5 ms·

Human curation is something that is definitely missing these days and was severely undervalued with the growth of the internet. I rarely conduct a Google search

Human curation is something that is definitely missing these days and was severely undervalued with the growth of the internet. I rarely conduct a Google search without appending "reddit" to the query. Because I know I want actual human answers. We are, ironically, using Google today as if it were the Yahoo! curated catalog of 1997. Because we can't trust that the links Google returns aren't some autogenerated SEO-driven affiliate link garbage. The same applies to music. Spotify is missing that certain ingredient that local radios (before they were sold and cannibalized by Clear Channel/iHeartMedia) and early 1980s MTV really nailed. We want a knowledgeable human to guide us through the landscape of books, music, film, and everything else. > Not "highest rated" or "most popular" - but books I wouldn't get otherwise exposed to that an employee has selected carry, and display. In the past few years Netflix introduced their "Top 10" feature which is prominent near the top of their app. This was the reason I unsubscribed from Netflix. I had been a member since 2004. The "Top 10" feature reminded me on a daily basis that I have no interest in the content Netflix has. Previously I had assumed (because of their rather horrible discovery mechanisms) that Netflix had a much deeper catalog and I could find something to watch if I keep searching. The top 10 list made me finally realize their offerings simply were bad. The value of the service wasn't there.

bwb 5y ago
I am trying to fix this with book browsing online, try shepherd.com and let me know (ben@shepherd.com). I go to authors and ask them to share 5 books around a topic/them they are passionate experts in, and then i try to connect it in different ways to make browsing fun :) Only 10 months old and trying to integrate genre now…
- teh_klev 5y ago
  Ben this is pretty neat. I've lined up a couple of reads already.
  - bwb 5y ago
    Awesome thanks! I am trying now to bring genres and other data in, my hope being that if you are on the WW2 page you can filter it to show only history, or only historical fiction, or even science fiction. And, I would like to do similar on genre pages (yet to be built), so that if you are on a fantasy genre page, you can filter down to elves, dragons, or things like that. Big technical challenges but I am going to see what I can do. This is something I've been wanting for a long time, and playing with some cool formats other than the current one to help people bump into awesome books/authors.
- Enginerrrd 5y ago
  Dude... This is really good! If I wasn't on the most limited budget I've ever been on, I would have just bought like 3 books without even blinking. I don't know how you managed to get such a large list of bookshelves already, but I'm impressed.
  - bwb 5y ago
    Thank you, that is awesome to hear :) Ya, I worked really hard in the early days to get a ton of lists and now I've built out a small PT team that helps me contact authors and shepherd them through the publishing process. We are adding ~400 lists a month, and it takes a TON of time to set it all up, vet it for quality, format, setup all the data, etc. I've got some really great stuff coming, and I hope to leave beta toward this summer or fall.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  I'm sure you already know this, but “genre” boundaries are fuzzy. (Some people refute the concept entirely, which I think is a bit silly.) There are several different ways to define each genre. If you can do some magic with your genre data that lets me sort some books into what I think of as genre classifications (say, if I consider Star Wars a fantasy work), then automagically lets me filter by that… Not sure how useful, or possible, that actually is, but it seemed like a good idea when I started writing the comment. Apart from thinking that Minecraft was set in Washington D.C., it gave multiple good-seeming suggestions for all the random topics I thought to put into it. That's pretty impressive, especially given (or, perhaps, because) your data is manually curated. Have you considered supporting Bookwyrm-flavoured ActivityPub, for (potentially curated) reviews?
  - bwb 5y ago
    Yep, I am going to need to start by using BISAC or THEMA which are a pretty standardized format used in the industry. I am testing both now to figure out which I want to use, or if I could use a combo (if that his helpful). BISAC has 1 to 5 categories assigned to a book, pretty standard. THEMA is similar, but has a qualifier which is a cool concept. So you can add a location, age group, or other qualifiers to help define who the books is for. Ya, right now we use NLP to analyze a bunch of data to to determine what the book is about. It works pretty well but I am working to improve some of that :). "Have you considered supporting Bookwyrm-flavoured ActivityPub, for (potentially curated) reviews?" I am not familiar, can you tell me more or send me a URL? I don't know what that is :) (ben@shepherd.com I added it to my list to check out via google search as well)
