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I think there's something special about websites where everyone gets the same thing. Like how Wordle was so popular, or Hacker News -- I often mention to my wif

by vgel 4y ago

I think there's something special about websites where everyone gets the same thing. Like how Wordle was so popular, or Hacker News -- I often mention to my wife some article from here, and she already read it so we have an interesting discussion. Compare that to TikTok "have you seen that one? no... well they're talking about this roman battle, but the soldiers are all birds..." That was a small part of the thread, but I mention it because of what he said about the power of human curation -- that the curator picked out these great treasuries from the sea of shirtless dudes. Because if you have the same frontpage for everyone, it's feasible to have an expert just pick that instead of needing some weird flaky NN that's expensive to develop, train, and run, and produces bland (or disturbing) recommendations anyways. (Even algorithmically-driven sites like HN benefit from that, like dang manually emailing people to resubmit interesting stories.)

eterm 4y ago
There was a moment like this in this years' Glatsonbury festival where the performer (Girl in Red) made a cultural reference then realised that no one in the audience could relate, because, as she put it, "I guess your Tik Tok isn't my Tik Tok, huh?". There is a lot to be said about the death of the shared experience, I wish I had the energy and writing talent to actually write a book about it because I think it deserves one. It's shaping our world from our politics to our culture. There are many positives and negatives about it.
- vgel 4y ago
  Yeah, there's definitely positives to the algorithmic / personalized approach. He mentions it in the thread, even: they were feeling pressure because there was only one homepage with ~15 slots, and getting on it was a big deal, but only a tiny fraction of sellers could get lucky. You either got super lucky and got a huge sales boost, or nothing, no middle ground. Compare that to, the other day I uploaded my first TikTok about some obscure bit of Lord of the Rings appendices minutiae[1] and got 1500 views. Not going to be the next John Green here, but it felt cool to just try something on a whim and have some success. The algorithm spread that viewership out and made things more "equal", I guess. Plus, it made the "niche lord of the rings content" genre possible, since it wouldn't merit 1/15th of all TikTok viewership in the "TikTok has a fixed Etsy-style FYP with 15 videos" alternate universe. I wonder what the most popular 15 videos on TikTok are right now... That's all to say, you should write that book (or essay!), I'd read it :-) [1] Middle-third-age Gondor looks a lot like a mirrored Tang dynasty China, and has other similarities
- glenngillen 4y ago
  A podcast I used to listen to would throw out seemingly random ideas and then try and debate the moral and ethical angles of it. One episode started with a premise like “Netflix is the end of society”. The person arguing the affirmative called out something I’d not fully appreciated: binge watching of shows has killed what we used to call water cooler conversations. Prime time TV was a great provider of shared experiences most weeknights. Sunday evenings would be some just-released-to-TV blockbuster. And we’d roll into the office the next day and “omg! Did you see X last night?!” Of course they did, there was only like 3 channels back then (I’m in Australia, don’t laugh ;). But binge watching, catch-ups, streaming in all its form has sufficiently time shifted everything to the point we have low guarantees about having a shared experience. Or maybe I only managed to consume 2 episodes, and you watched them all. But you cant remember exactly about… “episode 2, is that the one… oh no that’s episode 3! Never mind”. We’re not able to have the same kind of free flowing conversations we used to. They also pointed out that sport is one of the last remaining shared in thine experiences that provide that offer similar opportunities. But it carries with it the factional tribalism the can push us away from someone as much as it can unite us. That was used as a jumping point to suggest this lack of shared experience has slowly broken our sense of togetherness and community. That in turn has fostered the kind of hostility to others that seems prevalent online. I found that a bit of a bridge too far. Though at the same time so much of the rest of the rationale actually resonated with my own experience, I’ve just not found the destination we’re at quite as bleak.
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    Binge watching satisfies a small, but vocal, group of people. The super-fans with time to watch 15 hours of content in one sitting. The rest of us are just left out. Even if we get time to watch one or two episodes, we can't talk to the ones who binged it all, because they can't remember what happened in which episode. The only way to prevent spoilers is not to communicate at all. I like the Disney+ way of dumping 1-3 episodes straight away and then an episode every week, that allows the water cooler talk and fan theories to develop.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    The lack of shared tv is older than just Netflix. Before satellite tv or digital tv when there were only a few channels, popular tv shows would get viewing figures that would be totally insane by todays standards (eg 10s of millions of people in the U.K.) so there would in theory be much more of a shared culture from it.
- stackbutterflow 4y ago
