I agree with you and could say the same thing about 90s/00s TV as he does with YouTube.

"Celeb takes a bath in baked beans for charity"

mplanchard 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is in fact one of the primary points of TFA and the book it recommends: that the degradation of literacy, public discourse, and general intelligence that started with the television (and was well-described in Amusing Ourselves to Death, referenced in TFA, and which the title pays homage to) has only continued and, if anything, accelerated with the introduction of the smartphone and modern social media.

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Crabber 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Perhaps I missed the full name somewhere in the thread, but what is TFA?

	▲	mikestew 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sibling comment got the definition, but “TFA” comes from “RTFA”: “read the fucking article”, in response to “yeah, but what about ($THING that was discussed at length in the first paragraph)?” Origins: “RTFM”. “What’s the switch for ls that prints time stamps?” “Read the fucking manual.”
	▲	tonyedgecombe 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The fucking article. Or you could imagine a more polite alternative.

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Jtariiiii 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The average children's cartoon from the early 2000s has several orders of magnitude more value than the average tiktok feed.

The existence of slop in the 90s doesn't prove that slop is not more prominent in the 2020s.