[HN Gopher] If nothing is curated, how do we find things
___________________________________________________________________
If nothing is curated, how do we find things
Author : nivethan
Score : 319 points
Date : 2025-05-17 15:51 UTC (1 days 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.
| Sleaker wrote:
| I used Pandora from inception, but swapped to Spotify because
| the algo stopped working completely for me, and they ran into
| licensing issues with a lot of content and a lot of the oddball
| music I was listening to or used as a seed for stations just
| vanished completely.
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| This comment was down voted but it's right. We don't need
| more open source platforms - we need more _successful open_
| (source code doesn 't matter) platforms.
|
| Actual businesspeople are pretty ruthless in getting people
| to using their product. Open source people aren't, by nature
| (except for Lennart Poettering).
|
| Also open source people tend to make software instead of
| services. Mastodon isn't a Twitter clone - it's software you
| can install on a server to make your own Twitter clone.
| Mastodon is software and Twitter is a service.
| mastodon.social is a Twitter clone. The only exceptions to
| this are highly P2P softwares like Bitcoin, where the
| software and the service merge into one.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >Actual businesspeople are pretty ruthless in getting
| people to using their product. Open source people aren't,
| by nature (except for Lennart Poettering)
|
| I watched that PewDiePie video[1] of him using Linux and I
| found it extremely funny that this guy was like "Linux is
| awesome! Freedom! (literal USA flag in the background) You
| are a god now!" and then every Linux-focused channel
| reacting to that video was like "yeah, you can play games,
| but not all of them. Yeah, it works, except... Yeah, you
| can customize but he will grow out of it when he needs to
| get work done..."
|
| Linux people are downers. It's like I was watching the
| second coming of Stallman selling to everyone the idea that
| you get to control what your computer does, unlike on
| Windows. You can customize it, you can optimize it
| yourself, you can remove everything and add anything. And
| that he had been having so much fun doing it. The man
| literally told his audience that everyone should use Linux
| so Linux gets better. While the people who should be
| promoting it the most insist that "Linux is not for
| everyone."
|
| It really feels like I peered into some sort of alternative
| reality in that video and it was really refreshing.
|
| And I think that's the problem with FLOSS, what FLOSS truly
| lacks.
|
| FLOSS tends to be merely "an alternative." It should be
| more than that. It should be freedom. It's absolutely
| ridiculous to me that I can change the font and color of
| the text of my post on Tumblr, a proprietary closed source
| social media, but I can't do that on Mastodon, on Bluesky,
| on Lemmy, and I bet not even on Pixelfed or Peertube
| although I never really used them. Where is the freedom? I
| don't have the freedom to change my text color? I don't
| have the freedom to opt into an algorithmic feed in
| Mastodon because the developers have opinions about that? I
| don't have the freedom to follow someone from Threads
| because my instance's administrator wants to LARP as
| Internet police? Richard Stallman would be spinning in his
| grave if he had one.
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| The net has also gone to shit with ISPs blocking things, NAT
| and CGNAT. (I'd ignore CGNAT if every ISP with CGNAT also
| supplied IPv6, but they don't)
| immibis wrote:
| Addition: A recent front-page Hacker News article was
| censored by my ISP, but I could access it through Tor.
| 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.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Platforms are closed by definition, if it's open source it's
| not a platform any more.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Tv tropes seems an undervalued platform for "finding media that
| engages with a specific idea", however the downside is that
| once it starts to get used for that purpose, someone will learn
| how to use it to push their content and then it will be
| worthless.
|
| For curation to work, you have to trust the currator.
| 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.
| protocolture wrote:
| Mens rights arent a conspiracy theory, but are often used
| as dull propaganda in the same way.
|
| It sucks because theres a group local to me that does free
| information sessions and bbq meet ups in front of the local
| family court house.
|
| But online MRA's have given them such a bad name with
| terrible behaviour.
| 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
| Nasrudith wrote:
| What on earth makes you think that the prior state of affairs
| was to benefit the users?
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| >The "new" of today is no match for the "new" of back then
|
| _Breaking Bad_ is almost certainly one of the best series of
| all time that started strong and ended strong. There were a
| TON of shows in that period that were weak or that, at a
| minimum, sort of petered out. Yes, a lot of shows probably
| get canceled too quickly. Then there 's _Grey 's Anatomy_
| because it still apparently has lazy viewers who will tune in
| each week.
| paleotrope wrote:
| Re: 2, That's definitely another part of it. There's this
| timelessness about the current culture that I am not sure
| where it's coming from.
|
| I find myself encountering bits of culture
| (tv/movies/music/books) that could be from today, or from 10
| years ago, and little way to determine from when. And there's
| so much of it now.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Having watched TNG and BB for the first time roughly at the
| same time, I disagree it's that of a huge leap. (Quality is
| about much more than cinematography, and these two shows are
| just too different anyway.)
|
| Also we have probably reached almost the top of what is
| possible for a TV show, especially in what matters the most
| (writing, acting).
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| I wasn't referring to the cinematography. While that one's
| certainly noticeable, I think the way the shows narrative
| is structured and builds up over time is the true leap.
| _The X-Files_ or _Twin Peaks_ were maybe more cohesive, but
| that 's also because mystery box shows wouldn't work very
| well any other way. Maybe that's it... cohesiveness found
| its way into TV productions, and it took mystery box shows
| to make that quality really obvious as a recipe?
| Ekaros wrote:
| Deep Space 9. Star Trek starting in late in TNG's. It had
| actually overarching narrative and story going beyond a
| few episode. Though still had those self-containt
| episodes.
| superultra wrote:
| We have ground breaking amazing shows like The Rehearsal
| (which could really only be made now), Resevoir Dogs, Shogun,
| Fleabag, The Bear, Severance, For All Mankind, Peaky
| Blinders...to name a few.There is so much good tv.
|
| Some either you don't know about any of these which is the
| fault of the algo I guess, or you're stuck in a bubble of 15
| years ago, in which the algo failed.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| I think my point didn't quite come across... Comedy got way
| more serious and certainly made that (necessary) leap after
| a big dive in quality during the 00s (thanks Chuck Lorre!).
| Writers of other genres learned from the successful HBO and
| AMC productions that TV shows are more than just a fixed
| universe with a static cast and a dynamic part, and that
| each episode could be more than one short story told in
| this staged universe - that is the main part in the leap
| that makes old shows feel old now.
|
| Thanks for the recommendations, didn't know about _The
| Rehearsal_ , _Shogun_ , and _Reservation Dogs_ (you wrote
| "Resevoir Dogs"?). Our tastes may wary, but I think _For
| All Mankind_ fell back to some 90s formula after season 2.
| encom wrote:
| Slightly OT, but it's been a long time since I've been as
| disappointed with anything as I was with the last season
| (3) of The Bear. I made it three episodes in, then deleted
| it. The first seasons were so good.
| zyx_db wrote:
| for point 1, i think this example is a bit biased. its not
| really fair to compare random shows made now to some of the
| greatest shows ever made.
|
| although, i will say, it is a lot better of an experience
| watching old, well reviewed shows / movies, than it is to
| watch whatever comes out now. but again thats mainly because
| i can choose from some of the best productions ever.
| idoubtit wrote:
| > 1. The amount of "culture" being created has to be like a
| magnitude of order greater than 25 years ago.
