
Taste is increasingly dictated by algorithms - raleighm
https://www.racked.com/2018/4/17/17219166/fashion-style-algorithm-amazon-echo-look
======
pnathan
> No one is original anymore, not even you.

Article opens with the quote, but that's the essence of a vast amount of art
through the ages: only the thinnest bit of art is truly original, and looking
to get rid of the non-original bits generates absurd junk.

I would argue that the cult of original and the cult of individualism-via-
consumerism is largely an 1800s ideology filtered through post-war marketing.
"only by consuming a unique set can you truly be yourself" is a fascinating
and materialist way of looking at the world.

Gently, I would suggest that we are neither original nor should we find our
identity in material goods.

Elsewhere in this thread the word "serendipity" is used - this is a true
observation in my opinion. The internet removes serendipity, replacing it with
"you may also like". While libraries have librarians making selections, they
also allow for a free-range wandering over the stacks, rather than keeping you
in one specific area of "you may also like". That is something worth thinking
about, and, I think, solvable.

~~~
nileshtrivedi
> they also allow for a free-range wandering over the stacks, rather than
> keeping you in one specific area of "you may also like"

You mean like the "Random" links on Wikipedia and Reddit?

~~~
pnathan
no.

libraries are curated, organized, and structured to allow browsing.

random does nothing of the above.

meaning is a polyspectral space, and libraries are a lower-dimensional
reduction of that to allow perusal through multiple bands of meaning. while
the result may be arbitrary, it's within the bounds of the arc in the meaning-
space. In addition, the curation of books means that arrant nonsense is culled
(hello r/ooer), and highly niche bits of meaning are stored in appropriate
places - usually residing in academic journals housed in university libraries.

~~~
gowld
Libraries are also tiny though. Subreddits also have curated lists of related
subreddits in sidebar. /r/popular and /r/all give you a sample of posts from
various subreddits (curated by users), which then link to related subs. Each
sub itself is a browsable and sortable collection of related content.

~~~
pnathan
Yes, definitely. I would consider a subreddit to be something _like_ a daily
magazine, and the curated lists to be something _like_ a collection of them.

Libraries.... are not precisely tiny. Depends on the library. And a shocking
amount of internet statements have a shockingly small entropy.....

------
greggarious
I'm a film buff and I think so. A lot of people don't seem to go out of their
way to obtain films aside from looking at Netflix recommendations. Back when I
used OkCupid I could tell when something older went on because it immediately
got listed under "favorite movies" by a certain type of hipster ;)

(I distinctly remember how overnight everyone looooovveeed Amelie when it went
up)

Sadly it's a lot harder to find new (or new to me) films serendipitously. With
the closing of rental shops, the last bastion seems to be the DVD section at
local libraries.

~~~
mattkrause
Do you think people actually like—or are claiming to like—a movie just because
Netflix recommends it? To me, it seems more likely that this just reflects
increase availability: more people suddenly have access to a movie, so more
watch it and some of those will like it.

I can see how people, especially on a dating site, would feel pressured to
mention something highbrow, but the social pressure itself isn’t coming from
Netflix.

~~~
gascan
They weren't pressured to like it, but without the "algorithm" showing it to
them, they never would have discovered it.

------
pradn
I don't see a significant difference between algorithmic and old-guard mass-
media taste-makers. Your personality reflects the profile used to target you
with ads for objects like Eames chairs and MCM consoles. Your same personality
pushes you to choose Architecture Review, which contains objects of the same
style. Fashion magazines get paid by advertisers to showcase products of a
certain style and cache even in their non-ad sections. The thin layer of a
Vogue editor doesn't shield you from market forces buying your taste and
making you feel like the sort of person who chooses a certain style. The
homogenizing tendency of mass-media is present in either circumstance.

Most people aren't underground reading fashion zines or choosing to follow
edgy fashion designers from Serbia. The dominant culture perpetuates itself
either way.

------
majormajor
Pop-up galleries designed for instagram selfie appeal, restaurant trendiness
where one ramen place is the "internet approved" one and has an hour long
line, and a place two blocks away with a different style - but not really
worse, just not as trendy - has no line at all, etc - there are definitely
ways in which there's more of a hive mind than ever. The meme popularity of
bacon on the internet, even. For a more local example: growing up, Whataburger
was just another Texas fast food option, not a tightly-held piece of people's
online identities.

But at the same time, there's a lot of opportunities for increased
individualism. You can buy clothes and furniture from far more places. You can
much more exhaustively search restaurants. You have way more options in what
you watch and listen to. Even the existence of "mainstream hipster" taste in
movies is a change compared to just "maintstream" being a single thing.

