
On Flooding: Drowning the Culture in Sameness - howard941
https://longreads.com/2019/03/29/on-flooding-drowning-the-culture-in-sameness/
======
tomc1985
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.

~~~
i_am_proteus
I have similar sentiments; I wonder if there's any future for paid, curated
content given society's invention and use of pejorative terms (paywalls!) for
publishers who restrict their content to paid subscribers. It's not like we
were just paying for the ink and paper back in 1993.

~~~
CM30
Hard to say. There's definitely a future for curated content; Hacker News,
Reddit etc are basically that. As are numerous newsletters, blog articles and
videos listing interesting or underrated resources and creators.

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.

~~~
AstralStorm
Are they really curated? What they actually are is a reflection of community
of people inhabiting then, posting and upvoting. Being a curator implies a
degree of objectivity and skill more than getting votes. Including building a
cohesive whole.

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briga
The problem is that there's just too much out there--too many books, movies,
TV shows, news articles, blog posts. No one has time to keep up with it, so
some sort of cultural selection process is necessary. The only content that
can stand out is content that can get views, and it just so happens that a lot
of that content is the same. Until we have more platforms that don't rely on
ads to keep those engagement rates high I think we're stuck with this
situation. Maybe it's just an inevitable by-product of a world where anyone
can produce anything and instantly publish it for the whole world to see.

~~~
ip26
I would argue that the infrastructure we have could do a much better job of
discoverability & catering to a variety of interests. Selection is good &
necessary, but none of the big news players have been able to figure out that
I'm far more interested in Tommy Caldwell than Kim Kardashian, so to this day
pop entertainment headlines I never visit continue to scroll past. Tailoring
to interests could broaden the range of useful content that generates views.

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.

~~~
doctorpangloss
Discoverability has long ago reduced to collaborative filtering.

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.

~~~
MrEldritch
I don't buy this argument - specifically, I don't buy that there are normbie
pleb users with "majority tastes" as opposed to the patricians with refined,
elite "minority tastes."

 _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_.

------
rchaud
You know how every couple of months there's an article posted on HN about why
web design feels so generic today? The responses are usually of the "people
want a familiar UX" and "design that doesn't convert isn't worth anything".

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?

------
egypturnash
I'm thinking about end of this piece, where it briefly discusses some artists
who are finding some measure of fame and fortune in their seventies and
eighties.

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/](https://thekanyestory.com/), hn discussion at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19523853](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19523853)
(such as it is)

2:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual](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/](http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/)) and cartoon
animals in space
([http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/](http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/)) and
am working on reprinting my super-stylized and nerdy tarot deck
([http://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/](http://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/))

------
foobarbecue
If only the internet experience was more like wandering though the shelves of
a library.

~~~
int_19h
It can be if you want it to. The problem is that it's a library big enough
that you can spend your entire life wandering, and still only see a small part
of it.

~~~
foobarbecue
How? I want shelves full of curated but not necessarily popular material,
organized by dewey decimal system so that I can physically step through
subjects. The closest thing I can think of online is wikipedia, and that's a
long way off.

