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I agree, GitHub is a nice comparison, and has been transformative in promoting a hobbyist's ecosystem while also being a viable commercial entity. However, I th
by Myrmornis 9y ago
I agree, GitHub is a nice comparison, and has been transformative in promoting a hobbyist's ecosystem while also being a viable commercial entity. However, I think you are being a bit unfair and leaning towards characterizing the artists as valuing obscurity and non-mainstreamness per se. The point about SoundCloud is that it provided access to the people making music from their bedrooms, the hobbyists of github. Arty music types were attracted to the platform not (only) out of a pretentious desire to avoid the mainstream but because many, most even, of our culture's musical gems are surely to be found in the long tail of not-(yet) commercial music.
- WJW 9y agoI think you are right about the musical value in the long tail, but what I was driving at was that the monetary value is concentrated in the 'top', in a power law fashion. Since soundcloud has to pay for its employees and servers it needs money, but most of the ways of actually getting that money will chase away users. I think a self-hosted soundcloud where people host their own music but use the network for discoverability might be one of the few use cases where decentralization actually makes a lot of sense, because since the users are not (mainly) in it for the money the economies of scale from centralization don't matter as much.
- pas 9y agoHow would you distribute the recommendation system efficiently?