[HN Gopher] If nothing is curated, how do we find things
___________________________________________________________________
If nothing is curated, how do we find things
Author : nivethan
Score : 117 points
Date : 2025-05-17 15:51 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tadaima.bearblog.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (tadaima.bearblog.dev)
| flappyeagle wrote:
| I asked o3 about bjorks latest releases and news -- it did a
| great job.
| imiric wrote:
| A machine learning algorithm that summarizes and hallucinates
| information is arguably worse than a machine learning algorithm
| that decides which social media posts you see. They're both
| controlled by corporations, but at least on social media you
| (still) have the option to read content written by humans.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I do sort of think Pandora feels like better algorithmic song
| finding--maybe it is just that I have an old profile so it has
| learned enough about me to do good matching, though.
|
| But, it is notable for being a pretty old site, from back before
| the algorithmic feeds really exploded and took control of
| everything... I often wonder if we actually don't like
| algorithmic (non)curation, or if we just don't like the shitty
| version of it has developed.
|
| --
|
| What's the story behind the Bjork thing? I've always found
| celebrities that just sort of stay hidden between releases
| endearing. I mean isn't that what the rest of us would do?
|
| Enya, obviously, has it all figured out.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I think it goes far deeper than curation, it's that all tooling
| that encourages self determination and discovery has been
| stripped out of UIs.
|
| Every influencer or algo is some one/corp curating content
| (ultimately for their own profit motive, not for their followes)
|
| The only place to get lost is wikipedia or tvtropes, there is no
| sense that you can discover things and this is tied to profit
| motives.
|
| We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed
| platforms behind logins but with open source codebases, but open
| platforms, where data is free, where the focus is on having all
| the data from all the sources and surfacing it in any way a
| person can imagine.
|
| We used to have tools curators could use, powerful search
| functionality, there was a sense that with infinite things to do
| some people wanted the wiki and some people wanted to create
| articles from the wiki and some people liked the article or the
| broadcast and didn't care to look at the wiki.
|
| But now we have only curation and all the data itself is hidden
| behind walled gardens.
|
| So now we look at jpgs posted on instagram to figure out what
| might be fun to do this weekend and that's just dumb.
|
| We have curation to our specific tastes and we grow less and less
| tolerant of the shocking and surprising because even when we
| radically change our views it's because an algorithm has slowly
| steared us that way, and so nothing is new or surprising and
| there is no discovery anymore.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Kinda wild to read a post on here so true it stops you in your
| tracks. People are missing a lot of opportunities.
| vladms wrote:
| I honestly think we have more tools and they are more powerful
| than "before".
|
| I would give an example: find a weekend hike.
|
| Before (20-30 years ago): you need to have a book (for profit,
| curated) or a map (for profit, less info). You needed to rely
| on other people or on previous experience. Hard to know what
| changed since the info was collected.
|
| Now: multiple websites both hike focused and more generic that
| give you reviews, photos, comments. Generic websites
| (openstreetmap, google maps) that allow you to check further
| details if you wish so, some with open data.
|
| I think people should take more responsibility and stop blaming
| so much "the algorithm" and "the profit". It's the same as with
| smoking. Even if most people agree it is bad for health, 1 in 5
| people still smoke.
| darkwater wrote:
| > Before (20-30 years ago): you need to have a book (for
| profit, curated) or a map (for profit, less info). You needed
| to rely on other people or on previous experience. Hard to
| know what changed since the info was collected.
|
| Counterargument: the hiking app was good 10-12 years ago when
| it was used by the overlap of tech enthusiasts and hiking
| enthusiasts, which provided good routes made by expert people
| (just like the books and maps before). Now you have a
| cacophony of tracks recorded by anyone, with lot of back and
| forths because they got lost as well while recording it. Oh
| and you need a monthly subscription to properly follow the
| hike!
|
| (Yes, I know you can still find books and maps)
| vladms wrote:
| Not all areas had a hiking app 10 years ago. I doubt is the
| case even today.
|
| And then, if you were "different" than the average
| preference, you had to put the effort to select the stuff
| good for you. Not that different to "fighting" an
| algorithm.
|
| The difference might be now that more people have a
| "chance" to find what they want, and "before" there was
| just a "specific group" that was happy. I get that "the
| specific group" might feel "is worse" in such a case.
|
| Regarding the quality, I hate "following the hike" (I mean
| people complain about "algorithms" but then following a
| hike is fine ...?) - I just have some markers and look each
| 15 minutes on the map (which also means back and forths are
| not an issue).
