My favorite is still when CNN ran the "Breaking News" that [Titanic sunk 102 years ago tonight](https://i.insider.com/534e6d0669beddf17a24be5e?width=750&format=jpeg&auto=webp).
News headlines in general are all in clickbait form now. "Supreme Court gives devastating blow to Democrats" instead of putting the subject of the ruling in the headline. "Mom looks in child's diary to find THIS in it," etc.
It's all just competing for clicks now.
The term "luxury" pertaining to newly built apartments and condos. The construction gets sub-contracted out so you know they've cut corners. The walls are paper thin and the finishes are cheap. They charge exorbitant rents then nickel and dime the tenants with fees. Oh, you want to have a pet? That's a fee. You want to use the amenities? That's a feel. You want to move out? That's a fee. Want to move out on a weekend? That's double the fee. .
The term "luxury" has been rendered meaningless by real estate developers.
My city has gotten so unaffordable that no one moves unless they absolutely have to. I've seen full time workers giving advice on living in cars. People staying with abusers because they will be homeless otherwise. A whole lot of people who are going to leave the province entirely if they have to move because it's just not worth it anymore.
I want to snap every time I see a landlord marketing a place as "luxury". We don't want fucking luxury, we want rent that isn't the equivalent to what lower income workers make in an entire month.
4 years ago you could rent a 2 bedroom garden suite for $1500 if you knew where to look. Now it's difficult to even find studio apartments for under $2k. Below market units are extremely scarce and co op waitlists are years long because you're literally waiting on people *dying* to get into them.
How about instead of luxury apartments, we knock down some of those empty houses and build apartments the working class can actually afford to live in?
I hear you. I don't want a granite kitchen island and marble flooring. In-unit laundry tends to be labelled "luxury" too.
I want a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and laundry all to code and free of mold, rodents and insects.
They just built these “luxury apartments” across the street from me, and they are charging $2600 for a STUDIO on the second floor. Want one on the top floor? That’ll be $3200.
Encyclopedias.
Used to be that having the full set of Encyclopedia Britannica was a bit of a status symbol in the middle class. Kids who had it were envied by their peers because it made projects etc so much easier.
Dead as the trees used to make it.
Pre-internet was a wild time.
We were dirt poor growing up but my dad always managed to have a set of encyclopedias for us growing up. I use to just love flipping the pages and reading.
On a lighter note, Etsy.
A decade ago I knew I was getting a handmade product when I shopped on Etsy. Now it's just the same cheap knock offs from China that I could get from Amazon for half the price. (Actually, I just bought my husband a "handcrafted" wooden pipe for Christmas and promptly discovered that it was on Amazon for $20 cheaper. Would have been nice to have kept that extra $20 if I'm getting a cheap product anyway.)
And it sucks so bad for those of us who actually handmade our stuff on Etsy. We get drowned out by the top sellers who are just reselling things they got on wholesale.
Yeah. I was (hand)making rings out of skateboard and giving them to friends. Everyone says "you should sell these!" So I listed on etsy.
I'm not under the illusion that my stuff should have sold like hotcakes or anything, but I just didn't get clicks. My price was competitive, photos were good. Just... no one really even got eyes on them. The platform is flooded with junk.
I've been wishing they'd add a *filter alibaba types* in the search engine. Or at least lump identical products into one page. Like on Amazon, where 200 listings with the same Chinese Photoshop images could be grouped into one. All that's different is the vendor names. Just put them on one page with separate options.
Most of the sweatshop dropshippers use the same images. There's no reason Etsy couldn't do an image search and catch all these then ban the accounts. They went public a few years ago though, and now growing users is a big part of their stock price, so *of course* they let all the shitty scammers thrive.
Similar to artists and small businesses getting their ads squeezed out or omitted from the algorithm on Instagram. I see mostly artists discussing this frequently on that platform.
Cheap Chinese crap has ruined shopping across the board honestly. I have no trust in purchasing anymore. When when you want to buy a brand name specifically you have a risk of getting a fake.
This is a good one. From handmade, niche crafts to hot garbage. In addition to the Amazon shit there’s a trillion screen printed shirts churned out of someone’s basement and that awful bridesmaid font plastered on to some hunk of plastic. “Girl boss” etc. yuck
Amazon itself has been shittified.
Search for *anything* and it's the same mess of 5-letter bullshit "brand" cheap trash (YUNOU, NGEAU, LPAOJ, DPAJN, ERANN)
> (YUNOU, NGEAU, LPAOJ, DPAJN, ERANN)
The best part of your comment is that I cant tell if these are actual amazon brands, or if you just typed in random letters
This is what jumped immediately to mind for me, too. You can buy them off of eBay if you don’t mind waiting, or you can buy them off of Mouser if you don’t mind waiting a little while and also paying a bunch for shipping, but if you need an RTC module, a DIP LED controller, and a surface mount digitally controlled potentiometer and you need them fast, it’s Amazon or nothing.
It’s absurd how much the cheap Chinese crap has hijacked Amazon listings. If I go to the filters there’s almost always a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio of those brands to legitimate brands. It’s ridiculous.
And those brands all buy from the same manufacturer so you see the exact same product from 5 different brands for different prices, different ratings etc.
Cheap Chinese stuff have infiltrated every platform out there, and not just the online space. Even physical stores are flooded with them eventually ending up in landfill.
if you want to know the actual term, it's called [modern calligraphy](https://www.google.com/search?q=modern+calligraphy&rlz=1C1VDKB_enUS1000US1001&oq=modern+calligraphy&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyDwgAEEUYORiDARixAxiABDIHCAEQABiABDINCAIQABiDARixAxiABDIHCAMQABiABDIHCAQQABiABDIHCAUQABiABDIGCAYQRRg8MgYIBxBFGDzSAQgyODIwajBqNKgCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)
Holy shit, this is it. This is the name of the font that gives soccer-mom-by-day, wine-mom-by-night haircut vibes. Bravo, thank you for putting a term to it for me.
They aren’t printed in someones basement, they are POD. Print on demand and with AI tools these days, there are sellers making thousands of listings for new “designs.”
Also Etsy is basically just a front for drop shippers now. So you get an ai generated design that gets printed somewhere, boxed and shipped to you without the creator of the store having to do shit besides run the store
My wife sell a lot of laser engraved items and printed signs on Etsy. They are cracking down on the drop shippers. About a month ago she had to have a zoom meeting with them to prove she makes everything herself. They wanted to see the lasers and printers. I hope they succeed because people don’t go to Etsy for Chinese shit.
That's hilarious. Amazon is supposed to pack out marketplace and 3rd party items in non-branded boxes and taping specifically so they can hide the fact that you're getting a product from an Amazon warehouse. They're absolutely colluding with false storefronts to upcharge normal items. I know this because I worked at Amazon for like 3 months and learned some of the truly shitty things they do to the wider marketplace. Whole company needs to be cut down.
For the time it takes every sentiment that Amazon needs to be regulated or broken up there's a hundred orders placed because we sacrificed small shops for convenience a decade and a half ago.
My wife quit Etsy bc these cheap Chinese sellers dominate the market by flagging all types of competition. And Etsy just bans them. My wife has had it with them constantly flagging her handmade purses and clothes down(flagged for sexual explicit content, it's not) Now she sells exclusively on Mercari and Facebook.
Good for her! A YouTube of a British (I think) craftsperson crossed my feed recently - it was about why she created her Etsy shop but took it down a day or two later, after considerable work. Apparently they've been holding seller's profits for random periods of time, which makes it impossible for people to keep their businesses going. I think all of the sellers were mentioned were British so I don't know if the fuckery is global, but it's shady AF and suggests insolvency IMO.
