13 ms·

The Internet as Television

58 points by ntang 8y ago

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
>In a lot of ways, it would be a turn back to the early days of the web that some of us remember, except with much more democratic participation this time. And it’s a much more appealing vision for the internet than billions of people scrolling through their Facebook feeds. Very much a dreamer I see. This basically can’t happen and he nailed why at the beginning. It WAS a thing for the small minority, outsiders, geeks. It will never go back to that. Does make an interesting point though. That most of us here remember life before the internet (assuming demographic here is older than Reddit), but for 20-somethings that do not... fundamentally they MUST see it as something totally different than I do. More like how people my age see electricity, of course it’s always existed and always will, it just makes sense it’s always been there. We don’t appreciate the work it must have taken or that anyone made decisions to shape it what it is today, nor that it could be “done wrong” or used to be better, because if mistakes were made surely someone would have fixed them by now!
paulcnichols 8y ago
Maybe I wasn’t hardcore enough, but my youth started trapped in AOL’s walled garden. It took a long time to realize there was an internet outside of it.
- micah94 8y ago
  You broke out, that's all that matters. :) I was once trapped inside the CompuServe walled garden. It took a while to discover there were BBSes outside of it.
magnamerc 8y ago
People see the problem, but they have yet to see the solution. The solution to walled gardens is smart contracts platforms like Ethereum. People will eventually see this, but it'll take some time. Centralized organizations are NOT the future of the internet.
- jstanley 8y ago
  The solution is certainly decentralisation, but while there is a place for Ethereum, I don't think it lends itself well to every single problem.
  - magnamerc 8y ago
    I agree, which is why I said platforms like Ethereum. Financial contracts are an important aspect of content creation and distribution.
- stanleydrew 8y ago
  I really shouldn't engage with this, but if you are suggesting that we will eventually have a "decentralized" version of Facebook that's built on something like Ethereum's smart contracts then I think you are placing too much weight on the probability that people care about decentralization.
  - magnamerc 8y ago
    I'm placing a high probability that the UI/UX for these systems will improve drastically over the next decade, and that a decentralized FB will be more efficient and transparent than the current platform.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  First time I've seen HN-friendly keyword stuffing as an attempted defense against downvotes. Though I suspect you'll still be downvoted for complaining about downvotes (which is against the guidelines here).
  - magnamerc 8y ago
    I removed it. Didn't know it was against the guidelines.
- m-i-l 8y ago
  Decentralised blockchain-based solutions either can't scale or aren't secure[0]. There may be some other more viable ways of (re-)decentralising the web though, e.g. Solid[1]. The problem I see with these is that they all seem to be a bit of a hassle for users, who aren't typically worried about the problems they try to address - so either the user experience has to be made as simple as opening a web site or installing an app, or vast amounts of users need to become worried about these problems (with the former being the path of least resistance). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilemma#In_blockchain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilemma#In_blockchain [1] https://solid.mit.edu/ https://solid.mit.edu/
nix0n 8y ago
> there are ... tons of creative products that you ... would truly love, if only you knew about them – music, art, stories, and more. The problem is that you don’t know about them yet ... This “discovery” problem is one that no platform on the web has really bothered to address in a meaningful way Pandora attempted this, and for me, it worked. I think Pandora succeeded because they took the effort (in the Music Genome Project) to understand how to categorize music, so they could build a really good recommendation engine.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  I'm always surprised when people are enthusiastic about Pandora. maybe I just haven't tried it enough (and/or recently enough). when I use Pandora I find that it plays a bunch of related artists that don't actually sound very similar. for instance, if I make a Death Cab for Cutie radio station, I just hear a bunch of mainstream indie rock from the mid/late 00s. I'm sure that modest mouse and dcfc are very close on an association graph, but they don't really sound anything like each other.
  - nix0n 8y ago
    I've had better luck if I give Pandora a bit more input data (try the "add variety" button). That being said, I used to listen to Death Cab and I'm not sure what to recommend either. Maybe Andrew Bird? I think the lesson to be learned here is that recommendation engines are difficult.
amelius 8y ago
We all have a television set on our office desks, and we're wondering why millennials are on average poorer than their parents ...
mudil 8y ago
It is my opinion that internet giants are destroying creativity on the internet. Creativity has to be paid for, whether it is journalism or artists. As a publisher of the medical technologies news website (since 2004), I can tell you that what we have now is monopolized internet. Few entities, like Google and FB, took over the internet and crafted the landscape to their advantage. They monopolized ads revenue, search traffic, and they are actively spying on the general public, taking away any possible advantages from publishers and creators. So website for doctors cannot make money by advertising to doctors. Doctors will see Google ads on Candy Crush game. The result is a dearth of advertising money for creators. Google and FB own the biggest slice of internet money... In the olden days we had websites and blog networks being born, Gawker, Weblogs Inc, TechCrunch network, political networks, etc etc. And what do we have now? Central stations with fake news shenanigans and retarded memes. While publishers, including your local newspaper and your favorite websites, are struggling. And your privacy is being exploited.
