24 ms·

If nothing is curated, how do we find things

358 points by nivethan 1y ago

flappyeagle 1y ago
I asked o3 about bjorks latest releases and news — it did a great job.
- imiric 1y ago
  A machine learning algorithm that summarizes and hallucinates information is arguably worse than a machine learning algorithm that decides which social media posts you see. They're both controlled by corporations, but at least on social media you (still) have the option to read content written by humans.
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bee_rider 1y ago
I do sort of think Pandora feels like better algorithmic song finding—maybe it is just that I have an old profile so it has learned enough about me to do good matching, though. But, it is notable for being a pretty old site, from back before the algorithmic feeds really exploded and took control of everything… I often wonder if we actually don’t like algorithmic (non)curation, or if we just don’t like the shitty version of it has developed. — What’s the story behind the Bjork thing? I’ve always found celebrities that just sort of stay hidden between releases endearing. I mean isn’t that what the rest of us would do? Enya, obviously, has it all figured out.
- Sleaker 1y ago
  I used Pandora from inception, but swapped to Spotify because the algo stopped working completely for me, and they ran into licensing issues with a lot of content and a lot of the oddball music I was listening to or used as a seed for stations just vanished completely.
fellowniusmonk 1y ago
I think it goes far deeper than curation, it's that all tooling that encourages self determination and discovery has been stripped out of UIs. Every influencer or algo is some one/corp curating content (ultimately for their own profit motive, not for their followes) The only place to get lost is wikipedia or tvtropes, there is no sense that you can discover things and this is tied to profit motives. We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed platforms behind logins but with open source codebases, but open platforms, where data is free, where the focus is on having all the data from all the sources and surfacing it in any way a person can imagine. We used to have tools curators could use, powerful search functionality, there was a sense that with infinite things to do some people wanted the wiki and some people wanted to create articles from the wiki and some people liked the article or the broadcast and didn't care to look at the wiki. But now we have only curation and all the data itself is hidden behind walled gardens. So now we look at jpgs posted on instagram to figure out what might be fun to do this weekend and that's just dumb. We have curation to our specific tastes and we grow less and less tolerant of the shocking and surprising because even when we radically change our views it's because an algorithm has slowly steared us that way, and so nothing is new or surprising and there is no discovery anymore.
- th0ma5 1y ago
  Kinda wild to read a post on here so true it stops you in your tracks. People are missing a lot of opportunities.
- vladms 1y ago
  I honestly think we have more tools and they are more powerful than "before". I would give an example: find a weekend hike. Before (20-30 years ago): you need to have a book (for profit, curated) or a map (for profit, less info). You needed to rely on other people or on previous experience. Hard to know what changed since the info was collected. Now: multiple websites both hike focused and more generic that give you reviews, photos, comments. Generic websites (openstreetmap, google maps) that allow you to check further details if you wish so, some with open data. I think people should take more responsibility and stop blaming so much "the algorithm" and "the profit". It's the same as with smoking. Even if most people agree it is bad for health, 1 in 5 people still smoke.
ZeroConcerns 1y ago
Well, originally, the answer to this question was "search engines, like Google" And, for a while, this worked pretty well. The breaking point for me was when Google bought pompous-restaurant-ranker Zagat and proceeded to disappear their curated reviews into something that would nowadays best be described as "an AI blackhole". And that was in 2011, mind you. Of course, Zagat going away was an entirely elitist event with no consequence to the Internet-or-society-as-a-whole whatsoever, but for me, it was the moment I realized that democratized data-ranking would never provide any real value. And the whole "AI" story is pretty much history repeating: unless actual-humans-with-distinguisable options feed "the algorithm", the output will be... well, slop. TL;DR: curation by actual living, thinking and critical humans (which automatically excludes most "best of" repositories on Github, BTW) is still the way forward.
WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
Corollary: If everything is curated, how do we find helpful curation? If we fill the void indicated in the article - that is, we post and host useful information, how do we get it noticed by the audience that's looking for it? As far as we believe we can't rise above the noise, we're unlikely to assemble info and make it available.
- herrherrmann 1y ago
  There are some explicit efforts to surface smaller/indie websites, like web rings and e.g. Kagi’s small web features[1]. These kinds of things might help. 1: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
neuroelectron 1y ago
In the real world.
behnamoh 1y ago
> We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't. No thanks. The last time this happened we ended up with opinionated articles, hidden promotions, and censorship in news, media, newspapers, etc. A good example: try searching for "fluoride residue in brain" on Google vs Yandex and see how they tell totally opposite stories.
- noduerme 1y ago
  And now that no one trusts any kind of expert, we've ended up with millions of various conspiracy peddlers believed by billions too uneducated to even begin to parse fact from fiction. Sort of like taking the centralized religion/opinion/censorship problem and smashing it into tiny shards that get on everything. At least when there were 2, 3, or 10 curated sides to a story, with sources and expertise to draw on, a somewhat literate person could draw some conclusions on which parts of each were valid.
  - eastbound 1y ago
    Uh… no. What made me look into a subject that it often called a conspiracy theory (men’s rights) was the several levels of obvious bullshit that newspapers were delivering. Think about it: The only thing they had to do was to say lies that seem right, and they didn’t even succeed at that. So no, it’s not the mediatization of the opposite point of view that gives it an audience, but the sheer lack of truthfulness of the dominating class.
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    - protocolture 1y ago
      Mens rights arent a conspiracy theory, but are often used as dull propaganda in the same way. It sucks because theres a group local to me that does free information sessions and bbq meet ups in front of the local family court house. But online MRA's have given them such a bad name with terrible behaviour.
paleotrope 1y ago
Seems there are two things going on here that is being conflated. 1. The amount of "culture" being created has to be like a magnitude of order greater than 25 years ago. Of course you can't watch all those shows and movies't now. There are too many and it's too much. 2. The algorithms were developed to help with this problem. They are just a poor match for the problem.
- pimlottc 1y ago
  The algorithms are a poor match because they were primarily developed to benefit content providers, not users.
  - paleotrope 1y ago
    Oh that's definitely true. I mean you can definitely see the conflict of interest between say you know HBO Max trying to get their content viewed versus any other streamer
  - Nasrudith 1y ago
    What on earth makes you think that the prior state of affairs was to benefit the users?
- whilenot-dev 1y ago
  I would make a different list of points: 1. The "new" of today is no match for the "new" of back then: Breaking Bad is as good for a first binge today as it was 2008. I'm currently watching Mad Men for the first time and can't see how anything could've been made differently 18 years(!) ago. That's 7 seasons of a well-made show and I couldn't care less for any Netflix production that gets cancelled after its 2nd season. The change in quality from Star Trek: TNG to Breaking Bad seems like a huge leap, do these leaps exist anymore? 2. There is no discussion about any current Zeitgeist, everything feels intermixed and nothing is ever finished. Leaving politics aside here, consumers are beta testers without any way to provide direct feedback to producers (one that isn't public outrage of some kind) - every other usual customer interaction is just a waste of your time. Big studios are busy milking "universes" that have been created pre-social media. 3. Algorithms are part of the creation for these problems, not their solution. Big tech just doesn't like this take, creative work is risky, businesses need to scale up quickly and efficiently.
lapcat 1y ago
