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

The MCU is the hardest to ignore.

Of the first bad five.

You left off Youtube.

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

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

easily social media
easily social media
easily social media

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

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

Probably could have augmented the MCU w/Disney everything.

Broadway Musical Theater - not for me, easily ignored

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

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

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

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

voted MCU because it's fucking shite!

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

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

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

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

That's most American team sports tho.

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

And isn’t Spotify swedish ?

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

Also: Kaepernick

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

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

I was just writing the same thing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:)

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

mcu, the rest are good

Love Broadway, hate social media, never encounter the others

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

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

climate change ruined physical music media for me personally

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

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

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

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

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

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

just watch basketball which rules

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

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

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

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

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

No pro sport is close to as bad as the WWE

THANK you

everything on the list boils down to capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

world sucks and is a trap

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

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

The parts I wish would stay:

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

the parts I wish would go away:

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

-Political GIF memes

-all of the toxicity

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

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

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

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

I think that opinion is complete and total nonsense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SNL, Not See teevee

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

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

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

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

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

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Well I guess I know how Elon voted

This is very much the NFL or social media

Missing out on megachurches here.

I still wish to write-in cable news.

NFL easily

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

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

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

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

SNL is fine!

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

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

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

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

adele album’s gonna save the monoculture

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

let's reflect a moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is very much the NFL or social media

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

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

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

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

Mind you aesthetics is morality so lemme chew it over

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

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

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

have no clue about True Crime or Broadway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck the NFL:

Pay to play: How 21 NFL stadiums have been financed

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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