- porpoisely 8y ago
  I think you are putting the blame on the wrong entity here. It isn't google or facebook who are to blame, it's the large news and media companies. Google or facebook doesn't care which creators get paid. They actually want a variety of creators to get paid. The large news and media companies care greatly. Vox, huffingtonpost, etc are media that are fairly new and they thrived in an open environment. But they are struggling because large established news and media companies have pressured google and facebook into giving them preferential treatment. So traffic that may have gone to vox, huffingtonpost, etc in the past is now being redirected to the nytimes or cnn. You may have a medical technologies site, but if google or facebook has to favor large news sites over smaller specialized sites like yours, then you simply won't be getting much traffic. Look at youtube. It's now mostly CNN, SNL, John Oliver, Will Smith, etc recommendations. Look at google news. Go look at reddit and any other social media platform. What used to be a user driven platforms are now traffic drivers for large media companies. This is why it's so strange to see smaller players supporting the established media in attacking social media. What do you think will be the outcome? Social media is going to serve large media corporations. Facebook nor google cares whether your medical site or the nytimes gets the view. They are middle man taking a slice of the ad revenue. They used to be pretty fair and showed the most relevant results. If your article had more traction than the nytimes article, your link would rank higher than the nytimes. Now, it's almost certain that the large established media companies will get the first billing.
ungzd 8y ago
Ironically, jumping header on top of this page, that jumps to cover text that you are reading right now when you scroll, reminds you that you are living in this dark "instagram age" of interwebs.
JediWing 8y ago
One detail that really bugs me about this article:How is a cellist making 81k 2013 dollars as a cellist a failure of the web? That sounds like a decent amount of success to me, for what is a pretty niche genre. Would anything other than playing in an orchestra even allow a cellist to make even close to that before the web? Seems very strange and/or out of touch to claim this as a failure.
- Finnucane 8y ago
  A cellist at a top city orchestra might make more than that, but those spots are few.
  - ikeyany 8y ago
    Top orchestras pay well into 6 figures. $80k is definitely above average.
- arkades 8y ago
  > She writes, composes, plays and tours widely, and has released a number of very successful albums. Keating enjoys a level of success that is beyond the wildest imagination of even the most talented musicians I think the premise of his argument is that that’s her income as “wild success in the field of (musicians)”, not “reasonably successful in the field of (cellists)”.
- coldtea 8y ago
  It's not some obscure cellist playing chamber music. It's a world famous pop cellist, with tons of fans, big tours, etc etc.
gallerdude 8y ago
The "paradox of meritocracy." Meritocracy is seen, universally, as a good thing - the people who work the hardest get the most. But at a certain point, if you want to stand out at anything, you have to basically put every waking moment into something. There was a really interesting article on Polygon recently[1] about how making video games is basically impossible now. There are so many developers making so many great games. Studios with 3 hits in the past go bankrupt off of a 4th game which is (only) alright. But what's the alternative? We go back to a world where connections and your parents determine how far you can go? That's no good either! The scary thing about the efficient market hypothesis is that it basically guarantees a feedback loop of people pushing themselves to the edge, farther and farther out, in order to do what they like. [1] https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/28/17911372/there-are-too-many-video-games-what-now-indiepocalypse https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/28/17911372/there-are-too-man...
- emilfihlman 8y ago
  >Meritocracy is seen, universally, as a good thing - the people who work the hardest get the most. This is not what meritocracy is about. Meritocracy is about achievements, not just working hard.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    Yes, in fact because you can work infinitely hard at digging a hole and filling it back up again we would certainly not want a world that distributed rewards according to the labor theory of value.
    - CJKinni 8y ago
      It's my understanding that the labor theory of value is only concerned with "socially necessary labor," and not completely valueless labor -- digging and filling in a hole ad nauseam.
      - whatshisface 8y ago
        That isn't that much of a fix, because you can add hole digging/filling in any amount to the schedule of any socially necessary worker. Someone who digs and fills a hole in the course of welding a pipeline will engage in more labor than someone who just welds the pipeline, but they will both accomplish the same goal of welding the pipeline. You might say, "by labor I mean the difficulty of accomplishing the task when operating at the greatest possible efficiency," but an idealized, infinitely smart programmer could write perfect, bug-free code as fast as they could type, and an ideal physicist could make all possible theoretical inferences instantly.
m-i-l 8y ago
One of the most exciting and transformative things about the world wide web at first was the concept of "disintermediation", i.e. that small independent shops could reach out directly to customers via their web site, or (using the example in the article) artists could reach out directly to their audience. What has happened of course is in many ways the exact opposite of this, the "re-intermediation" of even bigger and even more dominant organisations than in the pre-internet era. Not sure what the solution to this is though. Even if there were a standard easy to use open source set of tools for users to build their own sites/apps and ecommerce facilities with very little effort (little enough to compete with near-zero effort), which integrated with a variety of low cost hosting providers so they could deploy and run at little cost (little enough to compete with zero cost), you'd still face the problem of how users would find these sites/apps - via an internet search or an app store?
