10 ms·

Taste is increasingly dictated by algorithms

161 points by raleighm 9y ago

Mononokay 9y ago
Answer: no.
kristianc 9y ago
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.
egypturnash 9y ago
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.
malvosenior 9y ago
> 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.
- pjc50 9y ago
  It seems to me that there are no more undergrounds any more - it's very hard for something to be both "popular" and "undiscovered", and there's an entire industry of trend-hunters looking to monetise new scenes the second they're discovered. Similarly the mainstream is not so big any more. Back in 1977 half the UK, 28 million people, watched the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show live. That was our peak mainstream, a shared set of jokes everyone could be expected to know. Now peak programmes reach about half that audience.
- bazzlexposition 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      Ah yes, the Wayans Brothers channel and the Star Trek Voyager channel
andyidsinga 9y ago
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.
crankylinuxuser 9y ago
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!
thisisit 9y ago
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.
firasd 9y ago
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!"
- vlunkr 9y ago
  I don't know that algorithms are the sole cause, but this behavior, where nearly everyone has the same opinion, really annoys me. As you said, Beyonce worship is a common one. Or that Empire Strikes Back is the best of the original Star Wars and Return of the Jedi is the worst. I hear these ideas all over as if they were facts rather than opinions. Just have an original thought people.
  - gowld 9y ago
    There are only 6 original thoughts about ranking 3 movies, and a billion people who have seen them to form opinions.
- everdev 9y ago
  Initially the algorithm is a reflection (or amplification) of our existing behavior. But at some point, that reflection and amplification causes it's own ripples. So, the Beyonce fever becomes pitched in large part because of algorithms suggesting that content. I don't think each of those tweets would have happened independently. The critique is that we're being fed so many suggestions that we don't have room to find out for ourselves what we like or want to talk about. Instead many times we're simply responding to and consuming the recommended content. So there are people at the wheel, but the majority is along for the ride.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  In a sense social media feeds on our pack animal hindbrain...
tw1010 9y ago
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.
greggarious 9y ago
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.
- sctb 9y ago
  And yet I find it impossible to muster any indignation at the idea of more people watching and enjoying Amélie.
- indigochill 9y ago
  It might be interesting to analyze how it is you serendipitously find new films and whether that could be applied to a site like Netflix. Is it a cover that catches your eye? A recommendation from a passerby? A random pick off the shelf? Etc. Any of these approaches could be replicated in a web interface. I think Stumbleupon was quite clever at what it did and I'm disappointed more services haven't picked up on the "Give us a broad category and pull the lever to make the slot machine spit out something you've never seen before" approach to content. But it does give me hope that algorithms can provide the experience of serendipity if the people designing the application make that choice.
  - greggarious 9y ago
    >It might be interesting to analyze how it is you serendipitously find new films and whether that could be applied to a site like Netflix. Netflix seems to have a borderline religious obsession with keeping the UI "simple", A "random film" button would be welcome IMHO. (Or random within categories)
- mattkrause 9y ago
  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.
SadWebDeveloper 9y ago
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.
jxub 9y ago
Not mine. I'm still really fond of quicksort and BFS, and marvel at their elegance rather frequently.
MrL567 9y ago
Reminds me of this https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-... 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.
explodingcamera 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
majormajor 9y ago
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.
Finnucane 9y ago
'Yer ugly and your Echo dresses you funny.'
dehugger 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
pnathan 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  > 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?
  - ggg9990 9y ago
    Not really, since libraries are not laid out randomly, and few electronic display experiences allow the kind of massively parallel visual scanning that humans are good at.
    - mattkrause 9y ago
      One of the great pleasures of working at a research university is walking through the stacks and seeing shelf after shelf of books on the odd and interesting topics—-and they’re all free for the taking. I’d easily put this in the top three reasons I stay in this job.
  - pnathan 9y ago
    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.
al2o3cr 9y ago
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.
- kristianc 9y ago
  Vinyl, letters, no social media, found vintage... yes, it's amazing how many of these segue neatly with a SF hipster lifestyle isn't it?
- mar77i 9y ago
  The way you're presenting the issue it's making the whole question about taste unsolveable, really. Knowing what is great in ones own measure can still be learned, though, and please trust a stranger on the internet on that account for all the obvious reasons. How important can i be, though, there's always that laborous swag thing called "responsibilities". Ask the kids how sexy that one is... Or better, ask a so-called Hipster ;-)
lkrubner 9y ago
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_weblog.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w...
pradn 9y ago
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.
acdha 9y ago
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.
mar77i 9y ago
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.
dang 9y ago
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.
neap24 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
Asdfbla 9y ago
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=2959189 https://sci-hub.tw/https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=295918...
- raleighm 9y ago
  Cool paper. Thanks
venuur 9y ago
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?