|
| For music, I'm not even sure the cultural creation has
| increased.
|
| A few decades ago, there were scores of indie bands. In high
| school I knew a few friends that were playing in amateur rock
| bands. Later on, when I traveled in foreign lands, most people
| I met listened to local music, e.g. Turkish songs which were a
| mix of tradition and modern influence. In my latest travel,
| everyone was listening to the same globbish junk.
|
| I don't have any stats, but I suspect the music production is
| more homogeneous and less creative. There is less geographic
| variation. At least one source of creation has disappeared:
| musical bands are dead, except for the industrial kind, a la
| K-pop. Overall, I don't think the creation level is higher than
| 25 years ago.
|
| > 2. The algorithms were developed to help with this problem.
| They are just a poor match for the problem.
|
| I disagree with the OP that the algorithms are necessarily bad.
| For instance, once in a while, they could suggest a very
| different style to help broaden your tastes. Some already do
| that.
|
| But algorithms can't compare with recommendations by friends.
| There were music that I would have instantly rejected if the CD
| hadn't been given by a friend. And sometimes you have to
| persevere and learn to like a music. When the curator is a
| human I like, I try harder.
| gargron wrote:
| I'm sorry, but by what metric are musical bands "dead"? I'm
| asking because I follow a lot of bands that are actively
| releasing new music and touring across the US and Europe. Not
| to mention the musical festivals.
| 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.
| Yeul wrote:
| Back in the 90s all the big chain record stores were the
| same. At least with Spotify you can theoretically listen to
| whatever you want.
|
| If you were someone living in a provincial town you were SoL
| on alternative music.
| 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.
| wavemode 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.
|
| In what way is that a tangent? In both cases, the author argues
| that a centralized authoritative source of information is
| better than scattershot posts on social media.
| 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.
| protocolture wrote:
| >The argument for curation goes against the argument for
| democratization.
|
| Unless you are going to read every book, watch every movie,
| listen to every song you are going to consult others about
| their own experiences, or have an algorithm or radio station
| feed it to you in their own curated order.
|
| You didnt defeat trust, you just trust different people now.
| immibis wrote:
| No, they're right. If you have "democratization", you don't
| necessarily read every book yourself, but there are lots of
| competent or incompetent people you can choose to trust to
| review them for you and suggest which ones to read.
|
| Which means people who choose to trust different sources will
| get different cultural experiences.
| protocolture wrote:
| > but there are lots of competent or incompetent people you
| can choose to trust to review them for you
|
| Congratulations, you have invented curation.
| 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.
| arguflow wrote:
| What opensource tools are you talking about here? The only ones
| I know of is just building your own rss feed.
| 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...
| gtowey wrote:
| The consumer landscape has gotten so hostile. Once upon a time
| you could use price as a proxy for evaluating quality. More
| expensive versions of a product were generally better.
|
| Nowadays it's all smoke and mirrors; marketing, branding and
| lies. In general I find even the more expensive versions of
| consumer products are still garbage quality which end up in a
| landfill all to quickly. It's hard to buy something good even
| if you're willing to spend the money. Our current capitalism
| doesn't care about providing value for the money, no it's all
| about how much money to can squeeze out of people and how low
| you can make your production costs.
| 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.
| Papazsazsa wrote:
| This will never happen without the destruction of the
| individual.
|
| Humans will simply opt out and create their own islands of
| ideology or taste, and have been doing exactly that for
| millennia.
| immibis wrote:
| An extreme minority of irrelevant humans. You're talking
| about the information-economy equivalent of swearing off
| money and going to forage berries in the woods.
| 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???
| Papazsazsa wrote:
| Not sarcasm.
|
| My comment is a reaction to this idea that a ChatGPT-
| generated image has the same value as one done by a Picasso.
| It's still art and it still can have artistic value, but
| it'll never possess the intangibles carried by, say,
| Guernica.
|
| I think curation, in the age of procedurally-generated
| content, will be one of the most gratifying or at least
| profitable jobs to have. It already is, if you think about
| it; film studio heads, music producers like Rick Rubin, Anna
| Wintour/Vogue, and the MoMA... all wield curatorial power
| (for better or for worse).
| immibis wrote:
| But about half of the human population objectively does not
| and will never care about those intangibles.
| 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.
| Papazsazsa wrote:
| You're not wrong, but eventually they'll run out of old ideas
| or consumers will grow tired of them. See Marvel/superhero
| burnout. The macrocycle will force the microcycle back into
| gear.
| 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.
| larodi wrote:
| my French is not much better, sorry. still hoping I was able
| to get a point through. let me reiterate - total collapse of
| context. and I did not invent it.
|
| we are back to selling culture at bazaars.
| 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.
| defrost wrote:
| > but the next thing I ask is "how do you find new music".
|
| > expert curation. Someone who spends their whole life
| studying these things
|
| For a _long_ time I followed the Peel sessions (1967 -
| 2004) which was BBC DJ / Commonwealth new music and
| industry audience sized level of shared curation
| experience.
|
| That was richer in information and breadth and more niche
| an experience than the larger broader scale appeal of the
| UK's _Top of the Pops_ , Australia's _Countdown_ , the
| USofA's later _MTV_ curated new music offerings.
|
| Curated or not, now or in the 1960's, 70's, later there is
| and has always been a sizable amount of industry capture
| and strong influence in bringing artist's to audiences /
| markets.
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Peel_Sessions
| 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.
| johnisgood wrote:
| This has always been an issue though. I am 30 years old,
| and I could remember back to elementary school. I remember
| us bullying a girl for liking songs such a Linkin Park
| among other songs we (they) considered emo. For the record,
| I love Linkin Park now, but all the bullies never bothered
| to listen, and we did not know English either.
|
| Talk to people, ask them about it, introduce them to new
| music and movies, listen to these songs together, or watch
| the movie together. That is what I do with my girlfriend.
| She does not have the same taste in music at all as I do.
| There is an overlap, since I like songs from classical to
| rock, but yeah.
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| They're much more limited though. Heard of the series,
| but it's not Must see Thursday because I'm not in an
| office and know I can pretty much tune in whenever I
| want.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Ok?
| cpburns2009 wrote:
| Isn't that an old video game? Was it recently remastered
| like Oblivion?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It is a video game. It was remastered but not recently.
| It received a sequel and was adapted into a television
| series.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| In your particular group yes. I haven't really heard much
| about it (some, but not much).
|
| This isn't an attack on you - just a further point towards
| a split world. Something can be huge with one group and
| barely heard about elsewhere.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > The last of us
|
| Yet another zombie dystopia story? What is the gender ratio
| of people who watch these type of shows? I assume it must
| be 90%+ men.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > Yet another zombie dystopia story?
|
| The zombies are just a backdrop, the real story is
| focused on just two people, and it's really heavily
| centred on their relationship and personal choices.
| is_true wrote:
| I'm still watching shows from the early 2000
| Izkata wrote:
| Early 2000s to early 2010s here... I agree with GGP that
| we have more content than ever, but I don't agree that
| it's better. There definitely seems to have been a fall
| off in quality the past 10 years or so. The few good
| shows nowadays end up standing out even more than they
| did back then not because they're better but because the
| average has dropped.
