system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why 480p now seems me unwatchable, but 10 years ago it was like super good ?
gpt
About 20 years ago, you watched everything on a CRT TV, which is main factor for why 480p seemed okay back then.

Those displays were very tolerant of actual resolution of source, meaning that both details and imperfections were often blurred out and you got a nice and smooth TV signal with good following pictures and it was actually sharp because CRT didn't pixelate the analog signal.

Nowadays, modern TV use pixel grid, where 480p video has to be stretched to cover whole screen, and this scaling isn't exact number. Meaning some pixels are twice as big while some are there time as big. This leads to major loss of quality.

It doesn't help that we have 4k video sources available that makes the loss of quality on a 480p that much more significant.