Your comment feels good to read, to some extent. We are flooded with low quality content (art, music, books, articles), but we also have more high quality content than (probably) ever before. When you say “give everyone with no taste the means to create more mediocrity” I get the sense that you are overwhelmed with search results or feeds that are saturated with things you find unimpressive. Some of that comes with age (more experiences - that eventually overlap - can/will leave us wanting something new), but I think that’s more of a problem with curation than it is with an over abundance of mediocrity, or a lack of newness. I doubt everyone would hop onto the bandwagon and start creating mediocre <thing>. You have to already be interested in something to partake in its creation, and taste doesn’t magically exist without dabbling and experience and exposure to whatever the <thing> is. So maybe some of what you are seeing is more people exploring their interests and you happen to have similar interests that are maybe more developed or refined or opinionated.
Even before the democratization of art we were still flooded with crap. I've spent a lot of time curating through DJing and collecting digital music, and the goal has always been to find that 1% that is amazing in the sea of 99% crap.
That sea of 99% crap is beginning to feel like 99.9% if I widen my search parameters to all the "modern" sources that are algorithmically "curated" for me.
Call me a gatekeeper but art needs barriers and it needs to be hard. The process of overcoming those barriers contributes to an artists' skill, and conquering the difficult helps them to define their own style. The platform should not be favoring the unaccomplished and the accomplished with equal weight.
And the problem isn't just my feed. It's everyone's feed. Peoples' tastes conform to the constraints of the world around them -- if you grow up in a household and culture that loves bluegrass music, for example, there's a strong chance you will like it too. After talking with lots of local brewers I believe that IPAs are super popular around here because they're the most economical kind of beer to make in the climate I live in. Which means there's tons of them on the shelves, which means lots of people will buy them for no particular reason other than because they are there and suddenly now that's the predominant local taste.
If we surround people with crap (which is what we are doing), crap becomes the new standard and the new taste, dragging down society along with it. We are currently doing this with computers and look at all the mediocrity we've created in tech so that the smallminded can give their money to enterpreneurs with equal weighting as the nerds.
> The platform should not be favoring the unaccomplished and the accomplished with equal weight [...] tastes conform to the constraints of the world around them
A lot of great thoughts here; I see this as the gist of it. Modern media platforms have continually struggled to rank art in terms of quality. It may appear to be an impossible task because to some extent it's subjective, but we seemed to have done better in the past with human curators.
Since general AI is almost certainly a long way off, the most we can expect from algorithms is to help us narrow down various categories. Someone still needs to be at the wheel to further refine or rank the results. The alternative is indeed much like swimming through a sea of excrement in search of a few rare pearls.
There is already a system for this: DJs, radio, and mixes. But the DJs need to control the radio or the mix, and they need to do so solely for artistic or aesthetic reasons, not commercial, political, or economic ones.
If the music can be easily identified (either by IDing the track directly or via something like Shazam), and the listener has found a DJ they like, finding that 1% becomes really easy. Curated playlists is moving in the right direction, but you're still missing out on the extra context and flourish that a good selector can add.
The signal-to-noise ratio for this approach is extremely high; the right party or twitch stream can be worth 10x the amount of time spent trawling through Spotify's daily playlists.