It felt like the first 3 (or 2.5) paragraphs, which were arguing that Bjork needed an official website, were a bit of a tangent from the main argument of the article, which was that we need more professional critics, but social media has essentially defunded and dethroned them. I'm personally ambivalent about the argument. I'm old enough to have lived in a time before the rise of the web and social media. However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure content without the web. Nowadays I'm not a big fan of popular culture, but on the other hand my taste doesn't seem to match well with professional critics either. So how do I find stuff? My "process" is very hit-and-miss. I sample a bunch of stuff that sounds interesting to me, and if I don't actually find it interesting, I bail out ASAP. Streaming media sites are good for this kind of scattershot approach. I also go the public library, browse the shelves, and just randomly check out several books that I might like. Perhaps the majority turn out to be duds, but I've found a number of diamonds in the rough that way, books that I never would have read otherwise. (Incidentally, the library also provides access to sites such as https://www.kanopy.com/ https://www.kanopy.com/) I don't feel the need to stay current on culture. The books, films, and TV shows that I find might be recent, or they might be quite old. There's plenty of good stuff from the past that for whatever reason I never encountered until now. If you're following the professional critics, you'll likely only be learning about new content; it's not that the critics didn't talk about old stuff before, but it's just as difficult to find old critical discussions about old content as it is to find the old content itself. How else but randomly will you find reviews of obscure stuff from 20 years ago? [EDIT:] Thinking back to my preteen years, the public library was also crucial for me then. I remember discovering influential works such as Frank Herbert's Dune and Plato's Apology there, just browsing the shelves.
- microtonal 1y ago
  However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure content without the web. I was very deep into non-mainstream music when I was in my teenage years (90ies) and magazines and (the little access I had to) the web were not very useful. Even outside the mainstream, a lot of magazines were mostly into the big alternative acts and mostly fed by leads by music companies. The best way to discover music was to go to small alternative music shops. I would hang there for hours and would listen as many records as the owners tolerated. And since they were music buffs themselves and pretty much knew every obscure record they were selling, they could often point you to interesting records. I don't think much has changed for my peers, back then they would listen what the top-40, MTV, and TMF would give them, and now they listen what record companies are pushing or astroturfing. (I don't mean this in a denigrating way, there are other media where I am more into mainstream stuff, like TV shows.) I don't go to record shops anymore, but I still find music based on 'browsing' and word of mouth mostly. The good thing of 2025 is that I can get my hands on every bit of obscure music, whereas in 1995, some albums would have to be imported by a record store and it was way out of my budget as a teen.
steveBK123 1y ago
I'd agree with the jist of this article. Social media has been less "wisdom of crowds" and more endless algorithmic slop and pay-to-play influencers. Sure there was always PR dealmaking & money behinds the scenes previously I'm sure, but there were actual magazines/websites/etc in every genre publishing numerical reviews for cars/cameras/games/movies/shows/albums/etc. If you paid attention you could figure out which curators scoring aligned with what you tended to like. Now every reviewer is a YouTube influencer who loves every product put in front of them, no product is every bad, no scores are assigned because then you can cross compare, etc. The acquisition, death, resurrection and mundane ongoing existence of dpreview is a good example of this. What we had before wasn't perfect, but what has followed is worse.
AlienRobot 1y ago
I agree with the sentiment completely. From link directories to search engines, and now with AI, and from reblogging to recommendation algorithms, I think what is being lost is the ability to "browse" the web. To look at a list of things that may not interest you. Because sometimes among those things you do find something that piques your interest.
lmcinnes 1y ago
> And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen before. It'll never surprise you with something different. It keeps you in a little bubble. This is not true at all, algorithms can predict things you haven't seen before, and can take you well outside your bubble. A lot of the existing recommendation algorithms on social media etc. do keep you in a bubble, but that's a very specific choice 'cause apparently that's where the money is at. There's enough work in multi-armed-bandit explore/exploit systems that we definitely could have excellent algorithms that do exactly the kind of curation the author would like. The issue is not algorithms, but rather incentives on media recommendation and consumption. People say they would like something new, but they keep going back to the places that feed them more of the comfortable same.
reactordev 1y ago
The argument for curation goes against the argument for democratization. We collectively said “enough” with Hollywood gatekeeping which means you must bring your own audience. Movies roles are based on your followers. Music gigs, based on your followers. Any creative event, based on your followers. So known named artists like Bjork have to build a following for an event for promoters to green light it. It sucks, but that’s the nature of the business. Sell tickets, upsell merchandise, sell records, repeat.
- h2zizzle 1y ago
  Democratization is micro-curation. What we have now is not that. We have monolithic platforms - the richest companies in the world, or companies owned by the richest people in the world - serving content as they see fit, with a veneer of what your friends, family, and favorite celebrities want to to show you. We are back to, "Brought to you by GE!", for all intents and purposes. Right down to them telling us who to vote for.
- layer8 1y ago
  Curation is more like representative democracy. You elect the curators you trust the most.
- protocolture 1y ago
  >The argument for curation goes against the argument for democratization. Unless you are going to read every book, watch every movie, listen to every song you are going to consult others about their own experiences, or have an algorithm or radio station feed it to you in their own curated order. You didnt defeat trust, you just trust different people now.
  - immibis 1y ago
    No, they're right. If you have "democratization", you don't necessarily read every book yourself, but there are lots of competent or incompetent people you can choose to trust to review them for you and suggest which ones to read. Which means people who choose to trust different sources will get different cultural experiences.
monatron 1y ago
We have tools today that are uniquely good at wading through disparate sources and aggregating things into a format that we can easily digest. The worry of course - is that these tools are generally on offer from huge tech giants (google, openai, etc). The good news is, we have open-source versions of these tools that perform almost as well as the closed-source versions for these types of categorization and aggregation. I would agree that information is now more scattered (like bread for ducks as the author notes) than ever before -- but we now have the unprecedented ability to wrangle it ourselves.
- arguflow 1y ago
  What opensource tools are you talking about here? The only ones I know of is just building your own rss feed.
  - monatron 1y ago
    I'm referring to LLMs
chrisallick 1y ago
you dont. youre brought things inside your algo bubble. kind of a bummer of an evolution of the net.
tolerance 1y ago
What most people refer to as "culture" or "art" are products that are vectors for identity in a fractured society. If the author feels malaise over not being able to find to find new things to watch and listen to, imagine how hard it must be to just be yourself these days and foster communities around the likes and dislikes that you share with other people. Curating/taste-making is identity politics.
miiiiiike 1y ago
I miss Entertainment Weekly having a print subscription. I loved tearing out blurbs about stuff that was coming out and sticking them to my pin board. Feels more real than adding something to a watchlist (which I NEVER look at) in an app.
pigeons 1y ago
If everything is curated to only include what pays the highest affiliate commission, how will we find good things that don't include a large marketing expense in their cost?
os2warpman 1y ago
> It makes art (music, film, tv, etc.) seem like one big sludge pile. It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of things that you'll never get to the end of. If that is not hyperbole and the author is not taking steps to distance themselves from those feelings, that is extremely unhealthy. Like an addiction or something. The only thing that should feel like that is laundry. Perhaps the author should rebalance their leisure activities portfolio to include more things that aren't pop culture media.
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anywhichway 1y ago
> You then have to hunt around for the info Have you considered that that might be the goal of releasing trickles of information about the film prior to its official release? It makes collected information feel more exclusive to super fans and encourages fans to interact with each other on social media providing fuel for Bjork focused communities. If collecting this information feels exhausting instead of exciting to you... why are you trying so hard to collect it? Just wait for the actual release. > We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't. I don't understand how you expect a critic to tell you whether its worth your time based on a collection of pre-release rumors and interviews. For deciding if its worth my time, I mainly want to hear from critics who have seen the upcoming media and I want to hear their opinion on what they saw. Why would I care to hear Ebert and Roeper's opinion on what the actors said in their press release tour? Unless it was something especially newsworthy and they wouldn't need to go digging for that. I just don't see how a critic's review would be enhanced by "devoting their lives to browsing through the piles".
