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Comment by oneoff786 | Hacker News Reader

Ok but… this is so obviously a generational thing. You know who does know the YouTuber? His peers. He does not watch cheesy 80s films and you don’t watch 40s theater. People absolutely don’t need mainstream media. Mainstream media hits the lowest common denominator and tends to suck.

I think most YouTubers and uncomfortably fake to watch, but I would still prefer people watch that over mainstream tv…

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I'm only some ten years older. The films I spoke of were released before I was born. Yet most of my generation is familiar with some of them. Star Wars, then. Or Schindler's List. Maybe I'm Spielberg biased. The Exorcist.

My point is that there was such a thing -- a common film canon -- that people who were interested in film, could be expected to be somewhat familiar with. No longer true?

Yes. Lowest common denominator. Some common point of reference gives a common vocabulary. Even if it sucks.

Ten years is a lot of years. You specifically called out a single decade of films. If someone is twenty, a film in 1980 is more than double their whole lifetime away. Wanting to chat with the youth about things before their time as the SHARED culture is dumb. If you’re 35, you were born in the 80s.

Believe it or not, not a whole lot of people will watch Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time and think it was an amazing movie anymore. That’s not to say it isn’t well made. It is. But is also just not very interesting to modern youth.

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