So is personal taste really less present than it used to be? I don't think so,
I think the domains just shifted around a bit.

------
Asdfbla
On the topic of algorithms helping you discover your own 'taste' (whatever
that may be), some time ago when the topic came up on HN someone linked this
interesting paper: "Recommender Systems for Self-Actualization" [1], which
suggests some methods how filter bubbles could be avoided. I really liked it
and its suggestions like having extra recommendation lists for things the user
will likely hate, items that are very polarizing in the user base or things no
one ever rated before.

[1] [https://sci-
hub.tw/https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=295918...](https://sci-
hub.tw/https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2959189)

~~~
raleighm
Cool paper. Thanks

------
MrL567
Reminds me of this [https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-
aesthetic-...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-
global-minimalism-startup-gentrification) article on how airbnb has changed
the aesthetics of certain places. I feel like fears of algorithmic based
fashion is overgrown but articles like this and that one show that something
did happen that resulted in taste in certain places converging onto a similar
style.

------
firasd
Really interesting article. Weird thing is that in the social media era,
humans ourselves seem behave in algorithmic ways. My Twitter feed is full of
Beyonce worship every few months even though I've been mostly-indifferent to
her music for 20 years. But when people come together like a hive and retweet
how they excited they are about some shared interest, there doesn't need to be
a recommendation engine pushing a specific artist—it's just people using tools
to amplify their voices, creating the same algorithmic-bias effect. To
paraphrase the Soylent Green line, "Algorithms—it's people!"

~~~
bitwize
When I was in Japan in 2011, nearly every girl I talked to had the same
favorite singer -- Lady Gaga. I noticed that Japanese pop culture diversifies
in time rather than space: something reaches critical mass and then sweeps the
entire nation like cherry blossom season, only to be swept away by the next
big thing weeks later. Also trending at that time were the anime One Piece and
the Disney character Stitch (who had just gotten his own anime which was the
canon sequel to Lilo and Stitch and takes place in Okinawa rather than
Hawaii). Previous trends are traceable even after they've left Japan: in the
late 1980s, Nickelodeon suddenly picked up several shows featuring koalas.
What had happened was, a few years earlier, an Australian zoo donated a
breeding pair of koalas to a Japanese zoo, and that triggered "koala mania" in
Japan with koala-themed anime becoming popular. A similar mania involving
hamsters struck in the early 2000s.

Japanese people are individuals, but Japanese _society_ favors the collective,
and the person who goes along to get along. Accordingly, people are rewarded
for adding their voices to the throngs supporting something that is already
popular or favored by the elite, much less so for cultivating individual
tastes, which are pushed to the sidelines (think back-alley Akihabara with its
tsundere maid cafés and other businesses of peculiar interest).

In the USA we put high value on "being an individual like everyone else".
Social media has simply amplified the "like everyone else" bit by making it
easy to keep track of what everyone else is doing. Something that's been
ongoing in Japan for decades if not centuries. (The koseki can be considered a
form of paper-and-ink social media.)

~~~
blattimwind
> Japanese pop culture diversifies in time rather than space

That's not diversity, it's simply pop culture.

------
jxub
Not mine. I'm still really fond of quicksort and BFS, and marvel at their
elegance rather frequently.

------
dehugger
I cant speak for all mediums, but Spotify's "Related Artists" feature has
grown my personal taste in music more then anything else ever has. The ability
to easily find similar artists to the one I am currently enjoying drastically
lowered the barrier to entry for me and music.

~~~
mozumder
I've always found playlists or indie music stations with actual DJs worked
better than Spotify's algorithmic selections.

Same with movie/TV show recommendations.

------
andyidsinga
This is a really thought provoking article. I especially like the reference to
the movie The Devil Wears Prada, because in essence, what is being described
is a very complex algorithm embedded in a large group of people observing a
lot of things (fashion trends).

The question raised in my mind is this: where is the tipping point at which
the answers / predictions in that algorithm become stale or shift rapidly and
require an answer that is orthogonal to previews answers (!) but still
"correct". This tipping point seems to be what taste is about to some degree.
..so now we need an algorithm to predict the tipping point; its algorithms all
the way down.

------
neap24
It is pretty difficult for Netflix or Amazon to have recommendations that
appeal to me because their datasets are limited to their specific domains. In
reality, my tastes and interests pull from such a wide range of fields.