- simplecomplex 8y ago
  Disintermediation did happen. I can reach my fans directly. Many independent shops have their own website. But disintermediation doesn’t mean guaranteed customers, just that the independent shop owner doesn’t have to pay $1000 in rent every month to sell. Disintermediation is the cellist being able to sell on iTunes for $0 to anyone in the world, compared to having to ink a record deal and get lucky just to be in record stores.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Disintermediation did happen. I can reach my fans directly. Many independent shops have their own website. But disintermediation doesn’t mean guaranteed customers, just that the independent shop owner doesn’t have to pay $1000 in rent every month to sell. What we wanted to see was people buying 90% of the time from smaller shops, directly from producer websites, direct artists sites, and so on. Instead, the intermediation is just what happens the 10% of the time, which is probably even worse than what happened pre-internet (when e.g. music fans in England would get most of their music from indies, not from Spotify and co).
forgottenpass 8y ago
For me the Internet as Television is most noticeable in how the gatekeepers enforce their content preferences. Remember how the TV media pretended Ron Paul didn't exist whenever he ran for president and was doing well in polls? (Daily Show clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWet2SbU07c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWet2SbU07c) Similar windows of premeditated thought are being applied to the internet all the time; but the Jon Stewarts of the world that would point them out don't get to leverage the legitimacy of Viacom to avoid being called an old coot.
halfjew22 8y ago
Blair, I’m working on exactly the solution you’ve alluded to in your post. Knophy.com is going to change the way we think about monetizing content. I haven’t posted on SHOWHN yet as I’m not quite finished with the prototype, but check it out and please email me at my username at gmail. Our thoughts (from what I can tel in this article) and goals greatly overlap and I’d love to work with you both as a creator and to get your feedback on how the site works for you. It’s absolutely time we give the power back to the individual, and that is the core philosophy of Knophy. Oh, and also-all of this necessarily NEEDS to be open source and as decentralized as possible. So few can’t possibly be looking out for the betterment of the many.
sarcasmic 8y ago
The author raises some good points about a few gatekeepers controlling the majority of the audience, but then condemns recommendation algorithms and believes no one has attempted to solve the discovery problem. How does one miss the obvious when it's right in front of their face? Discovery is fundamentally hard because its success is judged by two parties whose interests align on paper -- for publishers to find a receptive audience, and for a consumer to find enjoyable content -- but the market is so vast that a missed match isn't just that, but often a match for a different pair. And consumer attention is vast, but ultimately finite, in that it suffers from oversaturation and requires novel and exciting experiences to stand out from a sea of similar offerings. So platforms use recommendation algorithms to try and guess the sort of stuff every person likes, and try to surface content they're more likely to appreciate, instead of surfacing something completely random. Content that's brand new has no data on its audience, so a chicken-or-egg problem occurs where popular content can bubble toward its most fitting audience, often growing until it can't, while never-before-seen content languishes in a popularity vacuum, desperate for out-of-band help. The classic out-of-band help is word of mouth. Sponsored, promoted content is a kind of in-band help, allowing platforms to make money and producers to jumpstart their exposure, but has the same structural properties as popularity: those most equipped have the potential to rise the most, while those least-equipped are disadvantaged once more.
- news_to_me 8y ago
  These are good points. Somewhat tangentially, I think my gripe with recommendation algorithms is simply my lack of control. If I had some knobs to fiddle with, I'm sure I could tune it to surface way more diversified content that I'm interested in. Particularly with YouTube, I've recently gotten the feeling that their algorithm has pigeon-holed me into a couple different interests, and I rarely see videos outside those recommended to me. Even if it were just a slider from "our best guess <------> throw in some risky recs", it would feel a lot better.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
jlarocco 8y ago
It's easy to blame Facebook and Google for this "problem", but on the technical side, nothing has changed that prevents independent creators from setting up their own platforms to distribute their own content. It's as easy as it's ever been to rent some shared hosting, FTP over static HTML files, and start posting links to it around the web. There's still no guaranteed audience, though. Facebook and Google are only "gatekeepers" to the extent their users treat them as such.
- expertentipp 8y ago
  It's dangerous to set up one's own content distribution platform. The moment the media industry will perceive one as a competition or copyright trolls as a profitable target, one'll be torn into pieces.
  - jlarocco 8y ago
    Sorry, but that's just paranoia and scare mongering. It's easier than ever for individuals to self distribute their own content. It costs less than $10 a month using Dreamhost (or dozens of others) and PayPal (or Square). Unless it's illegal or highly controversial nobody's going to shut it down.

