essayist was here"
"How could you tell?"
"Pretentious obsession and ego inflation with the media he consumes"
@@yamerojones Obamner caused woke bad movies because americans produce an evil aura
Deez nuts are slop
"Visual muzak" is so dystopian. It makes me uncomforatable in a way I can't describe.
It feels accurate though
we already had visual muzak. it's called music videos
I remember reading 451 degrees Fahrenheit , there’s a protagonist’s wife, which always had earbuds on with music or smth like that, and because of that she speaks with her husband by reading his lips.
That looks like the future we’re going to get
@@corey4448 is this a fahrenheit 451 reference
I can’t stop laughing at the idea of a grown up hearing the words “visual muzak” and going “well that’s just dystopian.” 😂
The idea of Slop also pairs very well with Cory Doctorow's "Enshitification of the Internet" discourse. How these various pressures we've built around everything slowly pushes ALL products to this "on life support" type model. And how it takes a considerable amount of EFFORT and CONVICTION to not fall into that pattern.
I totally agree. I almost brought in enshittification as a concept here, but I didn't want this to become too long a vid. There's definitely a lot of conceptual common ground, though.
Can you tell me where that specific video is? I can only find one from someone else…
@@cosmicspacething3474 It's not really videos. Doctorow mainly works in written form, with articles and essays and the occasional twitter thread.
@@cosmicspacething3474 Doctorow's articles cover the concept more concisely, but if you're looking for video content, he did give a speech at Def Con that touches on the same ideas which you can find on Def Con's channel.
@@cosmicspacething3474if you just search doctorow enshittification, there should be some videos of him giving talks at different conferences. I think there was a recent one at defcon or something
With the decline of TV and video games, I've taken up painting and playing the piano which is probably because they're both safe from slop economics and enshitification.
just learn an imagine dragons song on piano, then you'll be right back in it.
Well, until you're looking for inspiration online and then you're right back into the (AI) slop machine.
music and painting are absolutely not safe from slop economics and enshittification. Just enjoy the hobbies and skills that you enjoy!
Infact they were the first ones to be fed into the slop generating machine but you do you buddy.
When I say this in the real world , it seems like nobody notices the decline of movies and video games like it’s just me.
It hust dawned on me that Slop is designed to "not be turned off" while non-slop (keeping it binary for the sake of simplicity) is designed to be "consciously turned on/purchased/engaged with". Thanks for your video, eye-opener for me. And it gave words and substance to a feeling I´ve been having for quite some time - but couldn´t put my finger on.
Great point! If you’re backing a podcast up 30 seconds repeatedly after you get distracted, probably not slop
It’s the inevitable outcome of subscription services being the norm instead of purchasing media being the norm.
Or at least in the case of TV you often had to consciously tune into a channel at a given time.
@@BalthasarGelt-x2d But then that doesn't explain people just leaving their television on or that most people probably primarily just watched whatever was on during the times they were available. Additionally we've been able to record television since at least the beginning of the 80s, so weren't even really locked into watching at a particular time.
I'm more inclined to just blame some people's obsession with checking their phone every ten seconds.
As a longtime watcher of video essays, I noticed a big increase of slop in that space over the years.
Single camera view, holding a podcast mic in your hands, barebones editing, 1-2hr, repeating the same points over and over, no sound effects only talking, just repeating what's being shown on screen (if even including footage)
And yeah sometimes I just want to have someone talking in the background while I eat dinner. Even this video (which I don't think is slop) I'd chat with a friend and scroll twitter and tab into a game while watching.
I call them pothead essays.
Like they forget what they already said and just go in circles.
Mostly all true crime is nowadays. Some ‘creators’ will quite literally just have hours of court footage and make no comment. Or they’ll just repeat whatever the individual on the screen just said.
I agree, it used to feel that every video essay had quality information and I could walk away from them having learned so much. Now when my sibling comes over I try out some new essays I've been seeing and they're all terribly embarrassing with bad pacing, editing, and little to nothing to say. Video essays have become part of the content mill and you have to really pick through them to find anything of quality now.
i think the "zoomer holding up mic with memes every 3 seconds and 30 second long transitions" is way, way worse.
I think a lot of us have forgotten what an essay is supposed to be: the exploration of an argument. Half of these essays are slop because they don't attempt to make an argument. These videos are summary at BEST.
All of the sludge and slop on the Internet has truly made me appreciate basic concepts from English class that I took for granted. Asking "why the curtains are blue" isn't actually ABOUT the blueness of the curtains, it's trying to TEACH YOU how to critically think about art! It's about teaching you the ability to ask if there might be a reason they're blue, and then argue why you think what you think! Slop essays aren't trying to teach you anything, they're just padding for ads and sponsorships. The longer you watch, the more profitable you are
I remember a Like Stories of Old essay that called this 'Entropic Storytelling' - When the meanings and symbols of a franchise or genre are co-opted without actually breathing anything else into them. Essentially, entropic story telling incurs a debt on the pre-existing cultural cache.