  That's why I don't like when shows release all episodes at once. There's something about sharing the same experience and talking about it for a week, year after year. I remember how Game of Thrones was a worldwide phenomenon. I think it's getting rare now. What was the last show that had a similar impact on popular culture? I miss that experience when reading novels. Best I can do is go online and find some people who read the same book 3, 8, 20 years ago. That's not the same.
- teki_one 4y ago
  That is what I liked about good TV channels. Good curated content combined with shared experience. Customised feeds took this away from us, disconnecting us even further. I guess the Metaverse (or anything alike product) will try to exploit this and reconnect users in the virtual reality. Being connected is okay, but the context will be controlled by someone else.
- RF_Savage 4y ago
  Shared experience sure is getting smaller. And even when it is shared on a wider scale l, it is filtered thru your filter bubble and social bubble. And now every joke starts to be more of an inside joke.
  - ghastmaster 4y ago
    > Shared experience sure is getting smaller. It will be interesting to see how shared experiences evolve. We used to be limited by geography and subsequently cultures were geographic in origin. As geography becomes less of a limiting factor to how we share experiences, cultures and sub cultures will co-exist with the geographical cultures as well. I feel like we are in a transitional phase. Marketing works most efficiently when everyone has the same shared experiences. When marketers and widget makers have to increasingly create for niche sub cultures, the profits are less. Instead of making one ad for the super bowl, now marketers have to make an ad for each social platform. Instead of making one style iphone cover, there now has to be custom or curated designs for all the markets. I think eventually the profits will win out and or people will recognize the detrimental effects of lack of shared experiences, and somehow technology and society will coalesce around a broader shared experience environment. A hurdle to this happening is the fact that people love being part of sub cultures or "scenes". It may take a while. It is getting increasingly harder to socialize with people in general. There are so many references that the conversation has to stop, everyone has to view the video/tik tok/post, then the conversation can move forward again. Professional and educational settings I do not think are immune either. People are becoming so much more specialized in their fields that it is harder to identify with others. This would be less of a hinderance to socializing if everyone had a larger portion of shared experiences.
    - RF_Savage 4y ago
      On the flipside, I'd see the various niches make it possible to have much more vibrant ecosystems. Not only one-size-fits-most winner takes all markets. This makes so much more small things viable. Look at the custom keyboard scene. There are now multiple companies and people making their living selling keycaps for keyboards! This sure was not viable before.
- ratww 4y ago
  I don't know. I think since 2010 so many shared experiences coming from the internet that it actually became rare to learn new stuff from conversations. That's a huge pet peeve of mine. All my guitar playing friends watch the same fucking videos on Youtube, so they just repeat what the people say on the videos and there's no opinion anymore. Everyone watches Tom Scott videos and whenever I mention "Autotune" they go "They actually use Melodyne because someone on a Tom Scott video said Autotune is just an effect and every non-T-Pain vocal is Melodyne". Autotune can actually just auto tune, very happy for my Bavarian buddies for their success, but sometimes Autotune is just Autotune. I must have heard this about 10 times already. On Hacker News there's always those little memes... XKCD 927 (Jesus I wish it would die), Betteridge law of headlines, Gell-Mann Amnesia. It's the same things over and over. Even conspiracy theories have become homogenised, and now there's no new crazy cuckoo theory coming out of nowhere anymore that you can laugh about with your friends. Before that the only shared experiences were things like the Friends last episode or news, or sports, or things like that, and that was MORE than enough. It's great that the new generations are learning that people can know about different things and share experiences orally rather than via a screen. Sorry for the rant.
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    Yeah. I'd say while channels like Tom Scott and Smarter Every Day are good, they "encourage" a shallowness and a certain homogeneity It's only about the "money shot" the punch line and that's it.
  - substation13 4y ago
    Gosh, XKCD 927 is the most low effort comment that comes out every time sometimes tries to improve the state of things. I think there could be an argument for banning it entirely from Show HN threads.
    - scrame 4y ago
      "Relevant XKCD" is one of the few things that will get me to log into a site just to downvote.
- moomin 4y ago
  You definitely could write a book about it. But inevitably, some people would then be intimately familiar with your ideas while others would have no idea who you were.
MrPatan 4y ago
If I put my cynical hat on (who am I kidding, I'm always wearing it), I would ask how useful would it be to prevent Common Knowledge from forming for an autocratic government to stay in power. Think about the emperor's new clothes, but instead of the kid shouting his message in the town square, the kid privately sent the message to each of the same people. Not the same result, is it?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