tacker2000 1y ago
Just thought about this in the context of searching for products. Nowadays there is so much stuff and also so much information available, one just gets lost in this huge sea and spends countless hours trying to find the “best” product… back in the days you would have only one or two choices and that would be it. But was it better? Im actually not so sure…
- gtowey 1y ago
  The consumer landscape has gotten so hostile. Once upon a time you could use price as a proxy for evaluating quality. More expensive versions of a product were generally better. Nowadays it's all smoke and mirrors; marketing, branding and lies. In general I find even the more expensive versions of consumer products are still garbage quality which end up in a landfill all to quickly. It's hard to buy something good even if you're willing to spend the money. Our current capitalism doesn't care about providing value for the money, no it's all about how much money to can squeeze out of people and how low you can make your production costs.
- escapedmoose 1y ago
  It’s so difficult to tell the quality of things online, I’ve returned to buying almost exclusively from brick-and-mortar stores. If they don’t have it, I just don’t buy it. It’s less frustrating to live without than to own something that’s not right.
romankolpak 1y ago
When I was younger I had a few different sources for finding music - a couple of friends who were really into music and I knew they were investing time and searching for it, so I always wanted to hear what they recommend, even if it didn’t match my taste. There was also a curated website and a forum dedicated to alternative genres, like hardcore or post rock and other “edgy” stuff, where I liked to hang out. I knew this is where people really passionate about music gathered and it was interesting to see what they like and what they recommend. It was always driven my community, by people I liked or loved, or trusted their judgement. Needless to say you get none of that with algorithms. Spotify does recommend some good songs for me regularly and I often add them to “liked” but it’s much lonelier now. Music used to connect me with other people and now it’s just me and my Spotify.
- namenumber 1y ago
  mixcloud has been great for this for me. so many people post their mixes and their radio shows there that there is always something new to explore, and searching for something slightly off that i know i like leads to people using that in a mix so i know we're at least partly on the same wavelength when i start to listen. And then eventually you end up with a list of mixtape makers/DJ's/radio show hosts you trust which is cool, really feels like a world radio show at times.
- ghaff 1y ago
  Pretty much listened to what "my crowd" in college listened to. It spanned out in various other directions over time--some by organic discovery via music festivals and the like, some via friends. Mostly don't concern myself too much with "discovery" these days.
Papazsazsa 1y ago
Curation is the uncrossable moat for AGI/ASI as an inherently human-to-human behavior. Trends, tastes, and language evolve in real time, driven by social signaling, novelty bias, and the human instinct for signaling to preserve individuality and status within a group and against the algorithm. One need only rabbit hole down various corners of the internet to see this, but its even more pronounced in personal fashion, indie bookstores and art galleries, and even inside people's homes. It is immensely gratifying to me because it means humans will always need humans, no matter how hard tech tries. In trying to financialize, map, or otherwise algorithmically diagnose taste, effort impeaches itself.
- ukuina 1y ago
  > Curation is the uncrossable moat for AGI/ASI as an inherently human-to-human behavior. Infinite context models will understand everything about your life. Combined with real-time lookup of all content ever created alongside the ability to generate new content on demand, curation seems destined to be solved.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago
    Please tell me this is sarcasm. I mean, I know people love to extrapolate current LLM capabilities into arbitrary future capabilities via magical thinking, but "infinite context" really takes the cake.
  - fallinditch 1y ago
    If that's true it would be a sad outcome, I believe people would react against such an artificial world. In a music DJ context: even if an AI was able to mimic the dopest turntablist moves and factor in layers of depth and groove and create unique mixes, it would still be an artificial mix made by AI, and so not as valuable or worthwhile as a human DJ. That doesn't mean that AI DJs or musicians won't be successful, they just won't be human and can never be human, and that means something.
  - Papazsazsa 1y ago
    This will never happen without the destruction of the individual. Humans will simply opt out and create their own islands of ideology or taste, and have been doing exactly that for millennia.
larodi 1y ago
This article resonates so bad with me, like as if I did write it. This all the author writes about is called collapse of context. And people been waking up to noticing it, writing about it, eventually becoming victims. Everyone who previously had a natural sect of some subculture is failing victing the moment they move the member base into faang social media. It kills the opportunity to mold your community around itself - it gets molded for monetization. I dream the day when using social media would be considered as bad as a smoking or drinking habit, the endless scroll of mostly irrelevant content. Because even curated accounts are bombarded with advertised noised. In recent years I wake up to the fact that I keep meeting people who are totally supposed to be in my bubble, very similar, lived in the same city, not a big one, 2m, but we have not found each other because of media noise, and technological alienation. Its amazing as if living in the black mirror already and for a while. I keep investing massive efforts to get any public events gathering people spending hundreds of euros for promotion, prominent artists, in a time when delivery of information is supposed to be immediate. The audience, which includes all of us, fail to notice the information as there is so much of it. faang is milking everyone like crazy for the right to get to people supposed to be subscribed to our own content, which we don't own. it totally makes sense to have vanilla html at this point as i did with my event yesterday (tickets.dubigxbi.com), but then again - i need to submit a bribe to techbros to even let me emerge in the information sphere. like, I started considering running a bot farm, because this is what they deserve. 500$ of ads gets me mostly bot traffic, it is insane, paid advertising has never been so ineffective. Besides, the way many grow to behave, and not only the young generation, is that they get addicted to endless scrollers in tiktok/insta/x and it is not us/them anymore searching the information. It is algorithms packing it for everyone, which is amazing way to put tubes in everyone's eyes and minds and feed it hallucinations of all sorts. But it is the world we woke into.
- citizenkeen 1y ago
  I’m curious about your vernacular/cadence.
  - larodi 1y ago
    my French is not much better, sorry. still hoping I was able to get a point through. let me reiterate - total collapse of context. and I did not invent it. we are back to selling culture at bazaars.
jedberg 1y ago
I've been saying this forever!! When I was a teen in the 90s, I got new music from the radio. The music director picked 40ish songs a week and that's what we listened to. I still like to listen to the radio for the curation. I even wrote a program to scrape the websites of my favorite radio stations (well the stations of my favorite music directors) and add the songs to a Spotify playlist. Whenever I meet a teenager today, one of the first things I ask them is "what apps do you use most", but the next thing I ask is "how do you find new music". The answer is usually something like "I don't know, I just sort of find stuff I guess?". Some have said they follow influencer's playlists on YouTube or Spotify, which I guess is the new version of the music director? Or they just get it from Spotify playlists. But what's missing is a shared cultural experience. In the 90s, everyone at my school knew those 40 songs that the local stations played. They might know other stuff too, but you couldn't avoid those top songs. It's not the same today. And it's the same problem for visual media. We all knew the top movies at the theater, because it was the only place to see new movies. And we all knew the top TV shows because they were only on four major networks. Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
- withzombies 1y ago
  When we were kids, just knowing music that wasn't on the radio made you "into music". Things were very different! The internet has really allowed music choices to be much more personal and I think it's a good thing. We have such a wide variety of music available to us now. I've had some luck finding some TikTok creators who curate specific "vibes" and publish Spotify playlists. I think that's just how it's done now.
  - jedberg 1y ago
    I love the variety for sure, I just miss the curation and the shared culture. It's harder to find people in person who know the same music and TV that you do.
    - aspenmayer 1y ago
      Every silver lining has its cloud. Shared cultural touchstones came hand in hand with tastemakers and gatekeepers. We’re more directly connected to the movers and shakers than ever before, but it’s largely parasocial interaction, mediated by platforms and gated by subscriptions. We’re increasingly disintermediated with respect to creators so that we can be separated and reconstituted into our profit-bearing parts. We’re old wine poured into new wineskins.