58 points by ntang 8y ago

>In a lot of ways, it would be a turn back to the early days of the web that some of us remember, except with much more democratic participation this time. And it’s a much more appealing vision for the internet than billions of people scrolling through their Facebook feeds. Very much a dreamer I see. This basically can’t happen and he nailed why at the beginning. It WAS a thing for the small minority, outsiders, geeks. It will never go back to that. Does make an interesting point though. That most of us here remember life before the internet (assuming demographic here is older than Reddit), but for 20-somethings that do not... fundamentally they MUST see it as something totally different than I do. More like how people my age see electricity, of course it’s always existed and always will, it just makes sense it’s always been there. We don’t appreciate the work it must have taken or that anyone made decisions to shape it what it is today, nor that it could be “done wrong” or used to be better, because if mistakes were made surely someone would have fixed them by now!

paulcnichols 8y ago

Maybe I wasn’t hardcore enough, but my youth started trapped in AOL’s walled garden. It took a long time to realize there was an internet outside of it.

micah94 8y ago
You broke out, that's all that matters. :) I was once trapped inside the CompuServe walled garden. It took a while to discover there were BBSes outside of it.

magnamerc 8y ago

People see the problem, but they have yet to see the solution. The solution to walled gardens is smart contracts platforms like Ethereum. People will eventually see this, but it'll take some time. Centralized organizations are NOT the future of the internet.

