6 ms·

The downside of accessibility -- now, everyone has a voice, even if they shouldn't. I never thought I'd be saying this but I am beginning to miss the curation c

by tomc1985 8y ago

The downside of accessibility -- now, everyone has a voice, even if they shouldn't. I never thought I'd be saying this but I am beginning to miss the curation created by high costs of entry.

i_am_proteus 8y ago
I have similar sentiments; I wonder if there's any future for paid, curated content given society's invention and use of pejorative terms (paywalls!) for publishers who restrict their content to paid subscribers. It's not like we were just paying for the ink and paper back in 1993.
- CM30 8y ago
  Hard to say. There's definitely a future for curated content; Hacker News, Reddit etc are basically that. As are numerous newsletters, blog articles and videos listing interesting or underrated resources and creators. Charging for that seems like it could theoretically work, though the key would be that you'd have to A: have a solid audience in mind who'd be likely to consider decent curation valuable enough to pay for and B: be extremely good at selecting resources to show people, to the point there's no way in hell they could find all the stuff shown off themselves. It'd be a challenge, but I think it could be possible. Hell, I think something like this could probably work quite well in the SEO or digital marketing world, just because of how much bullshit there is online and how hard it can be to find the good stuff.
  - pandesmos 8y ago
    This sounds like reinventing the focused arty magazine/technical journal almost.
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    Are they really curated? What they actually are is a reflection of community of people inhabiting then, posting and upvoting. Being a curator implies a degree of objectivity and skill more than getting votes. Including building a cohesive whole.
- tomc1985 8y ago
  I'm thinking more of Youtube, or Instagram, which dramatically lowered the cost of publishing visual media, or Spotify and other digital download stores, which helped make the cost of publishing music almost nothing (Tunecore, etc). Youtube in particular seems to be flooded with crap
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    Youtube is filled with amazing content. You can learn how to do almost anything by watching Youtube videos. It's probably the most amazing content library created in all of human history. Would you really rather go back to "57 channels and nothing on"? More Emeril and Wheel of Fortune?
    - ams6110 8y ago
      It's both. There's lots of great stuff on YouTube and there's lots of crap on YouTube. I think the same was true with record stores, bookstores, and libraries in the physical world.
      - AstralStorm 8y ago
        Specialty libraries do get curated by librarians who are at least versed in the subject matter. Not sure about general ones, probably too. That's the difference between archives and libraries.
- MrEldritch 8y ago
  I've heard a theory that the very idea of paid, curated media content was kind of a relatively recent invention, and that what we're seeing is just the move back to the same model that had previously funded art of all kinds throughout history - patronage. (Or to be precise: Patreonage.) I've seen a lot of people discovering that Patreon-model support can be way more successful for them than ad support. People don't like to pay for free shit - in the age of Zero Marginal Cost, paying for digital goods always makes me feel like a bit of a sucker, but I suck it up and do it because I don't want to break the incentive structure by not rewarding the creator for their work. And I do want the creator to be rewarded. Divorcing the two - giving out free stuff, and also providing a way to directly toss someone a continuing stream of money to help them make this stuff based on how much I value making that happen - would seem to be the perfect compromise.
raxxorrax 8y ago
I think a main driver for the longing of curated content is due to saturation of the kind the article mentioned. Since there are quite many such places left, I cannot really emphasis with this position, to be honest. Access is a personal choice.
- pfortuny 8y ago
  Silly tidbit: you mean empathize, not emphasis (I guess). :)
  - raxxorrax 8y ago
    Yes! Of course, thank you.
balfirevic 8y ago
> now, everyone has a voice, even if they shouldn't Can you elaborate on this? I mean the part that someone shouldn't have a voice. By what mechanism should we take or deny someone a voice? Perhaps you meant it as nothing more than a casual remark, in a "I just wish the world was somehow magically different" way. But I think it's really important to think about what actual mechanisms are we desiring be implemented in that world, and what such a world would look like.
- kuzimoto 8y ago
  Not OP so I can only speculate, but perhaps something like in order to get content online you had to either have the ability and know-how to run a website yourself, or work for an organization like newspaper, journal, etc. I think traditionally, news organisations are able to output higher quality of information backed by research, reputable sources, etc. Today anyone can post any random thought on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc and have that viewed and shared anywhere from dozens to millions of times regardless of how accurate, insightful, truthful it really is. Now the onus is more on the reader to double-check and verify what they are reading since there is simply so much garbage. Certainly there are benefits as well, where people who have something important to share can do so easily, unfortunately I think it's easy to be drowned out by all the noise. It's certainly hard to argue that you should take away any "one" voice as that would be unconstitutional, but maybe there should be better ways of filtering information for each individual so they don't have to see stuff they don't want to.