bmink 1y ago
> I discovered interesting music like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Portishead, Tricky, Orbital, Takako Minekawa, Hooverphonic, Poe, Veruca Salt all from sporadically listening to one college radio station in my hometown and, once a week, watching one music program on MTV (usually 120 Minutes or AMP). Then, once a month, I would sometimes flip through a music magazine while at the hair salon (usually Rolling Stone or Spin). And that was literally it. This section contains two types of curation that have to be separated: college radio is good curation, it is nonprofit, done by people for the love of the medium and will help you broaden your horizon. Rolling Stone et. al. is bad curation, a form of gatekeeping really, very commercial, requiring lots of connections and resources to get featured in.
chowells 1y ago
I don't really disagree with the idea that there's value in curation. And I even think there's some value in gatekeeping. Sometimes, at least. But the timing is really funny here, given the massive success Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is currently experiencing. People have found this game - and it's not by curation. It's by massive word of mouth, as people who try the game tend to tell all their friends about it. In the case where something is really good, people find out about it without curators. Curators are good for finding some stuff. But the ones so good that everyone talks about? You'll find them anyway.
- _Algernon_ 1y ago
  Word of mouth is a form of curation.
- thombles 1y ago
  I'll take your word for it but I have to chuckle, since I'm adjacent to some groups of gamers and I've never seen the name of this game in my life. So it goes!
- BlueTemplar 1y ago
  It was also partially through marketing and curation (which overlap). But these, as well as word of mouth, are the least needed for something so popular.
- Falell 1y ago
  This doesn't follow at all. The game received _excellent_ reviews prior to release. It's currently the second best reviewed PC game of the year on metacritic [1] (an aggregator with some problems but I don't think this is controversial). Exactly contrary to your point, both Clair Obscur and Blue Prince (#1) got excellent reviews in the days leading up to release leading to people on e.g. Reddit saying "this game came out of nowhere and it has amazing reviews, I'm excited". https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/pc/all/all-time/metascore/?releaseYearMin=2025&releaseYearMax=2025&platform=pc&page=1 https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/pc/all/all-time/metas...
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ferguess_k 1y ago
Not entirely related, but back in the 80s we "found" PC games by getting a 5 inch diskette from my father's colleagues, with the bonuses of getting computer viruses at the same time. In the 90s I "found" PC games by reading magazines and borrowing a un-labeled CD from a classmate who owns every Japanese gaming consoles from NES to Saturn.
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rufus_foreman 1y ago
I listened to punk in the 70's and hardcore from 80 to 84, nothing was curated by some authoritative source. It was all word of mouth. Hardcore wasn't on the radio, it wasn't on TV (OK, "TV Party" and "Institutionalized" were on MTV, both of which were "joke" hardcore songs), you couldn't buy the records in the record stores in my town until the mid-80s, you couldn't buy the zines in my town. There was a tiny amount of it played on college radio, but it would be something like one show a week from 2 AM to 3 AM on Sunday morning. Kids would drive from where I lived to the "city" and drive around in their cars taping that show from the car radio to a boombox and then pass those tapes around to get copied. It was samizdat. And most hardcore they couldn't even play on those radio shows anyway. "We don't care what you say, fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you! FUCK YOU!!!" Great song, can't hear it on the radio. Can't hear it anywhere you go. We found things. You had to really dig, but we found things. No one curated it for us. I hate the very idea of it. I mean my friend Joe "curated" music for me when he made me a tape of the Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, and DOA in 6th grade in 1981, but I don't think that is the meaning of curation that the title is referring to. If a kid got a record, it got passed around and taped. Then those tapes got passed around and taped. Etc. No one tells me what music I should listen to, we told the musicians what kind of music we wanted to hear when we were in the pit. Many of them noped out from that. They were artists, not enablers of the violent tendencies of poorly parented 14 year olds. Fair enough. But we were finding things out.
- quesera 1y ago
  > There was a tiny amount of it played on college radio, but it would be something like one show a week from 2 AM to 3 AM on Sunday morning > We found things. ... No one curated it for us. I think you're getting to the essence of good curation. That college radio show is exactly curation. The record label that put out the hardcore 7"s is curation. The record store is curation. The kid who bought a record and made copies for friends is a curator. Word of mouth is the strongest curation. What's missing today is the human. The college radio DJ is a human curator, and is much more idiosyncratic and humanely engaging than an optimized-for-content-or-cost algorithmic curator. Algorithms might work for very mainstream (or nonspecific) tastes -- and actually it is self-reinforcing on that level. But it fails badly for nichier stuff. And it is in direct opposition to those of us for whom "different" is/was part of our personal or group identity. :)
yhager 1y ago
I had similar feeling over the past few years, trying futilely to escape the algorithm.. I recently discovered radiop aradise[1] which is exactly what I needed - free, old style, very little talk, human-curated radio. They have a vast selection of titles, and they simply play good music - stuff I know, stuff I don't.. it's just great. They also have a world music channel, which I couldn't find any parallel anywhere else. They have wonderful music there when I'm in my "world music" mood. All in all, it's a gem, highly recommended for any music lovers who prefer curated over algorithmic. [1] https://radioparadise.com/home https://radioparadise.com/home
- arguflow 1y ago
  Thank you this is great!
j45 1y ago
LLMs will be able to learn what we do and don't like. And try to serve that. Or try to serve it's agenda despite those likes.
smallpipe 1y ago
Curation is still around, it’s just a bit less easy to get. The local venues are filling that role now. Take a listen on the “what’s on” page.
pmarreck 1y ago
Machine learning algorithms. And they're doing a fine job of it too, even if they remove the shared cultural experience. (Which is a big loss, to be sure. I grew up listening to Casey Kasem cover the American Top 40 on the radio...)
- tossandthrow 1y ago
  Which is also curation
thejeswi 1y ago
Maybe IPTV is an interesting source of curated entertainment This playlist has hundreds of channels: https://iptv-org.github.io/iptv/index.m3u https://iptv-org.github.io/iptv/index.m3u Github page: https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv Another source could be following respected critics who have similar tastes to you, like the film critic Roger Ebert: https://rogerebert.com/reviews https://rogerebert.com/reviews
john2x 1y ago
I’ve been thinking about this in the context of my kids. I am a bit of a snob (a huge one if I’m being honest) about media I consume. Naturally I guide the content my kids watch quite closely, much closer than my peers. I am their curator. But I can’t help but feel I am isolating my kids when I do this. The things they watch and listen and play and read at home are vastly different than other kids their age.
- Jordan-117 1y ago
  Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation https://theonion.com/cool-dad-raising-daughter-on-media-that-will-put-her-en-1819572981/ https://theonion.com/cool-dad-raising-daughter-on-media-that...
  - john2x 1y ago
    That’s amazing. The post date is cherry on top.
lucasfdacunha 1y ago
I've been a subscriber for the hacker newsletter [1] for years and it does a great job of curating content from this website. This inspired me to create The Gaming Pub [2] which is a similar kind of curated newsletter but for gaming content. I believe newsletters like that are a great way to find interesting stuff. 1. https://hackernewsletter.com/ https://hackernewsletter.com/ 2. https://www.thegamingpub.com/ https://www.thegamingpub.com/
- duck 1y ago
  Thanks for the HNL mention and nice job with The Gaming Pub!
  - lucasfdacunha 1y ago
    Hey Kyle, your work on the Hacker Newsletter is awesome. Thanks for that and for the kind words regarding The Gaming Pub. I hope I grow the newsletter to be as big as yours in someday.
protocolture 1y ago
Good curation is amazing. When I first signed on to Netflix it worked me out and suggested a bunch of stuff that I love to this day. But then it ran out of stuff, or they borked the algorithm and now it sucks. And all its competitors suck. One thing I have noticed is that if you ask a human for a specific recommendation like "Suggest me a novel like The Martian" if they dont have a specific recommendation, you just get their favourite instead. Which makes reddit threads and similar completely useless. The signal to noise ratio is awful.
- robertlutece 1y ago
  off topic, but I recently read Alfred Lansing's "Endurance" and felt that was in spirit like "The Martian" although I remember the latter more from the film than the book.
- 9dev 1y ago
