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Old person (58) perspective -- You don't remember what it was like before the internet. We had a (1) local newspaper, Channels 2,5,7,9,11 and 32 on the TV. The
by mikewarot 4y ago
Old person (58) perspective -- You don't remember what it was like before the internet. We had a (1) local newspaper, Channels 2,5,7,9,11 and 32 on the TV. The most artistic things available on TV were William Alexander, Julia Child, and The Woodwright's shop.
There was an explosion of things when VHS and Cable TV showed up, but still... the variety wasn't that great because they had to satisfy mass audiences.
We've now got the long tail. If you want to watch a person clear out plugged drains for amusement, there's Post10. If you want to watch the machining of metal, there's MrPete222, ThisOldTony, ClickSpring, etc. If you want to learn about math, 3Blue1Brown, Mathologer, etc. There's PeriodicVideos, etc.
And the Podcasts... so many podcasts. The tail is long and wild and wonderful.
If there's something you're interested in, there's a niche somewhere exploring it.
- Gimpei 4y agoAgreed! Television is so much better. Comics are better. Obscure music from all over the world is readily available rather than being stuck with top 40, solid gold, American bandstand. Board games are more variegated; beer culture has exploded; coffee tastes good. Pretty much everything that was dull and bland in my youth now has a rich fan culture. Kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it.
- cs137 4y agoPretty much everything that was dull and bland in my youth now has a rich fan culture. Kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it. If only they had the gumption to time travel and get cushy BoomerJobs instead of gig-economy nightmare labor under tight quotas and constant surveillance, they'd even have the time and money to enjoy it.
- twiceaday 4y agoI spend hours every week watching a British man solve sudoku variation puzzles, as do his half a million subscribers. Hard to imagine this happening before. https://youtu.be/ejhtYYvUs5M?t=241 https://youtu.be/ejhtYYvUs5M?t=241
- mikewarot 4y agoOne thing does suck, though... the elimination of social sharing of bookmarks, music, videos, etc. For example, when Napster was a thing, I started buying 2-5 CDs per payday because I was discovering so much great stuff. They they (the record companies) started comparing the sharing of music with Piracy of Ships on the High Sea, and suing customers... and things imploded. F*ck the record companies! Delicio.us was a social bookmarking site - it was an awesome way to discover interesting things because people actually shared their bookmarks, and discovered new ones... then it got killed This trend repeats over and over as too much capital seeks too few resources. 8(
- ghaff 4y ago>Delicio.us was a social bookmarking site - it was an awesome way to discover interesting things because people actually shared their bookmarks, and discovered new ones... then it got killed There are still social bookmarking sites. However: 1. Relatively speaking, very few people use them 2. Even those of us who have been using them since delicio.us mostly don't bother sharing The sharing is probably mostly on Twitter these days.
- gammarator 4y agoI use pinboard a lot but have my bookmarks defaulted to private so I don’t have to deal with the mental friction of whether someone would judge me for it. Ironically my Twitter faves are likely much more useful in building a profile of me.
- 0898 4y agoI'm always surprised and intrigued when people recall discovering music through Napster. All I remember is using it as a pirate search engine for songs that I already knew I wanted. How did Napster work as a music discovery tool? Obviously there was some aspect I was missing out on.
- mikewarot 4y agoBefore it got weird, you could look and see all the music a given person was sharing.... and that's how I found some amazing stuff I'd never heard on the mainstream radio stations. I figured it was the right thing to do to actually buy the music, so I was doing that. Somewhere I've got a few hundred CDs on spindles that I bought retail at full price.
- seanp2k2 4y agoIf you want to build your own keyboard, now there are a billion parts easily available and tons of instructional videos on it. When I was a kid, model aircraft were fun, but you’d either go to the local hobby store or look through the Tower Hobby catalog. People built kits or sometimes made things themselves, and a lot of really interesting techniques were passed down through clubs and mailing lists. Now with the drone scene, there are many many more parts to choose from, all kinds of simulators and flight assist technology to almost completely avoid the expensive and time-consuming build-fly-crash loop, tons of resources in forums, videos, discord servers (I guess we did have IRC back in the day which is part of how I learned programming). The long tail has been growing since the 90s, but consumerism has been growing even faster.
- majormajor 4y agoYeah, look at the US population share of pre-cable, pre-internet things like I Love Lucy or Elvis. Nothing these days is even close to dominating pop culture in the same way. The author doesn't see it because they're swimming in it (even Substack is part of it) and it's so common that it's no longer noteworthy. They pay attention just to what's happening inside tentpole motion pictures that they ignore how much bigger the world of content outside of them has gotten. There's no monolithic "counterculture" because there's now thousands of them.
