I didn't see a definition, but this seems to be a concise instance of the effect: > These minimal improvements in each phone are indistinguishable to the avera

I didn't see a definition, but this seems to be a concise instance of the effect: > These minimal improvements in each phone are indistinguishable to the average person. It's still 2007 we are stuck. All they can do is add another camera to the back. Refining. It's kind of interesting that all of the examples lie in mass culture. Sports. Phones. Marketing. Cars. Writing is covered in Part 2: > It managed to get the top of Hacker News without anyone realizing it wasn’t a real person writing it [GPT-3 did]. https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture-c1b https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture-c1b Even so, writing that appears on the front page of HN is not likely to be too far out of the bounds of normal. That's the whole idea. What all of these phenomena have in common is mass market selection pressure. You have a thing that needs to appeal to the largest possible audience. Is it any surprise that the things that pop out the other end of this Darwinian selector tend to look the same? To be a little too optimized? To lack personality or quirkiness? If you want to see counterexamples, look at any niche community. They're all over the Internet. Some of them surfaced during the last US presidential election, to the shock and horror of the masses. These communities seem to be growing in number, and exploring ever more exotic norms of behavior, aesthetics, spirituality, and ground truth.