  Actually with Netflix, I'd argue that they used to produce a few shows that were great, novel, and interesting to watch. But over time, as their revenue (and shareholder expectations) grew, they started to crunch out targeted content created for specific audiences at a budget (ever noticed how the set is practically empty save for the show's protagonists at all times?). These shows suck because they're not works of art, but metric-driven checklists of features that the target group enjoys. I assume there's a small sliver of budget available for actually interesting productions, kind of similar to Google's moonshots, but the vast majority of Netflix' catalog is just algorithmic crap by now, so the recommendations are probably solid, there's just nothing good to recommend.
  - protocolture 1y ago
    The things I enjoyed that netflix curated for me all preexisted netflix. I bought in to netflix for the good content productions, but I stayed as long as I did for the recommendation engine.
abrahadabra 1y ago
I don't see the problem. When it comes to music, who exactly is stopping you from easily, quickly, and comfortably exploring new albums in any genre or style you want via Bandcamp, RateYourMusic, Last.fm, Discogs, or Spotify?
- nop_slide 1y ago
  Peep Soma FM too
pmkary 1y ago
Thanks for the great post.
andirk 1y ago
Cant find the OG quoter but "Wikipedia doesn't work in theory but does work IRL"
Hard_Space 1y ago
I get a lot of movie recommendations from Trakt, for Stremio, at the moment. Besides this, my wife uses Facebook a lot to find new shows and movies for us to watch, which is good, as I only got to FB when my work sometimes demands it. I do agree with the sentiment expressed in comments here that human>human curation is something AI can't replace. It doesn't understand the relation (or lack of relation) between songs, shows or movies for any one user. The choices we make for these things are usually underpinned by many factors specific to us, and don't represent valid or meaningful 'trends' to be discerned and applied to others.
arguflow 1y ago
I feel like this is one of the big reasons I find myself coming back to hackernews recently. The content I see is THE SAME content everyone sees. As a collective there is a consensus around what is happening in the community however small.
PicassoCTs 1y ago
Word of mouth annotated by chains of trust. If somebody is unknown, unless somebody else vouches for him - he is silenced, his links invisible. Vouching is somebody else giving him trust- and disappearing, if that was unearned. Your grandpa forwarding fb-pigfeed - his links invisible, except to his conspiracy cloud, that wants all and sees all. If you want new things, you temporary lift bans on curators- people who venture and search for new things. This is all that remains of the feed, the algos die. The social media parasites are purged and will become a warning footnote in history books.
kgwxd 1y ago
I find it way easier to find interesting things, and communities based around them, these days. Looking back, the curators of old were highly pretentious, and the kids obsessed with being one of the first to discover something, mostly so they could gatekeep, were exactly as unbearable as they’re portrayed in shows about those times.
billfruit 1y ago
Curation isn't that big of a problem as is stated. Especially when it becomes gatekeeping. It is more important that there is possibility of unrestricted discoverability and exploration than having curation.
Jgrubb 1y ago
At a beach rental house this week and they have some sort of internet television and no cable with a guide of channels playing whatever right now. I can stream anything I want at any time but I can't just watch the hockey game that's on right now without signing into something. It shouldn't be this hard. We keep a Sirius subscription even though it occurred to me 10 years ago that Apple Music has largely everything I need. I want, however, to hear stuff I don't like that forces me to change the channel to another station or to be exposed to something new that's not like the last thing the algorithm already knows I like. Infinite choice is horrible.
AngryData 1y ago
You look at the what the people you enjoy listen to or read or watch. Want more of a certain music? Find a streaming radio of that music and its just like the old radio DJ except its not 95% pop unless you want pop. Like particular videos? Look at what those video creators are subscribed to. Like certain books? Read what other people who liked that book call out or suggest om forums.
djhworld 1y ago
I still do listen to the radio to discover new music, not live shows though but catch-up episodes. It's definitely worth it, yes some of the songs might not be to my taste but at least you get the chance to make that determination yourself and you get exposed to different stuff. In my experience the algorithmic recommendation systems don't do this, I mean they might throw you a wildcard in here or there but I tend to find they overfit on some niche and it just becomes tiresome, and you don't get the commentary from the DJ who might add something like describing who the artist is, what the song's name is and maybe some flavour on the DJs interactions with the artist over time.
NonHyloMorph 1y ago
"..Feels like a job" Seems to be the case, that someone hasn't made the latent fact manifest to themselves, that they are actually on the way to become what they are missing.
shanesnotes 1y ago
i built www.codecrawl.co to solve this exact problem for engineering blogs
- jpc0 1y ago
  https://www.codecrawl.co/ https://www.codecrawl.co/ Because clickable links are nicer…
- immibis 1y ago
  Nice!
justincarter 1y ago
It's so odd to read a take like this. I agree with the problem but I do think there are ways to fix it, it's just going against the tide. For music I intentionally listen to local independent radio and also somafm, where I'm not "picking" the exact music. I read the NYTimes and the Economist and both of them do movie reviews and the Economist has good book reviews.
cratermoon 1y ago
The big platforms aren't geared for finding things, they're set up to keep you searching, staying on the platform/feed/scroll/whatever looking for your interests, feeding you things they think might catch your attention for a few seconds in between ads or as ads. Even Google search stopped helping you find things and started pushing to keep looking https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
CommenterPerson 1y ago
OP: "How do I fix this?". One small step is to vote for better data privacy rules. That might reduce some of what feeds this enshittification. EU is making some progress with this. I'm optimistic this would eventually happen but maybe not in my lifetime.
gorfian_robot 1y ago
for those seeking a curated experience trying listening to new orlean's fantastic WWOZ online https://www.wwoz.org/listen/player/ https://www.wwoz.org/listen/player/ I also used to listen to McMurdo Station's radio (AFAN) but it seems offline now KLAP from Gerlach NV is also good if Jeff has it up and running (lol). https://streema.com/radios/KLAP https://streema.com/radios/KLAP
- yunwal 1y ago
  NTS.live is great and has a show for pretty much any music fan
  - MitPitt 1y ago
    You only get the live tracklist if you pay? This sucks!
jtwoodhouse 1y ago
Word of mouth has been and will be always the most reliable form of curation.
zoomTo125 1y ago
From a collector's perspective, the way to do is simple. You sort by new or sort by most viewed in day/week. If you don't have time, sort by category and sort by new/most viewed again. That is how people discovered things and hobbyists curate stuff for broader audience. Sadly, they're dying because platforms can't even get that simple concept. Legal platform can't even tag properly.
robust-cactus 1y ago
Btw, these social media giants curate content wayyyy more than you'd expect. TikTok curates it's trends and gets it's biggest influencers to engage first. Pinterest seeded it's network with a few noteworthy creators. Even Airbnb famously took pictures for the top stays in NY. Curation is now just more opaque. Even in the AI age, human in the middle is going to be pervasive.
perching_aix 1y ago
I think this post misconstrues how social media platforms work and why critics are less relevant today than ever, in order to excuse a simple lack of popularity and poor marketing practices on their favorite musician's side. For example... > And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen before. It'll never surprise you with something different. ... this is both nonsensical (recommendation algorithms don't predict content, but that you'll want to engage and will remain engaged by a given content), and to the extent it isn't, is just blatantly and demonstrably false, since there's at least one counterexample available, and that is my own anecdotal one. Or... > It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of things that you'll never get to the end of. ... because it is. The sheer notion that back in the day you could have enumerated and gone through "all the local and foreign music releases" borders on comical. What you exhausted back then I'm pretty sure were the curated lists you were provided. Nothing less, nothing more. The only "area" I follow with this much determination is anime, and one season (the year is split into four seasons that the entire industry aligns with) I decided to try and watch every show that releases, just to see what I've been missing out on, and if I had misjudged anything like people would often tell me. It's actually possible there, as it is very centralized and localized. Turns out that no, I was perfectly right on the money with my watch decisions, the people who were loudly gloating and hating indeed were loudly (and mindlessly) just gloating and hating, and that while it was technically viable to follow every release next to a full time job, it would suck me and all my free time completely dry, rendering the experience borderline tortureous. And this is still a relatively niche area of entertainment. Imagine "following the entirety of film and music". Ridiculous.

