Here’s a bit of a personal list:

  1. Undeniably the food scene in the US has changed for the better. Sometimes almost to an overcorrection (protein-slop and all). It’s great that so many different cuisines are easy to name and find even in more traditional rural parts of the country. Organic food isn’t seen as a weird hippie thing but an investment you make for your health.

  2. A lot less smoking in the world. I say this as early gen Z but I never grew up in a time when smoking was seen as cool when I was a teenager. My uncle even quit and that was good to see.

  3. It may not seem like it sometimes, but the one consolation prize of YouTube is I can theoretically be a content creator and never need to worry about the bottleneck that is getting chosen out of millions of people in Hollywood. I could theoretically just stay in the midwest and learn to livestream or make an anime discussion channel and produce content without needing a massive studio or working in Hollywood. Of course, it’s still almost impossible to get paid for it, but still.

  4. More and more people are aware of cars not being the best way to get around which has sparked interest in walkable cities. Problem is, there’s too much demand and too little supply but seeing car culture be questioned is a great first start.

  • Abracadaniel [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    16·
    4 days ago

    l’m not happy to see CDs go, but FLAC on flash storage is goated.

    Also VHS always sucked and I can’t understand nostalgia for them. DVD was a quantum leap and Blu-ray a leap over that. I love UHD blu-rays but sadly that fight is lost to streaming I fear.

    Good riddance to smoking. I was a kid who coughed conspicuously because I found it so rude.

    • dr_robotBones@reddthat.comEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      If only Blu-rays weren’t crammed full of DRMs. I bought an external blu-ray/DVD player for my computer and it can’t play any blu-ray movies because its not licensed properly or something.

    • Busgirl [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      This is in my opinion most of the reason why vhs is still remembered as it has its own unique signature.

      “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

      -Brian Eno