Thank you for taking the time to write out a few of your criticisms. I think that I agree with most of them despite being unable to come up with them on my own. I've always wanted to get better at reading poetry critically.

Just don't have any treats for your entire life, easy.

What humans consider food has changed more in the last 100 years than it did in the preceding 10,000. Eat what your great-great grandmother would consider food, not what a scientist in a lab is trying to sell you as food.

Cake, donuts, ice cream, etc derive their extreme calorie density and negative satiety from cream, sugar, and frying, not some recent invention by a "scientist in a lab".

I don't understand the condescension in this comment. Do you think cinema can't be art? You seem incredulous that people might actually get a ton of value out of engaging with something at this level.

Some people seem to think that a movie is automatically terrible if they're not in the movie's target audience.

I tend more to think a movie is automatically terrible if it has a 'target audience'.

I guess target audience might be the wrong term since I'm not really thinking of a target audience in terms of "teenage guys who like sports" and stuff like that, but more along the lines of "people who like slow-paced movies about family drama and adolescence".

For example my favorite film, "A Brighter Summer Day" (1991), is four hours long. It's almost certainly not going to be your cup of tea if you dislike long and slow-paced movies, but that doesn't make it a bad film. It just means that it isn't for you.

What do you mean by that?

Not all movies are liked by all people and that‘s ok, or why would it not be?

I mean - to take the two ends of the spectrum - that some music, movies etc are made because the director/writer wants to make it, because doing so is meaningful to them. They're the ones that get called art, whether good or bad art. Every part is determined by the desires and taste of the creator. They're all about the creators' desires, imagination, experiments, taste, self-expression.

Others are made kind of backwards, first by figuring out the target audience, writing a plot filled with the kinds of things that have made money recently, then making that. Making music/movies by formula. Every part is determined by the supposed desires and taste of the 'target audience'. They're all about marketing and making money.

A work of art comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that people want what they want. – Oscar Wilde

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything. – Wilde

[An artist] cares about the end-result as a completion of what goes before and not because of its conformity or lack of conformity with a ready-made antecedent scheme... Like the scientific inquirer, he permits the subject-matter of his perception in connection with the problems it presents to determine the issue, instead of insisting upon its agreement with a conclusion decided upon in advance. ...one of the essential traits of the artist is that he is born an experimenter. Without this trait he becomes a poor or a good academician. The artist is compelled to be an experimenter because he has to express an intensely individualized experience through means and materials that belong to the common and public world. This problem cannot be solved once for all. It is met in every new work undertaken. Otherwise an artist repeats himself and becomes esthetically dead. – Dewey, Art as Experience

There is always an implicit target audience.

Oftentimes it's a matter of "you get out what you put into it". Some people are content watching film and engaging with it only on the surface level (and that's fine!), but others enjoy really diving in and ruminating on the different aspects of the art.

I think there's immense value in being able to engage with something creative (whether it's music, film, poetry, performance) at this level, and I honestly feel sadness for people who never give it a chance.

Look into the Powered by the Apocalypse games (Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, etc). My gaming group switched over to them after we spent an entire 3 hour session fighting a few vampires and everyone was sick of it. PBTA puts storytelling and player agency over granular combat.

It has quite a reputation from back in the day, but I find Something Awful to have a very high level of dialogue, probably because you have to pay a small fee for membership, and they aren't afraid to probate/ban people.

Paid forums are niche area, it will not be a reddit alternative: the "filter" you describe is not geared towards maximum quality, but to enrich the owners of the site.

They have financial incentive to ban at the slightest provocation, restricting everything to safe and predictable "high-level dialogue" that can't challenge the status quo.

Reddit thrives on multiple levels of "dialogue" segregated into their own communities. Its pro-growth vs SA pro-elitist stance. Thats why SA will never be a reddit alternative.

Yep, SA obviously has a brand of humor, but the discourse on a huge variety of things is absolutely top-notch. Active moderation keeps the riff-raff out.

SA is still my go-to when I'm looking for some random stranger's advice on a topic. Bonus points because I think humor is a good thing to have included in any subject, including serious discussions.