jstanley 8y ago
The solution is certainly decentralisation, but while there is a place for Ethereum, I don't think it lends itself well to every single problem.
- magnamerc 8y ago
  I agree, which is why I said platforms like Ethereum. Financial contracts are an important aspect of content creation and distribution.
stanleydrew 8y ago
I really shouldn't engage with this, but if you are suggesting that we will eventually have a "decentralized" version of Facebook that's built on something like Ethereum's smart contracts then I think you are placing too much weight on the probability that people care about decentralization.
- magnamerc 8y ago
  I'm placing a high probability that the UI/UX for these systems will improve drastically over the next decade, and that a decentralized FB will be more efficient and transparent than the current platform.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
First time I've seen HN-friendly keyword stuffing as an attempted defense against downvotes. Though I suspect you'll still be downvoted for complaining about downvotes (which is against the guidelines here).
- magnamerc 8y ago
  I removed it. Didn't know it was against the guidelines.
m-i-l 8y ago
Decentralised blockchain-based solutions either can't scale or aren't secure[0]. There may be some other more viable ways of (re-)decentralising the web though, e.g. Solid[1]. The problem I see with these is that they all seem to be a bit of a hassle for users, who aren't typically worried about the problems they try to address - so either the user experience has to be made as simple as opening a web site or installing an app, or vast amounts of users need to become worried about these problems (with the former being the path of least resistance). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilemma#In_blockchain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilemma#In_blockchain [1] https://solid.mit.edu/ https://solid.mit.edu/

nix0n 8y ago

> there are ... tons of creative products that you ... would truly love, if only you knew about them – music, art, stories, and more. The problem is that you don’t know about them yet ... This “discovery” problem is one that no platform on the web has really bothered to address in a meaningful way Pandora attempted this, and for me, it worked. I think Pandora succeeded because they took the effort (in the Music Genome Project) to understand how to categorize music, so they could build a really good recommendation engine.

leetcrew 8y ago
I'm always surprised when people are enthusiastic about Pandora. maybe I just haven't tried it enough (and/or recently enough). when I use Pandora I find that it plays a bunch of related artists that don't actually sound very similar. for instance, if I make a Death Cab for Cutie radio station, I just hear a bunch of mainstream indie rock from the mid/late 00s. I'm sure that modest mouse and dcfc are very close on an association graph, but they don't really sound anything like each other.
- nix0n 8y ago
  I've had better luck if I give Pandora a bit more input data (try the "add variety" button). That being said, I used to listen to Death Cab and I'm not sure what to recommend either. Maybe Andrew Bird? I think the lesson to be learned here is that recommendation engines are difficult.

amelius 8y ago

We all have a television set on our office desks, and we're wondering why millennials are on average poorer than their parents ...

mudil 8y ago

It is my opinion that internet giants are destroying creativity on the internet. Creativity has to be paid for, whether it is journalism or artists. As a publisher of the medical technologies news website (since 2004), I can tell you that what we have now is monopolized internet. Few entities, like Google and FB, took over the internet and crafted the landscape to their advantage. They monopolized ads revenue, search traffic, and they are actively spying on the general public, taking away any possible advantages from publishers and creators. So website for doctors cannot make money by advertising to doctors. Doctors will see Google ads on Candy Crush game. The result is a dearth of advertising money for creators. Google and FB own the biggest slice of internet money... In the olden days we had websites and blog networks being born, Gawker, Weblogs Inc, TechCrunch network, political networks, etc etc. And what do we have now? Central stations with fake news shenanigans and retarded memes. While publishers, including your local newspaper and your favorite websites, are struggling. And your privacy is being exploited.

porpoisely 8y ago
I think you are putting the blame on the wrong entity here. It isn't google or facebook who are to blame, it's the large news and media companies. Google or facebook doesn't care which creators get paid. They actually want a variety of creators to get paid. The large news and media companies care greatly. Vox, huffingtonpost, etc are media that are fairly new and they thrived in an open environment. But they are struggling because large established news and media companies have pressured google and facebook into giving them preferential treatment. So traffic that may have gone to vox, huffingtonpost, etc in the past is now being redirected to the nytimes or cnn. You may have a medical technologies site, but if google or facebook has to favor large news sites over smaller specialized sites like yours, then you simply won't be getting much traffic. Look at youtube. It's now mostly CNN, SNL, John Oliver, Will Smith, etc recommendations. Look at google news. Go look at reddit and any other social media platform. What used to be a user driven platforms are now traffic drivers for large media companies. This is why it's so strange to see smaller players supporting the established media in attacking social media. What do you think will be the outcome? Social media is going to serve large media corporations. Facebook nor google cares whether your medical site or the nytimes gets the view. They are middle man taking a slice of the ad revenue. They used to be pretty fair and showed the most relevant results. If your article had more traction than the nytimes article, your link would rank higher than the nytimes. Now, it's almost certain that the large established media companies will get the first billing.

ungzd 8y ago

Ironically, jumping header on top of this page, that jumps to cover text that you are reading right now when you scroll, reminds you that you are living in this dark "instagram age" of interwebs.

