The great thing is that you only have to watch junk if you want to watch junk. Even if you confine yourself to free videos on youtube, there's plenty of good stuff out there. If you curate your subscriptions and browse on the "subscribed" tab, rather than letting the algorithm feed you, you can control your viewing experience fully. You can even set up rss feeds for your subscribed channels if you want. Plus there are no shortage of ad- and sponsor-blocking options out there.

Ultimately, you get the online experience you work for. But it's certainly possible to curate a stream that is the equivalent or superior to the experience of the Discovery or History Channels back in their heyday, before their enshittification.

Kinda.

We have the ability to choose our content, but more often than not we let the algorithms pick the junk for us and we just go with it.

Look at what the TikTok format has done to the internet, it's turning it into TV 2.0.

and soon we will be watching the same ads again even with a paid subscription.

The funny thing is, having full control of it doesn't fully make it better. You'd think that's objectively just an improvement, but there's peculiar value in channels curating what's shown and when.

Even moreso, it's was wonderful to know that the TV didn't keep a bookmark of what you've watched or how far you got, and if you miss something you miss it. You could just stop watching something, or miss several episodes and pick up on it, and that's fine - liberating in retrospect!

Theoretically, yes... but the reality is that most people just let algorithms decide which junk they're going to watch.

Now instead of a few shitty things. The companies are making a shit ton less quality junk that's worse hoping one will become popular enough to justify the massive garbage they make.

That's what you get for watching programmed TV of any kind. Kind of your fault for turning it on.