  - balfirevic 8y ago
    > It's certainly hard to argue that you should take away any "one" voice as that would be unconstitutional, but maybe there should be better ways of filtering information for each individual so they don't have to see stuff they don't want to. Yeah, I think it's hopeless (at best) or totalitarian (at worst) to try to stop people from putting stuff online. You mention that the filter used to exist before (such as working for news organization or being able to run a website), but that's an unstable state of affairs - as soon as someone creates Twitter you have to either accept it's existence or take it down. So only possible way to improve things is to create tools and know-how on information consumer side - filtering tools, easy way to check references and a habit to actually do it, good discussion platforms, etc. Anything else is a cure far worse than disease.
UnpossibleJim 8y ago
Funny. I bet the Catholic church thought the same when the printing press was invented =P
- int_19h 8y ago
  Here's a more recent example related to printing. https://bust.com/books/16795-penny-dreadfuls-and-moral-panic.html https://bust.com/books/16795-penny-dreadfuls-and-moral-panic...
WillPostForFood 8y ago
Things aren't worse now, the author even acknowledges things are the same as they always have been: it was in the arts section and it was about a group of black artists who were suddenly being recognized in their 70s and 80s. It was a frustrating read, a sort of too-little-too-late scenario because, sure, it’s always nice to get half a million dollars for your work, but where was the money when you were actually producing the work, while supporting a family and paying a mortgage, with many decades of life ahead of you? When you could run to speaking engagements instead of rolling to them? “The kind of elation I may have had back 30 years, I’m past that point,” 75-year-old artist Howardena Pindell said. Where was all of this back in 1989? Oh, right, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons — guess they took up the allotted spots.
tarsinge 8y ago
Seriously? We live in a golden age of creation now, it takes just a minimum effort to find good content, compared to what it was before.
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  The downside of living in a 'golden age of creation' is that said creation is also taken advantage of by unscrupulous actors looking to take advantage of users by flooding content gateways with scam artist level content. Steam for example has had to deal with people embedding miners in their games, asset flips and games designed for the sake of selling cards on the digital marketplace. Youtube has auto-generated videos designed to take advantage of their recommendation algorithm to reach people that are less capable of curating content themselves like kids. Not to mention the algorithmic rabbit hole you can be taken down leading into extreme conspiracy theory territory and viewbots which push non-popular content out of the way. And I could talk at lengths at how companies abuse the various app stores by creating keyword spaghetti such as 'Fortnight Battle Royale Mini Battleground Survival' designed in order to fool people while making money off of a barrage of in-game ads. Without curation, you're accepting that a certain portion of your users are going to be scammers and that some users will be scammed. Whether it's through gaming the views, the search engine or the recommendation algorithms.
- MrEldritch 8y ago
  I'm not sure that's true. From my perspective, it seems like the golden age of creation may have been a few years ago - peaking around, say, the 2009-early10's-ish region. When stuff like Flash was big, but the Internet was still pretty experimental and not quite as cordoned off into walled gardens and laser-guided algorithmic ad-friendly-filtered channels, and the really big-budget content creators and networks hadn't quite rolled in yet. You had tons of people making absolute crap, but it was inventive crap, and some of it wasn't crap at all. When was the last time you saw anything as weird, experimental, and creative as, say, Homestuck? (Which was a huge multimedia webcomic...thing combining art, music, Flash animations, small interactive games, and a deeply ridiculous story centered around time travel and the meaning of online friendships.) Or something like Homestar Runner? What's the best webcomic you've found that was started in the past 5 years? The best new blog? YouTube's been getting increasingly dry and filtered as ad scare after ad scare forces people to tone down their content - even things like science channels have been getting hit for seeming too dangerous. The move off of forums and blogs to content platforms means that the kinds of expression that are even possible is increasingly restricted. Across the whole web, the rise of higher-budget and more-professional stuff has been discouraging and driving out weird amateur crap from getting started in the first place - meaning that it never develops into higher-quality stuff that would bring those novel ideas to a shine. It's easier than ever to find polished content, but the diversity of that content is usually less, and still shrinking.