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not at all sure that dropping an episode a week like
| Apple TV+ tends to do is a bad thing at all.
| AngryData wrote:
| Im the complete opposite and never watch anything that is
| on-going because I hate waiting around for every episode
| and having series drawn out over months. And even after
| they have completed there is usually little fanfare or
| noticed that a season is complete and so it is only a 50%
| chance I will watch it at all even if I am interested in it
| because all the talk about it has since died and it is
| forgotten about because it was going on for months already.
|
| I didn't mind what Andor did as much though for season 2
| releasing 3 episodes at a time. If it had just been 1
| episode at a time I probably wouldn't have seen it until a
| year or two from now after all discussion was dead.
| Yeul wrote:
| Lets be real most entertainment has a short shelf life.
| Something gets its 5 minutes of internet fame before the
| world moves on. Everything depends on the memes and
| social media buzz.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| What you describe is and has always been everyday life for
| me. Finding people with shared interests is pretty rare. Even
| then, there's usually minimal overlap.
|
| Internet improved this but it won't last. Communities are
| temporary, they all die at some point. I just got used to
| enjoying things alone.
| johnisgood wrote:
| You should be enjoying your own company the most, then may
| come others. Communities do not have to die at some point,
| unless you mean it in the same sense as "well, we all die
| at some point". You can preserve chat history of
| communities, but Discord these days would be pretty shit
| for that, I would say.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| You can always watch it _with_ them. Especially if it 's
| great enough to re-watch, or plan to finish watching together
| (or is old enough to re-watch anyway).
| johnisgood wrote:
| I watch movies online with some friends and my girlfriend
| (separately), and I am 30 years old. I never liked going
| out to the cinema, and now I have immobility issues, so
| that is even less more likely, plus all my friends are
| abroad, so... :(
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Finding friends within walking (or at least biking)
| distance can certainly be a hard problem (even for people
| in full health), but seems to be so ridiculously
| important for our well-being, that it's probably worth
| striving for.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I agree. A change of environment (to a more positive one)
| can save your life. I have experienced it first-hand. I
| have psychiatric co-morbidities (which is exacerbated by
| MS) but a change of environment can do wonders. The
| people there do not even have to be your friends (in the
| beginning), it can still have such a positive impact on
| one's mental and even physical health.
| chokma wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Perhaps this is a factor in the rise of reaction videos where
| people consume the content with you and react to it. A
| somewhat shallow experience, but someone pretending to
| genuinely like the same music video as I do is - in the
| vastness of the internet - slightly better than consuming
| completely alone.
| sunrunner wrote:
| With the recent surge in mindshare around language models and
| generative AI in general, one of the ideas that keeps coming
| up is unique content and experiences that are either tailored
| to the consumer or are at least unique for that person in
| some way.
|
| But I wonder if this is missing something that you've touched
| on, the function of cultural artefacts as a means of
| connection (and perhaps trust building) through a known
| shared experience. Whether it's watching a TV show, reading a
| book, listening to music, playing a game, all of these
| activities essentially have two functions. The first is the
| thing itself (I'm enjoying this book, song, game, etc.) but
| the second is the opportunity to _connect with others_ around
| that, which only really works when some majority of the thing
| is known by everyone.
|
| This doesn't say that there isn't value in unique
| experiences, except that these unique experiences are always
| unique _in the context_ of a shared and known thing.
|
| Roguelikes are perhaps a good example of this. Every run is
| unique to a player and essentially unique across all players
| (seeded runs aside), but you can always talk with others
| about the specific events that happened in any single run
| because everyone understands them in the context of the game
| as a whole. The 'crazy thing that happened in my last run'
| still works because other people know how rare the event or
| combination of events might be, so it's still a valid shared
| experience but also unique.
|
| Another more lightweight example might be the amount of NPC
| dialogue in Supergiant Game' Hades. I believe there's
| something like 80,000 unique lines of dialogue in the game,
| so players can go a long time without hearing the same thing
| again, and unless you play for a long time you might never
| hear certain lines that other people will have heard.
|
| As for your example about conversations going nowhere when
| there's no shared experience, perhaps there's even an
| argument that the connection aspect of the experiences is
| actually the primary function even if we think it's a
| secondary function.
|
| Tangential point related to generative models, but perhaps
| there's even a third function at play, which is that the the
| _process_ of creating the work may have been its own value
| for the creator, but this is more about the value of spending
| time and energy making a thing for yourself or others to
| experience (to connect over).
| wongarsu wrote:
| Another thing missing from generated content is the
| connection to the author. Media isn't just about
| experiences, it's also an exchange of ideas. Ideas the
| author communicates to the reader/viewer/player, and that
| you then discuss with other people who shared the same
| experience.
|
| When people say "literally 1984" they don't mean an
| amorphous story about an inescapable dystopia, they mean
| very specific ideas Orwell packaged in a story. A large
| part of what makes Breaking Bad compelling is the endless
| stream of ethical choices and their consequences in the
| eyes of the authors. These things are thought-provoking
| when consuming the story, and can be further digested by
| discussing them with others who experienced the same story.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| At this point YOU have to watch the content of the people
| that you want to mingle with. However, the "standard" of
| shows that you watch is higher (for you, as its more curated
| for your). Therefore, you do have to struggle with more
| subpar shows. Not sure what to do with that.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I've started curating the people I mingle with.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| Another option is curating the content for people you
| mingle with
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Outside of dedicated assignments for book clubs and
| schooling, this has always been the case for literature
| discussions.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Unless a specific piece reaches critical mass. Most people
| have an opinion on Harry Potter, A Song of Ice and Fire or
| 50 Shades of Gray. Granted, if they aren't an avid reader
| it might be an opinion based on the movie adaptations
| instead of the books, and for some their opinion only
| reaches as far as the reason they haven't engaged with that
| specific title yet. But those are still opinions you can
| engage with
| perrygeo wrote:
| When TV came to American homes in the 1950s, it was a
| revolution in our national shared consciousness (for better
| or worse). Obviously there are problems with this - it gives
| the advertisers and businesses enormous unchecked power to
| shape society. But we've likely never seen so many people so
| deeply in sync with the dominant cultural messages.
|
| When streaming became the norm, that dynamic was destroyed.
| We lurched back to private media consumption (for better or
| worse). There is no shared cultural narrative to tune into at
| 8:00 each night. There's millions of disparate voices,
| screaming into the void 24/7. More freedom and diversity for
| sure, but nothing coherent you can point to as a culture.
| 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.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > 800lb sisters
|
| First time I hear of these. I now wish I had not looked
| them up (I did not think it would be so literal).
|
| (I also now realise that I cannot even remember how Taylor
| Swift sounds like, despite hearing _about_ her quite
| frequently...)
| anton-c wrote:
| Seeing Taylor swift mentioned is weird to me cuz nobody I
| know listens to her. We had like, 10 international popstars
| thru my youth with the Disney ones too(not that anyone
| listened to those that I knew).
|
| When I was young you couldn't NOT know the song "semi-
| charmed life" by third eye blind, or 50 other songs.
| Nowadays idk if that's the case. Then again, I'm not sure
| how much would be lost if my whole middle school didn't
| know the song "shake that Laffy taffy".
| kranke155 wrote:
| Nope you're wrong. Actually media has become hyperlocal.
|
| The whole world was talking about tariffs? Nope. They were
| talking whatever they saw on their personalised feed.