One year, I decided to only watch movies filmed in, or about, the state where
I live. One year I caught up on famous horror movies I hadn't seen. None of
these ideas was "suggested" to me directly. Nor, do they really seem related
to each other. For me, at least, it seems a long way off before computer
algorithms are affecting the way my brain chooses something it likes or wants
to try.

~~~
thirdsun
Yes, I see this issue with Netflix very often. Watching Narcos doesn't mean
I'm interested in every mediocre drug-related documentary. Instead I'm looking
for high quality, detailed, in-depth productions covering a wide array of very
different themes, topics, locations and periods.

Algorithms don't seem to be able to solve this problem yet. Certainly not
those used at Netflix.

------
malvosenior
> That we are in the midst of this shift in taste might help explain our
> larger mood of instability and paranoia (or is it just me?).

It's just you. There's always been a mainstream and an underground. Now the
underground is _much_ larger and more diverse and arguably the mainstream is a
bit better (due to said diversity).

Source: I lived through the 90s and was basically forced by Clear Channel to
listen to Ozzy Osbourne 24/7 on every station on the dial.

~~~
bazzlexposition
Great point, they didn't have algorithms deciding our music in the 1990s,
instead you had Clear Channel. Radio in the 1990s was the same 40-60 songs
played over and over. Then for TV you basically had the 4 major networks,FOX
Friday Night, Must See TV, TGIF, and all the rest.

People don't remember how much that sucked.

~~~
dragonwriter
Actually, in the 1990s was the peak of major commercial broadcast networks
with 6, not 4 (the old big 3, plus Fox, plus UPN And The WB.)

~~~
bazzlexposition
Ah yes, the Wayans Brothers channel and the Star Trek Voyager channel

------
kristianc
It would probably help the argument if all of the 'data-driven' products:
dropshipped watches, Echo Look, whatever the hell 'Svpply' is, and virtual
Instagram influencers weren't completely obscure. None of these things
represent mainstream culture in any way, and as a result this article starts
to look more like an exercise in the writer showing how smart and well-
connected he is.

------
SadWebDeveloper
No, social media exposes us to a bigger world making it more easily to find
people like you online that share the same interests or "taste". If you only
take into account people on your close social circle, you will still be "the
one with that unique taste" around your bubble like everyone used to think
they had -a unique taste- before social media.

------
thisisit
I think lot of media seems to misunderstand the idea of algorithms - They are
not there to do the job for you, they are there to help you.

Taking the dating example from the article - it speaks less about intimacy and
more about people's expectation. Does matching means a sure shot chance of
intimacy? Not really. Algo thinks that two particular people might go well
together. A role previously played by a mutual friend.

Similarly, there are tons of people who want to wear better clothes but given
lack of knowledge turn to YT or a personal stylist. So, the app might help
them make better choices. Surely, people who are stylish might never use the
app.

That said, technology companies do have a habit of overselling features
sending media into a tizzy.

------
egypturnash
I find the illustrations in this somewhat profoundly undermine the thesis of
this article, given that they are rooted in the “vaporwave” aesthetic, which
basically comes from Millennials sorting through their faint memories of the
80s culture they were born into.

------
dang
This submission is rather more substantive than the titles it's had so far
("Have Algorithms Destroyed Personal Taste?", which we renamed to "Style Is an
Algorithm" per
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)),
so I've taken another crack at it. If anyone suggests a better title—one that
is accurate, neutral, and preferably uses representative language from the
article—we can change it again.