JediWing 8y ago

One detail that really bugs me about this article:How is a cellist making 81k 2013 dollars as a cellist a failure of the web? That sounds like a decent amount of success to me, for what is a pretty niche genre. Would anything other than playing in an orchestra even allow a cellist to make even close to that before the web? Seems very strange and/or out of touch to claim this as a failure.

Finnucane 8y ago
A cellist at a top city orchestra might make more than that, but those spots are few.
- ikeyany 8y ago
  Top orchestras pay well into 6 figures. $80k is definitely above average.
arkades 8y ago
> She writes, composes, plays and tours widely, and has released a number of very successful albums. Keating enjoys a level of success that is beyond the wildest imagination of even the most talented musicians I think the premise of his argument is that that’s her income as “wild success in the field of (musicians)”, not “reasonably successful in the field of (cellists)”.
coldtea 8y ago
It's not some obscure cellist playing chamber music. It's a world famous pop cellist, with tons of fans, big tours, etc etc.

gallerdude 8y ago

The "paradox of meritocracy." Meritocracy is seen, universally, as a good thing - the people who work the hardest get the most. But at a certain point, if you want to stand out at anything, you have to basically put every waking moment into something. There was a really interesting article on Polygon recently[1] about how making video games is basically impossible now. There are so many developers making so many great games. Studios with 3 hits in the past go bankrupt off of a 4th game which is (only) alright. But what's the alternative? We go back to a world where connections and your parents determine how far you can go? That's no good either! The scary thing about the efficient market hypothesis is that it basically guarantees a feedback loop of people pushing themselves to the edge, farther and farther out, in order to do what they like. [1] https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/28/17911372/there-are-too-many-video-games-what-now-indiepocalypse https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/28/17911372/there-are-too-man...

emilfihlman 8y ago
>Meritocracy is seen, universally, as a good thing - the people who work the hardest get the most. This is not what meritocracy is about. Meritocracy is about achievements, not just working hard.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  Yes, in fact because you can work infinitely hard at digging a hole and filling it back up again we would certainly not want a world that distributed rewards according to the labor theory of value.
  - CJKinni 8y ago
    It's my understanding that the labor theory of value is only concerned with "socially necessary labor," and not completely valueless labor -- digging and filling in a hole ad nauseam.
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      That isn't that much of a fix, because you can add hole digging/filling in any amount to the schedule of any socially necessary worker. Someone who digs and fills a hole in the course of welding a pipeline will engage in more labor than someone who just welds the pipeline, but they will both accomplish the same goal of welding the pipeline. You might say, "by labor I mean the difficulty of accomplishing the task when operating at the greatest possible efficiency," but an idealized, infinitely smart programmer could write perfect, bug-free code as fast as they could type, and an ideal physicist could make all possible theoretical inferences instantly.

m-i-l 8y ago

One of the most exciting and transformative things about the world wide web at first was the concept of "disintermediation", i.e. that small independent shops could reach out directly to customers via their web site, or (using the example in the article) artists could reach out directly to their audience. What has happened of course is in many ways the exact opposite of this, the "re-intermediation" of even bigger and even more dominant organisations than in the pre-internet era. Not sure what the solution to this is though. Even if there were a standard easy to use open source set of tools for users to build their own sites/apps and ecommerce facilities with very little effort (little enough to compete with near-zero effort), which integrated with a variety of low cost hosting providers so they could deploy and run at little cost (little enough to compete with zero cost), you'd still face the problem of how users would find these sites/apps - via an internet search or an app store?