| nonchalantsui wrote:
| I heavily disagree with this one. On first glance what you
| say feels true, but there are so many mega popular people now
| that you will never know of despite even being from the same
| country. People with dozens of millions of fans, selling out
| arenas doing multinational tours and you won't know them at
| all.
|
| But everyone knows Britney Spears, even if you were never in
| her target demographic. This sort of global fame now requires
| so much more to reach because of how many are really locked
| into hyper personalized online experiences. I used to be able
| to reference the latest big movie or show and people would
| know, now that's mostly turned into an explanation that the
| movie or show even came out and exists.
| CityOfThrowaway wrote:
| I mean... Taylor swift is literally the biggest musician in
| history... right now...
|
| There's still enormously mainstream culture. Even more
| enormous in the fat tail than before.
|
| There's just _also_ a shocking depth in the mid tail now
| too.
|
| The problem with movies is that Hollywood killed itself and
| tech helped. Movies and TV just suck now, for the most
| part.
|
| Music, fashion, and visual culture are still alive and
| well.
| voidspark wrote:
| Michael Jackson was the biggest in history. Global
| megastar before the internet. Taylor Swift has a lot of
| sales but in terms of global significance and cultural
| impact there is no comparison. Not in the same league.
|
| Taylor Swift has relatively niche popularity in India.
|
| Chinese are blocked from accessing any western social
| media, and no access to YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, etc.
| Taylor Swift is popular there but the Chinese have their
| own version of the internet separate from ours.
| rchaud wrote:
| > Global megastar before the internet.
|
| Not just the Internet. Before cable and satellite TV,
| even. Similar to Muhammad Ali in that sense - a globally
| renowned icon, regardless of cultural or languge
| barriers. In the west, there is the idea of a rivalry
| between Michael Jackson and Prince, but globally, there
| was only one King of Pop.
|
| Taylor Swift has mind-boggling levels of fandom in the
| Anglosphere (even if it is largely limited to women), but
| her music is pretty straightforward, there are other
| artists like her who would be considered interchangeable
| with her given enough publicity. But the full package of
| Michael Jackson was groundbreaking and inimitable: the
| musical production, the dance moves, the songwriting and
| the music videos.
| riffraff wrote:
| I think Taylor Swift is actually a perfect example, it's
| quite common to hear people say "I don't know any song by
| her beyond shake it off".
|
| I challenge anyone from the '80s not to know of a few
| songs by Madonna or Michael Jackson.
|
| Taylor is huge with some fans and completely unknown to
| her not-fans and there seem to be a steel transition
| between the two states.
| yunwal wrote:
| > I don't know any song by her beyond shake it off
|
| This is unheard of for children to say this. If you mean
| adults, there were plenty of adults in the 80s that
| didn't know Madonna songs, and even Michael Jackson
| schneems wrote:
| > The entire world was talking about the same thing.
|
| What you're describing is an echo chamber. Which is what most
| sites optimize to produce (when optimizing for engagement
| and). I switch between bsky where it frequently feels that
| way "everyone is talking about Y" and mastodon where the
| chronological timeline makes it clear that a lot of people
| might be talking about it, but they're also talking about
| other things.
|
| I feel that one of the most broken things about our current
| reality (with so many social sites) is that it feels so
| singular and shared, but turns out that's not the case at
| all. My partner and I have started to use the phrase "my
| internet" to refer to the general vibe we are taking in as in
| "is your internet talking about scandal Z?" I'm frequently
| surprised stuff that totally flys under their radar (and vice
| versa).
| Llamamoe wrote:
| I think you're conflating the idea of "shared culture" with
| "isolation from other social groups". We used to have more
| friends at the same time as we had more shared context
| thanks to media distribution patterns.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I think you're both right. Relative to the past, any given
| locale is more culturally fragmented, but the globe is
| simultaneously more culturally unified. We've hit a weird
| midpoint: You might have more cultural common ground with
| someone on the other side of the globe who follows the same
| people on social media, than with your next-door neighbor.
|
| Consider this thought experiment. Imagine you're going to get
| coffee with either a random person in your neighborhood, or a
| random HN user. Which conversation will have more shared
| topics of interest?
|
| This is the "global village" which was prophesied in the
| 1960s. It won't go away until interstellar colonization
| creates communication delays and a new era of cultural
| fragmentation.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Take the news for example. Last weeks it was tariffs. The
| entire world was talking about the same thing.
|
| ... I mean, that's because it's a global economic crisis. In
| the early 70s, the entire world was talking about the oil
| crisis, another induced economic shock. Late noughties? The
| Great Financial Crisis. That sort of thing is _always_ going
| to be news everywhere.
| crm9125 wrote:
| I think kids nowadays likely still have a shared cultural
| experience like we did when we were young. We're just,
| separated from that experience. Just like our parents were when
| we were young.
|
| Maybe they can't (or don't want to, out of fear of being
| embarrassed or feeling uncool/uncertain perhaps) explain to you
| how they find things, but when they are hanging out with their
| friends and are talking about similar interests, discovering
| they know about similar things, and sharing things they know
| about that their friends don't yet/learning similar things from
| their friends, that's where the magic happens.
| kaonwarb wrote:
| Anyone with, say, a fifth grader in the US can compare notes
| with parents elsewhere in the country. If your experience is
| at all like mine you'll be startled at the (odd to me!)
| shared culture. Especially if they spend time online.
| darkwater wrote:
| This. When we become adults we tend to forget how it worked
| when we were children. Plus, you think you remember but you
| what you remember has been already filtered by the adult's
| mind.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Reminds me of a dynamic I heard about with the rise of music
| backlog availability. Instead of just 80's kids listening to
| 80's music you would see a wider array of eras that kids
| would see more internet era kids having a more diverse amount
| of preferred eras. Because they have more of a choice now.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did."
|
| they did, they just have different algos for that. I found
| italian brainrot meme and what surprising it was so popular for
| kids, like tens of millions of views
|
| seems like Trends are more personalize now, what popular song
| that adult like is different with younger audience like
|
| its like having different Trends that live on bubble
| DavidPiper wrote:
| You kinda just disagreed with yourself.
|
| Every kid having their own tailored algorithm means there is
| no shared cultural experience by design.
|
| A shared cultural experience means there are people in it who
| don't like it or don't engage with it, even though they are
| aware of it, and they can engage with their peers about it.
|
| Tailored algorithms means maximal enjoyment and engagement at
| all times, but it's engagement with the software, not
| engagement with peers.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "A shared cultural experience means there are people in it
| who don't like it or don't engage with it"
|
| You just disagreed with yourself, the kids on america can
| relate to kids that live on middle east and asia
|
| if this not shared cultural experience, then idk what else
| is because original post mention that most people on his
| hometown aware of song that got played, not every hometown
| on america have same experience
| DavidPiper wrote:
| Hmm I take your logical point. I think I disagree with
| the premises though.
|
| > the kids on america can relate to kids that live on
| middle east and asia ... if this not shared cultural
| experience, then idk what else is
|
| This sounds like parasocial connection standing in for
| shared cultural experience to me, but I don't really know
| because I'm quite distant from that kind of connection
| anyway.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "This sounds like parasocial connection standing in for
| shared cultural experience to me"
|
| no no no, you are not understand, this is the new normal
|
| gone long time a way for you to meet and socialize in
| your local community. this is the new way
|
| You just miss old times
| DavidPiper wrote:
| I agree with you that it's becoming the new normal. I
| just don't think the new normal is better, and the old
| normal still exists.