161 points by raleighm 9y ago

Answer: no.

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.

egypturnash 9y ago

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.

malvosenior 9y ago

> 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.

pjc50 9y ago
It seems to me that there are no more undergrounds any more - it's very hard for something to be both "popular" and "undiscovered", and there's an entire industry of trend-hunters looking to monetise new scenes the second they're discovered. Similarly the mainstream is not so big any more. Back in 1977 half the UK, 28 million people, watched the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show live. That was our peak mainstream, a shared set of jokes everyone could be expected to know. Now peak programmes reach about half that audience.
bazzlexposition 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Ah yes, the Wayans Brothers channel and the Star Trek Voyager channel

andyidsinga 9y ago

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.

crankylinuxuser 9y ago

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!

thisisit 9y ago

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.

firasd 9y ago

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!"

vlunkr 9y ago
I don't know that algorithms are the sole cause, but this behavior, where nearly everyone has the same opinion, really annoys me. As you said, Beyonce worship is a common one. Or that Empire Strikes Back is the best of the original Star Wars and Return of the Jedi is the worst. I hear these ideas all over as if they were facts rather than opinions. Just have an original thought people.
- gowld 9y ago
  There are only 6 original thoughts about ranking 3 movies, and a billion people who have seen them to form opinions.
everdev 9y ago
Initially the algorithm is a reflection (or amplification) of our existing behavior. But at some point, that reflection and amplification causes it's own ripples. So, the Beyonce fever becomes pitched in large part because of algorithms suggesting that content. I don't think each of those tweets would have happened independently. The critique is that we're being fed so many suggestions that we don't have room to find out for ourselves what we like or want to talk about. Instead many times we're simply responding to and consuming the recommended content. So there are people at the wheel, but the majority is along for the ride.
digi_owl 9y ago
In a sense social media feeds on our pack animal hindbrain...

tw1010 9y ago

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.

greggarious 9y ago

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.

sctb 9y ago
And yet I find it impossible to muster any indignation at the idea of more people watching and enjoying Amélie.
indigochill 9y ago
It might be interesting to analyze how it is you serendipitously find new films and whether that could be applied to a site like Netflix. Is it a cover that catches your eye? A recommendation from a passerby? A random pick off the shelf? Etc. Any of these approaches could be replicated in a web interface. I think Stumbleupon was quite clever at what it did and I'm disappointed more services haven't picked up on the "Give us a broad category and pull the lever to make the slot machine spit out something you've never seen before" approach to content. But it does give me hope that algorithms can provide the experience of serendipity if the people designing the application make that choice.
- greggarious 9y ago
  >It might be interesting to analyze how it is you serendipitously find new films and whether that could be applied to a site like Netflix. Netflix seems to have a borderline religious obsession with keeping the UI "simple", A "random film" button would be welcome IMHO. (Or random within categories)
mattkrause 9y ago
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.

SadWebDeveloper 9y ago

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.

jxub 9y ago

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

MrL567 9y ago

Reminds me of this https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-... 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.

explodingcamera 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

majormajor 9y ago

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.

Finnucane 9y ago

'Yer ugly and your Echo dresses you funny.'

dehugger 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

pnathan 9y ago

> 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 9y ago
> 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?
- ggg9990 9y ago
  Not really, since libraries are not laid out randomly, and few electronic display experiences allow the kind of massively parallel visual scanning that humans are good at.
  - mattkrause 9y ago
    One of the great pleasures of working at a research university is walking through the stacks and seeing shelf after shelf of books on the odd and interesting topics—-and they’re all free for the taking. I’d easily put this in the top three reasons I stay in this job.
- pnathan 9y ago
  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.

al2o3cr 9y ago

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.

kristianc 9y ago
Vinyl, letters, no social media, found vintage... yes, it's amazing how many of these segue neatly with a SF hipster lifestyle isn't it?
mar77i 9y ago
The way you're presenting the issue it's making the whole question about taste unsolveable, really. Knowing what is great in ones own measure can still be learned, though, and please trust a stranger on the internet on that account for all the obvious reasons. How important can i be, though, there's always that laborous swag thing called "responsibilities". Ask the kids how sexy that one is... Or better, ask a so-called Hipster ;-)

lkrubner 9y ago

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_weblog.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w...

pradn 9y ago

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.

acdha 9y ago

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.

mar77i 9y ago

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.

dang 9y ago

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.

neap24 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

Asdfbla 9y ago

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=2959189 https://sci-hub.tw/https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=295918...

raleighm 9y ago
Cool paper. Thanks

venuur 9y ago

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?