- ithkuil 4y agoHuman perception adapts to everything and turns everything into "normal". Today all those things you mentioned are "mainstream", thus where are the counter culture things we used to have?
- cheriot 4y ago100% agreed > I’m not saying that all those ‘underground fringes’ that Anderson celebrated have disappeared—I’m merely claiming that they have less cultural impact than at almost any point in modern history. The author seems to think about counter culture in terms of large groups like the bohemians and beatniks. Instead, we have an unlimited supply of niche communities people can join. Seems pretty great to me.
- soderfoo 4y agoThe author alludes to something that resonated with me. I think the point he is trying to make is that even a lot of independent art is homogenized and tired because its underpinnings are more tied to a hustle-culture mindset than to actually asking something of the experiencer.
- Dan_Sylveste 4y ago>Instead, we have an unlimited supply of niche communities people can join. Seems pretty great to me. I think the issue is with the discoverability of those communities. When they're so small and niche and there are so many of them, discoverability suffers. There's a curation element that's missing and that algorithms driven by / manipulated by commercial pressure don't provide. I don't think we have a modern day replacement for John Peel, for example. We have tons of content (soundcloud etc) but the few people sorting the wheat from the chaff don't seem to be able to muster an audience. The art/talent of curation is much undervalued.
- ivan888 4y agoMadjestic Kasual (not to be confused with the much more popular channel which this is a parody of) is a really interesting YouTube channel that does just that; the curator seems to spend a lot of time seeking out independent music of a particular aesthetic and sharing it and has mustered at least some audience. I'd like to collect more channels/aggregations/internet magazines like this
- Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
- hinkley 4y agoBob Ross and some old German guy painting on PBS would challenge Roy Underhill’s Dad Jokes any day. If you want to watch someone swear about power tools, using swears you didn’t even know existed, AvE. And if that’s not weird enough for you, watch an ex-felon with a deep Chicago accent talk about plants on Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t.
- mikewarot 4y agoAvE is awesome... I have zero idea why he ends with keep your * in a vice, though.
- hinkley 4y agoIt might be a joke on “keep your stick on the ice”. That was always my assumption.
- Smoosh 4y agoIt's a Canadian joke - a play on "keep your stick on the ice" from ice hockey.
- hinkley 4y agoIt is also the last line in most episodes of Red Green, so I've never been sure if he's just making a general Canadian Cultural reference or specifically a Red Green reference.
- addicted 4y agoHow was live music and entertainment though? I mean, stuff that wasn’t available because the technology didn’t exist was obviously not as good. And none of the channels you’ve mentioned are counter culture. 3blue1brown, Mathologer, etc are a combination of being able to do stuff because animation is easy and cheap to do, but they are hardly long tail at this point.
- ge96 4y agoA weird one is watching people fix the hooves on horses, something about is captivating.
- Jistern 4y ago>> The tail is long and wild and wonderful. Well argued! I concur.
- mbg721 4y agoAnother notable thing on TV was ABC's Wide World of Sports; if you wanted to see anything outside the Big Four of North American sports plus bowling, golf, and horse/auto racing--(say, curling or rodeo stuff or water-skiing), they were the only game in town.
- TylerE 4y agoEven auto racing wasn't immune. Most were usually shown only as edited highlights, often days later. The Indy 500 wasn't broadcast live until 1986.
- mbg721 4y agoThat's the main criticism of NBC's Olympics coverage even now; we're still fed only edited highlights when there's no longer a technical reason to do so.
- CWuestefeld 4y agoYou got 6 channels? What luxury that must have been? We only got 3 reliably - the ABC and CBS affiliates, and an independent UHF station. That's right, we couldn't even get NBC programming. Once in awhile it would come through, and rarely the indie Channel 5 from NYC. There was a small city several towns over, maybe a 25-30 minute drive, that had a daily paper. Locally we only had a weekly.
- mikeiz404 4y agoTwo thoughts. 1) The 80/20 rule is a percent so absolute numbers can go up while relative numbers stay the same. So I’m not sure looking at absolute numbers of available items over time is good enough. You’d also want to look at sales/access I think (which isn’t the easiest to do). 2) You do bring up a good point. I wonder if there is a difference when an individual entity is largely responsible for market costs vs a market of producers where many individual entities are responsible for the costs / risks. I haven’t thought this fully through but it seems like there might be something there (amazon products vs amazon seller products, spotify may be an exception here but how much music isn’t on the platform? vs soundcloud, youtube handles streaming costs/sales in the form of ads while producers handle production costs, and podcasts are almost entirely paid by producers unless on spotify where streaming costs/sales are paid by the platform)