|
| We opine the enshittification of social media platforms,
| but seem to largely ignore the enshittification of our
| in-person social norms and culture by those same
| platforms.
|
| One of the reasons you have to get people in young (to
| any product) is so that they forget or just don't even
| realise/consider what life is could be like without it.
|
| EDIT: There are definitely cultural norms and situations
| that the current norm improves upon too - perhaps
| regression to the mean is a better descriptor than
| enshittification depending on the incoming perspective.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| well, no one force them to use current way
|
| they can stick to old way but we know its not going to
| happen since its inconvenience
|
| it is what it is
| immibis wrote:
| Or maybe a certain way is better. Or maybe it's better in
| some aspects and worse in others.
|
| It's already been pointed out in the comments on this
| article that we went from individual disconnected
| experiences, to mostly a shared collective experience via
| radio and TV and lately we went back to individual
| connected experiences.
| Cheetah26 wrote:
| Gianmarco Soresi discussed this on an episode of his podcast.
|
| He says how there used to be a number of nationally known
| comedians who could make jokes that appealed to everyone's
| shared cultural experience, but now that's effectively
| impossible because a) culture isn't tied to geography /
| location, and b) niches are much more prevalent. I loved the
| example that huge venues can now often be sold out for artists
| you've never heard of.
|
| On one hand it's not neccessarily a bad thing since individuals
| are getting more of what truly appeals to them, but I also
| think that the result could be increasing the barrier to
| connect with others because it decreases the chances that
| you'll have interests in common.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Interesting you mentioned movies because I think movies are
| resurgent now where it seems like everyone is seeing all the
| new releases. I can hardly book imax anymore because they book
| up a month in advance and are booked up a month out and then
| they pull it from the imax theater to make room for the next
| thing to be fully booked out a month out. There is serious
| demand it seems to keep up with the latest movies especially
| when it is offered in higher fidelity like imax and 70mm
| releases.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I am confused. Spotify and Netflix both have recommendation
| engines that include a wide variety of factors, including
| popularity with _other_ users and "closeness" to your
| favourite musical styles. I assume these are AI/ML models of
| some sort. Essentially, these automated engines have replaced
| the music director from 1990s radio stations.
| jedberg wrote:
| That's precisely the problem. Everyone gets a different
| experience. No shared cultural experience. Until recently,
| everyone in the same village/town/city/country had the same
| experience, and could talk about it.
| msla wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkfpi2H8tOE
|
| That's "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson. It's 8:21 and quotes
| both the Tao Te Ching and the US Postal Service. It peaked at
| number two on the UK Singles Chart in 1981. Why? Because John
| Peel curated a radio show on BBC Radio 1 and happened to like
| it. That's the advantage of human curation: Every so often
| you get a John Peel in the booth and hear something so off-
| the-wall no well-written algorithm would ever mix it in with
| everything else you listen to.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Superman
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > Essentially, these automated engines have replaced the
| music director from 1990s radio stations.
|
| They haven't. A nearest neighbor pseudo random walk from one
| viral song to the next doesn't replace a music director who
| could give you thematically, aesthetically or conceptually
| coherent selections of music.
|
| There's an interesting observation about this at the
| individual album level, the death of the concept album.
| Albums that tell coherent two hour long narratives are
| effectively dead because the almighty algorithm favors the
| exact opposite. Disjointed, catchy , viral, hook centric
| music that's short enough to fit over a TikTok clip.
|
| The medium is the message, thinking the Spotify algorithm
| replaces a music director is like thinking the Youtube short
| algorithm replaces a film director.
| cgio wrote:
| I think a pseudo random walk would be a good algo for
| diversity. Long form anything is being challenged, but form
| is an epoque attribute. In 10 years people will be
| lamenting how the young generation is lost in hourlong
| songs and encyclopaedia length posts, maybe... The only
| thing that got lengthier is cinema as subsumed by mini
| series. But it indicates a complexity in dynamics that may
| be harder to pin down than we think we do on the surface.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Yes, I agree. I think we're at the point where tastes are more
| important than ever and how to differentiate in this new AI
| slop world.
|
| No fancy algorithm or AI tool will replace human curation with
| good tastes (or what you think is good taste)
|
| I dig this for music curation: https://ghostly.com/
|
| If anyone has other similar links I'd love to see them.
| verisimi wrote:
| > Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
|
| I tend to think that humans historically have had very
| isolated, independent experiences. It is only recently with
| mass media that we all share a collective experience.
|
| I take your point that kids today are not having a shared one-
| directional (tv to person) experience. However, they are
| sharing apps, with that data being intermediated. It is uni-
| directional too, so more immersive.
|
| I tend to see technology, and the direction of travel, as
| highly collectivising rather less of a shared cultural
| experience. Everyone is endlessly exposed to exciting ideas and
| content that are not self-generated.
|
| So, collectivised thinking UP, independent thinking DOWN.
| b0ner_t0ner wrote:
| > _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._
|
| Those Top 40 singles were spoon-fed to you by Clear Channel
| within a very limited selection from the Top 5 major record
| labels.
| chgs wrote:
| And?
|
| That doesn't change the shared cultural experience. Decades
| had "sounds", disco was a thing in the 70s because everyone
| heard it. Today there's no shared cultural zeitgeist. You
| might find communities on reddit etc, but they aren't local.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Among those that read and study the Bible:
|
| A hundred years ago, everyone used the King James Version of
| the Bible.1 Poorly though it reflected the common language2, it
| was a shared experience, and things like memorisation and
| making and recognising scriptural allusions were
| straightforward, because everyone used the same words. Now, a
| wide variety of Bible translations are in common use, some more
| accurate than the KJV, some more loose paraphrases, all more
| understandable. There are some big advantages in this variety
| and modernity--but we _have_ lost something. The shared
| experience had a virtue of its own, quite a significant one.
|
| --***--
|
| 1 OK, by a hundred years ago the RV and ASV were used in some
| areas, but it was mostly as a distant extra to the KJV, not
| replacing it.
|
| 2 I understand that some of it was already becoming archaic, or
| at least overly formal, when it was _published_ , such as
| thee/thou (singular _you_ ). The fact is, it was "appointed to
| be read in Churches", and they wanted it to sound impressive.
| Compare it with Tyndale's translation almost a hundred years
| earlier, and Tyndale's generally reads _much_ more easily--
| because Tyndale wanted uneducated people to be able to
| understand the Bible.3
|
| 3 "And sone after Maister Tyndall happened to be in the
| companie of a learned man, and in communing and disputing with
| him, drove him to that issue that the learned manne sayde, we
| were better be without Gods lawe, then the Popes: Maister
| Tyndall hearing that, answered hym, I defie the Pope and all
| his lawes, and sayde, if God spare my lyfe ere many yeares, I
| wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall knowe more of
| the scripture then thou doest." -- John Foxe, _Actes and
| Monuments_ (1563), page 570.
| Paul_Clayton wrote:
| The Catholic Church had similar tradeoffs with Latin, though
| I suspect the language and style were less motivated by
| majesty (though bias of use by the educated might have
| entered early -- I am ignorant of the history). The New
| Testament Koine (Common) Greek was similarly a lingua franca.