------
explodingcamera
These algorithems don't destroy our taste, they shape it. If it woundnt be for
IMDb recommendations, I'd be wasting a lot more time watching bad movies.

~~~
onion2k
_If it woundnt be for IMDb recommendations, I 'd be wasting a lot more time
watching bad movies._

You'd spend more time watching movies that registered IMDb users didn't rate
highly. That's only "bad movies" if you enjoy films for the same reasons that
registered IMDb users give them high scores on IMDb. There are plenty of films
that don't score highly on there that _millions_ of people who are a bit less
invested in the film industry absolutely love. Maybe you would too.

------
mar77i
When it comes to these things, I remember when I was younger, how "metal"
always was an interesting study object. I would have to decide myself which of
it was "artsy" and which of it was just "for the masses", and the further back
you go, the more you find that it's not mutually exclusive. E.g. we're not
going to argue over the Beatles, Pink Floyd or Iron Maiden.

I listen to various music these days, but I waste "comparably little" time in
algorithmic maybe land. As opposed to the constant consumption pressure some
people expose themselves with ... whatever the hell that camera does between
watching women change.

------
acdha
Definitely – services like Spotify or Apple Music make it easy to listen to
the same top n tracks as everyone else but the lack of an effective training
mechanism makes it really hard to break out of the recommendation loop and the
cumbersome UI discourages attempting to find things yourself because
everything is built on the assumption that the recommendation engine is worth
using.

Since they’re widely used, there’s no room for local color or taste the way
you used to have local reviewers, independent store clerks, etc. Everyone in
the country gets the same thing.

------
lkrubner
Worth remembering is Clay Shirky’s Point about taste, recommendations and
power law curves. A paradox of the situation is the growth of these systems,
and their elimination of other systems, can ensure that each individual has
more options than before, while the total of all options declines.

[http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w...](http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_weblog.html)

------
tw1010
Clickbait titles does a disservice to the purpose of the body of an article in
the sense that it gives easy ammunition to naysayers who will default to
pointing out that the degree to which the argument is valid is incorrect. Yes,
algorithms may have influenced personal taste in some ways. But has it
"destroyed" personal taste? No, that's probably too extreme.

------
crankylinuxuser
Again, the core "meat and potatoes" of this article is that neural networks
that do the thinking are black boxes. We know not how they are trained, know
not their biases, and know not how they come to a specific decision.

But we are supposed to trust the NN in my life? I think not!

------
al2o3cr
Shorter this article: "I liked it better when my taste was dictated by who
paid the most to advertising agencies, not algorithms"

In all seriousness, consider the bit listed under "how to resist the
algorithm" (quotes indented):

    
    
        I might only read books I stumble across in used bookstores,
    

...which have been filtered by publishers deciding which manuscripts to
publish, a past consumer deciding which book to buy, AND a used bookstore
deciding which books to purchase for resale

    
    
        only watch TV shows on local channels,
    

...which are frequently central-planned from a national network, as well as
the massive filter that decides which stories should be TV programs

    
    
        only buy vinyl,
    

...which is filtered much like the used books

    
    
        only write letters,
    

Got me on this one, but letters != culture IMO

    
    
        forsake social media for print newspapers,
    

...which have editors who decide which stories to run, and advertisers those
editors want to keep happy

    
    
        wear only found vintage.
    

...which is subject to not only the filters applied to fashion when the
garments were made, but also filtering at the used clothing store.

These processes aren't new - ever wonder why so many pop songs are under 5
minutes (hint: it's not because that's an artistic decision)? In a lot of
ways, digital technology demolishes the old barriers; for instance, releasing
music doesn't take a significant up-front investment in pressing physical
copies & distributing them to stores, so it's easier than ever for that
content to get out. _Out_ is key there, IMO - just because it's released
doesn't mean anybody ever hears it. Seems like "the algorithm" might actually
help in that situation, however: maybe the music only has 200 people that want
it, making an old-school marketing push totally impractical.

~~~
tomc1985
The difference is that those old ways allowed for greater personal agency.
Perusing old books requires selection and even a bit of curation on part of
the buyer, whereas algorithmic recommendations make deciding fairly mindless.

You write as if the filters you lament are bad. I think, given the
overabundance of mischaracterized crap that seems to clutter up
'algorithmically' filtered exchanges (YouTube, Netflix, etc) I will take human
curation and filtration any day of the week, biases and all.

Pandora and Spotify still can't build or execute a playlist like a good DJ
can. Netflix's recommendations still miss the mark way more than talking about
movies/shows with friends.

~~~
kristianc
> Pandora and Spotify still can't build or execute a playlist like a good DJ
> can.

Spotify's playlists are at least in part human curated, so not sure how you
got to that conclusion.

~~~
melq
He's obviously talking about the ones that aren't, such as the 'Discover
Weekly' and the way it will guess at what to play next after an album
finishes.

I believe his point is that the algorithms don't generate playlists or dj
mixes with the same polish as a professional human and I'm inclined to agree.
That said, I do think their recommendation engine produces decent results, but
I don't think the composition of the list is something it focuses on. Rather
its just a list of unrelated tracks it thinks you'd be inclined to enjoy on
their own.

~~~
tomc1985
Exactly. A playlist full of tracks chosen at seeming random lacks the inter-
track context that a DJ can add through his choice in selections. Auto-
generated playlists have no sense of flow and transition.

You can similarly ruin a good, curated playlist by hitting shuffle.

------
venuur
How are recommendation algorithms robbing anyone? I can understand a credit
score algorithm denying a loan as potentially robbing. Recommendations seem at
the worst to be as annoying as a poorly curated catalogue. Am I missing
something?

------
Finnucane
'Yer ugly and your Echo dresses you funny.'

------
Mononokay
Answer: no.