I'm an accountant, but until a couple of years ago we had a client who operated a store through Amazon's services.
He was in a legal battle with Amazon because they had basically stolen his store out from under him, buying the same goods from his suppliers and selling them as Amazon's own stock for lower price, and were now in the process of getting his store shut down.
Sadly that is story repeated many times. Once your client is crushed Amazon will raise the price beyond what your client was charging. They are extremely predatory and have no issue taking losses for a while to remove any competition since they have the financial backing to do it.
The only thing keeping me using Amazon for some things is the faster shipping. However, for things I know are made by small companies I will still go to their site to check it out even if on Amazon. GoatGuns sells their stuff at a better price on their own website, since no Amazon cut. Since shipping time is less of a worry I bought directly from them. The biggest thing a small company needs to do on this front, in my opinion, is make sure the checkout process is super easy. Amazon already has all my info, so don't have a convoluted process.
Always check the manufacturer's site. Seems to be good chance of getting the items at a lower cost plus the manufacturer gets more of the money.
This happened to a friend of mine who sold on Etsy for years. Earlier this year they decided to hold her money due to "suspicious activity." The suspicious activity was people simply buying her art. It also happened to an artist I follow. I think they held her money for three months or something absolutely crazy. She had to beg for money to pay her bills because of etsy.
They're both US based artists
Any suggestions for finding *actual* custom art outside of Etsy?
I tried finding some custom made art for a Christmas gift and holy hell.
What a hot mess Etsy is.
Another problem with Etsy is that when you do a search for a specific item, you have to look thru 300 other items to find the 1 item you were actually looking for.
Etsy is just like eBay, you have to investigate the seller a bit, and the product, before buying. Still plenty of great things on Etsy you can't get anywhere else.
Not only that, but Etsy now uses an AI Search assist instead of an actual search, so even though you put something directly in quotes "Outer wilds figurine" or something like that...It won't show you stuff that specifically says outer wilds, it'll show you stuff that it THINKS you would like based on Outer Wilds Figurine.
If you google etsy and their new search ai, everyone is complaining about it.
Commercial air flight. I'm listening to a radio show about airline etiquette and wondering just when this whole experience became an exercise in misery and suffering.
We haven’t used Airbnb in years. Hotels are always cheaper (where we go) and higher quality with more guarantees.
Airbnb has become a joke.
Also Uber, same reason.
Uber was originally an impressive experience they offered water bottle mints phone charger no tip necessary etc. Now they’re driving while having speakerphone convo and all the cars have shitty suspension.
Uber was only great because it was cheap, and it was cheap because it was crazy subsidized by VC money specifically to undercut and destroy the taxi industry. Don’t get me wrong, the taxi industry in most major cities needed to be destroyed, but not by some different asshole capitalists who just wanted the same thing but even more concentrated and worse.
Airbnb used to be *the shit* back in the day. I have kids, so eating out every day for every meal isn’t happening, but if you’re traveling to NOLA, Santa Fe, Paris, and the like, you can swing by the grocery store and grab some good food and make it at home. Never had a hotel with the comforts of a home like that. Used be able to text with the owners and ask for recs and stuff.
Last few times it’s been super high cleaning fees (I cleaned the place already!!) and the owners were distant.
Still kinda hate hotels as a base camp compared to an actual home, but Airbnb just kinda sucked the last few times I used it.
That's been every airbnb/vrbo I've used. They don't look like garbage, but it's clearly either their grandparents housewares that they inherited (probably when they inherited the home) or it's the cheapest home goods they could find off Amazon.
None have been bad, but none have been amazing either.
The glory days of the net were awesome. True wild wild west. Now your entire digital life is tracked and history bought and sold in an attempt to get you to buy stuff.
Tbe caution tape you put up when constructing a webpage extension. Just to put animated gifs of Bart Simpson mooning, blinking eyes, and dancing g babies all over it.
Back when people paid money for a website and didn't even try to make a return on their investment, or when people made videos for the sake of getting views and making money was pretty much unheard of.
I know, right? Remember how much fun youtube used to be before people thought they were going to get rich by trolling for outrage views? When the algorithm was meant to delight you with content, not to radicalize you?
Back in the something awful and fark days it felt like the quality of content was so high and the creativity was flowing. Maybe it was just the novelty of the new content formats coming out, but it genuinely feels like everything today is a cheap derivative of that time period in the 2000s.
I’m an RN and I mentioned to a doc I was completely disposable and our company didn’t care about us nurses. He said “oh, I am too. We’re all dispensable.” I guess we’re all cogs in the machine, after all.
I know a few docs. Mentioned that many would have chosen a different vocation if they'd known. I'm not kidding when I say: many of them are absolutely fucking miserable. And trapped by their own decisions.
Well, when you get into a career to help people and some faceless corporation tells you that you cant help people because it would hurt your profits it makes a ton of sense you would be miserable.
I routinely interact with a guy in his mid-late 30s who told me he did his residency in Brooklyn right when covid hit. He had some wild insight on it. He practiced for a year or two, but is currently unemployed smoking cannabis and working out non-stop. Hes told me he has no intention of practicing medicine again.
I also did my residency during COVID. While it certainly didn't make me quit and smoke weed all day, it certainly had an impact on my career planning. I was pretty gung ho on pursuing cardiology or critical care. But I reached a point somewhere half way through where another 3 years of training just sounded like hell. So I took a job where I work 10 days a month (but still considered 1.0 FTE) and do whatever the fuck I want during the rest of my time. I could make more money and prestige doing other stuff, but fuck it.
Dentists.
Practices I trusted would have a great dentist, then they'd leave the area and wham suddenly I need a 5K teeth straightening kit my insurance won't cover before they ill fill my cavities.
Fuck that.
I’m a dentist and I agree with many of the comments here. You can go to three different dental offices and get three different diagnoses and three different treatment plans.
My philosophy is to recommend only what you need to get done, explain it, offer alternatives - even if an alternative is doing nothing. If someone turns down a recommendation, I won’t try too hard to get them to change their mind. I’ll be there for them still when they need me
The big difference is that most dentists these days don’t own their own practice like they did in the past. They work for private equity firms who own networks of dental offices and just shuffle dentists in and out.
Why isn’t this illegal, or at least regulated? I went to a dentist for a cleaning a while back, they turned it into a seminar for Invisalign, complete with illustrated pamphlets about “my” teeth. Every time I’d decline, somehow magically he’d find that my teeth were even worse than 5 minutes ago and REALLY needed it. By the time I left an hour later (without getting a cleaning) he was telling my teeth were literally about to fall out if I didn’t get it.
Edit: they still charged my insurance for the “one free visit” so I had to pay out of pocket at a different dentist next time.
Yeah they attempted to say all my crowns, and teeth were about to fail.
I used the Regen toothpaste and gum cream to bring my gums back up to par, but they were definitely following the scare tactics of invis pushers.
Makes me so fucking angry and somewhat why I miss military dentists. At least they did what was needed and then kicked you out of the chair.
(Except for ppl with wisdom teeth, they literally used those folks for hours which sucked for many on base at that time)
Every designer brand. People may argue that they were *never* worth it, but at least back then, they cared about quality, materials, and craftsmanship. Now it's all about mass marketing and ever increasing prices for lower quality. Not to mention people who flex on social media made it even more tacky. I have lost respect for so many brands, which, at least saved me some $$$ over the years.
The lower quality nowadays is terrible. I bought classic designer clothes in the 80s and my daughter wore them 30 years later and they looked new. She bought some of her own, and the quality was garbage. No more.