358 points by nivethan 1y ago

flappyeagle 1y ago

I asked o3 about bjorks latest releases and news — it did a great job.

imiric 1y ago
A machine learning algorithm that summarizes and hallucinates information is arguably worse than a machine learning algorithm that decides which social media posts you see. They're both controlled by corporations, but at least on social media you (still) have the option to read content written by humans.

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bee_rider 1y ago

I do sort of think Pandora feels like better algorithmic song finding—maybe it is just that I have an old profile so it has learned enough about me to do good matching, though. But, it is notable for being a pretty old site, from back before the algorithmic feeds really exploded and took control of everything… I often wonder if we actually don’t like algorithmic (non)curation, or if we just don’t like the shitty version of it has developed. — What’s the story behind the Bjork thing? I’ve always found celebrities that just sort of stay hidden between releases endearing. I mean isn’t that what the rest of us would do? Enya, obviously, has it all figured out.

Sleaker 1y ago
I used Pandora from inception, but swapped to Spotify because the algo stopped working completely for me, and they ran into licensing issues with a lot of content and a lot of the oddball music I was listening to or used as a seed for stations just vanished completely.

fellowniusmonk 1y ago

I think it goes far deeper than curation, it's that all tooling that encourages self determination and discovery has been stripped out of UIs. Every influencer or algo is some one/corp curating content (ultimately for their own profit motive, not for their followes) The only place to get lost is wikipedia or tvtropes, there is no sense that you can discover things and this is tied to profit motives. We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed platforms behind logins but with open source codebases, but open platforms, where data is free, where the focus is on having all the data from all the sources and surfacing it in any way a person can imagine. We used to have tools curators could use, powerful search functionality, there was a sense that with infinite things to do some people wanted the wiki and some people wanted to create articles from the wiki and some people liked the article or the broadcast and didn't care to look at the wiki. But now we have only curation and all the data itself is hidden behind walled gardens. So now we look at jpgs posted on instagram to figure out what might be fun to do this weekend and that's just dumb. We have curation to our specific tastes and we grow less and less tolerant of the shocking and surprising because even when we radically change our views it's because an algorithm has slowly steared us that way, and so nothing is new or surprising and there is no discovery anymore.

th0ma5 1y ago
Kinda wild to read a post on here so true it stops you in your tracks. People are missing a lot of opportunities.
vladms 1y ago
I honestly think we have more tools and they are more powerful than "before". I would give an example: find a weekend hike. Before (20-30 years ago): you need to have a book (for profit, curated) or a map (for profit, less info). You needed to rely on other people or on previous experience. Hard to know what changed since the info was collected. Now: multiple websites both hike focused and more generic that give you reviews, photos, comments. Generic websites (openstreetmap, google maps) that allow you to check further details if you wish so, some with open data. I think people should take more responsibility and stop blaming so much "the algorithm" and "the profit". It's the same as with smoking. Even if most people agree it is bad for health, 1 in 5 people still smoke.

