Old person (58) perspective -- You don't remember what it was like before the internet. We had a (1) local newspaper, Channels 2,5,7,9,11 and 32 on the TV. The most artistic things available on TV were William Alexander, Julia Child, and The Woodwright's shop.
There was an explosion of things when VHS and Cable TV showed up, but still... the variety wasn't that great because they had to satisfy mass audiences.
We've now got the long tail. If you want to watch a person clear out plugged drains for amusement, there's Post10. If you want to watch the machining of metal, there's MrPete222, ThisOldTony, ClickSpring, etc. If you want to learn about math, 3Blue1Brown, Mathologer, etc. There's PeriodicVideos, etc.
And the Podcasts... so many podcasts. The tail is long and wild and wonderful.
If there's something you're interested in, there's a niche somewhere exploring it.
One thing does suck, though... the elimination of social sharing of bookmarks, music, videos, etc.
For example, when Napster was a thing, I started buying 2-5 CDs per payday because I was discovering so much great stuff. They they (the record companies) started comparing the sharing of music with Piracy of Ships on the High Sea, and suing customers... and things imploded. F*ck the record companies!
Delicio.us was a social bookmarking site - it was an awesome way to discover interesting things because people actually shared their bookmarks, and discovered new ones... then it got killed
This trend repeats over and over as too much capital seeks too few resources. 8(
Are you looking for a site where people share interesting links on a variety of subjects? Perhaps we could make it even better if we had high quality discussion of those links. But of course, we should have good moderation of the submissions and comments so folks stay on topic. Maybe we could bootstrap the site by appealing to a small subculture, like “news for hackers”.
I've been on hn for a long time and I like it for what it is. But it doesn't do music discovery and only occasionally does other sorts of discovery. There are plenty of things to miss about the earlier web.
subreddits? basically music subreddits are half the usual reposts and the other half is the usual reposts of "recommend me artists/albums/tracks like this" :)
Voting systems are based inherently on popularity.
Whether that's direct or whether it's a FoaF operation, such as "those who like x also enjoy y" - it's still a popularity system.
All popularity systems centralize and are extremely hostile to divergences and counterintuitive things.
It'd be like if you asked the bedeviling Monty Hall problem, took a survey of the most common answer and only presented that one while the correct one gets hidden and downvoted. The centralizing feedback loop is because you're now reinforcing the most common wrong answer as the right one and thus the noise becomes the signal.
The failure of these systems is it pushes up those who know how to be popular and not expertise. It regurgitates commonality.
There's other ways. You can for instance, take a movie you like, see what studio made it, the director, the whatever - sound engineer, then browse out from there. It's a version of the Monty Hall problem where you go "let's only look at what most mathematicians say".
My favorite analogy for this is if you went to a beginner's karate/yoga/physical therapy class on the first day and took a survey of a proper punch/movement and considered the instructor's opinion as an equal vote with the 20 other first day people and went with whatever the plurality was. Or you went to the doctor's office and along with the doctor, surveyed the patients in the waiting room what their opinion of your ailment was. Or a foreign language class and had the students guess a translation and assign the fluent instructor's answer equal weight.
No really, that's how we've structured most content curation on the internet. Exactly like that.
Naive equal democracy and systems weighted in popularity are fine for general purposes but completely fail for the narrowband where specialized expertise is desired because it occludes expert knowledge systems and networks and swaps it out for popularity systems and tribes.
I'm always surprised and intrigued when people recall discovering music through Napster. All I remember is using it as a pirate search engine for songs that I already knew I wanted.
How did Napster work as a music discovery tool? Obviously there was some aspect I was missing out on.
Before it got weird, you could look and see all the music a given person was sharing.... and that's how I found some amazing stuff I'd never heard on the mainstream radio stations.
I figured it was the right thing to do to actually buy the music, so I was doing that. Somewhere I've got a few hundred CDs on spindles that I bought retail at full price.
>Delicio.us was a social bookmarking site - it was an awesome way to discover interesting things because people actually shared their bookmarks, and discovered new ones... then it got killed
There are still social bookmarking sites. However:
1. Relatively speaking, very few people use them
2. Even those of us who have been using them since delicio.us mostly don't bother sharing
The sharing is probably mostly on Twitter these days.
I use pinboard a lot but have my bookmarks defaulted to private so I don’t have to deal with the mental friction of whether someone would judge me for it.
Ironically my Twitter faves are likely much more useful in building a profile of me.
