On Flooding: Drowning the Culture in Sameness
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Charging for that seems like it could theoretically work, though the key would be that you'd have to A: have a solid audience in mind who'd be likely to consider decent curation valuable enough to pay for and B: be extremely good at selecting resources to show people, to the point there's no way in hell they could find all the stuff shown off themselves.
It'd be a challenge, but I think it could be possible. Hell, I think something like this could probably work quite well in the SEO or digital marketing world, just because of how much bullshit there is online and how hard it can be to find the good stuff.
I've seen a lot of people discovering that Patreon-model support can be way more successful for them than ad support. People don't like to pay for free shit - in the age of Zero Marginal Cost, paying for digital goods always makes me feel like a bit of a sucker, but I suck it up and do it because I don't want to break the incentive structure by not rewarding the creator for their work. And I do want the creator to be rewarded.
Divorcing the two - giving out free stuff, and also providing a way to directly toss someone a continuing stream of money to help them make this stuff based on how much I value making that happen - would seem to be the perfect compromise.
Since there are quite many such places left, I cannot really emphasis with this position, to be honest. Access is a personal choice.
Can you elaborate on this? I mean the part that someone shouldn't have a voice. By what mechanism should we take or deny someone a voice?
Perhaps you meant it as nothing more than a casual remark, in a "I just wish the world was somehow magically different" way. But I think it's really important to think about what actual mechanisms are we desiring be implemented in that world, and what such a world would look like.
Today anyone can post any random thought on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc and have that viewed and shared anywhere from dozens to millions of times regardless of how accurate, insightful, truthful it really is.
Now the onus is more on the reader to double-check and verify what they are reading since there is simply so much garbage.
Certainly there are benefits as well, where people who have something important to share can do so easily, unfortunately I think it's easy to be drowned out by all the noise.
It's certainly hard to argue that you should take away any "one" voice as that would be unconstitutional, but maybe there should be better ways of filtering information for each individual so they don't have to see stuff they don't want to.
Yeah, I think it's hopeless (at best) or totalitarian (at worst) to try to stop people from putting stuff online. You mention that the filter used to exist before (such as working for news organization or being able to run a website), but that's an unstable state of affairs - as soon as someone creates Twitter you have to either accept it's existence or take it down.
So only possible way to improve things is to create tools and know-how on information consumer side - filtering tools, easy way to check references and a habit to actually do it, good discussion platforms, etc. Anything else is a cure far worse than disease.
But if common ground is only thing that's left, you have an echo chamber. How to dial this in? I have no idea. HN seems to do this better than most, although some topics fare better than others.
[0] - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-...
I'm not mentioning names since I'm sure everyone's list of "ideas that should have stayed dead" is different, but you get the idea. The commonalities amongst that list between different people can form the basis for a metric for which ideas should be rebroadcast and which should be allowed to die
To rephrase my point, we are denying ourselves a beneficial natural selection by giving everyone a potentially global voice
What disagreement? I did not even make any statements or expressed opinion on whether it's good (whatever that might mean) that everyone has a voice (at least in my reply to you). I simply asked:
> By what mechanism should we take or deny someone a voice?
Without that we are simply daydreaming about how everything would be better if only things were better. Which is OK, just not very useful if you stop there.
https://bust.com/books/16795-penny-dreadfuls-and-moral-panic...
it was in the arts section and it was about a group of black artists who were suddenly being recognized in their 70s and 80s. It was a frustrating read, a sort of too-little-too-late scenario because, sure, it’s always nice to get half a million dollars for your work, but where was the money when you were actually producing the work, while supporting a family and paying a mortgage, with many decades of life ahead of you? When you could run to speaking engagements instead of rolling to them? “The kind of elation I may have had back 30 years, I’m past that point,” 75-year-old artist Howardena Pindell said. Where was all of this back in 1989? Oh, right, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons — guess they took up the allotted spots.
Steam for example has had to deal with people embedding miners in their games, asset flips and games designed for the sake of selling cards on the digital marketplace.
Youtube has auto-generated videos designed to take advantage of their recommendation algorithm to reach people that are less capable of curating content themselves like kids. Not to mention the algorithmic rabbit hole you can be taken down leading into extreme conspiracy theory territory and viewbots which push non-popular content out of the way.
And I could talk at lengths at how companies abuse the various app stores by creating keyword spaghetti such as 'Fortnight Battle Royale Mini Battleground Survival' designed in order to fool people while making money off of a barrage of in-game ads. Without curation, you're accepting that a certain portion of your users are going to be scammers and that some users will be scammed. Whether it's through gaming the views, the search engine or the recommendation algorithms.
When was the last time you saw anything as weird, experimental, and creative as, say, Homestuck? (Which was a huge multimedia webcomic...thing combining art, music, Flash animations, small interactive games, and a deeply ridiculous story centered around time travel and the meaning of online friendships.)
Or something like Homestar Runner?
What's the best webcomic you've found that was started in the past 5 years? The best new blog?
YouTube's been getting increasingly dry and filtered as ad scare after ad scare forces people to tone down their content - even things like science channels have been getting hit for seeming too dangerous. The move off of forums and blogs to content platforms means that the kinds of expression that are even possible is increasingly restricted. Across the whole web, the rise of higher-budget and more-professional stuff has been discouraging and driving out weird amateur crap from getting started in the first place - meaning that it never develops into higher-quality stuff that would bring those novel ideas to a shine.