|
| What I would love to see more often (and maybe would fit
| with the use-cases described here of curation) would be
| finding "favorite" people and getting their "content"
| across applications. Like, now I can't check the google
| maps reviews of people that I follow on strava or on
| Instagram or of editors of openstreetmap... Everybody does
| their own little walled garden (which I am fine with) but I
| need to find again and again the reasonable people.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed
| platforms behind logins
|
| No. Not really, no. We have like 20 open source platforms
| already. Nobody uses most of them. The ones that people do use
| are extremely boring compared to any closed platform because
| they were created for the worst possible use of social media:
| letting people post their opinions online. For the average user
| they often lack highly requested features like making profiles
| private because the open source platforms decided to be
| decentralized as well adding enormous complexity to them. That
| also comes with privacy issues like making all your likes
| public.
|
| People could just use Tumblr if they wanted. Text posts of any
| length, add as many images as you want anywhere in the post you
| want, share music, videos, reblog other's posts. But people
| don't go to Tumblr.
|
| You could create the perfect platform but people still wouldn't
| use it because they are too addicted to drama, arguing online,
| and doomscrolling to calmly scroll through a curated catalog of
| music that someone spend 3 years publishing on their blog.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| You make a solid case for abandoning the web. To be clear, in
| my mind I separate "the web" from "the net"; the web exists on
| top of the 'net!
|
| The web has become a cesspool of AI slop, SEO trash, walled
| gardens, and of course, bots of all kinds seeking entry points
| to everything. The dead internet theory seems more real every
| day.
|
| I think humanity will ultimately abandon the web. The day
| cannot come soon enough for me.
| whytaka wrote:
| It's no complete solution against AI slop but I've been
| working on www.webring.gg which is a democratic webring
| manager. To join, websites are invited and voted on by
| current members to keep slop from polluting the integrity of
| the webring.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Even when we do have the search tools, we have no assurance
| that the output of the tools is trustworthy and not biased
| towards whatever brings the most money to the toolmaker. And we
| have a lot of history with reasons to believe that our tools
| are _not_ trustworthy. The software industry has shit its own
| bed and thoroughly lost all credibility. To the point where I
| have zero doubt that any new software is acting in its own best
| interests and not the user 's.
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| Well, originally, the answer to this question was "search
| engines, like Google"
|
| And, for a while, this worked pretty well. The breaking point for
| me was when Google bought pompous-restaurant-ranker Zagat and
| proceeded to disappear their curated reviews into something that
| would nowadays best be described as "an AI blackhole". And that
| was in 2011, mind you.
|
| Of course, Zagat going away was an entirely elitist event with no
| consequence to the Internet-or-society-as-a-whole whatsoever, but
| for me, it was the moment I realized that democratized data-
| ranking would never provide any real value.
|
| And the whole "AI" story is pretty much history repeating: unless
| actual-humans-with-distinguisable options feed "the algorithm",
| the output will be... well, slop.
|
| TL;DR: curation by actual living, thinking and critical humans
| (which automatically excludes most "best of" repositories on
| Github, BTW) is still the way forward.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Corollary: If everything is curated, how do we find helpful
| curation?
|
| If we fill the void indicated in the article - that is, we post
| and host useful information, how do we get it noticed by the
| audience that's looking for it?
|
| As far as we believe we can't rise above the noise, we're
| unlikely to assemble info and make it available.
| herrherrmann wrote:
| There are some explicit efforts to surface smaller/indie
| websites, like web rings and e.g. Kagi's small web features[1].
| These kinds of things might help.
|
| 1: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
| neuroelectron wrote:
| In the real world.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the
| pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't.
|
| No thanks. The last time this happened we ended up with
| opinionated articles, hidden promotions, and censorship in news,
| media, newspapers, etc.
|
| A good example:
|
| try searching for "fluoride residue in brain" on Google vs Yandex
| and see how they tell totally opposite stories.
| noduerme wrote:
| And now that no one trusts any kind of expert, we've ended up
| with millions of various conspiracy peddlers believed by
| billions too uneducated to even begin to parse fact from
| fiction. Sort of like taking the centralized
| religion/opinion/censorship problem and smashing it into tiny
| shards that get on everything.
|
| At least when there were 2, 3, or 10 curated sides to a story,
| with sources and expertise to draw on, a somewhat literate
| person could draw some conclusions on which parts of each were
| valid.
| eastbound wrote:
| Uh... no. What made me look into a subject that it often
| called a conspiracy theory (men's rights) was the several
| levels of obvious bullshit that newspapers were delivering.
| Think about it: The only thing they had to do was to say lies
| that seem right, and they didn't even succeed at that.
|
| So no, it's not the mediatization of the opposite point of
| view that gives it an audience, but the sheer lack of
| truthfulness of the dominating class.