Pinterest is Del.icio.us for people outside of tech. It's widely used and the behaviors are almost exactly the same as how people used to use Del.icio.us.
And Spotify playlist sharing is a very common thing and a popular way for people tio discocver new music.
Spotify is doing this for me with their algorithms and playlists. I assume they're based on "other people that listen to this, also listen to this other thing".
> when Napster was a thing, I started buying 2-5 CDs per payday
You and no one else. Lars Ulrich was right.
Practically speaking it could be that bands‘ doing it all themselves may be an actual improvement, or may be a wash. Hard to tell. at least they have better control over their intellectual property.
In my case, I didn't buy CDs, but I did buy lots of singles. I was probably one of the earlier iTunes customers, and LimeWire and RantRadio were where I found my music.
> I’m not saying that all those ‘underground fringes’ that Anderson celebrated have disappeared—I’m merely claiming that they have less cultural impact than at almost any point in modern history.
The author seems to think about counter culture in terms of large groups like the bohemians and beatniks. Instead, we have an unlimited supply of niche communities people can join. Seems pretty great to me.
>Instead, we have an unlimited supply of niche communities people can join. Seems pretty great to me.
I think the issue is with the discoverability of those communities. When they're so small and niche and there are so many of them, discoverability suffers. There's a curation element that's missing and that algorithms driven by / manipulated by commercial pressure don't provide.
I don't think we have a modern day replacement for John Peel, for example. We have tons of content (soundcloud etc) but the few people sorting the wheat from the chaff don't seem to be able to muster an audience. The art/talent of curation is much undervalued.
> I think the issue is with the discoverability of those communities.
Honestly, I think this is why we don't see fatter tails than we see today. Google, YouTube, Netflix, and even Spotify push us into bubbles. Many of us are drawn in because on the exploration/exploitation scale it is high on exploration. But as we use the service more they focus more and more on exploitation. I remember awhile ago reading a blog my netflix (?) how it is actually easier to satisfy customers with wide variety of tastes and love the exploration paradigm. Maybe the next step is to figure out who is who or when someone is in a exploration mood. I'd assume that's common given that everyone jokes about scrolling around on Netflix for 15 minutes only to leave.
>Maybe the next step is to figure out who is who or when someone is in a exploration mood.
Why try and read people's minds when you can just make it an option? Half the problem (with so much modern tech) is algorithms trying to 'figure out' stuff like that. Just ask the user. And stop feeding back so much user behaviour into algorithms, it always converges to zero.
I would presume you'd want to have that explore option use different algorithms. When in the exploration situation you still want to narrow down what kinds of topics people want to find and not just a random assortment. You're always going to have to "read people's minds" to some extent because there's too much information and too many options out there. You should probably increase this exploration value as the user continues to scroll.
Also, if someone is scrolling and scrolling you'd probably want to increase your exploration hyperparameter as time goes by. So thus we're pretty much automating what is done above by user behavior. You don't really need to read someone's mind because they are already explicitly telling you that what you've presented to them isn't what they are looking for (otherwise they would have clicked it by now).
Though, for convenience I think you could find clear patterns in certain behaviors. For example, I'm one of those people that like to fall asleep to a show that I've seen a few times already. It is pretty easy to predict that. You can sure predict that if I'm opening Netflix late at night that I want to watch Star Trek.
Madjestic Kasual (not to be confused with the much more popular channel which this is a parody of) is a really interesting YouTube channel that does just that; the curator seems to spend a lot of time seeking out independent music of a particular aesthetic and sharing it and has mustered at least some audience. I'd like to collect more channels/aggregations/internet magazines like this
Marc Riley continues where John Peel left off.
Ezra furman's (guest filling for marc riley) shows also uncover a wealth of stuff, but less Now and more the last 5-10 years
Yeah, on Radio 6, which nobody who isn't a music enthusiast listens to. Peel's show was on R1. That's kinda what I'm saying about discoverability - how does anything get into the mainstream when 'mainstream' and 'up-and-coming' are now strictly segregated? There has to be a bridge connecting the two paths.
Maybe I'm just biased but I think it should be the job of the BBC to ram culture down people's necks whether they think they're going to like it or not, because otherwise they'll just listen to the same old crap for their entire lives.
The author alludes to something that resonated with me. I think the point he is trying to make is that even a lot of independent art is homogenized and tired because its underpinnings are more tied to a hustle-culture mindset than to actually asking something of the experiencer.
Yeah, look at the US population share of pre-cable, pre-internet things like I Love Lucy or Elvis. Nothing these days is even close to dominating pop culture in the same way.