ZeroConcerns 1y ago

Well, originally, the answer to this question was "search engines, like Google" And, for a while, this worked pretty well. The breaking point for me was when Google bought pompous-restaurant-ranker Zagat and proceeded to disappear their curated reviews into something that would nowadays best be described as "an AI blackhole". And that was in 2011, mind you. Of course, Zagat going away was an entirely elitist event with no consequence to the Internet-or-society-as-a-whole whatsoever, but for me, it was the moment I realized that democratized data-ranking would never provide any real value. And the whole "AI" story is pretty much history repeating: unless actual-humans-with-distinguisable options feed "the algorithm", the output will be... well, slop. TL;DR: curation by actual living, thinking and critical humans (which automatically excludes most "best of" repositories on Github, BTW) is still the way forward.

WarOnPrivacy 1y ago

Corollary: If everything is curated, how do we find helpful curation? If we fill the void indicated in the article - that is, we post and host useful information, how do we get it noticed by the audience that's looking for it? As far as we believe we can't rise above the noise, we're unlikely to assemble info and make it available.

herrherrmann 1y ago
There are some explicit efforts to surface smaller/indie websites, like web rings and e.g. Kagi’s small web features[1]. These kinds of things might help. 1: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

neuroelectron 1y ago

In the real world.

behnamoh 1y ago

> We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't. No thanks. The last time this happened we ended up with opinionated articles, hidden promotions, and censorship in news, media, newspapers, etc. A good example: try searching for "fluoride residue in brain" on Google vs Yandex and see how they tell totally opposite stories.

noduerme 1y ago
And now that no one trusts any kind of expert, we've ended up with millions of various conspiracy peddlers believed by billions too uneducated to even begin to parse fact from fiction. Sort of like taking the centralized religion/opinion/censorship problem and smashing it into tiny shards that get on everything. At least when there were 2, 3, or 10 curated sides to a story, with sources and expertise to draw on, a somewhat literate person could draw some conclusions on which parts of each were valid.
- eastbound 1y ago
  Uh… no. What made me look into a subject that it often called a conspiracy theory (men’s rights) was the several levels of obvious bullshit that newspapers were delivering. Think about it: The only thing they had to do was to say lies that seem right, and they didn’t even succeed at that. So no, it’s not the mediatization of the opposite point of view that gives it an audience, but the sheer lack of truthfulness of the dominating class.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - protocolture 1y ago
    Mens rights arent a conspiracy theory, but are often used as dull propaganda in the same way. It sucks because theres a group local to me that does free information sessions and bbq meet ups in front of the local family court house. But online MRA's have given them such a bad name with terrible behaviour.

paleotrope 1y ago

Seems there are two things going on here that is being conflated. 1. The amount of "culture" being created has to be like a magnitude of order greater than 25 years ago. Of course you can't watch all those shows and movies't now. There are too many and it's too much. 2. The algorithms were developed to help with this problem. They are just a poor match for the problem.

pimlottc 1y ago
The algorithms are a poor match because they were primarily developed to benefit content providers, not users.
- paleotrope 1y ago
  Oh that's definitely true. I mean you can definitely see the conflict of interest between say you know HBO Max trying to get their content viewed versus any other streamer
- Nasrudith 1y ago
  What on earth makes you think that the prior state of affairs was to benefit the users?
whilenot-dev 1y ago
I would make a different list of points: 1. The "new" of today is no match for the "new" of back then: Breaking Bad is as good for a first binge today as it was 2008. I'm currently watching Mad Men for the first time and can't see how anything could've been made differently 18 years(!) ago. That's 7 seasons of a well-made show and I couldn't care less for any Netflix production that gets cancelled after its 2nd season. The change in quality from Star Trek: TNG to Breaking Bad seems like a huge leap, do these leaps exist anymore? 2. There is no discussion about any current Zeitgeist, everything feels intermixed and nothing is ever finished. Leaving politics aside here, consumers are beta testers without any way to provide direct feedback to producers (one that isn't public outrage of some kind) - every other usual customer interaction is just a waste of your time. Big studios are busy milking "universes" that have been created pre-social media. 3. Algorithms are part of the creation for these problems, not their solution. Big tech just doesn't like this take, creative work is risky, businesses need to scale up quickly and efficiently.

lapcat 1y ago

It felt like the first 3 (or 2.5) paragraphs, which were arguing that Bjork needed an official website, were a bit of a tangent from the main argument of the article, which was that we need more professional critics, but social media has essentially defunded and dethroned them. I'm personally ambivalent about the argument. I'm old enough to have lived in a time before the rise of the web and social media. However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure content without the web. Nowadays I'm not a big fan of popular culture, but on the other hand my taste doesn't seem to match well with professional critics either. So how do I find stuff? My "process" is very hit-and-miss. I sample a bunch of stuff that sounds interesting to me, and if I don't actually find it interesting, I bail out ASAP. Streaming media sites are good for this kind of scattershot approach. I also go the public library, browse the shelves, and just randomly check out several books that I might like. Perhaps the majority turn out to be duds, but I've found a number of diamonds in the rough that way, books that I never would have read otherwise. (Incidentally, the library also provides access to sites such as https://www.kanopy.com/ https://www.kanopy.com/) I don't feel the need to stay current on culture. The books, films, and TV shows that I find might be recent, or they might be quite old. There's plenty of good stuff from the past that for whatever reason I never encountered until now. If you're following the professional critics, you'll likely only be learning about new content; it's not that the critics didn't talk about old stuff before, but it's just as difficult to find old critical discussions about old content as it is to find the old content itself. How else but randomly will you find reviews of obscure stuff from 20 years ago? [EDIT:] Thinking back to my preteen years, the public library was also crucial for me then. I remember discovering influential works such as Frank Herbert's Dune and Plato's Apology there, just browsing the shelves.

microtonal 1y ago
However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure content without the web. I was very deep into non-mainstream music when I was in my teenage years (90ies) and magazines and (the little access I had to) the web were not very useful. Even outside the mainstream, a lot of magazines were mostly into the big alternative acts and mostly fed by leads by music companies. The best way to discover music was to go to small alternative music shops. I would hang there for hours and would listen as many records as the owners tolerated. And since they were music buffs themselves and pretty much knew every obscure record they were selling, they could often point you to interesting records. I don't think much has changed for my peers, back then they would listen what the top-40, MTV, and TMF would give them, and now they listen what record companies are pushing or astroturfing. (I don't mean this in a denigrating way, there are other media where I am more into mainstream stuff, like TV shows.) I don't go to record shops anymore, but I still find music based on 'browsing' and word of mouth mostly. The good thing of 2025 is that I can get my hands on every bit of obscure music, whereas in 1995, some albums would have to be imported by a record store and it was way out of my budget as a teen.

steveBK123 1y ago

I'd agree with the jist of this article. Social media has been less "wisdom of crowds" and more endless algorithmic slop and pay-to-play influencers. Sure there was always PR dealmaking & money behinds the scenes previously I'm sure, but there were actual magazines/websites/etc in every genre publishing numerical reviews for cars/cameras/games/movies/shows/albums/etc. If you paid attention you could figure out which curators scoring aligned with what you tended to like. Now every reviewer is a YouTube influencer who loves every product put in front of them, no product is every bad, no scores are assigned because then you can cross compare, etc. The acquisition, death, resurrection and mundane ongoing existence of dpreview is a good example of this. What we had before wasn't perfect, but what has followed is worse.