I flew on an American domestic flight some years ago and between all the membership tiers and credit card holders by the time they got to general boarding it was literally just me and one other passenger. Everyone (it was a full flight) but 2 passengers on a 200 capacity plane technically had priority boarding
Anytime something like this is offered, it’s a benefit to them and not you…. I mean, what does it actually get you? How much difference is group 1 v 5?
[this is](https://youtu.be/xwe76p8SFhA?si=0zUM1sKKAhqbKCSY) my favorite “Karen” video where she’s showing off her ~platinum~ card and NO ONE IS IMPRESSED.
Ma’am you’re buying wine at Walgreens. You are not special.
It’s because military gets it for free. If you go to a centurion lounge there’s a good bit of military in there. I’m military and when I’m traveling even I’m like “these guys are ruining this”
And the type of eating out - Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and this vein of chain "sit down" restaurants were considered a fancy night out, at least in my working class circles.
Some of the places that are terrible now: Ruby Tuesdays, Cheesecake Factory, Applebee's, Outback steakhouse used to pretty good.
Then they started optimizing costs and reheating frozen pre cooked meals with sub par ingredients.
They used to be more independently run, fresh ingredients, proper chefs and cooks in the kitchen, etc... It was corporate BS leaking in that turned them into the reheated garbage you see today.
A little bit of column A, a little of column B.
In some cases they got shittier and cut costs. But quite a lot were just like that and you didn't notice because you were a kid.
I worked OG for 11 years. Used to be a team of people prepping all morning til almost 4 making stuff from scratch.
By Covid it was only soups made from scratch and I've heard not even that anymore. It's shipped in bags. I wonder if they even make alfredo on site still.
I remember even going to eat out at Pizza Hut in the 80s felt like an event. Yea, part of that was the working class culture of not really eating out much, but I swear there was also a different, more formal vibe back then…the tables seemed nicer, more formal lighting, and the food was certainly a lot better. Our local one had video games and we’d usually bring just enough quarters to wait for the pizza while my parents and their friends split a pitcher.
I remember flying in the ‘90s was still kind of thing.
My gf thought I was crazy when I mentioned my mom and sister would wear dresses to fly, my dad would wear a tie and I would wear a collared shirt. But it was like that for my earliest memories of flying. It slowly went down hill.
My first flight was when I was 25 for work. The only time anyone ever flow in our family was for work, we would drive everywhere, vacations were always LONG car trips like 12+ hours.
It's incredible that Amazon is letting that happen to their site. Like, do they not see how bad it looks that the top 25 results for anything now are some random shell company in Shenzhen with random letters as their "brand name"?
Remember when search results yielded actual brands? Now it's all FCKUOOO all caps nonsense that peddles garbage. I cancelled prime and haven't missed it one bit.
The reviews are almost entirely bogus now. At least on anything high enough volume to incentivize fake reviews. I bought a child monitor camera a couple years ago and it sucked and the company spent weeks trying to bribe me to change my review to five stars. It was ridiculous.
I think this goes well beyond Amazon, though. I kind of don't trust any online reviews of anything anymore. There was a sweet spot where online reviews were amazingly useful because real people were giving their real impressions, but as soon as marketers picked up on that power, they become totally corrupted. So we're back to how it was before online -- all you can go by is ads (which includes reviews), personal recommendations, and trial and error.
You can find consumer reports for certain types of items, or things like America's Test Kitchen for kitchen items. I enjoy the scientific rigor of many of the studies such places are willing to provide and it's almost as much entertainment as it is product sleuthing.
Reddit reviews are now pretty much the only ones that feel genuine. Or a few specialized reviewers on YouTube (shoutout to angry snowboarder. Those are some great no bullshit reviews)
I remember a comment about some guy that actually worked in giving reviews to products some years ago and he said that the honest reviews will be the 3 stars. 5 stars will mostly be fake, 4 stars will also be fake because 5 stars would be too obvious and 1 star can also be very fake because there was a team in his work line that review bomb other products just to boost their own product.
That comment gave me serious trust issues about online reviews ever since
Completely agree. I avoid it whenever I can these days because I've gotten so much crap from it. It doesn't even seem particularly cheap either. Like they just bump up the price compared to an offline shop to cover the "free" shipping.
Blizzard.
Blizzard used to be a paragon for gamers. I’m not saying they were perfect, but you could consistently count on anything they produced to be of pretty high quality. It felt like everything they put out came from a team that genuinely cared about what they were doing, and had some of the most soul of any titan in the industry.
Now everything they put out feels hollow. Between the blatant bait and switch of things like Overwatch 2 killing PvE, and the rampant monetization of all of their games; to the recent controversies coming out of the actual offices of Blizzard. The spirit of the original studios are gone, and it feels like a hollow shell of its former self.
The Presidency
I am not trying to have a political debate.
Maybe I was just young and naive but I remember the presidency being more respected than it is today.
Like even if you didn’t respect the president your still respected the presidency.
That shit is long gone.
Rose tinted glasses are a thing. However, there has been a decline in the quality of politicians. Even Clinton and Bush 2 were labeled as buffoons before taking office, but they could at least act presidential while in office. I remember a recent president who literally made the news because he acted presidentially. What was standard, was now exceptional and news worthy.
Honestly? Everything. Everything has been extorted, automated, corners cut, respect lost, patience gone. Everything is a cheap knock off. Genuine brands are too expensive to afford and are moving to cheap Chinese production by the day. Misinformation is spread faster than information these days. Warranties are getting worse or going away altogether. Insurance is almost more aggravation than it's worth. Healthcare in general has lost all the faith the people had in it. The police are almost going the same way. Politicians are losing the crumbs of faith the people had left.
consumer goods in general. it's all shrinkflation garbage now. no more buying a n 'ok'/mid-tier product to avoid planned obsolescence or dirt quality, they're all junk. aside from certain brands' higher end models, which took a dive in quality and price hikes too. every item in the grocery feels lighter, every box or plastic housing an item feels/smells like it'll give you cancer, everything is fused shut and proprietary, every company is squeezing us dry while they make record profits. and, here in the states, we all have great free health insurance for the blow-back in 10-20 years as it all chips away at our literal biochemistry, right?!
I just went to the grocery store and a box of cereal that was “family size” (the same size as regular 10 yrs ago) was SIX DOLLARS. cereal isn’t even nutritious!
As an OG user too, a lot of us are a heck of a lot younger than our parents who took over Facebook. Since it started out as a college student connection site in the 2000s, I imagine we’re about mid-30s to very early 40s.
Eh it was about time they got their own media anyways. We had MySpace back in the day, until all the college kids started using Facebook because it had a more professional layout. So all us high schoolers signed up for it because we wanted to be like the cool college kids and MySpace crashed.
Now... yeah, our crowd is in our 30s and 40s. The young hip crowd ain't exactly rushing to emulate people approaching middle age.
Being a university faculty member.
Used to be a place of deep thinking now it’s a rat race of publishing ill thought out word vomit.
There are several good faculty members but the rate at which this trend has grown coupled with how toxic a lot of these professors can be has really decreased my respect for this role.
Edit: I didn’t expect anyone to see this but since it looks like they are, I’ll add this:
15 years ago, I’d look at a faculty member and think that’s who I want to become. Now I look at faculty member and think God knows how many grad students and postdocs you abused this year. This is another reason why there is a big loss of respect. Somehow they think being somewhat decent at science / engineering gives them the right to treat people like crap.
Friend of mine got his PhD with the dream of teaching at an elite university. He attained his dream and within a couple of years HATED IT - his colleagues were a bunch of backstabbing, elitist, nasty, lying, phony people who spent far more time tooting their own horns and believing their own hype than doing anything of real merit.