The downside of accessibility -- now, everyone has a voice, even if they shouldn't. I never thought I'd be saying this but I am beginning to miss the curation created by high costs of entry.

i_am_proteus 8y ago

I have similar sentiments; I wonder if there's any future for paid, curated content given society's invention and use of pejorative terms (paywalls!) for publishers who restrict their content to paid subscribers. It's not like we were just paying for the ink and paper back in 1993.

CM30 8y ago
Hard to say. There's definitely a future for curated content; Hacker News, Reddit etc are basically that. As are numerous newsletters, blog articles and videos listing interesting or underrated resources and creators. Charging for that seems like it could theoretically work, though the key would be that you'd have to A: have a solid audience in mind who'd be likely to consider decent curation valuable enough to pay for and B: be extremely good at selecting resources to show people, to the point there's no way in hell they could find all the stuff shown off themselves. It'd be a challenge, but I think it could be possible. Hell, I think something like this could probably work quite well in the SEO or digital marketing world, just because of how much bullshit there is online and how hard it can be to find the good stuff.
- pandesmos 8y ago
  This sounds like reinventing the focused arty magazine/technical journal almost.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  Are they really curated? What they actually are is a reflection of community of people inhabiting then, posting and upvoting. Being a curator implies a degree of objectivity and skill more than getting votes. Including building a cohesive whole.
tomc1985 8y ago
I'm thinking more of Youtube, or Instagram, which dramatically lowered the cost of publishing visual media, or Spotify and other digital download stores, which helped make the cost of publishing music almost nothing (Tunecore, etc). Youtube in particular seems to be flooded with crap
- malvosenior 8y ago
  Youtube is filled with amazing content. You can learn how to do almost anything by watching Youtube videos. It's probably the most amazing content library created in all of human history. Would you really rather go back to "57 channels and nothing on"? More Emeril and Wheel of Fortune?
  - ams6110 8y ago
    It's both. There's lots of great stuff on YouTube and there's lots of crap on YouTube. I think the same was true with record stores, bookstores, and libraries in the physical world.
    - AstralStorm 8y ago
      Specialty libraries do get curated by librarians who are at least versed in the subject matter. Not sure about general ones, probably too. That's the difference between archives and libraries.
MrEldritch 8y ago
I've heard a theory that the very idea of paid, curated media content was kind of a relatively recent invention, and that what we're seeing is just the move back to the same model that had previously funded art of all kinds throughout history - patronage. (Or to be precise: Patreonage.) I've seen a lot of people discovering that Patreon-model support can be way more successful for them than ad support. People don't like to pay for free shit - in the age of Zero Marginal Cost, paying for digital goods always makes me feel like a bit of a sucker, but I suck it up and do it because I don't want to break the incentive structure by not rewarding the creator for their work. And I do want the creator to be rewarded. Divorcing the two - giving out free stuff, and also providing a way to directly toss someone a continuing stream of money to help them make this stuff based on how much I value making that happen - would seem to be the perfect compromise.

raxxorrax 8y ago

I think a main driver for the longing of curated content is due to saturation of the kind the article mentioned. Since there are quite many such places left, I cannot really emphasis with this position, to be honest. Access is a personal choice.

pfortuny 8y ago
Silly tidbit: you mean empathize, not emphasis (I guess). :)
- raxxorrax 8y ago
  Yes! Of course, thank you.

balfirevic 8y ago

> now, everyone has a voice, even if they shouldn't Can you elaborate on this? I mean the part that someone shouldn't have a voice. By what mechanism should we take or deny someone a voice? Perhaps you meant it as nothing more than a casual remark, in a "I just wish the world was somehow magically different" way. But I think it's really important to think about what actual mechanisms are we desiring be implemented in that world, and what such a world would look like.