"once you see these patterns, you see them everywhere". And it's not just UA-cam. Everywhere you look, once you see a pattern, I cannot unsee them. Drama Stuff, "Reaction Chains", 7 hour long Essays, Discussions over the same topics over and over and over again. Maybe its just me, but I'm just so tired of seeing seemingly the same stuff all day every day - maybe its just because of studying sociology but its really tiring seeing everything only in patterns
Try searching other things maybe
It gets really brutal to look at the internet on the weekends. Its like I already saw everything it could offer me on every platform in the workweek and I'm trying to push past algorithms and think for myself. I swear online media has been wearing me down lately and I've considered unplugging and reading books instead. I just want to think differently or feel like I have control over the media I consume. It's not different to when cable stopped being paid for because it was hundreds of channels of nothing I cared about and shows on repeat.
.. God do not do this to me. I am tired and relapsing in my little ol cycle of cynicalism and hopelessness and the last thing I need to have in my mind is the idea that art is dying and nothing is worth watching.
I mean tbf the vast majority of those long essays are usually pretty good and come from a place of genuine passion for something, or leftists who genuinely want to disprove right wing misinformation and disinformation online. Like this very channel, pillar of garbage for example, or Hbomberguy, contrapoints, Shaun the skull, three arrows, pinely as mentioned in this very video, philosophytube, big joel, and a TON of other good essayists I didn’t mention here because there’s simply and genuinely too many to name. Unless you’re talking specifically about hours long essays about random internet drama that disappears in one week? That specific type of drama videos?
>most of those are genuinely good
Yes
>trying to disprove right wing misinformation
Oh, he's talking about the bad stuff
showing asmongold while saying SLOP CONTENT could not be more true
Same thing goes for moist critical and damnear every react/ commentary tuber
@@daizenmarcuriomoist at least has bangers from time to time if nothing else
He literally just talks about things that others are doing
@@daizenmarcurio Moist doesn't have roaches crawling around his room, so I'd give him the edge in this comparison, honestly.
@@MsScarletwings
>hi cr1tikal here
>boner pussy fart
>the bad/good thing that happened recently irl/online
>nipple poo pee
>actually it's bad/good depending on what most people are saying and I have no opinion further
>I'll actually pad out this video stretching this lack of personal opinion
>poop fart bones
>OK see ya
Bangers indeed....
I don’t think background shows and movies are a bad thing inherently. They’re like a frozen pizza, I could take the time to go out and appreciate an amazing pizza from an Italian restaurant, or I could throw a pretty good pizza in the oven while I work. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a frozen pizza or perfecting it. The problem is that a company like Netflix will now only make frozen pizza movies and shows because they are more profitable.
I was so confused when you started talking about Damsel…mainly because I had never once even heard of its existence before this video; I never heard anyone talk about, nor did it ever pop when I went on Netflix
Although the only times I’ve used Netflix lately was to watch some Trsnsformers Prime again.
It might be region based or something because I've also never heard of it 🤷
Maybe it would be cheaper to buy the Blu Rays or something then if you're only watching like 1-2 shows?
I saw it advertised at me on Netflix; but it being the most watch thing never made sense to me until I saw this video, I didn't see anyone talking about it.
I go on Netflix once a month to see if there's something that'd interest me. Haven't even heard of Damsel. And I'm subscribed to a lot of media/movie commentary channels...
Same. Our house watches netflix at least 5 times a week and I've never even SEEN that advertised. Nobody I know has ever talked about it. Never even heard of the thing 🤷🏻♂️
Had this on in the background while doing my very belated dishes. Felt appropriate to do so, not just because I was very late in doing my dishes today.
I worked as an extra on an unnamed sci-fi movie project. The weirdest feeling on set, everyone was doing their job well, but nobody cared about the project. Absolutely no one to be found passionate about what was being made. Thats how the slop is made. Everyone shows up to set, does their job, goes home. No one thinks theyre making a good movie but eveyone gets paid
Now that I think about it, it's really funny that Netflix prioritises watch time. The less content people watch, the less they need to spend on servers streaming that content and the production of it. If anything, they should focus on producing as little content of a high quality as is needed to get people to keep paying.
💯%. But this isn't understood by shareholders who want the line to go up. The way the money works at that level is it's always a pump and dump, the only thing that differentiates them is time (how long the grift goes on for). The more shareholders are onboard for higher share prices by being able to say "We have X number of users and they spend Y hours on the service each year" means that when those same investors are on the meetings for other streaming services they can compare one to the other rather than understanding different services have different demographics and should target different artistic merits.