simplecomplex 8y ago
Disintermediation did happen. I can reach my fans directly. Many independent shops have their own website. But disintermediation doesn’t mean guaranteed customers, just that the independent shop owner doesn’t have to pay $1000 in rent every month to sell. Disintermediation is the cellist being able to sell on iTunes for $0 to anyone in the world, compared to having to ink a record deal and get lucky just to be in record stores.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Disintermediation did happen. I can reach my fans directly. Many independent shops have their own website. But disintermediation doesn’t mean guaranteed customers, just that the independent shop owner doesn’t have to pay $1000 in rent every month to sell. What we wanted to see was people buying 90% of the time from smaller shops, directly from producer websites, direct artists sites, and so on. Instead, the intermediation is just what happens the 10% of the time, which is probably even worse than what happened pre-internet (when e.g. music fans in England would get most of their music from indies, not from Spotify and co).

forgottenpass 8y ago

For me the Internet as Television is most noticeable in how the gatekeepers enforce their content preferences. Remember how the TV media pretended Ron Paul didn't exist whenever he ran for president and was doing well in polls? (Daily Show clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWet2SbU07c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWet2SbU07c) Similar windows of premeditated thought are being applied to the internet all the time; but the Jon Stewarts of the world that would point them out don't get to leverage the legitimacy of Viacom to avoid being called an old coot.

halfjew22 8y ago

Blair, I’m working on exactly the solution you’ve alluded to in your post. Knophy.com is going to change the way we think about monetizing content. I haven’t posted on SHOWHN yet as I’m not quite finished with the prototype, but check it out and please email me at my username at gmail. Our thoughts (from what I can tel in this article) and goals greatly overlap and I’d love to work with you both as a creator and to get your feedback on how the site works for you. It’s absolutely time we give the power back to the individual, and that is the core philosophy of Knophy. Oh, and also-all of this necessarily NEEDS to be open source and as decentralized as possible. So few can’t possibly be looking out for the betterment of the many.

sarcasmic 8y ago

The author raises some good points about a few gatekeepers controlling the majority of the audience, but then condemns recommendation algorithms and believes no one has attempted to solve the discovery problem. How does one miss the obvious when it's right in front of their face? Discovery is fundamentally hard because its success is judged by two parties whose interests align on paper -- for publishers to find a receptive audience, and for a consumer to find enjoyable content -- but the market is so vast that a missed match isn't just that, but often a match for a different pair. And consumer attention is vast, but ultimately finite, in that it suffers from oversaturation and requires novel and exciting experiences to stand out from a sea of similar offerings. So platforms use recommendation algorithms to try and guess the sort of stuff every person likes, and try to surface content they're more likely to appreciate, instead of surfacing something completely random. Content that's brand new has no data on its audience, so a chicken-or-egg problem occurs where popular content can bubble toward its most fitting audience, often growing until it can't, while never-before-seen content languishes in a popularity vacuum, desperate for out-of-band help. The classic out-of-band help is word of mouth. Sponsored, promoted content is a kind of in-band help, allowing platforms to make money and producers to jumpstart their exposure, but has the same structural properties as popularity: those most equipped have the potential to rise the most, while those least-equipped are disadvantaged once more.

news_to_me 8y ago
These are good points. Somewhat tangentially, I think my gripe with recommendation algorithms is simply my lack of control. If I had some knobs to fiddle with, I'm sure I could tune it to surface way more diversified content that I'm interested in. Particularly with YouTube, I've recently gotten the feeling that their algorithm has pigeon-holed me into a couple different interests, and I rarely see videos outside those recommended to me. Even if it were just a slider from "our best guess <------> throw in some risky recs", it would feel a lot better.
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jlarocco 8y ago

It's easy to blame Facebook and Google for this "problem", but on the technical side, nothing has changed that prevents independent creators from setting up their own platforms to distribute their own content. It's as easy as it's ever been to rent some shared hosting, FTP over static HTML files, and start posting links to it around the web. There's still no guaranteed audience, though. Facebook and Google are only "gatekeepers" to the extent their users treat them as such.

expertentipp 8y ago
It's dangerous to set up one's own content distribution platform. The moment the media industry will perceive one as a competition or copyright trolls as a profitable target, one'll be torn into pieces.
- jlarocco 8y ago
  Sorry, but that's just paranoia and scare mongering. It's easier than ever for individuals to self distribute their own content. It costs less than $10 a month using Dreamhost (or dozens of others) and PayPal (or Square). Unless it's illegal or highly controversial nobody's going to shut it down.