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> 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" li

> 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.
- gowld 9y ago
  Libraries are also tiny though. Subreddits also have curated lists of related subreddits in sidebar. /r/popular and /r/all give you a sample of posts from various subreddits (curated by users), which then link to related subs. Each sub itself is a browsable and sortable collection of related content.
  - pnathan 9y ago
    Yes, definitely. I would consider a subreddit to be something like a daily magazine, and the curated lists to be something like a collection of them. Libraries.... are not precisely tiny. Depends on the library. And a shocking amount of internet statements have a shockingly small entropy.....
npsimons 9y ago
> You mean like the "Random" links on Wikipedia and Reddit? I consider clicking the random link on Reddit analogous to firing a gun into a bookstore, or randomly flipping channels on a TV: no discernment whatsoever, and very shallow, very often completely worthless results. 99% of the time I click random on Reddit, it comes up with complete garbage, IMHO, to the point I don't use it anymore. Meanwhile, the best subreddits I've come across have been "curated" by recommendations.

> 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.

gowld 9y ago
Libraries are also tiny though. Subreddits also have curated lists of related subreddits in sidebar. /r/popular and /r/all give you a sample of posts from various subreddits (curated by users), which then link to related subs. Each sub itself is a browsable and sortable collection of related content.
- pnathan 9y ago
  Yes, definitely. I would consider a subreddit to be something like a daily magazine, and the curated lists to be something like a collection of them. Libraries.... are not precisely tiny. Depends on the library. And a shocking amount of internet statements have a shockingly small entropy.....

npsimons 9y ago

> You mean like the "Random" links on Wikipedia and Reddit? I consider clicking the random link on Reddit analogous to firing a gun into a bookstore, or randomly flipping channels on a TV: no discernment whatsoever, and very shallow, very often completely worthless results. 99% of the time I click random on Reddit, it comes up with complete garbage, IMHO, to the point I don't use it anymore. Meanwhile, the best subreddits I've come across have been "curated" by recommendations.