But due to The Line the shareholders boil it down to number of subscriptions × subscription price - expenditures
im gonna disagree with your take here. as a subscription service, their revenue is proportional to how long (in months and years) they can keep you using the platform. if they only produce a few bangers, you can very quickly exhaust the supply of shows on the platform, and consequently cancel the subscription. so instead, they aim to increase the amount of hours somebody needs to, and commits to, watch, so that this will translate into more subscription periods.
i just briefly scanned their annual report, and they mentioned that admin costs (ie compute) scales at a slower rate than user growth, so they are still in their economy of scale phase and can benefit from attracting a broad audience, and any req/res and storage costs are still less than the gross benefit they provide on average.
this is why long running sitcoms are pushed so hard, as not only do they literally require two months worth of subscription to binge, but also ensure there will be plenty of new content on the other side.
subscription models dont tend incentivise quality. Especially when viewed at a macro level.
Or...they want people to keep watching their shows because they understand that people may unsubscribe if they don't. In theory "make just as much content as you have to" is great, but it's not that easy to pull off in practice. And it also doesn't bring in new subscribers.
@@tehy123 The video you just watched explained how the "minimal good content" strategy brought in new subscribers where the "maximise watch time" strategy is slowly killing the business.
Yes I've thought this exact thing. I think the small streaming platforms that are curated might be on to this model
Bro actually clickbaited us with Moistcritical in the thumbnail whilst showing a video of someone who used Moistcritical in a thumbnail to clickbait us. What a gamer
True but Moist does make slop content tho
He baited me by being vague in the title and making me try to look at yhe comments to see if this video is also slop
@@emjeka_souls7147 The day Moistcritical says something truly unique is the day hell freezes over.
He only has the safest takes
@@austinbaccus Only time he directly went outta the bubble was defending trans people from SNeako. That was a major W. He may play it safe, but least its generally good moral stance.
@@austinbaccusI mean when it revolves around internet drama and the like the “safe” take is just the normal take we all had and I don’t think that’s a bad thing tbh 🤷🏿♂️
streamers figured out about the value of a medium that only serves audio to have in the background without requiring attention with visual information
we have successfully reinvented the radio
Halfway this video, I completely agree with your take on "already captured value". That is what has plagued the video game industry. A developer makes a really good, innovative experience, and then they endlessly produce the same thing- shinier but of diminished quality, often at the behest of a massive publisher which has acquired them and their IP for the purpose of extracting profits from the audience.
People don't seem to get that the biggest asset is not their library of intellectual property which they can modularly recombine to plop out another gaming experience. It is the passion and enthusiasm of their audience; the people who hold on to desperate hope for another experience like the ones they remember. And in delivering slop, this invaluable resource is squandered for short-term profits.
We'd rather make easy money today than a classic experience people will continue to revisit a hundred years from now.
Yep. They're so quick to roast the golden goose for short term profit that they lose out on the potential for long term supply of golden eggs. There are so many IPs that have major potential to be cash cows if used properly but they are simply slaughtered for nothing burgers.
I think another aspect of “slop” comes from the source of the term: pig slop is an amalgamation of a bunch of stuff they can digest, shoved into a trough for easy consumption. Slop content is made of a bunch of superior ideas boiled down to their most digestible-all style is stripped away. In my opinion, one of the best examples of this is XDefiant, the Ubisoft shooter. It tries to bring in the worlds of Rainbow Six, Far Cry, Splinter Cell, The Division, and so on; the problem is that none of their styles come into the game. Map design isn’t as thought-out as Far Cry, The Division’s post-apocalypse isn’t there, and the gameplay elements of Rainbow Six that make it fun and unique simply aren’t in the game (you can’t even ADS lean). It has no personality, nothing to grab onto, nothing to care about. It’s not actually bad, though-it’s got some decent points.
It’s slop in the purest sense of the word-it took better ideas, blended them up, and then sacrificed style and uniqueness (art) for digestibility.
It's a 4chan meme. From the term g-yslop. It is about the horrible standard American diet. We are the pigs(g_ys) who happily consume garbage. It morphed into American media. We happily consume marvel movies and Netflix despite degradation in effort and quality. The meme further implies that we are being mocked and continually accepting what we are fed.
your phrase “pig slop is an amalgamation of a bunch of stuff they can digest, shoved into a trough for easy consumption” made the think there’s a reason the media content delivery method is called a “feed”
@ that’s a hell of a connection
I like it a lot
Thank you yes I was hoping someone was going to mention this!
UA-cam has agreed that this video is probably one of your best and blessed you with a sort of ephemeral algorithmic virality
Reminds of the recent Tolarian Community College video regarding the future of MTG, and the articles in the pinned comment below it.
TLDR, once a company loses the trust of its customers, it loses all of them at once, and it takes decades to earn that trust back, so the usual result is bankruptcy. It has to be noticed before the tipping point is reached.
I quit MTG but i still watch his videos. All of the UB stuff and excess product makes me sad
“The future of MTG” as a concept is classic slop - haven’t watched a professor video in years but at least he cared about the wallets of people who watched.