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      https://bookwyrm.social/ https://bookwyrm.social/ is a project to basically make a group of decentralised book-based social media sites, a little like Goodreads (but on the Fediverse). Something being made available over ActivityPub isn't a copyright license to use it, but you could contact individual people and ask to be able to use their reviews, if that's something you wanted to do. (There's probably some degree of “permission by default” that you get, but as I'm not a copyright lawyer I tend to play it safe.)
com2kid 5y ago
> Spotify is missing that certain ingredient that local radios This was orignaly Pandora's big selling point. Every track sent to them was analyzed by someone with a degree in music to help build a recommendation engine. It was a combination of algorithms and people. I am not sure how well that scaled or if they still do that, for the longest time Pandora had a tiny selection of music and I presume the reason was their intake process.
WalterBright 5y ago
I'm glad I was able to satisfy my movie bucket list when Netflix still had a large catalog of DVDs. Netflix today also has weird gaps, like if a show had 5 seasons, Netflix only has seasons 2 and 3 available.
- MiddleEndian 5y ago
  The Netflix DVD recommendation system was fantastic. Massive selection of films, rankings based on what you liked, nothing seemed to be actively pushed at you. I certainly liked it better than the way they have their streaming site laid out.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    I feel their interests were aligned with their customers with the dvds - now they’re almost adversarial as they want you to watch their content or the cheapest content. It also didn’t hurt that the dvds had everything
    - bradknowles 5y ago
      You nailed it. Misalignment of incentives. With DVDs, it cost the same to send A or B or Z, and they made more money if you rented more or got a more expensive subscription that let you get more. So, they were highly incentivized to have a huge catalog and send you stuff you actually wanted. With streaming, they want to push certain content based on what they're paid by their content partners, or what SEO tells them you will accept, and they want to do it for the lowest cost possible.
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
> Spotify is missing that certain ingredient that local radios (before they were sold and cannibalized by Clear Channel/iHeartMedia) and early 1980s MTV really nailed. This is interesting to me, as someone who's played with Spotify and Tidal but mostly stuck with Apple Music. In part I think this is inertia -- if you stick with any of these streaming services for more than, say, half a year, then it's probably not worth switching unless there's a really compelling reason -- but all three of the services have both human-curated playlists and algorithmically generated ones, and it seems to me that Apple Music has the best curated playlists of any of those three. Spotify has the best algorithmically generated playlists of all three, but I find the best discovery trick for me is to let Apple's algorithms recommend curated playlists. :) (Tidal, at least when I was last a regular user, was genuinely bad at algorithmically generated playlists and pretty mediocre with their curated ones. I'm not really sure what their unique strengths are beyond being willing to deeply integrate with virtually everyone and offering streams with MQA, which is basically a lossy hi-res format.)
voussoir 5y ago
> I rarely conduct a Google search without appending "reddit" to the query. Same here. I added a custom search keyword to chrome that automatically puts site:reddit.com after the %s.
mguerville 5y ago
Since you mentioned Spotify, I would like to plug my favorite music site and app, Hype Machine (hypem.com) which combines the simplicity of RSS and a curation of blogs to make a great discovery engine (once you found the right blogs to follow) It’s a bit of the best of both worlds, aggregation and app features like a solid tech company, and human magic that feels like local music store rather than top 20 radio stations
schrectacular 5y ago
Total opposite Spotify experience - their "Discover Weekly" playlist has turned me on to so much cool music I don't think I would have found elsewhere. I don't like a lot of what they do (why would I listen to podcasts there?!) but that playlist is what keeps my subscription. Added bonus is that friends share _their_ discovery playlists with me and I get to hear a different curation based on their different musical tastes.