| watwut wrote:
| It was easier to find good stuff back then tho. For all
| complains about hidden promotions, situation now is worst.
| paleotrope wrote:
| Seems there are two things going on here that is being conflated.
|
| 1. The amount of "culture" being created has to be like a
| magnitude of order greater than 25 years ago. Of course you can't
| watch all those shows and movies't now. There are too many and
| it's too much.
|
| 2. The algorithms were developed to help with this problem. They
| are just a poor match for the problem.
| pimlottc wrote:
| The algorithms are a poor match because they were primarily
| developed to benefit content providers, not users.
| paleotrope wrote:
| Oh that's definitely true. I mean you can definitely see the
| conflict of interest between say you know HBO Max trying to
| get their content viewed versus any other streamer
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| I would make a different list of points:
|
| 1. The "new" of today is no match for the "new" of back then:
| _Breaking Bad_ is as good for a first binge today as it was
| 2008. I 'm currently watching _Mad Men_ for the first time and
| can 't see how anything could've been made differently 18
| years(!) ago. That's 7 seasons of a well-made show and I
| couldn't care less for any Netflix production that gets
| cancelled after its 2nd season. The change in quality from
| _Star Trek: TNG_ to _Breaking Bad_ seems like a huge leap, do
| these leaps exist anymore?
|
| 2. There is no discussion about any current Zeitgeist,
| everything feels intermixed and nothing is ever finished.
| Leaving politics aside here, consumers are beta testers without
| any way to provide direct feedback to producers (one that isn't
| public outrage of some kind) - every other usual customer
| interaction is just a waste of _your_ time. Big studios are
| busy milking "universes" that have been created pre-social
| media.
|
| 3. Algorithms are part of the creation for these problems, not
| their solution. Big tech just doesn't like this take, creative
| work is risky, businesses need to scale up quickly and
| efficiently.
| lapcat wrote:
| It felt like the first 3 (or 2.5) paragraphs, which were arguing
| that Bjork needed an official website, were a bit of a tangent
| from the main argument of the article, which was that we need
| more professional critics, but social media has essentially
| defunded and dethroned them.
|
| I'm personally ambivalent about the argument. I'm old enough to
| have lived in a time before the rise of the web and social media.
| However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my
| current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure
| content without the web. Nowadays I'm not a big fan of popular
| culture, but on the other hand my taste doesn't seem to match
| well with professional critics either. So how do I find stuff? My
| "process" is very hit-and-miss. I sample a bunch of stuff that
| sounds interesting to me, and if I don't actually find it
| interesting, I bail out ASAP. Streaming media sites are good for
| this kind of scattershot approach. I also go the public library,
| browse the shelves, and just randomly check out several books
| that I might like. Perhaps the majority turn out to be duds, but
| I've found a number of diamonds in the rough that way, books that
| I never would have read otherwise. (Incidentally, the library
| also provides access to sites such as https://www.kanopy.com/)
|
| I don't feel the need to stay current on culture. The books,
| films, and TV shows that I find might be recent, or they might be
| quite old. There's plenty of good stuff from the past that for
| whatever reason I never encountered until now. If you're
| following the professional critics, you'll likely only be
| learning about new content; it's not that the critics didn't talk
| about old stuff before, but it's just as difficult to find old
| critical discussions about old content as it is to find the old
| content itself. How else but randomly will you find reviews of
| obscure stuff from 20 years ago?
|
| [EDIT:] Thinking back to my preteen years, the public library was
| also crucial for me then. I remember discovering influential
| works such as Frank Herbert's Dune and Plato's Apology there,
| just browsing the shelves.
| danieldk wrote:
| _However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my
| current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure
| content without the web._
|
| I was very deep into non-mainstream music when I was in my
| teenage years (90ies) and magazines and (the little access I
| had to) the web were not very useful. Even outside the
| mainstream, a lot of magazines were mostly into the big
| alternative acts and mostly fed by leads by music companies.
|
| The best way to discover music was to go to small alternative
| music shops. I would hang there for hours and would listen as
| many records as the owners tolerated. And since they were music
| buffs themselves and pretty much knew every obscure record they
| were selling, they could often point you to interesting
| records.
|
| I don't think much has changed for my peers, back then they
| would listen what the top-40, MTV, and TMF would give them, and
| now they listen what record companies are pushing or
| astroturfing. (I don't mean this in a denigrating way, there
| are other media where I am more into mainstream stuff, like TV
| shows.)
|
| I don't go to record shops anymore, but I still find music
| based on 'browsing' and word of mouth mostly. The good thing of
| 2025 is that I can get my hands on every bit of obscure music,
| whereas in 1995, some albums would have to be imported by a
| record store and it was way out of my budget as a teen.