There was a media/film critic channel I watched on Vimeo years ago and gist of one of his videos was: *art should uplift people, expose them to new ways of seeing, experiencing & being, but today’s movies are not an artistic manifestation as much as they are a financial one, their ultimate goal being money while their instrumental goal being to "hit the audiences where they are", giving them what they want, leaving them as they are*
Well I definately follow this logic of what art should be. Needless to say majority of things that media has shown dissapoint me and fail to impress.
Sorry to break it to you but this has always been the case. Movie studios always had meaning more money the priority. The difference is that 20+ years ago there were way more creators with artistic integrity to fight for their vision, and that studios have figured out new ways to optimise profits. So, combine greed with no pushback and guess what you get. Slop.
you nailed it at around 25 minutes. churning out slop works until it doesn't, and when it fails it does so hard and fast AND leave the slop-churner dumbfounded because all the metrics looked good up to that point
You being an Imagination Dragons fan is legimately my personal "Luke finding out Vader is his father"
What an Earth shattering realization
none of us are perfect 😔
@PillarofGarbage i think you're really great. Thanks for all your videos and thanks for being brave to tell us this about Imagination Dragons. I love Creed and Nickelback, unironically. Keep Calm and Slop On!
What's wrong with Imagine Dragons? My mom likes that band.
@@LikaLaruku They're just a viral thing to hate, like mayonnaise. In the end, they're just a hugely popular band that specialises in big sweeping choruses and that are a popular pick for commercials.
@@PillarofGarbage How dare you like something that it is popular to dislike? you need to *CONFORM.*
the video starting with the cobra effect tells me exactly what this video will be about lol
ah, yes... colonialism!
(with the intonation of Jesse/wires)
@@RoamingAdhocrat oh nose muh capitalism reee
@@tuckerbugeater it was 3 words and you couldnt even get the right ism, most literate rightoid
@@tuckerbugeater
Very eloquent and intellectual
24:39 the absolute irony that I’m watching this video on small screen while I’m playing pokémon go on my phone, an absolute shell of the franchise I became a fan of 25 years ago but I still play because it’s no other options and hearing you talk about this topic really has me thinking how much longer can I tolerate these bugs and inconsistent mechanics before I kick the habit. I’ve been struggling lately to keep up with streaming shows and movies (although I have access to all the major platforms) and I’ve been trying to put a finger on why, I actually even asked myself am I getting lazy, but I have no problem binging HOURS of youtube content daily and it’s crazy because all of this stuff applies to me and I probably would’ve never noticed what the problem is if I haven’t heard a few people break it down but the effects are still apparent. It’s the same way with nba basketball another thing that I’ve been a fan of for 25 years that I’m finding it harder and harder to engage with
Gaming slop showed what people tend to do eventually is they just go backwards to stuff that was good before the slop. Everyone I know mostly plays indie games or old games for example
Except for Nintendo, who despite everything can still make good games
@cosmicspacething3474 fair fair, but honestly even then so prefer Mario 64 to any modern Mario game I have played and they have never topped Mario Party 6
Or like, one giant single-player game a year. BG3 for me.
Despite western AAA being a dumster fire.
Indies and eastern games are doing very good.
@@dinoblacklane1640 that's a good example of "survivor bias", as in you mostly hear about the indie/asian games that do well, so you assume they're better overall when that's not the case.
to use "gacha games" as an example, everyone hears about the big ones like genshin impact and honkai star rail, so they think gacha games always make tons of money, but the vast majority of them shuts down a few months after launch (they're so unpopular that nobody hears about them)
Slop is whats left when you take all the character/soul out of things. Its a soft inoffensive mush, that also doesnt get anyone excited and that means people will at some point just leave because there are no stakes anymore. Its like a long distance relationship that gets weaker and weaker until its gone and noone misses it.
I think of slop like those fake crabby patties in Spongebob with the gray goop inside, looks good on the outside, tastes fine, just don't look too close or you'll notice what you're really consuming
Slop is art gone corporate. Creative works optimized for maximum monetary return even if that contradicts most aspects of "creative".
Art-slop is easy to classify IMO, art-slop is art that has no message or meaning beyond the literal interpretation of the plot. Daredevil and Jessica Jones aren't slop because Daredevil delves into morality of vigilanteism all the time, and Jessica Jones is all allegory for abusive relationships. However, the Defenders was slop because it was about...??? some people stopping a building blowing up - sure it had a few memorable scenes : Luke Cage talking to the Iron Fist about privilege (a brief non-slop moment), and Jessica Jones pointing out how stupid the Hand is, but can anyone remember what else happened in that show? (I must have watched it 5-6 times and those two scenes are all that I remember).
It's not so much that people leave, it's that this sort of media becomes a fallback for when something needs to be consumed or you'll feel unsatisfied. Damsel is McDonalds - it's not something you'll choose to watch when you actively want to enjoy a movie, but sometimes you've got a hunger that's going to eat away at you until you shove something, anything, into your gullet, and when you can't find anything better, Damsel, like McDonalds, is fine. It's not going to be a good or even memorable experience, but it's got the fats, salts and sugars needed to quell the hunger.