by vgel 4y ago

eterm 4y ago

There was a moment like this in this years' Glatsonbury festival where the performer (Girl in Red) made a cultural reference then realised that no one in the audience could relate, because, as she put it, "I guess your Tik Tok isn't my Tik Tok, huh?". There is a lot to be said about the death of the shared experience, I wish I had the energy and writing talent to actually write a book about it because I think it deserves one. It's shaping our world from our politics to our culture. There are many positives and negatives about it.

vgel 4y ago
Yeah, there's definitely positives to the algorithmic / personalized approach. He mentions it in the thread, even: they were feeling pressure because there was only one homepage with ~15 slots, and getting on it was a big deal, but only a tiny fraction of sellers could get lucky. You either got super lucky and got a huge sales boost, or nothing, no middle ground. Compare that to, the other day I uploaded my first TikTok about some obscure bit of Lord of the Rings appendices minutiae[1] and got 1500 views. Not going to be the next John Green here, but it felt cool to just try something on a whim and have some success. The algorithm spread that viewership out and made things more "equal", I guess. Plus, it made the "niche lord of the rings content" genre possible, since it wouldn't merit 1/15th of all TikTok viewership in the "TikTok has a fixed Etsy-style FYP with 15 videos" alternate universe. I wonder what the most popular 15 videos on TikTok are right now... That's all to say, you should write that book (or essay!), I'd read it :-) [1] Middle-third-age Gondor looks a lot like a mirrored Tang dynasty China, and has other similarities
glenngillen 4y ago
A podcast I used to listen to would throw out seemingly random ideas and then try and debate the moral and ethical angles of it. One episode started with a premise like “Netflix is the end of society”. The person arguing the affirmative called out something I’d not fully appreciated: binge watching of shows has killed what we used to call water cooler conversations. Prime time TV was a great provider of shared experiences most weeknights. Sunday evenings would be some just-released-to-TV blockbuster. And we’d roll into the office the next day and “omg! Did you see X last night?!” Of course they did, there was only like 3 channels back then (I’m in Australia, don’t laugh ;). But binge watching, catch-ups, streaming in all its form has sufficiently time shifted everything to the point we have low guarantees about having a shared experience. Or maybe I only managed to consume 2 episodes, and you watched them all. But you cant remember exactly about… “episode 2, is that the one… oh no that’s episode 3! Never mind”. We’re not able to have the same kind of free flowing conversations we used to. They also pointed out that sport is one of the last remaining shared in thine experiences that provide that offer similar opportunities. But it carries with it the factional tribalism the can push us away from someone as much as it can unite us. That was used as a jumping point to suggest this lack of shared experience has slowly broken our sense of togetherness and community. That in turn has fostered the kind of hostility to others that seems prevalent online. I found that a bit of a bridge too far. Though at the same time so much of the rest of the rationale actually resonated with my own experience, I’ve just not found the destination we’re at quite as bleak.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  Binge watching satisfies a small, but vocal, group of people. The super-fans with time to watch 15 hours of content in one sitting. The rest of us are just left out. Even if we get time to watch one or two episodes, we can't talk to the ones who binged it all, because they can't remember what happened in which episode. The only way to prevent spoilers is not to communicate at all. I like the Disney+ way of dumping 1-3 episodes straight away and then an episode every week, that allows the water cooler talk and fan theories to develop.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  The lack of shared tv is older than just Netflix. Before satellite tv or digital tv when there were only a few channels, popular tv shows would get viewing figures that would be totally insane by todays standards (eg 10s of millions of people in the U.K.) so there would in theory be much more of a shared culture from it.
stackbutterflow 4y ago
That's why I don't like when shows release all episodes at once. There's something about sharing the same experience and talking about it for a week, year after year. I remember how Game of Thrones was a worldwide phenomenon. I think it's getting rare now. What was the last show that had a similar impact on popular culture? I miss that experience when reading novels. Best I can do is go online and find some people who read the same book 3, 8, 20 years ago. That's not the same.
teki_one 4y ago