| When the once common language is no longer broadly used, the
| language can become a class-oriented separating factor.
|
| Even more recent translations seem to retain significant
| similarity in a lot of "famous" texts (e.g., the Beatitudes
| -- people also seem to use the archaic pronunciation of
| "blessed" as two syllables), presumably to ease acceptance of
| the change. This hints that some commonality is preserved.
| (Some words are also jargon, so not modernizing the word is
| more reasonable.)
|
| Story outlines and concepts can also be preserved even though
| the "poetry" of earlier versions is lost in translation. Yet
| as contexts change even concepts may be less understandable
| and shared; "go to the ant thou sluggard" may be unclear not
| merely from language but from unfamiliarity with concepts.
| Aesop's "The Ant and the Grasshopper" has lasted thousands of
| years, but is not a fundamentally human metaphor and even the
| human concepts diligence and foresight can have different
| cultural tones.
|
| "A sluggard is someone who does not work hard." "Oh, you mean
| someone who works smarter not harder?" "No. It means someone
| who does not accomplish much." "Oh, you mean someone who is
| burnt out?" "No. It means someone who chooses not to do
| things that are profitable." "Oh, you mean someone who has
| recognized the futility of striving for accomplishments and
| has learned to be content with a simple life?" "No!"
| sailorganymede wrote:
| There are plenty of internet radios like NTS which are all
| about curated discovery. It's worth checking out if that's your
| thing!
| squigz wrote:
| > Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
|
| I suppose you didn't have the same cultural experience as your
| parents. That's how culture works - it changes over time.
| lordnacho wrote:
| > Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
|
| Heh, I told my kid this today on the way to dropping him off
| with a friend. We were listening to The Rest is History, about
| the Rolling Stones. They made the point that this common
| cultural experience started to become a thing roughly in the
| 60s.
|
| When I was a kid, there were things that you just could not
| avoid. It was the same in many places: there was a national
| broadcaster, and maybe a second and third TV station. There
| were only so many things you could watch. Whatever TV series,
| music, or sports were on, you could be sure everyone else was
| also watching it.
|
| It started changing in the 1990s where I grew up, completely
| changing from the start to the end. You got a bunch of
| channels. You could watch news from America and other places,
| which maybe deserves a footnote about immigrants being able to
| watch something from faraway for the first time. More options
| everywhere, but there was still momentum. You still watched the
| national news on the main stations, and sports was still there
| too. They also tended to curate the "best" foreign shows, so
| you didn't have to wait to get your dose of America.
|
| Now that's finished. Everything is private now, you can watch
| whatever you want on your own screen (TVs got really cheap.
| When I was a kid, people would congratulate you when you bought
| a new one, like it was a car. Now I have more TVs than I can
| use.) You don't have to watch things at the scheduled time
| anymore, and you don't have to arrange your life around when
| the episodes come out.
|
| The kids now watch a wider variety of content. There's still
| "local" fads that are maybe restricted to friendship groups,
| instead of being national phenomena. For instance my kid and
| his friends ended up watching One Piece, a Japanese production.
| But I never ran into other kids who were into it.
|
| I also dare to say that the kids now watch lower quality
| content. This was already a thing when we got flooded with
| channels in the 1990s. There was a heck of a lot of mediocre
| crap on those 100 extra channels. But now it's a whole new
| world of terrible. Yes, I'm an old man. But it does seem like
| having curation would mostly bubble the good things to the top,
| and so when the curation went away, you got more stuff, but
| worse stuff. Similar to consumer products, the items at your
| department store tended to be reasonable, but when there's a
| webshop where you can buy anything at all, you have to sort
| through a pile of low quality stuff yourself.
| darkerside wrote:
| Didn't our parents also think our content was objectively
| inferior to theirs? I would personally agree with you but it
| may also be that we don't understand the new content well
| enough to properly value it.
|
| And, I do think even for me personally that mediocre content
| today is much better than the mediocre content of the past.
| The average is higher even if the peaks are not (and those
| peaks are probably overestimated due to survivorship bias).
|
| Tldr, there used to be a lot of crap and we forgot about it.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| > Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
|
| Schools don't have bullies?
|
| That's the extent of my shared cultural experience as a kid.
| bflesch wrote:
| > Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
|
| You observe correctly but the conclusion is incorrect. You fail
| to take into account that year-, location- and interest-based
| cohorts of kids tend to follow the same influencers, and
| thereby consume the same content.
|
| The problem for outside observers is that without the
| platform's data we cannot identify the cohorts and thereby
| cannot distinguish between the groups.
|
| This logic follows a set-based approach to social media
| analytics called social set analysis pioneered by a research
| group at which I later did my PhD.
| giggyhack wrote:
| I've had this conversation with my friends before about how
| valuable it would be to understand our different perspectives
| if we could swap/share our full "algorithmic experience" from
| our apps.
|
| What conclusions did your research find?
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I mean, there's certainly greater diversity (particularly for
| music, stuff outside of the mainstream always existed, of
| course, but the barrier to entry was far higher then than now),
| but there's still a large shared _core_ of content.
| jzb wrote:
| "Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did."
|
| I think this is two claims -- AFAICT kids do have a shared
| cultural experience, but it is true it's not like yours, or
| mine. The Spotify playlists are one way they find new music,
| TikTok being another, movies/TV shows, or word of mouth.
|
| What some folks may have found useful about radio playing
| gatekeeper and music directors choosing 40 songs per week (they
| didn't _) others of us found stifling.
|
| I grew up in the 70s and 80s in a small town on outskirts of
| St. Louis. We could get a few classic rock/AOR stations (KSHE,
| KSD) and starting in the early 80s there was "hit radio" KHTR
| which almost quite literally followed the 40 songs per week
| model...
|
| There's tons of music I _didn't* discover in the early 80s,
| such as The Smiths, that I only happened on later because of
| strong gatekeeping via radio.
|
| In the 90s we got KPNT ("the point") which was alternative rock
| and more adventurous than KHTR, and by then I also had a car
| and access to the good record stores in St. Louis. I amassed a
| large CD collection and stopped listening to the radio almost
| entirely excepting some college radio, and kept up with new
| music via Rolling Stone, Spin, etc. Even bought some albums
| based entirely on their reviews without having heard them at
| all.
|
| All of that long and rambly comment to say... I like music
| discovery today far more than I did in my youth, 20s, and early
| 30s. I skim Bandcamp regularly for new music, watch questions
| about music on Ask Metafilter, and have found YouTube Music's
| algorithm to be decent. (e.g., pick a song, make it a "radio"
| station and add songs I haven't heard before but like to my
| library.)
|
| It _is_ true that I rarely find folks to discuss music with
| because I am not listening to mainstream music much. That part
| sucks -- but few people my age seem to care about music deeply.
|
| * Almost certainly the music director for your local station
| was subscribed to a service that provided a weekly list of
| songs to program, rather than choosing them themselves. I
| worked part-time in radio while in college, taking weekend and
| evening/midnight-6 a.m. shifts, in Washington MO and Kirksville
| MO. KSLQ (adult contemporary), KRXL (classic rock/AOR), KTUF
| (country) and KIRX (talk, sports) were all largely getting
| program direction from national syndicated programming. The
| local music director _might_ have used some discretion in
| choosing / filtering out some songs, but they were likely
| getting the direction from a service.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| Disagree. Eberyone is on the same websites, seeing the same
| memes, listening to the same music. Its just not from a radio.