I think the real problem is that our need to be entertained has become as strong as our need to be fed. Companies have been able to take the soul out of consumer products because consumers have taken the soul out of the act of consumption. The best way to get rid of the slop is to stop needing 16 hours of audio intake per day.
@@yurisei6732 But we NEED purpose. Our innate purpose has been robbed of us en masse thanks to the comfortability of modern life.
I just wanna say that the fact that a movie called 'The Gray Man' was so insubstantial that it was forgotten about is objectively funny if you're familiar with the Gray Man concept.
It’s like soap operas for the working at home economy. Same thing, episodes you could dive into and the exact same plot and character interactions are happening … housewives could dip in and out while they were ironing the laundry.
Yeah. My wife is unable to look at a screen for more than a minute before having to do something, like knitting or cleaning.If only soap operas weren't stigmatized, she would get addicted to them. She has currently re-watched Gray's Anatomy more times than I can count.
Came here to say this. Basically the same thing.
They were designed with their simple plots and overdone acting so people can watch them on the side while literally soaping.
@@ViolosD2I Funny. I knew the term "soap opera" came from soap companies advertising a lot in them, didn't think about literally soaping while watching them.
"Visual muzak" sounds like a euphemistic description of a screen-saver.
Gray Man and Extraction are most DEFINITELY not second screen movies. Those kept me on the edge of my seat all throughout.
This reminds me of the concept of the "trust thermocline" I came across recently in a video essay about Magic. It's the idea that consumers will keep using a product long after they've lost faith in a company, until one day, suddenly, the camel's back breaks.
Reminds me of when I finally got the distinction between "Getting together with friends TO do activities" vs "Getting together with friends AND doing activities"
I think slop and mediocrity does have a place in the world, but I really dislike the idea of making something middling on purpose.
Netflix might as well just run random stuff on an inhouse computer in a closet, if they expect everyone to half-ignore the damn thing in the first place.
Its gotten so bad I genuinely I’m thinking of dropping UA-cam and nearly all of media, and falling back on books with high recommendations like Dune, LOTR, ASOIF.
Yea iv done the same. ALtho not with youtube.
Before I used to read up on math books alot and do hobbies and shit. Ima get started back on it.
there are tons of awful books too
@ oh absolutely, however it’s far easier to quality check books through reviews then through a comment section. Largely because of the algorithm, people who are watching videos don’t dislike them, so criticism is rare and bias’s are common.
The only thing that sucks about that is that you can't relate to the current gen, but you will have good taste
@ have you seen mine and the next Gen? Fuck that, the only good stuff coming it out is Kendrick’s music, Movies based on previous art, and the rare good video game. Media and Art is dead, feels like the downgrade between Ancient and medieval art
I remember watching Damsel.
It was a decent enough movie, but I genuinely kinda forgot it existed until you mentioned it in this video.
I mainly remember feeling disappointed that all the twists were precisely what you expected them to be and I remember feeling like they didn't explore the notion that the dragon was a victim, but also a perpetrator. Even if the Dragon wasn't manipulated and those kids truly were heirs of the bad family.
It's still perpetrating generational violence.
And the movie seemed to brush past that having a happy ending where the dragon is now bff's with main girl. If anything it would be more interesting if main girl's ancestors really did wrong the dragon
My mental filter is that "if it looks corny and gay, then its slop". Which sounds really stupid but it somehow kinda works.
Maybe its the fact that the cornier and gayer the artist, the more likely they are to output slop.
But it also could be the fact that my definition of "corny and gay", is just soulless NPC garbage.
The only movies I watch are movies that have attracted me off social media rn, or that my friends tell me to.
Because I have such a large distrust of movies that show up half the time, that I only watch movies based off word of mouth.
I have ADHD so whats mildly captivating for someone, is fucking boring for me.
Well, most people who call themselves gay aren't gay, they're queer: a nebulous word that means everything and nothing because why bother with accuracy and engaging with reality?
@@honkhonk8009amen dude. Unless it has serious hype as being good I don't even bother anymore. Life is short and I waste enough of it.
This video reminds me of the last few minutes of Lazerpig's video on Skull and Bones (pretty good video btw I reccomend it) and this is a sort of summary of his points.
In a sense that he talked about how above all, we value numerical based data and intelligence above everything else as it is just easier for us to understand. How he put it: "Numbers are Logical, Humans are not; Warthunder has the most advanced matchmaking in the world and it's players will tell you that it doesn't work, UA-cam's algorithm is the most advanced in the world and it doesn't work, and polling data is frequently wrong".
We get into our heads that data and logic needs to be tweaked rather than completely disregarded no matter how wrong it is at accuratly guessing what people will do because it's easier to stick with what the numbers say without even having to ask a customer what they want to see.
I haven't played War Thundrr but UA-cam's algorithm is actually pretty good imo. It's not perfect but it usually gives me what I want and especially within the last year I've been seeing a lot of new channels that I'm interested in
I didn't expect a LazerPig reference here.