| lapcat wrote:
| Now that you mention magazines, I recall that there was a lot
| of obscure music I discovered only by reading the guitar
| player magazines. But these were specialty publications, not
| for a general audience. And their primary advertisers were
| not record labels but rather instrument manufacturers.
| kace91 wrote:
| Message boards and niche sites worked really well for me in
| the early 2000. What made them useful though was that
| astroturfing was non existing at the time.
|
| There was a very famous case in my country of a preppy kid
| who took the whole rap world by storm getting stupid numbers
| in a niche site, and only _after_ he had gotten big contracts
| with multinational labels it came out that he had just set a
| bot to download the music and inflate numbers, that's how
| trust based the system was.
| gwern wrote:
| > It felt like the first 3 (or 2.5) paragraphs, which were
| arguing that Bjork needed an official website, were a bit of a
| tangent from the main argument of the article, which was that
| we need more professional critics, but social media has
| essentially defunded and dethroned them.
|
| Not so much of a tangent as just the relevant argument not
| being made clearly. The Bjork example demonstrates the value of
| a central, canonical source for information in overcoming the
| costs of friction from direct messaging, which creates a
| chaotic cacophony of tiny bite-sized messages which are
| difficult and exhausting to piece together into a final
| meaningful message, and result in the interested Bjork fans
| living in their own little information-universes: in one
| universe, it's a film+documentary, in another, it's a film. So
| they can't even manage to agree on the most basic facts. (Which
| has downstream effects: a Bjork fan may not know they have
| access to the documentary or that they can assume most of the
| film-watchers saw the documentary and they can invoke it
| without confusion or spoilers.) The 'advantage' of social media
| and disintermediation proved to be illusory as they came with
| too much overhead and destruction of any canon or commons.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| I'd agree with the jist of this article. Social media has been
| less "wisdom of crowds" and more endless algorithmic slop and
| pay-to-play influencers.
|
| Sure there was always PR dealmaking & money behinds the scenes
| previously I'm sure, but there were actual magazines/websites/etc
| in every genre publishing numerical reviews for
| cars/cameras/games/movies/shows/albums/etc. If you paid attention
| you could figure out which curators scoring aligned with what you
| tended to like.
|
| Now every reviewer is a YouTube influencer who loves every
| product put in front of them, no product is every bad, no scores
| are assigned because then you can cross compare, etc.
|
| The acquisition, death, resurrection and mundane ongoing
| existence of dpreview is a good example of this.
|
| What we had before wasn't perfect, but what has followed is
| worse.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment completely. From link directories to
| search engines, and now with AI, and from reblogging to
| recommendation algorithms, I think what is being lost is the
| ability to "browse" the web. To look at a list of things that may
| not interest you. Because sometimes among those things you do
| find something that piques your interest.
| lmcinnes wrote:
| > And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen
| before. It'll never surprise you with something different. It
| keeps you in a little bubble.
|
| This is not true at all, algorithms _can_ predict things you
| haven 't seen before, and can take you well outside your bubble.
| A lot of the existing recommendation algorithms on social media
| etc. do keep you in a bubble, but that's a very specific choice
| 'cause apparently that's where the money is at. There's enough
| work in multi-armed-bandit explore/exploit systems that we
| definitely could have excellent algorithms that do exactly the
| kind of curation the author would like. The issue is not
| algorithms, but rather incentives on media recommendation and
| consumption. People say they would like something new, but they
| keep going back to the places that feed them more of the
| comfortable same.
| reactordev wrote:
| The argument for curation goes against the argument for
| democratization. We collectively said "enough" with Hollywood
| gatekeeping which means you must bring your own audience.
|
| Movies roles are based on your followers. Music gigs, based on
| your followers. Any creative event, based on your followers. So
| known named artists like Bjork have to build a following for an
| event for promoters to green light it.
|
| It sucks, but that's the nature of the business. Sell tickets,
| upsell merchandise, sell records, repeat.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Democratization is micro-curation. What we have now is not
| that. We have monolithic platforms - the richest companies in
| the world, or companies owned by the richest people in the
| world - serving content as they see fit, with a veneer of what
| your friends, family, and favorite celebrities want to to show
| you. We are back to, "Brought to you by GE!", for all intents
| and purposes. Right down to them telling us who to vote for.
| layer8 wrote:
| Curation is more like representative democracy. You elect the
| curators you trust the most.
| monatron wrote:
| We have tools today that are uniquely good at wading through
| disparate sources and aggregating things into a format that we
| can easily digest. The worry of course - is that these tools are
| generally on offer from huge tech giants (google, openai, etc).