| The curation process happens via social media consumption where
| the most popular sthff floats to the top. There is absolutely
| still a shared cultural experience, youre just not hip to it.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
|
| Of course they do. The music director is now the recommendation
| algorithm of each platform (as mentioned), and so what you'll
| find is that like-minded people have very similar
| recommendations in their feeds. There are also meta profiles on
| these platforms who instead of making their own content,
| "curate" and reshare content within (or from out of) the
| platform. And what disparities do arise, people undo them
| organically by sharing content with each other in different
| channels anyways. This is how things go "viral".
|
| It's actually kind of scary how people can convince themselves
| into ideas like yours here. One would think you live in a
| different world or something. This is the same world where
| memes and viral social media posts are everyday news topics.
| It's where blockbuster movies and TV shows continue to exist,
| where GTA6's release will cause a billion dollar revenue loss
| to the economy in lost workhours, and so on.
| iNic wrote:
| Music YouTubers are the curation now. Anthony Fantano is most
| famous in this scene but there are many others
| 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.
| thombles wrote:
| I'll take your word for it but I have to chuckle, since I'm
| adjacent to some groups of gamers and I've never seen the name
| of this game in my life. So it goes!
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| It was also partially through marketing and curation (which
| overlap).
|
| But these, as well as word of mouth, are the least needed for
| something so popular.
| Falell wrote:
| This doesn't follow at all. The game received _excellent_
| reviews prior to release. It's currently the second best
| reviewed PC game of the year on metacritic [1] (an aggregator
| with some problems but I don't think this is controversial).
|
| Exactly contrary to your point, both Clair Obscur and Blue
| Prince (#1) got excellent reviews in the days leading up to
| release leading to people on e.g. Reddit saying "this game came
| out of nowhere and it has amazing reviews, I'm excited".
|
| https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/pc/all/all-time/metas...
| chowells wrote:
| Yes, people noticed it's good. But that's not how I heard
| about the game. That's not how anyone in the three separate
| groups of friends I heard about the game from heard about it.
| In fact, the only person I knew who really follows that sort
| of stuff is the only person I know who _wasn 't_ interested.
|
| I think you're confusing cause and effect. If you look at
| steam's concurrent player counts, you see that the number of
| concurrent players kept increasing for the first 10 days
| after the game's release. That's not consistent with curators
| instructing people to buy a game at release. That's
| consistent with massive word-of-mouth spread. Everyone is
| talking about it and rating it highly because it's good, not
| because they were told to.
|
| https://steamdb.info/app/1903340/charts/
| loveparade wrote:
| I think you are bringing up an interesting discussion of
| curation vs. word of mouth. Where exactly do you draw the
| line?
|
| Players counts kept increasing because a people came across
| the game on social media - upvoted reddit posts, high
| number of retweets, streamer sponsorships, etc. And a lot
| of that got rolling only because of initial positive
| reviews and PR. But isn't upvoting/downvoting something on
| reddit or other social media a form of curation? Is there
| even such a thing as pure word of mouth on the internet?
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Word of mouth is a form of curation.
| 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.
| quesera wrote:
| > _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_
|
| > _We found things. ... No one curated it for us._
|
| I think you're getting to the essence of _good_ curation.
|
| That college radio show is exactly curation. The record label
| that put out the hardcore 7"s is curation. The record store is
| curation. The kid who bought a record and made copies for
| friends is a curator.
|
| Word of mouth is the strongest curation.
|
| What's missing today is the human. The college radio DJ is a
| human curator, and is much more idiosyncratic and humanely
| engaging than an optimized-for-content-or-cost algorithmic
| curator.
|
| Algorithms might work for very mainstream (or nonspecific)
| tastes -- and actually it is self-reinforcing on that level.
| But it fails badly for nichier stuff. And it is in direct
| opposition to those of us for whom "different" is/was part of
| our personal or group identity. :)
| 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
| arguflow wrote:
| Thank you this is great!
| 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
| john2x wrote:
| I've been thinking about this in the context of my kids.
|
| I am a bit of a snob (a huge one if I'm being honest) about media
| I consume. Naturally I guide the content my kids watch quite
| closely, much closer than my peers. I am their curator.
|
| But I can't help but feel I am isolating my kids when I do this.
| The things they watch and listen and play and read at home are
| vastly different than other kids their age.
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely
| Out Of Touch With Her Generation
|
| https://theonion.com/cool-dad-raising-daughter-on-media-that...
| john2x wrote:
| That's amazing. The post date is cherry on top.
| lucasfdacunha wrote:
| I've been a subscriber for the hacker newsletter [1] for years
| and it does a great job of curating content from this website.
|
| This inspired me to create The Gaming Pub [2] which is a similar
| kind of curated newsletter but for gaming content.
|
| I believe newsletters like that are a great way to find
| interesting stuff.
|
| 1. https://hackernewsletter.com/
|
| 2. https://www.thegamingpub.com/
| duck wrote:
| Thanks for the HNL mention and nice job with The Gaming Pub!
| protocolture wrote:
| Good curation is amazing.
|
| When I first signed on to Netflix it worked me out and suggested
| a bunch of stuff that I love to this day.
|
| But then it ran out of stuff, or they borked the algorithm and
| now it sucks. And all its competitors suck.
|
| One thing I have noticed is that if you ask a human for a
| specific recommendation like "Suggest me a novel like The
| Martian" if they dont have a specific recommendation, you just
| get their favourite instead. Which makes reddit threads and
| similar completely useless. The signal to noise ratio is awful.
| robertlutece wrote:
| off topic, but I recently read Alfred Lansing's "Endurance" and
| felt that was in spirit like "The Martian" although I remember
| the latter more from the film than the book.
| 9dev wrote:
| Actually with Netflix, I'd argue that they used to produce a
| few shows that were great, novel, and interesting to watch. But
| over time, as their revenue (and shareholder expectations)
| grew, they started to crunch out targeted content created for
| specific audiences at a budget (ever noticed how the set is
| practically empty save for the show's protagonists at all
| times?). These shows suck because they're not works of art, but
| metric-driven checklists of features that the target group
| enjoys.
|
| I assume there's a small sliver of budget available for
| actually interesting productions, kind of similar to Google's
| moonshots, but the vast majority of Netflix' catalog is just
| algorithmic crap by now, so the recommendations are probably
| solid, there's just nothing good to recommend.
| protocolture wrote:
| The things I enjoyed that netflix curated for me all
| preexisted netflix. I bought in to netflix for the good
| content productions, but I stayed as long as I did for the
| recommendation engine.
| abrahadabra wrote:
| I don't see the problem. When it comes to music, who exactly is
| stopping you from easily, quickly, and comfortably exploring new
| albums in any genre or style you want via Bandcamp,
| RateYourMusic, Last.fm, Discogs, or Spotify?
| nop_slide wrote:
| Peep Soma FM too
| pmkary wrote:
| Thanks for the great post.
| andirk wrote:
| Cant find the OG quoter but "Wikipedia doesn't work in theory but
| does work IRL"
| Hard_Space wrote:
| I get a lot of movie recommendations from Trakt, for Stremio, at
| the moment. Besides this, my wife uses Facebook a lot to find new
| shows and movies for us to watch, which is good, as I only got to
| FB when my work sometimes demands it.