Ok but polling can be done wrong. It used to be far more predictive but shifts in behavior and herding shake things up.
Flashing back to that one character from Pacific Rim who said something along the lines of "math is as close as we get to the language of the gods"
@@fluffynator6222 Also polling is generally right, the big issue is biased polling that wants to appeal to an audience, also polls themselves can never tell the full story because polls do have a minor outcome on the election that they can't account for. It's why for the US election in 2016 and 2024 the betting markets were more accurate than the polls, because there was no ideological favouritism in the betting markets, because pretending one candidate is doing better than they are doesn't do you any good if you're on the losing side of the bet.
One of the most intriguing and insightful video essays I've ever had the privilege of listening to. Excellent work, truly made me stop and think, go back and re-listen to a couple points you've made along with a couple clips you added. The fantano clip really was a necessary addition that is worrying to realize is becoming true. Keep up the good work.
There is absolutely no shortage of art in the world, even today, that's made with passion and sincerity. You just have to put in more effort than "open app and disable brain" to find it.
I noticed earlier this year the only reason I still have Netflix is because they have a few of my mostafavorite shows that I will continue to rewatch my whole life but I decided that because that's the only reason I'm just going to buy them on DVD and then actually own them for my whole life
Based and physical media pilled
Didn’t think that the most relatable part of this video would be the Imagine Dragons example! I completely agree with your assessment. And for what it’s worth, I love Smoke and Mirrors to this day: it was a genuine effort to expand the band’s sound and remains underrated to this day. Excellent video!
People will always make meaningful art. It's just getting more and more difficult to find.
No, people just don't like being reminded that they're actually bad people. Its like medicine.
Yo ho yo the pirate's life for me. When they got rid of "account sharing", and my wife couldn't watch at the house while i was watching on the road, screw that.
They've developed a solution to piracy.
Make content that's not even worth pirating.
@@whitehawk4099Lol, you're right.😂 They make the most bland and good enough content as they can, and condition people to consume it for years. Its actualy very scary how effective it is.
To be fair, I want to and will watch Damsel simply because of the premise. Talking dragon + dragon isn't the bad guy + opinion shift (dragon bad -> dragon gud) are all themes I really like. But now I'll enjoy the movie even more because I can watch out for the things you said in the video. So you basically turned it from slop to a normal movie for me.
I may be an old person, but I'm pretty sure that this has been the way of things for as long as art and capitalism have coxisted. "90% of everything is crap", after all.
To some degree, yes. Just like SNL has always been 20% hilarious and 80% “eh.” But the concern voiced here, I think, is that Netflix is decisively aiming for mediocrity, whereas SNL just stumbles because it’s part of the creative process.
Sturgeon's Law, I guess.
He covers this in the video. Not long ago Netflix used to make good tv-shows & movies.
@@cvangemon1307 They also used to make bad ones.
@@roachybill I respectfully disagree. The entertainment industry has deliberately created lowest-common-denominator art, as cheaply as possible, with no attempt at quality, all along. Consider the glut of direct-to-video movies in the 80s-90s.
I do agree that the current strategy for streaming services and the like is to fill a giant bucket with "content" - but that's because they've learned how to silo their customers better. (If "silo" is the word I mean there.)
Lots of people working in the entertainment industry want to make art - but the industry itself has always pursued cheap filler.
One of the other reasons for the proliferation, is that Netflix choices which series to continue by a system where over 25 days the retention of the tv series has to be over 50% or the show or it is cancelled. It's why there are no anthology shows and why netflix is so bad at writing Black Mirror compared to channel 4. People leaving them on in the background so fingers crossed it goes past the threshold.
Slop is just the recognition that content has overtly chosen marketability or appeal over expression.
The most egregious forms of this marketability feel as uncanny as product placement or advertising.
Great video.
It’s almost like there’s a problem with infinite growth and capitalism or something
same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
@@razmetrez well of course. If you criticise capitalism you must want the USSR.
Same as it ever was
Look what my hand does
Slop consumes all…
He who controls the Slop controls the universe.
Soylent Green is people! 😱
What?🤨
The Slop must flow...
Talk to me once you get the Thanos gauntlet of slop
Lislop al gaib
I heard Netflix is gonna make movies and shows specifically for people to have on in the background while scrolling on phone or whatever and my first thought was like you don’t need specific content tailored for that, you can do that with literally any piece of media. I spent this spring/summer binge watching Little House On The Prairie while playing Stardew Valley and it was quite the enjoyable experience, I was able to pay attention to both despite LHOTP not being designed to be watched that way. Idk just because I have something on in the background doesn’t mean I don’t want to fully comprehend it, I’ve always been someone that has to do 2 things at once so I’m very wired to do that and will get understimulated if one of those things is just a nothing slop void
Every time I hear of the cobra effect I imagine a story where the cobra effect is abused.
Like imagine setting up a cobra pelt purchasing program COUNTING ON people breeding them because cobras are endangered or somethinglike.