bwb 5y ago

I am trying to fix this with book browsing online, try shepherd.com and let me know (ben@shepherd.com). I go to authors and ask them to share 5 books around a topic/them they are passionate experts in, and then i try to connect it in different ways to make browsing fun :) Only 10 months old and trying to integrate genre now…

teh_klev 5y ago
Ben this is pretty neat. I've lined up a couple of reads already.
- bwb 5y ago
  Awesome thanks! I am trying now to bring genres and other data in, my hope being that if you are on the WW2 page you can filter it to show only history, or only historical fiction, or even science fiction. And, I would like to do similar on genre pages (yet to be built), so that if you are on a fantasy genre page, you can filter down to elves, dragons, or things like that. Big technical challenges but I am going to see what I can do. This is something I've been wanting for a long time, and playing with some cool formats other than the current one to help people bump into awesome books/authors.
Enginerrrd 5y ago
Dude... This is really good! If I wasn't on the most limited budget I've ever been on, I would have just bought like 3 books without even blinking. I don't know how you managed to get such a large list of bookshelves already, but I'm impressed.
- bwb 5y ago
  Thank you, that is awesome to hear :) Ya, I worked really hard in the early days to get a ton of lists and now I've built out a small PT team that helps me contact authors and shepherd them through the publishing process. We are adding ~400 lists a month, and it takes a TON of time to set it all up, vet it for quality, format, setup all the data, etc. I've got some really great stuff coming, and I hope to leave beta toward this summer or fall.
wizzwizz4 5y ago
I'm sure you already know this, but “genre” boundaries are fuzzy. (Some people refute the concept entirely, which I think is a bit silly.) There are several different ways to define each genre. If you can do some magic with your genre data that lets me sort some books into what I think of as genre classifications (say, if I consider Star Wars a fantasy work), then automagically lets me filter by that… Not sure how useful, or possible, that actually is, but it seemed like a good idea when I started writing the comment. Apart from thinking that Minecraft was set in Washington D.C., it gave multiple good-seeming suggestions for all the random topics I thought to put into it. That's pretty impressive, especially given (or, perhaps, because) your data is manually curated. Have you considered supporting Bookwyrm-flavoured ActivityPub, for (potentially curated) reviews?
- bwb 5y ago
  Yep, I am going to need to start by using BISAC or THEMA which are a pretty standardized format used in the industry. I am testing both now to figure out which I want to use, or if I could use a combo (if that his helpful). BISAC has 1 to 5 categories assigned to a book, pretty standard. THEMA is similar, but has a qualifier which is a cool concept. So you can add a location, age group, or other qualifiers to help define who the books is for. Ya, right now we use NLP to analyze a bunch of data to to determine what the book is about. It works pretty well but I am working to improve some of that :). "Have you considered supporting Bookwyrm-flavoured ActivityPub, for (potentially curated) reviews?" I am not familiar, can you tell me more or send me a URL? I don't know what that is :) (ben@shepherd.com I added it to my list to check out via google search as well)
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    https://bookwyrm.social/ https://bookwyrm.social/ is a project to basically make a group of decentralised book-based social media sites, a little like Goodreads (but on the Fediverse). Something being made available over ActivityPub isn't a copyright license to use it, but you could contact individual people and ask to be able to use their reviews, if that's something you wanted to do. (There's probably some degree of “permission by default” that you get, but as I'm not a copyright lawyer I tend to play it safe.)

com2kid 5y ago

> Spotify is missing that certain ingredient that local radios This was orignaly Pandora's big selling point. Every track sent to them was analyzed by someone with a degree in music to help build a recommendation engine. It was a combination of algorithms and people. I am not sure how well that scaled or if they still do that, for the longest time Pandora had a tiny selection of music and I presume the reason was their intake process.

WalterBright 5y ago

I'm glad I was able to satisfy my movie bucket list when Netflix still had a large catalog of DVDs. Netflix today also has weird gaps, like if a show had 5 seasons, Netflix only has seasons 2 and 3 available.

MiddleEndian 5y ago
The Netflix DVD recommendation system was fantastic. Massive selection of films, rankings based on what you liked, nothing seemed to be actively pushed at you. I certainly liked it better than the way they have their streaming site laid out.
- bombcar 5y ago
  I feel their interests were aligned with their customers with the dvds - now they’re almost adversarial as they want you to watch their content or the cheapest content. It also didn’t hurt that the dvds had everything
  - bradknowles 5y ago
    You nailed it. Misalignment of incentives. With DVDs, it cost the same to send A or B or Z, and they made more money if you rented more or got a more expensive subscription that let you get more. So, they were highly incentivized to have a huge catalog and send you stuff you actually wanted. With streaming, they want to push certain content based on what they're paid by their content partners, or what SEO tells them you will accept, and they want to do it for the lowest cost possible.

chipotle_coyote 5y ago

> Spotify is missing that certain ingredient that local radios (before they were sold and cannibalized by Clear Channel/iHeartMedia) and early 1980s MTV really nailed. This is interesting to me, as someone who's played with Spotify and Tidal but mostly stuck with Apple Music. In part I think this is inertia -- if you stick with any of these streaming services for more than, say, half a year, then it's probably not worth switching unless there's a really compelling reason -- but all three of the services have both human-curated playlists and algorithmically generated ones, and it seems to me that Apple Music has the best curated playlists of any of those three. Spotify has the best algorithmically generated playlists of all three, but I find the best discovery trick for me is to let Apple's algorithms recommend curated playlists. :) (Tidal, at least when I was last a regular user, was genuinely bad at algorithmically generated playlists and pretty mediocre with their curated ones. I'm not really sure what their unique strengths are beyond being willing to deeply integrate with virtually everyone and offering streams with MQA, which is basically a lossy hi-res format.)

voussoir 5y ago

> I rarely conduct a Google search without appending "reddit" to the query. Same here. I added a custom search keyword to chrome that automatically puts site:reddit.com after the %s.

mguerville 5y ago

Since you mentioned Spotify, I would like to plug my favorite music site and app, Hype Machine (hypem.com) which combines the simplicity of RSS and a curation of blogs to make a great discovery engine (once you found the right blogs to follow) It’s a bit of the best of both worlds, aggregation and app features like a solid tech company, and human magic that feels like local music store rather than top 20 radio stations

schrectacular 5y ago

Total opposite Spotify experience - their "Discover Weekly" playlist has turned me on to so much cool music I don't think I would have found elsewhere. I don't like a lot of what they do (why would I listen to podcasts there?!) but that playlist is what keeps my subscription. Added bonus is that friends share _their_ discovery playlists with me and I get to hear a different curation based on their different musical tastes.