The author doesn't see it because they're swimming in it (even Substack is part of it) and it's so common that it's no longer noteworthy. They pay attention just to what's happening inside tentpole motion pictures that they ignore how much bigger the world of content outside of them has gotten. There's no monolithic "counterculture" because there's now thousands of them.
I spend hours every week watching a British man solve sudoku variation puzzles, as do his half a million subscribers. Hard to imagine this happening before.
During the Rubik's Cube craze of the early 1980s, people would gather round to watch a skilled person solve one. I seem to recall even seeing it on TV. Behavior is the same, technology has just allowed a change in scale.
If you want to build your own keyboard, now there are a billion parts easily available and tons of instructional videos on it. When I was a kid, model aircraft were fun, but you’d either go to the local hobby store or look through the Tower Hobby catalog. People built kits or sometimes made things themselves, and a lot of really interesting techniques were passed down through clubs and mailing lists. Now with the drone scene, there are many many more parts to choose from, all kinds of simulators and flight assist technology to almost completely avoid the expensive and time-consuming build-fly-crash loop, tons of resources in forums, videos, discord servers (I guess we did have IRC back in the day which is part of how I learned programming).
The long tail has been growing since the 90s, but consumerism has been growing even faster.
Agreed! Television is so much better. Comics are better. Obscure music from all over the world is readily available rather than being stuck with top 40, solid gold, American bandstand. Board games are more variegated; beer culture has exploded; coffee tastes good. Pretty much everything that was dull and bland in my youth now has a rich fan culture. Kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it.
Pretty much everything that was dull and bland in my youth now has a rich fan culture. Kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it.
If only they had the gumption to time travel and get cushy BoomerJobs instead of gig-economy nightmare labor under tight quotas and constant surveillance, they'd even have the time and money to enjoy it.
Bob Ross and some old German guy painting on PBS would challenge Roy Underhill’s Dad Jokes any day.
If you want to watch someone swear about power tools, using swears you didn’t even know existed, AvE. And if that’s not weird enough for you, watch an ex-felon with a deep Chicago accent talk about plants on Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t.
It is also the last line in most episodes of Red Green, so I've never been sure if he's just making a general Canadian Cultural reference or specifically a Red Green reference.
You got 6 channels? What luxury that must have been?
We only got 3 reliably - the ABC and CBS affiliates, and an independent UHF station. That's right, we couldn't even get NBC programming. Once in awhile it would come through, and rarely the indie Channel 5 from NYC.
There was a small city several towns over, maybe a 25-30 minute drive, that had a daily paper. Locally we only had a weekly.
1) The 80/20 rule is a percent so absolute numbers can go up while relative numbers stay the same. So I’m not sure looking at absolute numbers of available items over time is good enough. You’d also want to look at sales/access I think (which isn’t the easiest to do).
2) You do bring up a good point. I wonder if there is a difference when an individual entity is largely responsible for market costs vs a market of producers where many individual entities are responsible for the costs / risks.
I haven’t thought this fully through but it seems like there might be something there (amazon products vs amazon seller products, spotify may be an exception here but how much music isn’t on the platform? vs soundcloud, youtube handles streaming costs/sales in the form of ads while producers handle production costs, and podcasts are almost entirely paid by producers unless on spotify where streaming costs/sales are paid by the platform)
I mean, stuff that wasn’t available because the technology didn’t exist was obviously not as good.
And none of the channels you’ve mentioned are counter culture. 3blue1brown, Mathologer, etc are a combination of being able to do stuff because animation is easy and cheap to do, but they are hardly long tail at this point.
Another notable thing on TV was ABC's Wide World of Sports; if you wanted to see anything outside the Big Four of North American sports plus bowling, golf, and horse/auto racing--(say, curling or rodeo stuff or water-skiing), they were the only game in town.
That's the main criticism of NBC's Olympics coverage even now; we're still fed only edited highlights when there's no longer a technical reason to do so.
There was an explosion of things when VHS and Cable TV showed up, but still... the variety wasn't that great because they had to satisfy mass audiences.
We've now got the long tail. If you want to watch a person clear out plugged drains for amusement, there's Post10. If you want to watch the machining of metal, there's MrPete222, ThisOldTony, ClickSpring, etc. If you want to learn about math, 3Blue1Brown, Mathologer, etc. There's PeriodicVideos, etc.
And the Podcasts... so many podcasts. The tail is long and wild and wonderful.
If there's something you're interested in, there's a niche somewhere exploring it.