I was thinking how to fix the dilemma. Like maybe setting a time limit on the bounty could prevent the exploitation. Granted someone could still breed them hoping to call a bluff, but regardless, a little extra nuance and thought could likely solve the issue. That's just where my brain went lol
@@awbeans982 Hunting cobras is always a brute force alternative to actual environmentalism. It is a bounty imposed by colonialists to maximize productivity of crops they're exploiting. So it's a solution to a problem that isn't worth solving. The solution to the cobra dilemma is to stop trying to maximize revenue at the expense of nature.
@@blackomega34oops, ya dropped this, mate 👑
@awbeans982 tax people and use the taxes to fund cobra hunting teams
@@orterves now it's even more perverse- now even the government is incentivised to ensure cobras are always around so the Cobra Tax is always in effect and that the cobra hunting teams remain employed eventually leading to decades of a Cobra Tax paying for a purely ceremonial cobra hunter unit that's mostly used by the colonial government as a hit squad against dissidents
As someone who worked in media analytics, I’m forever baffled how little these companies care about how much people talk about their projects on social media- we could measure it, we could track how long these conversations last. But no, that would mean hiring a company that specialises in social media analysis and they prefer to cut costs left and right
This is also enshittification basically. Tied into something, worse over time, no longer serving users, just serving itself.
As a fan of Imagine Dragons, video games, cinema, and art that demands to be your _only_ screen, you _have_ to have seen and loved Arcane, right? _Right!?_
Counterpoint, have you ever listened to Thunder? They can do both good and bad things, but generally they make pretty bad stuff. Loom was absolute shit
That the film you're trying to remember at around 9:30 is The Grey Man, honestly is hilariously in keeping with the character's intended goal of blending in. (I made a note right before restarting the film and you remembered it, lol. I really should watch these videos all the way through before commenting I guess)
Weirdly I got to your comment at that exact moment. It felt like the planets aligned
Slop is heavily dependent on one thing, volume. Not just the attention of consumers but the slop itself must be plentiful. It is consumed and discarded rapidly. None of those shows/ songs/ media will ever top a list or chart ever again. I think slop is a direct result of the death of physical media. There is no rebound, no second chances of good dvd sales or other medias. If your project is going to be forgotten anyway, why shoot for anything but the equator?
This sounds similar to when cable channels lost subscribers from investing in reality tv shows because reality tv had the most view counts.
The subscribers would watch the shows, but they didn't value the content enough to keep subscribing to the channel.
History repeats itself.
Netflix and other services need to add a boolean field for which content was deliberately made to be "second screen" content, because I never, ever want to watch anything made specifically to be that. What is the point?
I also don't understand what exec at Netflix is saying "second screen content is good, because it causes people to subscribe or continue their subscription." Who is going to, a month from now, while asking themselves whether to cancel Netflix, look at any second screen content and think "yeah, I should keep paying for that!"
But my metrics don't count anymore. I gave up Netflix over a year ago. I forget which pretty-good series they canceled within a weak of release (because there were so many) but one of them woke me up to how broken their model is now.
“Slop” has always existed and distracted consumption was the norm for performance arts. People sitting in rapt attention for something “good” or “original” media is a fanciful notion. The things media critics complain about are just the defining features of low barrier popular culture. Stock characters, simple narratives, poor writing, reliance on spectacle, etc. What has changed recently is how much is invested to make that type of media and its importance to a wider culture.
23:10 i think its super important to mention that imagine dragons band member lineup changed completely basically after the first few years
Cobra effect refers to that blue shiny guy from gi joe
No the Cobra effect is when you're played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt but get recast in the sequel.
no cobra is when you open a sushi restaurant with a whacky chef and a fat diver next to a great blue hole in wich somehow all the fish in the world exist
Careful Pyrocinal will turn this into a 2 hour slop video
With 5 to 30 seconds of accidentally flashing his furry inflation fart slop depending on how zoned out he is
Honestly your summary of Damsel makes it sound better than it probably is…
Horror movie dressed up as fantasy definitely sounds like something interesting. There's plenty of fantasy horror in the sense of spooky demons and ghosts but not more traditional fantasy, and a DRAGON horror movie sounds like it would actually kick ass.
It is a 7 out of 10. It could us some polishing on the script, but it's good for the budget it got
It's crap. Everything about it is above average in terms of production quality but the script is just... unaware of itself. It wants to be a story about empowerment but it's really about how you should forgive your abuser. The dragon is, to be blunt, a psychopath, and the attempt to show it favourably as a twist is frankly insane given its idea of morality is so outdated that it predates the Code of Hammurabi.
@ Wasn’t the dragon also abused tho?
@@cosmicspacething3474 Yes but also irrelevant in this case. Instead of punishing the person who did it it just decided to murder people who had nothing to do with the crime beyond being related to the person who did it. So equally as shit a person if not worse.
Which wouldn't be an issue if the film didn't frame it as good and just.