| The good news is, we have open-source versions of these tools
| that perform almost as well as the closed-source versions for
| these types of categorization and aggregation.
|
| I would agree that information is now more scattered (like bread
| for ducks as the author notes) than ever before -- but we now
| have the unprecedented ability to wrangle it ourselves.
| chrisallick wrote:
| you dont. youre brought things inside your algo bubble. kind of a
| bummer of an evolution of the net.
| tolerance wrote:
| What most people refer to as "culture" or "art" are products that
| are vectors for identity in a fractured society. If the author
| feels malaise over not being able to find to find new things to
| watch and listen to, imagine how hard it must be to just be
| yourself these days and foster communities around the likes and
| dislikes that you share with other people. Curating/taste-making
| is identity politics.
| miiiiiike wrote:
| I miss Entertainment Weekly having a print subscription. I loved
| tearing out blurbs about stuff that was coming out and sticking
| them to my pin board. Feels more real than adding something to a
| watchlist (which I NEVER look at) in an app.
| pigeons wrote:
| If everything is curated to only include what pays the highest
| affiliate commission, how will we find good things that don't
| include a large marketing expense in their cost?
| os2warpman wrote:
| > It makes art (music, film, tv, etc.) seem like one big sludge
| pile. It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list
| of things that you'll never get to the end of.
|
| If that is not hyperbole and the author is not taking steps to
| distance themselves from those feelings, that is extremely
| unhealthy. Like an addiction or something.
|
| The only thing that should feel like that is laundry.
|
| Perhaps the author should rebalance their leisure activities
| portfolio to include more things that aren't pop culture media.
| anywhichway wrote:
| > You then have to hunt around for the info
|
| Have you considered that that might be the goal of releasing
| trickles of information about the film prior to its official
| release? It makes collected information feel more exclusive to
| super fans and encourages fans to interact with each other on
| social media providing fuel for Bjork focused communities. If
| collecting this information feels exhausting instead of exciting
| to you... why are you trying so hard to collect it? Just wait for
| the actual release.
|
| > We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the
| pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't.
|
| I don't understand how you expect a critic to tell you whether
| its worth your time based on a collection of pre-release rumors
| and interviews. For deciding if its worth my time, I mainly want
| to hear from critics who have seen the upcoming media and I want
| to hear their opinion on what they saw. Why would I care to hear
| Ebert and Roeper's opinion on what the actors said in their press
| release tour? Unless it was something especially newsworthy and
| they wouldn't need to go digging for that. I just don't see how a
| critic's review would be enhanced by "devoting their lives to
| browsing through the piles".
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Just thought about this in the context of searching for products.
| Nowadays there is so much stuff and also so much information
| available, one just gets lost in this huge sea and spends
| countless hours trying to find the "best" product... back in the
| days you would have only one or two choices and that would be it.
| But was it better? Im actually not so sure...
| romankolpak wrote:
| When I was younger I had a few different sources for finding
| music - a couple of friends who were really into music and I knew
| they were investing time and searching for it, so I always wanted
| to hear what they recommend, even if it didn't match my taste.
| There was also a curated website and a forum dedicated to
| alternative genres, like hardcore or post rock and other "edgy"
| stuff, where I liked to hang out. I knew this is where people
| really passionate about music gathered and it was interesting to
| see what they like and what they recommend. It was always driven
| my community, by people I liked or loved, or trusted their
| judgement.
|
| Needless to say you get none of that with algorithms. Spotify
| does recommend some good songs for me regularly and I often add
| them to "liked" but it's much lonelier now. Music used to connect
| me with other people and now it's just me and my Spotify.
| namenumber wrote:
| mixcloud has been great for this for me. so many people post
| their mixes and their radio shows there that there is always
| something new to explore, and searching for something slightly
| off that i know i like leads to people using that in a mix so i
| know we're at least partly on the same wavelength when i start
| to listen. And then eventually you end up with a list of
| mixtape makers/DJ's/radio show hosts you trust which is cool,
| really feels like a world radio show at times.
| ghaff wrote:
| Pretty much listened to what "my crowd" in college listened to.
| It spanned out in various other directions over time--some by
| organic discovery via music festivals and the like, some via
| friends. Mostly don't concern myself too much with "discovery"
| these days.
| Papazsazsa wrote:
| Curation is the uncrossable moat for AGI/ASI as an inherently
| human-to-human behavior.
|
| Trends, tastes, and language evolve in real time, driven by
| social signaling, novelty bias, and the human instinct for
| signaling to preserve individuality and status within a group and
| against the algorithm. One need only rabbit hole down various
| corners of the internet to see this, but its even more pronounced
| in personal fashion, indie bookstores and art galleries, and even
| inside people's homes.