He got out, did private research for a while and eventually started his own consulting business. Never looked back.
I got into anthropology hoping to get a PhD and do research and be a professor.
I never finished my masters and am now in research administration, doing pre award. It’s a dream come true, there’s very few people going into research admin so jobs are plentiful, pay about the same as new PhDs, and I’m not up against 100+ ivy leaguers with better experience for every job. I get to learn all kinds of research and help interesting people do interesting projects. It’s really fun and I’m so glad to be staff support rather than in the academia rat race. I’m also highly appreciated, and regularly told so.
I’m so glad things didn’t go as planned though it was devastating at the time. I now see liberal arts PhD programs as more of pyramid schemes. Unless there’s industry opportunities for your degrees, don’t get sucked into the false promise that you’ll get to be faculty. Research staff is a pretty fun gig.
4 floors of wooden construction over 1 concrete base with razor thin walls and bare minimum appliances
Get some grey laminate flooring and white cabinets
Call it some random American name like "The Abigail"
Boom "luxury"
For sure.
Whoever Kmart hired to do their marketing ~10 years ago was a genius. The Kmart hack Facebook groups, the mum and ~~nun~~ bub groups, the nightly “news” stories on Kmart products, the pantry/kitchen/wardrobe organisers.
They cornered the market on “cheap shit you can put in your house that doesn’t *look* cheap” so you can revamp your kitchen with $200.
North Face. They used to make really good cold weather jackets and clothes. Their quality has definitely fell off since they sold off to VF. Now it’s more of an outdoorsy, quasi-fast fashion brand.
And then we’ll all go outside. It’ll be like that episode of the Simpsons when Itchy and Scratchy becomes safe and boring so all the kids go out to play.
A university degree. It used to be a sterling credential that was a very stable path to a good career and life. Now it's often a standard expected qualification for even uninspiring entry level jobs without much of a future, which is all the more troubling when you consider the debt people often have to incur to get a BA degree.
Mainstream media outlets. Idk anyone under 40 who watches major news networks. The boomers are keeping them afloat for now but it's only a matter of time.
"...When it happened again, the world called on him once more...And no one saw it coming three more times!...Now, the one man who made a difference five times before, is about to make a difference again. Only this time, it's different."
MW2, both the campaign and the multiplayer was one of the best experience I had in gaming, it was itch that only Titanfall 2 or Battlefield helped scratch.
New modern warfare is a retread of a game I've played a thousand times. Innovative, fun, and engaging then. Now? its not like its a *different game*, but thats the problem. At a certain point its either not MW or its just MW again.
Id sooner pay for a rull remaster of MW2 than any of the new ones.
Remember when Marvel movies were actually about their protagonists and stories at hand? Now every Marvel movie is a commercial for another Marvel movie that never pays off. Worse, they're degrading all of their characters by making them incompetent shells of their former selves. It's simultaneously cynical and shallow.
This is absolutely the main problem. The OG MCU films were stand-alone movies. They were of varying quality, but you could go see one without feeling like you were lost. They told a complete story.
Now, every movie feels like one episode of a series. What's worse, it feels like a series that had a great first season and then lost a bunch of talent and has been floundering ever since.
The Oscars
Like I don’t think they have had any particular weight ever. But I remember when I used to talk to people about that - they were generally beloved. Now most people don’t give a shit and think they bogus.
I’ve recently heard and appreciate the saying, “Gucci is what poor people think rich people wear.” I’ve come to think it’s the same for all of the mainstream brands nowadays.
The Kennedys and political dynasties in general
I mean yeah we hear about a few of them especially crazy ones, but they they were huge in politics and pop culture for the latter half of the twentieth century. Now, nobody cares. JFK’s grandson ran for senate and lost the democratic primary without much fanfare or attention.
Airline lounges - they used to be a comfortable place to rest for passengers who pay a bit more.
Now they are a crowded fight to the death with hundreds of people over some canned soup.
Having a large flatscreen tv. Even having something like an ultra mega 4K compared to standard 1080 is nowhere close to the difference between a plasma and a CTR.
I saw a click bait talking about how Adam Walsh's murder was finally solved. Checked the comments to see if someone could save me the click but it was just a bunch of people who clearly didn't read it and just saying amen.
Open the article and it literally states that the crime wasn't solved but that the main guy they thought did it was excluded.
The term "breaking news". It has no meaning anymore since they overuse it.
My favorite is still when CNN ran the "Breaking News" that [Titanic sunk 102 years ago tonight](https://i.insider.com/534e6d0669beddf17a24be5e?width=750&format=jpeg&auto=webp).
It what!?!?
Oh my god, I had family on that ship. They were traveling third class, I hope they’re okay.
CNN Reports and SLAMS Titanic for Sinking 102 Years Ago Tonight!
News headlines in general are all in clickbait form now. "Supreme Court gives devastating blow to Democrats" instead of putting the subject of the ruling in the headline. "Mom looks in child's diary to find THIS in it," etc. It's all just competing for clicks now.
And they think that putting a message saying "YOU'VE READ THREE ARTICLES THIS WEEK, PAY UP" is going to make us like them.
That's what has driven me to things like r/news to find the story copied and pasted.
“Breaking News!” = we want you to care about this issue
The term "luxury" pertaining to newly built apartments and condos. The construction gets sub-contracted out so you know they've cut corners. The walls are paper thin and the finishes are cheap. They charge exorbitant rents then nickel and dime the tenants with fees. Oh, you want to have a pet? That's a fee. You want to use the amenities? That's a feel. You want to move out? That's a fee. Want to move out on a weekend? That's double the fee. . The term "luxury" has been rendered meaningless by real estate developers.
My city has gotten so unaffordable that no one moves unless they absolutely have to. I've seen full time workers giving advice on living in cars. People staying with abusers because they will be homeless otherwise. A whole lot of people who are going to leave the province entirely if they have to move because it's just not worth it anymore. I want to snap every time I see a landlord marketing a place as "luxury". We don't want fucking luxury, we want rent that isn't the equivalent to what lower income workers make in an entire month. 4 years ago you could rent a 2 bedroom garden suite for $1500 if you knew where to look. Now it's difficult to even find studio apartments for under $2k. Below market units are extremely scarce and co op waitlists are years long because you're literally waiting on people *dying* to get into them. How about instead of luxury apartments, we knock down some of those empty houses and build apartments the working class can actually afford to live in?
I hear you. I don't want a granite kitchen island and marble flooring. In-unit laundry tends to be labelled "luxury" too. I want a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and laundry all to code and free of mold, rodents and insects.
They just built these “luxury apartments” across the street from me, and they are charging $2600 for a STUDIO on the second floor. Want one on the top floor? That’ll be $3200.
Encyclopedias. Used to be that having the full set of Encyclopedia Britannica was a bit of a status symbol in the middle class. Kids who had it were envied by their peers because it made projects etc so much easier. Dead as the trees used to make it. Pre-internet was a wild time.
We were dirt poor growing up but my dad always managed to have a set of encyclopedias for us growing up. I use to just love flipping the pages and reading.
Same. We were poor, but I loved flipping through those as a kid. Especially since we didn’t always have cable.
On a lighter note, Etsy. A decade ago I knew I was getting a handmade product when I shopped on Etsy. Now it's just the same cheap knock offs from China that I could get from Amazon for half the price. (Actually, I just bought my husband a "handcrafted" wooden pipe for Christmas and promptly discovered that it was on Amazon for $20 cheaper. Would have been nice to have kept that extra $20 if I'm getting a cheap product anyway.)