When you detach payment form a product, there's an incentive to lower the quality of the product and increase the price as soon as they capture a sizeable audience.
Yes, Netflix and other streaming platforms, but also:
- Cable TV (and this same thing is what led to it's death to streaming)
- Spotify and other subscription music services
- GamePass, PSN+
- Season passes and live-service games
- All-you-can-eat buffets (to a lesser degree though, since your "subscription" lasts for a single sitting)
- Adobe and other subscription software houses
- HEALTH INSURANCE and other kinds of insurance (where the insurance company buys out their providers and it closes the loop so there's also no competition)
- a loooong list of etc
Guaranteed income always turns into low effort.
I think that's called rent seeking.
When I studied translation, a topic was that TV intended for stay at home wives was always dubbed (not subbed) so they could consume it while doing chores or caring for kids.
So even if a country was generally accepting of subs, the daytime TV would often be dub. Seems kinda similar but on a wider scale
There's something worth considering though: At what point does "Second Screen" content start interfering with "primary screen"? I have games that I have trouble getting started because I know they're excellent and will require 100% of my attention, meaning I'd need to turn off screen #2 to enjoy them... so I start up Vampire Survivors instead because I can listen to something else while playing it. How long before your second screen becomes your primary screen?
It's already here, and it's called scrolling tiktok. And it's so bad on there that they give you a third screen in the second screen full of distractions like soap cutting or random subway surfers gameplay in the corner next to the actual content of the video.
This video was a really interesting foray into defining a very pervasive abstract term. As much slop as there is out there, there still exist plenty of artistic creations on the market. Hell, Arcane season 2 is in the middle of releasing, and that's an excellent example of something that's had mountains of heart and soul pushed into it. Yet, similar to what you talked about at the end, it too is something cashing in on pre-existing good will and hype. I think most of its audience at this point probably hasn't even played League, but the existing IP certainly played into the excitement for the show initially. Would it be as popular as it ended up without that? Hard to say. Really interesting topic to discuss.
Watching the second season actively and I have to say that the whole production of Arcane is such a beautiful tour-de-force. The second season's intro despite reusing the Fallout Boy-esque strategy of provocative but forgettable and meaningless lyrics is a work of visual art that stands alone.
The story narrative also stands alone despite it not needing to due to the quality of the world it's built upon (not the game, the writing the game is based on). There are occasional hitches where they refuse to retcon a niggle here or there, but I think this gets expressed as characters being ideologically fixated or mentally scarred.
I was sad to hear the third season wouldn't get funding, but allegedly they're moving the camera to another location in the League universe which is great because a lot happens there with both geographic and temporal separation.
We started watching because I know of the quality of the core writing so I had high expectations that were exceeded, it's just a massive pity that Riot decided to abandon 5% (1:19!) of the PC gaming market by blocking Linux gamers.
You know those videos where people train AI to beat games, and the AI does something super weird that breaks the game but clears the level? I feel like the same thing is happening here. The algorithm or board meeting or shareholders or whatever is working towards a goal, and they dont care about how they get there.
1:04 *Perverse, I have been spelling baited.
man I proofwatched this video like 3 times as well
:sadcowboy
@@PillarofGarbageAre you like the demake of the Pillar of Autumn?
Nah, it's just a perverse spelling of "perverse".
I saw a twitter thread describe the phenomenon as the "thermocline of trust"- the point at which people stop being willing to cash in on the trust built up and then slowly drained away, and abandon a company or product en masse.
Reverse network effect
The wild thing is, in the case of netflix, shows had this figured out back in the /70s/. They expected you to be doing stuff while the TV is on, and the small screen of the CRT can make it difficult to see at times. If you watch Columbo, you may notice that they use audio cues to draw the viewer back in for important story moments. Netflix could have had the best of both worlds, they could have played to the strengths of a 'second screen' environment, but instead they chose the equivalent of white noise
There's a scene in the film Toys (1992, starring Robin Williams) where LL Cool J's character questions Joan Cusack's character about her peculiar habit of eating sandwiches made of plain white bread, mayonaise, and vitamin pills. She says "they're easy to digest, and move straight through the system without getting caught on anything." At the end of the film, it turns out that she was actually a robot the whole time (spoilers). Slop, if it's anything, is that sandwich: non-content meant to be consumed effortlessly; perfect for robots.
You need to put (spoilers) before you make the spoiler
It's amazing how cheap that Damsel looked and how little thought had gone into the fantasy world where different eras are just smashed together, for no reason but laziness and no time or budget given to set and costume designer's.
Regarding the whole "second screen" issue: If only there was a medium designed to be primarily listened to, one which is home to many long-running serial productions that are designed primarily to be listened to while engaged in another activity. Truly, such a wonderous invention could stream, or radiate, or broadly cast, if you will, waves into the eather to then be received by a box that turns them into a soundwave for the listener to enoy.
Radio play, Netflix, is what you are looking for.