That is what I liked about good TV channels. Good curated content combined with shared experience. Customised feeds took this away from us, disconnecting us even further. I guess the Metaverse (or anything alike product) will try to exploit this and reconnect users in the virtual reality. Being connected is okay, but the context will be controlled by someone else.
RF_Savage 4y ago
Shared experience sure is getting smaller. And even when it is shared on a wider scale l, it is filtered thru your filter bubble and social bubble. And now every joke starts to be more of an inside joke.
- ghastmaster 4y ago
  > Shared experience sure is getting smaller. It will be interesting to see how shared experiences evolve. We used to be limited by geography and subsequently cultures were geographic in origin. As geography becomes less of a limiting factor to how we share experiences, cultures and sub cultures will co-exist with the geographical cultures as well. I feel like we are in a transitional phase. Marketing works most efficiently when everyone has the same shared experiences. When marketers and widget makers have to increasingly create for niche sub cultures, the profits are less. Instead of making one ad for the super bowl, now marketers have to make an ad for each social platform. Instead of making one style iphone cover, there now has to be custom or curated designs for all the markets. I think eventually the profits will win out and or people will recognize the detrimental effects of lack of shared experiences, and somehow technology and society will coalesce around a broader shared experience environment. A hurdle to this happening is the fact that people love being part of sub cultures or "scenes". It may take a while. It is getting increasingly harder to socialize with people in general. There are so many references that the conversation has to stop, everyone has to view the video/tik tok/post, then the conversation can move forward again. Professional and educational settings I do not think are immune either. People are becoming so much more specialized in their fields that it is harder to identify with others. This would be less of a hinderance to socializing if everyone had a larger portion of shared experiences.
  - RF_Savage 4y ago
    On the flipside, I'd see the various niches make it possible to have much more vibrant ecosystems. Not only one-size-fits-most winner takes all markets. This makes so much more small things viable. Look at the custom keyboard scene. There are now multiple companies and people making their living selling keycaps for keyboards! This sure was not viable before.
ratww 4y ago
I don't know. I think since 2010 so many shared experiences coming from the internet that it actually became rare to learn new stuff from conversations. That's a huge pet peeve of mine. All my guitar playing friends watch the same fucking videos on Youtube, so they just repeat what the people say on the videos and there's no opinion anymore. Everyone watches Tom Scott videos and whenever I mention "Autotune" they go "They actually use Melodyne because someone on a Tom Scott video said Autotune is just an effect and every non-T-Pain vocal is Melodyne". Autotune can actually just auto tune, very happy for my Bavarian buddies for their success, but sometimes Autotune is just Autotune. I must have heard this about 10 times already. On Hacker News there's always those little memes... XKCD 927 (Jesus I wish it would die), Betteridge law of headlines, Gell-Mann Amnesia. It's the same things over and over. Even conspiracy theories have become homogenised, and now there's no new crazy cuckoo theory coming out of nowhere anymore that you can laugh about with your friends. Before that the only shared experiences were things like the Friends last episode or news, or sports, or things like that, and that was MORE than enough. It's great that the new generations are learning that people can know about different things and share experiences orally rather than via a screen. Sorry for the rant.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Yeah. I'd say while channels like Tom Scott and Smarter Every Day are good, they "encourage" a shallowness and a certain homogeneity It's only about the "money shot" the punch line and that's it.
- substation13 4y ago
  Gosh, XKCD 927 is the most low effort comment that comes out every time sometimes tries to improve the state of things. I think there could be an argument for banning it entirely from Show HN threads.
  - scrame 4y ago
    "Relevant XKCD" is one of the few things that will get me to log into a site just to downvote.
moomin 4y ago
You definitely could write a book about it. But inevitably, some people would then be intimately familiar with your ideas while others would have no idea who you were.

MrPatan 4y ago

If I put my cynical hat on (who am I kidding, I'm always wearing it), I would ask how useful would it be to prevent Common Knowledge from forming for an autocratic government to stay in power. Think about the emperor's new clothes, but instead of the kid shouting his message in the town square, the kid privately sent the message to each of the same people. Not the same result, is it?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]