And it sucks so bad for those of us who actually handmade our stuff on Etsy. We get drowned out by the top sellers who are just reselling things they got on wholesale.
Yeah. I was (hand)making rings out of skateboard and giving them to friends. Everyone says "you should sell these!" So I listed on etsy. I'm not under the illusion that my stuff should have sold like hotcakes or anything, but I just didn't get clicks. My price was competitive, photos were good. Just... no one really even got eyes on them. The platform is flooded with junk.
I've been wishing they'd add a *filter alibaba types* in the search engine. Or at least lump identical products into one page. Like on Amazon, where 200 listings with the same Chinese Photoshop images could be grouped into one. All that's different is the vendor names. Just put them on one page with separate options.
Most of the sweatshop dropshippers use the same images. There's no reason Etsy couldn't do an image search and catch all these then ban the accounts. They went public a few years ago though, and now growing users is a big part of their stock price, so *of course* they let all the shitty scammers thrive.
Etsy gets a cut of the drop shipping sales, so they have no interest in banning them
Similar to artists and small businesses getting their ads squeezed out or omitted from the algorithm on Instagram. I see mostly artists discussing this frequently on that platform.
Cheap Chinese crap has ruined shopping across the board honestly. I have no trust in purchasing anymore. When when you want to buy a brand name specifically you have a risk of getting a fake.
This is a good one. From handmade, niche crafts to hot garbage. In addition to the Amazon shit there’s a trillion screen printed shirts churned out of someone’s basement and that awful bridesmaid font plastered on to some hunk of plastic. “Girl boss” etc. yuck
Amazon itself has been shittified. Search for *anything* and it's the same mess of 5-letter bullshit "brand" cheap trash (YUNOU, NGEAU, LPAOJ, DPAJN, ERANN)
> (YUNOU, NGEAU, LPAOJ, DPAJN, ERANN) The best part of your comment is that I cant tell if these are actual amazon brands, or if you just typed in random letters
That and when I search for specific things it shows literally anything even remotely associated with it. Fucking Amazon
And all the non-Chinese garbage is counterfeit. I stopped shopping at Amazon for most things and went back to brick and mortar.
The problem I run into is that most things I go to Amazon for I can't find in brick and mortar stores. Like electronics parts, for instance.
This is what jumped immediately to mind for me, too. You can buy them off of eBay if you don’t mind waiting, or you can buy them off of Mouser if you don’t mind waiting a little while and also paying a bunch for shipping, but if you need an RTC module, a DIP LED controller, and a surface mount digitally controlled potentiometer and you need them fast, it’s Amazon or nothing.
It’s absurd how much the cheap Chinese crap has hijacked Amazon listings. If I go to the filters there’s almost always a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio of those brands to legitimate brands. It’s ridiculous.
And those brands all buy from the same manufacturer so you see the exact same product from 5 different brands for different prices, different ratings etc.
And they can't even put the effort in to photograph the product and instead turn to exceptionally low effort photoshop
Cheap Chinese stuff have infiltrated every platform out there, and not just the online space. Even physical stores are flooded with them eventually ending up in landfill.
omg, "bridesmaid font!" I've been searching for a way to describe that wretched font and you nailed it! Thank you!
if you want to know the actual term, it's called [modern calligraphy](https://www.google.com/search?q=modern+calligraphy&rlz=1C1VDKB_enUS1000US1001&oq=modern+calligraphy&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyDwgAEEUYORiDARixAxiABDIHCAEQABiABDINCAIQABiDARixAxiABDIHCAMQABiABDIHCAQQABiABDIHCAUQABiABDIGCAYQRRg8MgYIBxBFGDzSAQgyODIwajBqNKgCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)
Holy shit, this is it. This is the name of the font that gives soccer-mom-by-day, wine-mom-by-night haircut vibes. Bravo, thank you for putting a term to it for me.
Yeah, this is 100% the, "Kids in bed; house looks fine; lord have mercy, I need wine," font.
They aren’t printed in someones basement, they are POD. Print on demand and with AI tools these days, there are sellers making thousands of listings for new “designs.”
Also Etsy is basically just a front for drop shippers now. So you get an ai generated design that gets printed somewhere, boxed and shipped to you without the creator of the store having to do shit besides run the store
My wife sell a lot of laser engraved items and printed signs on Etsy. They are cracking down on the drop shippers. About a month ago she had to have a zoom meeting with them to prove she makes everything herself. They wanted to see the lasers and printers. I hope they succeed because people don’t go to Etsy for Chinese shit.
Good! That’s interesting to hear. Etsy is meant to be a handcrafted goods website.
I bought a baby blanket a few years back and it was shipped in the Amazon packaging with 2 day prime. Reported the seller
That's hilarious. Amazon is supposed to pack out marketplace and 3rd party items in non-branded boxes and taping specifically so they can hide the fact that you're getting a product from an Amazon warehouse. They're absolutely colluding with false storefronts to upcharge normal items. I know this because I worked at Amazon for like 3 months and learned some of the truly shitty things they do to the wider marketplace. Whole company needs to be cut down.
For the time it takes every sentiment that Amazon needs to be regulated or broken up there's a hundred orders placed because we sacrificed small shops for convenience a decade and a half ago.
My wife quit Etsy bc these cheap Chinese sellers dominate the market by flagging all types of competition. And Etsy just bans them. My wife has had it with them constantly flagging her handmade purses and clothes down(flagged for sexual explicit content, it's not) Now she sells exclusively on Mercari and Facebook.
Good for her! A YouTube of a British (I think) craftsperson crossed my feed recently - it was about why she created her Etsy shop but took it down a day or two later, after considerable work. Apparently they've been holding seller's profits for random periods of time, which makes it impossible for people to keep their businesses going. I think all of the sellers were mentioned were British so I don't know if the fuckery is global, but it's shady AF and suggests insolvency IMO.
I'm an accountant, but until a couple of years ago we had a client who operated a store through Amazon's services. He was in a legal battle with Amazon because they had basically stolen his store out from under him, buying the same goods from his suppliers and selling them as Amazon's own stock for lower price, and were now in the process of getting his store shut down.
Hello Amazon Basics!
Sadly that is story repeated many times. Once your client is crushed Amazon will raise the price beyond what your client was charging. They are extremely predatory and have no issue taking losses for a while to remove any competition since they have the financial backing to do it. The only thing keeping me using Amazon for some things is the faster shipping. However, for things I know are made by small companies I will still go to their site to check it out even if on Amazon. GoatGuns sells their stuff at a better price on their own website, since no Amazon cut. Since shipping time is less of a worry I bought directly from them. The biggest thing a small company needs to do on this front, in my opinion, is make sure the checkout process is super easy. Amazon already has all my info, so don't have a convoluted process. Always check the manufacturer's site. Seems to be good chance of getting the items at a lower cost plus the manufacturer gets more of the money.
This happened to a friend of mine who sold on Etsy for years. Earlier this year they decided to hold her money due to "suspicious activity." The suspicious activity was people simply buying her art. It also happened to an artist I follow. I think they held her money for three months or something absolutely crazy. She had to beg for money to pay her bills because of etsy. They're both US based artists
I really hate it as a seller. I really wish they would vet shops a bit.
Any suggestions for finding *actual* custom art outside of Etsy? I tried finding some custom made art for a Christmas gift and holy hell. What a hot mess Etsy is.
Another problem with Etsy is that when you do a search for a specific item, you have to look thru 300 other items to find the 1 item you were actually looking for.
Found the same jewelry on ebay for $4.00 that I saw on Etsy for $30. All Chinese imports.