kuzimoto 8y ago
Not OP so I can only speculate, but perhaps something like in order to get content online you had to either have the ability and know-how to run a website yourself, or work for an organization like newspaper, journal, etc. I think traditionally, news organisations are able to output higher quality of information backed by research, reputable sources, etc. Today anyone can post any random thought on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc and have that viewed and shared anywhere from dozens to millions of times regardless of how accurate, insightful, truthful it really is. Now the onus is more on the reader to double-check and verify what they are reading since there is simply so much garbage. Certainly there are benefits as well, where people who have something important to share can do so easily, unfortunately I think it's easy to be drowned out by all the noise. It's certainly hard to argue that you should take away any "one" voice as that would be unconstitutional, but maybe there should be better ways of filtering information for each individual so they don't have to see stuff they don't want to.
- balfirevic 8y ago
  > It's certainly hard to argue that you should take away any "one" voice as that would be unconstitutional, but maybe there should be better ways of filtering information for each individual so they don't have to see stuff they don't want to. Yeah, I think it's hopeless (at best) or totalitarian (at worst) to try to stop people from putting stuff online. You mention that the filter used to exist before (such as working for news organization or being able to run a website), but that's an unstable state of affairs - as soon as someone creates Twitter you have to either accept it's existence or take it down. So only possible way to improve things is to create tools and know-how on information consumer side - filtering tools, easy way to check references and a habit to actually do it, good discussion platforms, etc. Anything else is a cure far worse than disease.

UnpossibleJim 8y ago

Funny. I bet the Catholic church thought the same when the printing press was invented =P

int_19h 8y ago
Here's a more recent example related to printing. https://bust.com/books/16795-penny-dreadfuls-and-moral-panic.html https://bust.com/books/16795-penny-dreadfuls-and-moral-panic...

WillPostForFood 8y ago

Things aren't worse now, the author even acknowledges things are the same as they always have been: it was in the arts section and it was about a group of black artists who were suddenly being recognized in their 70s and 80s. It was a frustrating read, a sort of too-little-too-late scenario because, sure, it’s always nice to get half a million dollars for your work, but where was the money when you were actually producing the work, while supporting a family and paying a mortgage, with many decades of life ahead of you? When you could run to speaking engagements instead of rolling to them? “The kind of elation I may have had back 30 years, I’m past that point,” 75-year-old artist Howardena Pindell said. Where was all of this back in 1989? Oh, right, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons — guess they took up the allotted spots.

tarsinge 8y ago

Seriously? We live in a golden age of creation now, it takes just a minimum effort to find good content, compared to what it was before.

fzeroracer 8y ago
The downside of living in a 'golden age of creation' is that said creation is also taken advantage of by unscrupulous actors looking to take advantage of users by flooding content gateways with scam artist level content. Steam for example has had to deal with people embedding miners in their games, asset flips and games designed for the sake of selling cards on the digital marketplace. Youtube has auto-generated videos designed to take advantage of their recommendation algorithm to reach people that are less capable of curating content themselves like kids. Not to mention the algorithmic rabbit hole you can be taken down leading into extreme conspiracy theory territory and viewbots which push non-popular content out of the way. And I could talk at lengths at how companies abuse the various app stores by creating keyword spaghetti such as 'Fortnight Battle Royale Mini Battleground Survival' designed in order to fool people while making money off of a barrage of in-game ads. Without curation, you're accepting that a certain portion of your users are going to be scammers and that some users will be scammed. Whether it's through gaming the views, the search engine or the recommendation algorithms.
MrEldritch 8y ago
I'm not sure that's true. From my perspective, it seems like the golden age of creation may have been a few years ago - peaking around, say, the 2009-early10's-ish region. When stuff like Flash was big, but the Internet was still pretty experimental and not quite as cordoned off into walled gardens and laser-guided algorithmic ad-friendly-filtered channels, and the really big-budget content creators and networks hadn't quite rolled in yet. You had tons of people making absolute crap, but it was inventive crap, and some of it wasn't crap at all. When was the last time you saw anything as weird, experimental, and creative as, say, Homestuck? (Which was a huge multimedia webcomic...thing combining art, music, Flash animations, small interactive games, and a deeply ridiculous story centered around time travel and the meaning of online friendships.) Or something like Homestar Runner? What's the best webcomic you've found that was started in the past 5 years? The best new blog? YouTube's been getting increasingly dry and filtered as ad scare after ad scare forces people to tone down their content - even things like science channels have been getting hit for seeming too dangerous. The move off of forums and blogs to content platforms means that the kinds of expression that are even possible is increasingly restricted. Across the whole web, the rise of higher-budget and more-professional stuff has been discouraging and driving out weird amateur crap from getting started in the first place - meaning that it never develops into higher-quality stuff that would bring those novel ideas to a shine. It's easier than ever to find polished content, but the diversity of that content is usually less, and still shrinking.