|
| I do agree with the sentiment expressed in comments here that
| human>human curation is something AI can't replace. It doesn't
| understand the relation (or lack of relation) between songs,
| shows or movies for any one user. The choices we make for these
| things are usually underpinned by many factors specific to us,
| and don't represent valid or meaningful 'trends' to be discerned
| and applied to others.
| arguflow wrote:
| I feel like this is one of the big reasons I find myself coming
| back to hackernews recently. The content I see is THE SAME
| content everyone sees. As a collective there is a consensus
| around what is happening in the community however small.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Word of mouth annotated by chains of trust. If somebody is
| unknown, unless somebody else vouches for him - he is silenced,
| his links invisible. Vouching is somebody else giving him trust-
| and disappearing, if that was unearned. Your grandpa forwarding
| fb-pigfeed - his links invisible, except to his conspiracy cloud,
| that wants all and sees all. If you want new things, you
| temporary lift bans on curators- people who venture and search
| for new things. This is all that remains of the feed, the algos
| die. The social media parasites are purged and will become a
| warning footnote in history books.
| kgwxd wrote:
| I find it way easier to find interesting things, and communities
| based around them, these days. Looking back, the curators of old
| were highly pretentious, and the kids obsessed with being one of
| the first to discover something, mostly so they could gatekeep,
| were exactly as unbearable as they're portrayed in shows about
| those times.
| billfruit wrote:
| Curation isn't that big of a problem as is stated. Especially
| when it becomes gatekeeping.
|
| It is more important that there is possibility of unrestricted
| discoverability and exploration than having curation.
| Jgrubb wrote:
| At a beach rental house this week and they have some sort of
| internet television and no cable with a guide of channels playing
| whatever right now. I can stream anything I want at any time but
| I can't just watch the hockey game that's on right now without
| signing into something. It shouldn't be this hard.
|
| We keep a Sirius subscription even though it occurred to me 10
| years ago that Apple Music has largely everything I need. I want,
| however, to hear stuff I don't like that forces me to change the
| channel to another station or to be exposed to something new
| that's not like the last thing the algorithm already knows I
| like.
|
| Infinite choice is horrible.
| AngryData wrote:
| You look at the what the people you enjoy listen to or read or
| watch. Want more of a certain music? Find a streaming radio of
| that music and its just like the old radio DJ except its not 95%
| pop unless you want pop. Like particular videos? Look at what
| those video creators are subscribed to. Like certain books? Read
| what other people who liked that book call out or suggest om
| forums.
| djhworld wrote:
| I still do listen to the radio to discover new music, not live
| shows though but catch-up episodes. It's definitely worth it, yes
| some of the songs might not be to my taste but at least you get
| the chance to make that determination yourself and you get
| exposed to different stuff.
|
| In my experience the algorithmic recommendation systems don't do
| this, I mean they might throw you a wildcard in here or there but
| I tend to find they overfit on some niche and it just becomes
| tiresome, and you don't get the commentary from the DJ who might
| add something like describing who the artist is, what the song's
| name is and maybe some flavour on the DJs interactions with the
| artist over time.
| NonHyloMorph wrote:
| "..Feels like a job"
|
| Seems to be the case, that someone hasn't made the latent fact
| manifest to themselves, that they are actually on the way to
| become what they are missing.
| shanesnotes wrote:
| i built www.codecrawl.co to solve this exact problem for
| engineering blogs
| jpc0 wrote:
| https://www.codecrawl.co/
|
| Because clickable links are nicer...
| justincarter wrote:
| It's so odd to read a take like this. I agree with the problem
| but I do think there are ways to fix it, it's just going against
| the tide.
|
| For music I intentionally listen to local independent radio and
| also somafm, where I'm not "picking" the exact music.
|
| I read the NYTimes and the Economist and both of them do movie
| reviews and the Economist has good book reviews.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The big platforms aren't geared for finding things, they're set
| up to keep you searching, staying on the
| platform/feed/scroll/whatever looking for your interests, feeding
| you things they think might catch your attention for a few
| seconds in between ads or _as_ ads.
|
| Even Google search stopped helping you _find_ things and started
| pushing to keep _looking_ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-
| who-killed-google/
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| OP: "How do I fix this?". One small step is to vote for better
| data privacy rules. That might reduce some of what feeds this
| enshittification. EU is making some progress with this. I'm
| optimistic this would eventually happen but maybe not in my
| lifetime.
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| for those seeking a curated experience trying listening to new
| orlean's fantastic WWOZ online
|
| https://www.wwoz.org/listen/player/
|
| I also used to listen to McMurdo Station's radio (AFAN) but it
| seems offline now
|
| KLAP from Gerlach NV is also good if Jeff has it up and running
| (lol). https://streema.com/radios/KLAP
| yunwal wrote:
| NTS.live is great and has a show for pretty much any music fan
| MitPitt wrote:
| You only get the live tracklist if you pay? This sucks!
| jtwoodhouse wrote:
| Word of mouth has been and will be always the most reliable form
| of curation.
| zoomTo125 wrote:
| From a collector's perspective, the way to do is simple. You sort
| by new or sort by most viewed in day/week. If you don't have
| time, sort by category and sort by new/most viewed again. That is
| how people discovered things and hobbyists curate stuff for
| broader audience. Sadly, they're dying because platforms can't
| even get that simple concept. Legal platform can't even tag
| properly.
| robust-cactus wrote:
| Btw, these social media giants curate content wayyyy more than
| you'd expect. TikTok curates it's trends and gets it's biggest
| influencers to engage first. Pinterest seeded it's network with a
| few noteworthy creators. Even Airbnb famously took pictures for
| the top stays in NY. Curation is now just more opaque. Even in
| the AI age, human in the middle is going to be pervasive.
| perching_aix wrote:
| I think this post misconstrues how social media platforms work
| and why critics are less relevant today than ever, in order to
| excuse a simple lack of popularity and poor marketing practices
| on their favorite musician's side.
|
| For example...
|
| > And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen
| before. It'll never surprise you with something different.
|
| ... this is both nonsensical (recommendation algorithms don't
| predict content, but that you'll want to engage and will remain
| engaged by a given content), and to the extent it isn't, is just
| blatantly and demonstrably false, since there's at least one
| counterexample available, and that is my own anecdotal one.
|
| Or...
|
| > It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of
| things that you'll never get to the end of.
|
| ... because it _is._ The sheer notion that back in the day you
| could have enumerated and gone through "all the local and
| foreign music releases" borders on comical. What you exhausted
| back then _I 'm pretty sure_ were the curated lists you were
| provided. Nothing less, nothing more.
|
| The only "area" I follow with this much determination is anime,
| and one season (the year is split into four seasons that the
| entire industry aligns with) I decided to try and watch _every_
| show that releases, just to see what I 've been missing out on,
| and if I had misjudged anything like people would often tell me.
| It's actually possible there, as it is very centralized and
| localized. Turns out that no, I was perfectly right on the money
| with my watch decisions, the people who were loudly gloating and
| hating indeed were loudly (and mindlessly) just gloating and
| hating, and that while it was technically viable to follow every
| release next to a full time job, it would suck me and all my free
| time completely dry, rendering the experience borderline
| tortureous. And this is still a relatively niche area of
| entertainment. Imagine "following the entirety of film and
| music". Ridiculous.
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