It's easier than ever to find polished content, but the diversity of that content is usually less, and still shrinking.
I eventually went back to RSS, picked feeds from twenty or so minor news sources focused on my interests, and in general I'm much more satisfied. I eventually started using Pocket as well to retain a small trickle of "best of", which has the best ratio of interesting headlines (to me) I've encountered in an aggregator.
It works because it services majority tastes specifically at the expense of minority ones.
Put another way, imagine you’re a PM trying to make a chart go up and to the right. Here’s a magic algorithm that gives you best users more of what they want, and ones for whom the product doesn’t work no reason to stick around so they leave.
An increasing numerator with a decreasing denominator. That’s a hyperbolic upwards curve! Promote that PM! You let the prisoners run the asylum in this case, choosing which metrics they will be evaluated on, that totally runs counter to the whole point of building platforms.
As long as your inbound user count exceeds churn due to booting out people with minority tastes—which a PM EXTREMELY RARELY had anything to do with—the PM’s career takes off.
No dude, discoverability as it is defined by every tech company is killing culture. And it’s Product Management that’s holding the knife.
Everybody has some minority tastes. Everyone's got their own long tail of stuff they like. Obviously there's stuff that's more popular than other stuff - otherwise they wouldn't be majority tastes - but it's not like someone who watches Jimmy Kimmel on Youtube therefore doesn't also enjoy, like, woodworking channels.
The difference is, I guess, what you're willing to settle for - if the algorithm discovers you like a thing that's easy to find more of, it will really start shoving that in your face, because it's easy, and if you're not persistent enough to keep seeking out specialty content despite the tide, then the popular stuff is what you're going to get.
I understand, but it’s more than that.
I mean pretty soon, if you ask a kid to describe what a movie is, they might say a long video with eight to ten superheroes in it.
All this sameness is stunting our imagination.
The "sameness" makes the technical burden easier for anyone who develops a search engine. If more searches had to be treated as "unique" this would require more resources and more time to complete. Sameness allows results to be returned faster.
Thus Google and others providing "search" are invcentivized to facilitate what you call the "cultural selection" process, i.e. selection by popularity. This article reflects a common view that this process is not adequate for all type of "content".
In the early days of web search engines, sites like AltaVista or later Google, would include a line on the results page boasting about the number of returned results and the number of pages searched, drawing attention to the size of their database and presumably the variety it would contain.
The irony of this is that we see now that Google, and any other who followed their lead, does not want nor expect people rapidly digging deep into search results. The majority of queries they receive are repeat queries. They would prefer and they expect that users be content with a "top search result", never moving beyond "page one". This not only lessens the technical burden, it can be presented as "what people want", they can portray this as the optimal "experience" for the user. Whereas someone who keeps digging and digging for more would draw suspicion and be blocked. Genuine curiousity, often a hallmark of intelligence, is not accounted for.
The system is geared toward delivering the sameness that purportedly all (e.g., 80% of) users want, as efficiently as possible. They offer no option (for the remaining 20%) to sort all results alphabetically, by date, or some other field or to download a list of all results to do this offline. Even sorting by "relevance" is a non-transparent process. It is not a disclosed algorithm and we are not allowed to do our own relevance filtering on raw results. What we get has already been pre-filtered. Advertisers pay the bills.
If the majority of users never reach page two, then an ad at the top of page one can command a higher price. The order of results is all-important. The user is not allowed to control the order.
"Everything is on the web" and yet doing "real" research -- as, e.g., one would using a databse in a library - is, 30 years on, still nigh impossible. Advertising is the problem, as the Google founders published in their search engine paper announcing Google in the 1990's. Alas, they later found advertising was the solution... to commercializing what was originally meant to be academic.
That same assumption is playing out in the world of web content strategy. What is the incentive to write about obscure topics when keywords like "Netflix", "Marie Kondo", "Trump" etc will near-guarantee more shares, more clicks and more ad impressions?
And I'm thinking about a story I saw here a little earlier this morning about a guy who built his gleefully stupid idea of "a dating site for fans of Kanye West" into something that got him a meeting with that star. [1]
And I'm thinking about The KLF's "The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way" [2] and how much that Kanye-dating story reminded me of the parts of that which weren't specifically about the nuts and bolts of making a pop song for eighties Britain.
And I don't necessarily have any conclusions. Something about the role of advertising in our culture to grab attention, to tell people that hey, this thing you might like exists, and to repeatedly tell them that until they actually bother having a look at the thing [3] and maybe deciding they like it enough to tell other people about it and maybe even give you a little money for the thing, and how hard it is to keep doing that when you're focused on honing your craft and doing the best whatever-it-is you can do around the demands of keeping a roof over your head, and who the hell can find time to do all that advertising, let alone learn how to do it effectively.
And you know who has the money to pay people to do all that advertising? Mostly people working for the megacorporations that squat over our cultural landscape, making work that walks a fine line between being new enough to be different, but close enough to existing successful work to be able to get funding.
And once again I want to start that Kickstarter to dig up the corpse of Jesse Helms and do terrible things to him in vengeance for his role in gutting the NEA that I keep making jokes about lately.
1: https://thekanyestory.com/, hn discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19523853 (such as it is)
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual - the full text is one search for "klf manual" away
3: tangentially, I make nerdy comics about robot ladies with reality problems (http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/) and cartoon animals in space (http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/) and am working on reprinting my super-stylized and nerdy tarot deck (http://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/)