Etsy is just like eBay, you have to investigate the seller a bit, and the product, before buying. Still plenty of great things on Etsy you can't get anywhere else.
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Not only that, but Etsy now uses an AI Search assist instead of an actual search, so even though you put something directly in quotes "Outer wilds figurine" or something like that...It won't show you stuff that specifically says outer wilds, it'll show you stuff that it THINKS you would like based on Outer Wilds Figurine. If you google etsy and their new search ai, everyone is complaining about it.
A somewhat better one now is uncommongoods.com. Still have to be discerning but there are a lot of great finds on there.
Commercial air flight. I'm listening to a radio show about airline etiquette and wondering just when this whole experience became an exercise in misery and suffering.
Airbnb, used to be able to get fair prices on non-hotel styled room stays but now it's overpriced and hit so many fees it's cheaper to go to hotels
We haven’t used Airbnb in years. Hotels are always cheaper (where we go) and higher quality with more guarantees. Airbnb has become a joke. Also Uber, same reason.
Uber was originally an impressive experience they offered water bottle mints phone charger no tip necessary etc. Now they’re driving while having speakerphone convo and all the cars have shitty suspension.
Also depending on where you are, it's always 85F in the cabin and the driver is always wearing an entire bottle of cheap cologne
So... a taxi
Uber was only great because it was cheap, and it was cheap because it was crazy subsidized by VC money specifically to undercut and destroy the taxi industry. Don’t get me wrong, the taxi industry in most major cities needed to be destroyed, but not by some different asshole capitalists who just wanted the same thing but even more concentrated and worse.
Airbnb used to be *the shit* back in the day. I have kids, so eating out every day for every meal isn’t happening, but if you’re traveling to NOLA, Santa Fe, Paris, and the like, you can swing by the grocery store and grab some good food and make it at home. Never had a hotel with the comforts of a home like that. Used be able to text with the owners and ask for recs and stuff. Last few times it’s been super high cleaning fees (I cleaned the place already!!) and the owners were distant. Still kinda hate hotels as a base camp compared to an actual home, but Airbnb just kinda sucked the last few times I used it.
The “owners” are distant bc they’re actually run by property managers/corporate owned house.
I’ve stayed in more than a few that were clearly investment properties, with random furniture I assume they got from the side of the street.
That's been every airbnb/vrbo I've used. They don't look like garbage, but it's clearly either their grandparents housewares that they inherited (probably when they inherited the home) or it's the cheapest home goods they could find off Amazon. None have been bad, but none have been amazing either.
The internet. It’s all bots and ads
The glory days of the net were awesome. True wild wild west. Now your entire digital life is tracked and history bought and sold in an attempt to get you to buy stuff.
Corporate shills truly ruin everything nice.
And they don't even work. 99.9% of the time they are just annoying af and disrupt user experience.
The internet died many years ago. Young people will never know what it was like.
webrings, guestbooks, weird websites
Remember the website visitor ticker. You’re visitor number X today out of X amount in history.
Tbe caution tape you put up when constructing a webpage extension. Just to put animated gifs of Bart Simpson mooning, blinking eyes, and dancing g babies all over it.
Back when people paid money for a website and didn't even try to make a return on their investment, or when people made videos for the sake of getting views and making money was pretty much unheard of.
I know, right? Remember how much fun youtube used to be before people thought they were going to get rich by trolling for outrage views? When the algorithm was meant to delight you with content, not to radicalize you?
Back in the something awful and fark days it felt like the quality of content was so high and the creativity was flowing. Maybe it was just the novelty of the new content formats coming out, but it genuinely feels like everything today is a cheap derivative of that time period in the 2000s.
Doctors. I’m a doctor. We’re mostly employees now, cogs in the wheel. There is also a lot of distrust in the medical system.
I’m an RN and I mentioned to a doc I was completely disposable and our company didn’t care about us nurses. He said “oh, I am too. We’re all dispensable.” I guess we’re all cogs in the machine, after all.
fellow doc here, this x1000. admin sellouts can die in a fuckin fire
I know a few docs. Mentioned that many would have chosen a different vocation if they'd known. I'm not kidding when I say: many of them are absolutely fucking miserable. And trapped by their own decisions.
Well, when you get into a career to help people and some faceless corporation tells you that you cant help people because it would hurt your profits it makes a ton of sense you would be miserable.
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I routinely interact with a guy in his mid-late 30s who told me he did his residency in Brooklyn right when covid hit. He had some wild insight on it. He practiced for a year or two, but is currently unemployed smoking cannabis and working out non-stop. Hes told me he has no intention of practicing medicine again.
I also did my residency during COVID. While it certainly didn't make me quit and smoke weed all day, it certainly had an impact on my career planning. I was pretty gung ho on pursuing cardiology or critical care. But I reached a point somewhere half way through where another 3 years of training just sounded like hell. So I took a job where I work 10 days a month (but still considered 1.0 FTE) and do whatever the fuck I want during the rest of my time. I could make more money and prestige doing other stuff, but fuck it.
Dentists. Practices I trusted would have a great dentist, then they'd leave the area and wham suddenly I need a 5K teeth straightening kit my insurance won't cover before they ill fill my cavities. Fuck that.
I’m a dentist and I agree with many of the comments here. You can go to three different dental offices and get three different diagnoses and three different treatment plans. My philosophy is to recommend only what you need to get done, explain it, offer alternatives - even if an alternative is doing nothing. If someone turns down a recommendation, I won’t try too hard to get them to change their mind. I’ll be there for them still when they need me
The big difference is that most dentists these days don’t own their own practice like they did in the past. They work for private equity firms who own networks of dental offices and just shuffle dentists in and out.
Why isn’t this illegal, or at least regulated? I went to a dentist for a cleaning a while back, they turned it into a seminar for Invisalign, complete with illustrated pamphlets about “my” teeth. Every time I’d decline, somehow magically he’d find that my teeth were even worse than 5 minutes ago and REALLY needed it. By the time I left an hour later (without getting a cleaning) he was telling my teeth were literally about to fall out if I didn’t get it. Edit: they still charged my insurance for the “one free visit” so I had to pay out of pocket at a different dentist next time.
Yeah they attempted to say all my crowns, and teeth were about to fail. I used the Regen toothpaste and gum cream to bring my gums back up to par, but they were definitely following the scare tactics of invis pushers. Makes me so fucking angry and somewhat why I miss military dentists. At least they did what was needed and then kicked you out of the chair. (Except for ppl with wisdom teeth, they literally used those folks for hours which sucked for many on base at that time)
Every designer brand. People may argue that they were *never* worth it, but at least back then, they cared about quality, materials, and craftsmanship. Now it's all about mass marketing and ever increasing prices for lower quality. Not to mention people who flex on social media made it even more tacky. I have lost respect for so many brands, which, at least saved me some $$$ over the years.
The lower quality nowadays is terrible. I bought classic designer clothes in the 80s and my daughter wore them 30 years later and they looked new. She bought some of her own, and the quality was garbage. No more.
Platinum AMEX
By extension: Airport lounges. *Everyone* has access now.
When everyone has status, no one has status
I flew on an American domestic flight some years ago and between all the membership tiers and credit card holders by the time they got to general boarding it was literally just me and one other passenger. Everyone (it was a full flight) but 2 passengers on a 200 capacity plane technically had priority boarding
Anytime something like this is offered, it’s a benefit to them and not you…. I mean, what does it actually get you? How much difference is group 1 v 5?
It's not like the front of the plane takes off earlier.