|
| It is immensely gratifying to me because it means humans will
| always need humans, no matter how hard tech tries.
|
| In trying to financialize, map, or otherwise algorithmically
| diagnose taste, effort impeaches itself.
| ukuina wrote:
| > Curation is the uncrossable moat for AGI/ASI as an inherently
| human-to-human behavior.
|
| Infinite context models will understand everything about your
| life. Combined with real-time lookup of all content ever
| created alongside the ability to generate new content on
| demand, curation seems destined to be solved.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Please tell me this is sarcasm. I mean, I know people love to
| extrapolate current LLM capabilities into arbitrary future
| capabilities via magical thinking, but "infinite context"
| really takes the cake.
| fallinditch wrote:
| If that's true it would be a sad outcome, I believe people
| would react against such an artificial world.
|
| In a music DJ context: even if an AI was able to mimic the
| dopest turntablist moves and factor in layers of depth and
| groove and create unique mixes, it would still be an
| artificial mix made by AI, and so not as valuable or
| worthwhile as a human DJ. That doesn't mean that AI DJs or
| musicians won't be successful, they just won't be human and
| can never be human, and that means something.
| autobodie wrote:
| > _immensely gratifying to me because it means humans will
| always need humans_
|
| Just to confirm, this is sarcasm, right? It's hard to tell, and
| it's terrifying to me that so many people don't comprehend this
| as a basic fact at least by grade school.
|
| Also, is it still gratifying if humans won't have other humans?
| Curation is harder to come by than ever before because it's
| less profitable. What is gratifying about that???
| Terr_ wrote:
| The problem is that the economic forces here aren't nearly as
| interested in _discovering_ human taste /interests as opposed
| to _causing_ them.
|
| For them, the lack of authenticity is not a bug, but a feature.
| larodi wrote:
| This article resonates so bad with me, like as if I did write it.
|
| This all the author writes about is called collapse of context.
| And people been waking up to noticing it, writing about it,
| eventually becoming victims. Everyone who previously had a
| natural sect of some subculture is failing victing the moment
| they move the member base into faang social media. It kills the
| opportunity to mold your community around itself - it gets molded
| for monetization.
|
| I dream the day when using social media would be considered as
| bad as a smoking or drinking habit, the endless scroll of mostly
| irrelevant content. Because even curated accounts are bombarded
| with advertised noised.
|
| In recent years I wake up to the fact that I keep meeting people
| who are totally supposed to be in my bubble, very similar, lived
| in the same city, not a big one, 2m, but we have not found each
| other because of media noise, and technological alienation. Its
| amazing as if living in the black mirror already and for a while.
|
| I keep investing massive efforts to get any public events
| gathering people spending hundreds of euros for promotion,
| prominent artists, in a time when delivery of information is
| supposed to be immediate. The audience, which includes all of us,
| fail to notice the information as there is so much of it. faang
| is milking everyone like crazy for the right to get to people
| supposed to be subscribed to our own content, which we don't own.
| it totally makes sense to have vanilla html at this point as i
| did with my event yesterday (tickets.dubigxbi.com), but then
| again - i need to submit a bribe to techbros to even let me
| emerge in the information sphere. like, I started considering
| running a bot farm, because this is what they deserve. 500$ of
| ads gets me mostly bot traffic, it is insane, paid advertising
| has never been so ineffective.
|
| Besides, the way many grow to behave, and not only the young
| generation, is that they get addicted to endless scrollers in
| tiktok/insta/x and it is not us/them anymore searching the
| information. It is algorithms packing it for everyone, which is
| amazing way to put tubes in everyone's eyes and minds and feed it
| hallucinations of all sorts. But it is the world we woke into.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| I'm curious about your vernacular/cadence.
| jedberg wrote:
| I've been saying this forever!! When I was a teen in the 90s, I
| got new music from the radio. The music director picked 40ish
| songs a week and that's what we listened to. I still like to
| listen to the radio for the curation.
|
| I even wrote a program to scrape the websites of my favorite
| radio stations (well the stations of my favorite music directors)
| and add the songs to a Spotify playlist.
|
| Whenever I meet a teenager today, one of the first things I ask
| them is "what apps do you use most", but the next thing I ask is
| "how do you find new music".
|
| The answer is usually something like "I don't know, I just sort
| of find stuff I guess?". Some have said they follow influencer's
| playlists on YouTube or Spotify, which I guess is the new version
| of the music director? Or they just get it from Spotify
| playlists.
