The downside of accessibility -- now, everyone has a voice, even if they shouldn't. I never thought I'd be saying this but I am beginning to miss the curation created by high costs of entry.
https://bust.com/books/16795-penny-dreadfuls-and-moral-panic...
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.
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.
Since there are quite many such places left, I cannot really emphasis with this position, to be honest. Access is a personal choice.
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.
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.