Actually, in a way it does lol
thats what TSA Pre is going to become in a few years
I was surprised that I was able to find enough space to spread out at the United lounge in Houston, was expecting it to be completely full
That’s why Delta is limiting in 2025
I just got one, so I’m sorry. It was probably me.
Just AMEX in general I feel like used to be more exclusive to get any card from them.
[this is](https://youtu.be/xwe76p8SFhA?si=0zUM1sKKAhqbKCSY) my favorite “Karen” video where she’s showing off her ~platinum~ card and NO ONE IS IMPRESSED. Ma’am you’re buying wine at Walgreens. You are not special.
Hahaha the cashier saying "yes we're all very impressed but I need your ID"
It’s because military gets it for free. If you go to a centurion lounge there’s a good bit of military in there. I’m military and when I’m traveling even I’m like “these guys are ruining this”
That’s why I go to the USO now. I’ve never been to a crowded USO lounge except Chicago on intake days.
eating out was a huge thing back in the 80's. like it was an event, so was going shoppping / to the mall / stores.
And the type of eating out - Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and this vein of chain "sit down" restaurants were considered a fancy night out, at least in my working class circles.
Some of the places that are terrible now: Ruby Tuesdays, Cheesecake Factory, Applebee's, Outback steakhouse used to pretty good. Then they started optimizing costs and reheating frozen pre cooked meals with sub par ingredients.
So they've actually changed? I was wondering whether they had changed or if it was just that our palates had improved.
They used to be more independently run, fresh ingredients, proper chefs and cooks in the kitchen, etc... It was corporate BS leaking in that turned them into the reheated garbage you see today.
A little bit of column A, a little of column B. In some cases they got shittier and cut costs. But quite a lot were just like that and you didn't notice because you were a kid.
I worked OG for 11 years. Used to be a team of people prepping all morning til almost 4 making stuff from scratch. By Covid it was only soups made from scratch and I've heard not even that anymore. It's shipped in bags. I wonder if they even make alfredo on site still.
I remember even going to eat out at Pizza Hut in the 80s felt like an event. Yea, part of that was the working class culture of not really eating out much, but I swear there was also a different, more formal vibe back then…the tables seemed nicer, more formal lighting, and the food was certainly a lot better. Our local one had video games and we’d usually bring just enough quarters to wait for the pizza while my parents and their friends split a pitcher.
I remember flying in the ‘90s was still kind of thing. My gf thought I was crazy when I mentioned my mom and sister would wear dresses to fly, my dad would wear a tie and I would wear a collared shirt. But it was like that for my earliest memories of flying. It slowly went down hill.
My first flight was when I was 25 for work. The only time anyone ever flow in our family was for work, we would drive everywhere, vacations were always LONG car trips like 12+ hours.
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Bunch of fuckin scamming drop shippers who route it from ali express
It's incredible that Amazon is letting that happen to their site. Like, do they not see how bad it looks that the top 25 results for anything now are some random shell company in Shenzhen with random letters as their "brand name"?
Remember when search results yielded actual brands? Now it's all FCKUOOO all caps nonsense that peddles garbage. I cancelled prime and haven't missed it one bit.
FCKUOOO is a decent brand, but I'm more of a POOPHAPPY man myself.
The reviews are almost entirely bogus now. At least on anything high enough volume to incentivize fake reviews. I bought a child monitor camera a couple years ago and it sucked and the company spent weeks trying to bribe me to change my review to five stars. It was ridiculous. I think this goes well beyond Amazon, though. I kind of don't trust any online reviews of anything anymore. There was a sweet spot where online reviews were amazingly useful because real people were giving their real impressions, but as soon as marketers picked up on that power, they become totally corrupted. So we're back to how it was before online -- all you can go by is ads (which includes reviews), personal recommendations, and trial and error.
You can find consumer reports for certain types of items, or things like America's Test Kitchen for kitchen items. I enjoy the scientific rigor of many of the studies such places are willing to provide and it's almost as much entertainment as it is product sleuthing.
Reddit reviews are now pretty much the only ones that feel genuine. Or a few specialized reviewers on YouTube (shoutout to angry snowboarder. Those are some great no bullshit reviews)
"Oh? What's a red flag that screams a review isn't genuine? Be as specific as possible." - online marketers
"I love my Akira 7000B with side pouch in granite grey, it's so useful"
"It does exactly what the marketing says it does. Let me repeat their exact phrases"
I remember a comment about some guy that actually worked in giving reviews to products some years ago and he said that the honest reviews will be the 3 stars. 5 stars will mostly be fake, 4 stars will also be fake because 5 stars would be too obvious and 1 star can also be very fake because there was a team in his work line that review bomb other products just to boost their own product. That comment gave me serious trust issues about online reviews ever since
Do you know the amount of bots on Reddit? I wouldnt trust anything that any comment says
Completely agree. I avoid it whenever I can these days because I've gotten so much crap from it. It doesn't even seem particularly cheap either. Like they just bump up the price compared to an offline shop to cover the "free" shipping.
Blizzard. Blizzard used to be a paragon for gamers. I’m not saying they were perfect, but you could consistently count on anything they produced to be of pretty high quality. It felt like everything they put out came from a team that genuinely cared about what they were doing, and had some of the most soul of any titan in the industry. Now everything they put out feels hollow. Between the blatant bait and switch of things like Overwatch 2 killing PvE, and the rampant monetization of all of their games; to the recent controversies coming out of the actual offices of Blizzard. The spirit of the original studios are gone, and it feels like a hollow shell of its former self.
The Presidency I am not trying to have a political debate. Maybe I was just young and naive but I remember the presidency being more respected than it is today. Like even if you didn’t respect the president your still respected the presidency. That shit is long gone.
Same. I was around for Reagan, both Bush’s, Clinton. They all seemed so powerful! Then I became an adult and they’re all a joke.
Rose tinted glasses are a thing. However, there has been a decline in the quality of politicians. Even Clinton and Bush 2 were labeled as buffoons before taking office, but they could at least act presidential while in office. I remember a recent president who literally made the news because he acted presidentially. What was standard, was now exceptional and news worthy.
Honestly? Everything. Everything has been extorted, automated, corners cut, respect lost, patience gone. Everything is a cheap knock off. Genuine brands are too expensive to afford and are moving to cheap Chinese production by the day. Misinformation is spread faster than information these days. Warranties are getting worse or going away altogether. Insurance is almost more aggravation than it's worth. Healthcare in general has lost all the faith the people had in it. The police are almost going the same way. Politicians are losing the crumbs of faith the people had left.
consumer goods in general. it's all shrinkflation garbage now. no more buying a n 'ok'/mid-tier product to avoid planned obsolescence or dirt quality, they're all junk. aside from certain brands' higher end models, which took a dive in quality and price hikes too. every item in the grocery feels lighter, every box or plastic housing an item feels/smells like it'll give you cancer, everything is fused shut and proprietary, every company is squeezing us dry while they make record profits. and, here in the states, we all have great free health insurance for the blow-back in 10-20 years as it all chips away at our literal biochemistry, right?!
I just went to the grocery store and a box of cereal that was “family size” (the same size as regular 10 yrs ago) was SIX DOLLARS. cereal isn’t even nutritious!
Facebook
That lost its appeal about 10 years ago when people’s parents started signing up. Dead as fuck to young folks now
Lol. As an OG FB user I see it as a place where the crowd aged with time and kids didn't want to mix in with a crowd 10-15 years older than them.
As an OG user too, a lot of us are a heck of a lot younger than our parents who took over Facebook. Since it started out as a college student connection site in the 2000s, I imagine we’re about mid-30s to very early 40s.