|
| But what's missing is a shared cultural experience. In the 90s,
| everyone at my school knew those 40 songs that the local stations
| played. They might know other stuff too, but you couldn't avoid
| those top songs. It's not the same today. And it's the same
| problem for visual media. We all knew the top movies at the
| theater, because it was the only place to see new movies. And we
| all knew the top TV shows because they were only on four major
| networks.
|
| Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
| ta12653421 wrote:
| i like how you frame "shared cultural experience" which was
| mainly scarcity and lack of access due to less distribution
| channels as nowadays :-)
| jedberg wrote:
| This is completely true. But there is something to be said
| for expert curation. Someone who spends their whole life
| studying these things so I don't have to.
| withzombies wrote:
| When we were kids, just knowing music that wasn't on the radio
| made you "into music". Things were very different! The internet
| has really allowed music choices to be much more personal and I
| think it's a good thing. We have such a wide variety of music
| available to us now.
|
| I've had some luck finding some TikTok creators who curate
| specific "vibes" and publish Spotify playlists. I think that's
| just how it's done now.
| jedberg wrote:
| I love the variety for sure, I just miss the curation and the
| shared culture. It's harder to find people _in person_ who
| know the same music and TV that you do.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Every silver lining has its cloud. Shared cultural
| touchstones came hand in hand with tastemakers and
| gatekeepers. We're more directly connected to the movers
| and shakers than ever before, but it's largely parasocial
| interaction, mediated by platforms and gated by
| subscriptions. We're increasingly disintermediated with
| respect to creators so that we can be separated and
| reconstituted into our profit-bearing parts.
|
| We're old wine poured into new wineskins.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Is it hard because of the media landscape or is it hard
| because you are older?
|
| As someone who is still listening to today's pop acts and
| whatnot, there are still tons of people you can talk to in
| person who probably listen to similar music, concerts are
| well-attended, etc. If anything the definition of popular
| has broadened to include new stuff like KPop, Latin pop,
| Afrobeats, etc. and I don't have an issue finding people
| who like that music in person.
| rout39574 wrote:
| Jerry Pournelle wrote about this, I think I recall reading in
| USENET; how with the burgeoning availability of media, the role
| of the editor, the curator, would become critical.
|
| He thought well and deeply about the challenges of the growing
| net.
| acomjean wrote:
| I always think it would be useful for radio stations to keep
| logs of their playlists.
|
| I do check out mit radios list from time to time. It's somewhat
| useful to know the names of the shows that play music you
| like..
|
| https://track-blaster.com/wmbr/
| jedberg wrote:
| Most do now. Most radio stations have a "now playing" window
| on their website, where you can see the last few songs
| played. If you dig in, it's a JSON with the last 10 or so
| songs. If you grab that JSON every 30 minutes, you'll get a
| full playlist.
| curun1r wrote:
| > But what's missing is a shared cultural experience
|
| This is my problem with the proliferation of streaming
| platforms when it comes to movies and TV. We've arguably got
| more and better content than we've ever had. But I find myself
| far less motivated to watch it. I used to watch content
| anticipating the conversations I'd have with friends and
| colleagues. Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it's 30
| seconds of, "Have you seen ...?" "No, have you seen ...?" "No."
| Until we give up and talk about something else.
|
| It's made me realize that the sharing it with others part was
| always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without
| that, I can't really become emotionally invested it the
| experience.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| there are definitely still cultural experiences like that
| around release time. The last of us is huge right now.
| jedberg wrote:
| > The last of us
|
| Never seen it. Not even sure what it's about.
| jedberg wrote:
| I find that I've mostly made up for that part by
| participating in online discussions.
|
| But that leads to a different problem -- When Netflix drops
| an entire season of something, I feel like I have to have
| time to watch the whole thing, or I don't watch at all.
| Because I don't want participate in the online discussion
| having seen less than everyone else.
|
| I end up watching the shows that drop one episode a week far
| more often than whole seasons at once.
| baxtr wrote:
| I am not sure if I agree.
|
| I feel like social media trough its amplification has lead to a
| global sync in topics and experiences.
|
| I'd argue a kid growing up India or China shares much more
| culturally today with a western Kid than 30 years ago.
|
| Take the news for example. Last weeks it was tariffs. The
| entire world was talking about the same thing.
|
| To the contrary I feel like we are living more and more in the
| same global reality going from one headline to the next every
| week.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| Not just headlines being shared, but culture is still being
| shared.
|
| Sure the shared cultural experience of being limited to a
| handful of TV channels is gone, but it's been replaced by a
| handful of streaming services. The world has shared the
| Marvel Cinematic Universe and 800lb sisters and Taylor Swift.