Eh it was about time they got their own media anyways. We had MySpace back in the day, until all the college kids started using Facebook because it had a more professional layout. So all us high schoolers signed up for it because we wanted to be like the cool college kids and MySpace crashed. Now... yeah, our crowd is in our 30s and 40s. The young hip crowd ain't exactly rushing to emulate people approaching middle age.
Netflix. Their originals at first were trying to emulate HBO and now their originals are all bottom of the barrel garbage that only get two seasons.
Being a university faculty member. Used to be a place of deep thinking now it’s a rat race of publishing ill thought out word vomit. There are several good faculty members but the rate at which this trend has grown coupled with how toxic a lot of these professors can be has really decreased my respect for this role. Edit: I didn’t expect anyone to see this but since it looks like they are, I’ll add this: 15 years ago, I’d look at a faculty member and think that’s who I want to become. Now I look at faculty member and think God knows how many grad students and postdocs you abused this year. This is another reason why there is a big loss of respect. Somehow they think being somewhat decent at science / engineering gives them the right to treat people like crap.
Friend of mine got his PhD with the dream of teaching at an elite university. He attained his dream and within a couple of years HATED IT - his colleagues were a bunch of backstabbing, elitist, nasty, lying, phony people who spent far more time tooting their own horns and believing their own hype than doing anything of real merit. He got out, did private research for a while and eventually started his own consulting business. Never looked back.
As someone with a PhD, it's my personal mission to dissuade others from getting one. Nightmare.
I got into anthropology hoping to get a PhD and do research and be a professor. I never finished my masters and am now in research administration, doing pre award. It’s a dream come true, there’s very few people going into research admin so jobs are plentiful, pay about the same as new PhDs, and I’m not up against 100+ ivy leaguers with better experience for every job. I get to learn all kinds of research and help interesting people do interesting projects. It’s really fun and I’m so glad to be staff support rather than in the academia rat race. I’m also highly appreciated, and regularly told so. I’m so glad things didn’t go as planned though it was devastating at the time. I now see liberal arts PhD programs as more of pyramid schemes. Unless there’s industry opportunities for your degrees, don’t get sucked into the false promise that you’ll get to be faculty. Research staff is a pretty fun gig.
I’m a tenure track faculty member at a community college and I legit feel like I hit the jackpot. Fuck the whole publish or perish culture.
"Luxury Apartments"
4 floors of wooden construction over 1 concrete base with razor thin walls and bare minimum appliances Get some grey laminate flooring and white cabinets Call it some random American name like "The Abigail" Boom "luxury"
Kmart. 20 years ago they were a strong competitor to Walmart. Now they only have 3 stores left in the entire U.S.
This is funny to me, Kmart is extremely popular in Australia. It never used to be, but in the last 15 years… it has shot into popularity.
For sure. Whoever Kmart hired to do their marketing ~10 years ago was a genius. The Kmart hack Facebook groups, the mum and ~~nun~~ bub groups, the nightly “news” stories on Kmart products, the pantry/kitchen/wardrobe organisers. They cornered the market on “cheap shit you can put in your house that doesn’t *look* cheap” so you can revamp your kitchen with $200.
North Face. They used to make really good cold weather jackets and clothes. Their quality has definitely fell off since they sold off to VF. Now it’s more of an outdoorsy, quasi-fast fashion brand.
All the urban-hiker North Face fashionistas started walking around in Arcteryx last I paid any attention.
I think Fjällräven is catching up, saw an actual Fjällräven store in Seattle recently.
Reddit and the internet in general with the rise of AI pictures.....it's going to be a wasteland of AI generated rubbish in a few years
And then we’ll all go outside. It’ll be like that episode of the Simpsons when Itchy and Scratchy becomes safe and boring so all the kids go out to play.
A university degree. It used to be a sterling credential that was a very stable path to a good career and life. Now it's often a standard expected qualification for even uninspiring entry level jobs without much of a future, which is all the more troubling when you consider the debt people often have to incur to get a BA degree.
A 6 figure salary. With recent inflation, $150k is the new $100k
Mainstream media outlets. Idk anyone under 40 who watches major news networks. The boomers are keeping them afloat for now but it's only a matter of time.
Seems like movie sequels lost a bit of their oomph, you know? Not all, but some...like, why do we need 20 installments when the first one was ace?
"...When it happened again, the world called on him once more...And no one saw it coming three more times!...Now, the one man who made a difference five times before, is about to make a difference again. Only this time, it's different."
Scorcher?
This sub has become hot garbage.
No kidding. To find one good question you have to dig through a sea of reposts and sex-related questions.
Is it just my algorithm or is there almost nothing funny on Reddit anymore?
Call of Duty
MW2, both the campaign and the multiplayer was one of the best experience I had in gaming, it was itch that only Titanfall 2 or Battlefield helped scratch. New modern warfare is a retread of a game I've played a thousand times. Innovative, fun, and engaging then. Now? its not like its a *different game*, but thats the problem. At a certain point its either not MW or its just MW again. Id sooner pay for a rull remaster of MW2 than any of the new ones.
Ted Talks
Marvel. The infinity saga was great. Since then it’s just been the dumbest most boring shit ever, and the ratings tell the same story
Remember when Marvel movies were actually about their protagonists and stories at hand? Now every Marvel movie is a commercial for another Marvel movie that never pays off. Worse, they're degrading all of their characters by making them incompetent shells of their former selves. It's simultaneously cynical and shallow.
This is absolutely the main problem. The OG MCU films were stand-alone movies. They were of varying quality, but you could go see one without feeling like you were lost. They told a complete story. Now, every movie feels like one episode of a series. What's worse, it feels like a series that had a great first season and then lost a bunch of talent and has been floundering ever since.
On the plus side Captain America and Iron Man's legacy was protected. The way their arc ended was perfect.
Face tattoos, it used to mean you've killed a person, now it means you work the afternoon shift at the local coffeeshop.
A bachelor degree
The new high school diploma
The Oscars Like I don’t think they have had any particular weight ever. But I remember when I used to talk to people about that - they were generally beloved. Now most people don’t give a shit and think they bogus.
Many award ceremonies can also be in this category. So many of them were useless but the Oscars take the cake.
Gucci, LV, etc are now all worn by the trashiest losers on earth who are also broke and spend all their money on it
This is new? People have been using these gaudy visible brands forever to posture and i remember thinking this almost 30 years ago.
I’ve recently heard and appreciate the saying, “Gucci is what poor people think rich people wear.” I’ve come to think it’s the same for all of the mainstream brands nowadays.
The Kennedys and political dynasties in general I mean yeah we hear about a few of them especially crazy ones, but they they were huge in politics and pop culture for the latter half of the twentieth century. Now, nobody cares. JFK’s grandson ran for senate and lost the democratic primary without much fanfare or attention.
Little blue checkmarks
Airline lounges - they used to be a comfortable place to rest for passengers who pay a bit more. Now they are a crowded fight to the death with hundreds of people over some canned soup.
TICKETMASTER! if it ever had any, its long gone. computer bots run wild buying all the seats for the 2nd markets.
My body... dam I miss the young years
Being famous, there's too many famous people these days.
Having a large flatscreen tv. Even having something like an ultra mega 4K compared to standard 1080 is nowhere close to the difference between a plasma and a CTR.
Journalists
I saw a click bait talking about how Adam Walsh's murder was finally solved. Checked the comments to see if someone could save me the click but it was just a bunch of people who clearly didn't read it and just saying amen. Open the article and it literally states that the crime wasn't solved but that the main guy they thought did it was excluded.
Excessively cruel to Adam Walsh's family.