| bmink wrote:
| > I discovered interesting music like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher,
| Portishead, Tricky, Orbital, Takako Minekawa, Hooverphonic, Poe,
| Veruca Salt all from sporadically listening to one college radio
| station in my hometown and, once a week, watching one music
| program on MTV (usually 120 Minutes or AMP). Then, once a month,
| I would sometimes flip through a music magazine while at the hair
| salon (usually Rolling Stone or Spin). And that was literally it.
|
| This section contains two types of curation that have to be
| separated: college radio is good curation, it is nonprofit, done
| by people for the love of the medium and will help you broaden
| your horizon. Rolling Stone et. al. is bad curation, a form of
| gatekeeping really, very commercial, requiring lots of
| connections and resources to get featured in.
| chowells wrote:
| I don't really disagree with the idea that there's value in
| curation. And I even think there's some value in gatekeeping.
| Sometimes, at least.
|
| But the timing is really funny here, given the massive success
| Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is currently experiencing. People
| have found this game - and it's not by curation. It's by massive
| word of mouth, as people who try the game tend to tell all their
| friends about it. In the case where something is _really_ good,
| people find out about it without curators.
|
| Curators are good for finding some stuff. But the ones so good
| that everyone talks about? You'll find them anyway.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Not entirely related, but back in the 80s we "found" PC games by
| getting a 5 inch diskette from my father's colleagues, with the
| bonuses of getting computer viruses at the same time.
|
| In the 90s I "found" PC games by reading magazines and borrowing
| a un-labeled CD from a classmate who owns every Japanese gaming
| consoles from NES to Saturn.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| I listened to punk in the 70's and hardcore from 80 to 84,
| nothing was curated by some authoritative source. It was all word
| of mouth.
|
| Hardcore wasn't on the radio, it wasn't on TV (OK, "TV Party" and
| "Institutionalized" were on MTV, both of which were "joke"
| hardcore songs), you couldn't buy the records in the record
| stores in my town until the mid-80s, you couldn't buy the zines
| in my town.
|
| There was a tiny amount of it played on college radio, but it
| would be something like one show a week from 2 AM to 3 AM on
| Sunday morning. Kids would drive from where I lived to the "city"
| and drive around in their cars taping that show from the car
| radio to a boombox and then pass those tapes around to get
| copied. It was samizdat. And most hardcore they couldn't even
| play on those radio shows anyway. "We don't care what you say,
| fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you! FUCK YOU!!!" Great song, can't hear
| it on the radio. Can't hear it anywhere you go.
|
| We found things. You had to really dig, but we found things. No
| one curated it for us. I hate the very idea of it. I mean my
| friend Joe "curated" music for me when he made me a tape of the
| Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, and DOA in 6th grade in
| 1981, but I don't think that is the meaning of curation that the
| title is referring to. If a kid got a record, it got passed
| around and taped. Then those tapes got passed around and taped.
| Etc.
|
| No one tells me what music I should listen to, we told the
| musicians what kind of music we wanted to hear when we were in
| the pit. Many of them noped out from that. They were artists, not
| enablers of the violent tendencies of poorly parented 14 year
| olds. Fair enough. But we were finding things out.
| yhager wrote:
| I had similar feeling over the past few years, trying futilely to
| escape the algorithm.. I recently discovered radiop aradise[1]
| which is exactly what I needed - free, old style, very little
| talk, human-curated radio. They have a vast selection of titles,
| and they simply play good music - stuff I know, stuff I don't..
| it's just great.
|
| They also have a world music channel, which I couldn't find any
| parallel anywhere else. They have wonderful music there when I'm
| in my "world music" mood. All in all, it's a gem, highly
| recommended for any music lovers who prefer curated over
| algorithmic.
|
| [1] https://radioparadise.com/home
| j45 wrote:
| LLMs will be able to learn what we do and don't like.
|
| And try to serve that.
|
| Or try to serve it's agenda despite those likes.
| smallpipe wrote:
| Curation is still around, it's just a bit less easy to get. The
| local venues are filling that role now. Take a listen on the
| "what's on" page.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Machine learning algorithms.
|
| And they're doing a fine job of it too, even if they remove the
| shared cultural experience. (Which is a big loss, to be sure. I
| grew up listening to Casey Kasem cover the American Top 40 on the
| radio...)
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Which is also curation
| thejeswi wrote:
| Maybe IPTV is an interesting source of curated entertainment
|
| This playlist has hundreds of channels: https://iptv-
| org.github.io/iptv/index.m3u
|
| Github page: https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv
|
| Another source could be following respected critics who have
| similar tastes to you, like the film critic Roger Ebert:
|
| https://rogerebert.com/reviews
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-17 23:00 UTC)