AlienRobot 1y ago

I agree with the sentiment completely. From link directories to search engines, and now with AI, and from reblogging to recommendation algorithms, I think what is being lost is the ability to "browse" the web. To look at a list of things that may not interest you. Because sometimes among those things you do find something that piques your interest.

lmcinnes 1y ago

> And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen before. It'll never surprise you with something different. It keeps you in a little bubble. This is not true at all, algorithms can predict things you haven't seen before, and can take you well outside your bubble. A lot of the existing recommendation algorithms on social media etc. do keep you in a bubble, but that's a very specific choice 'cause apparently that's where the money is at. There's enough work in multi-armed-bandit explore/exploit systems that we definitely could have excellent algorithms that do exactly the kind of curation the author would like. The issue is not algorithms, but rather incentives on media recommendation and consumption. People say they would like something new, but they keep going back to the places that feed them more of the comfortable same.

reactordev 1y ago

The argument for curation goes against the argument for democratization. We collectively said “enough” with Hollywood gatekeeping which means you must bring your own audience. Movies roles are based on your followers. Music gigs, based on your followers. Any creative event, based on your followers. So known named artists like Bjork have to build a following for an event for promoters to green light it. It sucks, but that’s the nature of the business. Sell tickets, upsell merchandise, sell records, repeat.

h2zizzle 1y ago
Democratization is micro-curation. What we have now is not that. We have monolithic platforms - the richest companies in the world, or companies owned by the richest people in the world - serving content as they see fit, with a veneer of what your friends, family, and favorite celebrities want to to show you. We are back to, "Brought to you by GE!", for all intents and purposes. Right down to them telling us who to vote for.
layer8 1y ago
Curation is more like representative democracy. You elect the curators you trust the most.
protocolture 1y ago
>The argument for curation goes against the argument for democratization. Unless you are going to read every book, watch every movie, listen to every song you are going to consult others about their own experiences, or have an algorithm or radio station feed it to you in their own curated order. You didnt defeat trust, you just trust different people now.
- immibis 1y ago
  No, they're right. If you have "democratization", you don't necessarily read every book yourself, but there are lots of competent or incompetent people you can choose to trust to review them for you and suggest which ones to read. Which means people who choose to trust different sources will get different cultural experiences.

monatron 1y ago

We have tools today that are uniquely good at wading through disparate sources and aggregating things into a format that we can easily digest. The worry of course - is that these tools are generally on offer from huge tech giants (google, openai, etc). The good news is, we have open-source versions of these tools that perform almost as well as the closed-source versions for these types of categorization and aggregation. I would agree that information is now more scattered (like bread for ducks as the author notes) than ever before -- but we now have the unprecedented ability to wrangle it ourselves.

arguflow 1y ago
What opensource tools are you talking about here? The only ones I know of is just building your own rss feed.
- monatron 1y ago
  I'm referring to LLMs

chrisallick 1y ago

you dont. youre brought things inside your algo bubble. kind of a bummer of an evolution of the net.

tolerance 1y ago

What most people refer to as "culture" or "art" are products that are vectors for identity in a fractured society. If the author feels malaise over not being able to find to find new things to watch and listen to, imagine how hard it must be to just be yourself these days and foster communities around the likes and dislikes that you share with other people. Curating/taste-making is identity politics.

miiiiiike 1y ago

I miss Entertainment Weekly having a print subscription. I loved tearing out blurbs about stuff that was coming out and sticking them to my pin board. Feels more real than adding something to a watchlist (which I NEVER look at) in an app.

pigeons 1y ago

If everything is curated to only include what pays the highest affiliate commission, how will we find good things that don't include a large marketing expense in their cost?

os2warpman 1y ago

> It makes art (music, film, tv, etc.) seem like one big sludge pile. It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of things that you'll never get to the end of. If that is not hyperbole and the author is not taking steps to distance themselves from those feelings, that is extremely unhealthy. Like an addiction or something. The only thing that should feel like that is laundry. Perhaps the author should rebalance their leisure activities portfolio to include more things that aren't pop culture media.

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anywhichway 1y ago

> You then have to hunt around for the info Have you considered that that might be the goal of releasing trickles of information about the film prior to its official release? It makes collected information feel more exclusive to super fans and encourages fans to interact with each other on social media providing fuel for Bjork focused communities. If collecting this information feels exhausting instead of exciting to you... why are you trying so hard to collect it? Just wait for the actual release. > We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't. I don't understand how you expect a critic to tell you whether its worth your time based on a collection of pre-release rumors and interviews. For deciding if its worth my time, I mainly want to hear from critics who have seen the upcoming media and I want to hear their opinion on what they saw. Why would I care to hear Ebert and Roeper's opinion on what the actors said in their press release tour? Unless it was something especially newsworthy and they wouldn't need to go digging for that. I just don't see how a critic's review would be enhanced by "devoting their lives to browsing through the piles".

tacker2000 1y ago

Just thought about this in the context of searching for products. Nowadays there is so much stuff and also so much information available, one just gets lost in this huge sea and spends countless hours trying to find the “best” product… back in the days you would have only one or two choices and that would be it. But was it better? Im actually not so sure…

gtowey 1y ago
The consumer landscape has gotten so hostile. Once upon a time you could use price as a proxy for evaluating quality. More expensive versions of a product were generally better. Nowadays it's all smoke and mirrors; marketing, branding and lies. In general I find even the more expensive versions of consumer products are still garbage quality which end up in a landfill all to quickly. It's hard to buy something good even if you're willing to spend the money. Our current capitalism doesn't care about providing value for the money, no it's all about how much money to can squeeze out of people and how low you can make your production costs.
escapedmoose 1y ago
It’s so difficult to tell the quality of things online, I’ve returned to buying almost exclusively from brick-and-mortar stores. If they don’t have it, I just don’t buy it. It’s less frustrating to live without than to own something that’s not right.

romankolpak 1y ago

When I was younger I had a few different sources for finding music - a couple of friends who were really into music and I knew they were investing time and searching for it, so I always wanted to hear what they recommend, even if it didn’t match my taste. There was also a curated website and a forum dedicated to alternative genres, like hardcore or post rock and other “edgy” stuff, where I liked to hang out. I knew this is where people really passionate about music gathered and it was interesting to see what they like and what they recommend. It was always driven my community, by people I liked or loved, or trusted their judgement. Needless to say you get none of that with algorithms. Spotify does recommend some good songs for me regularly and I often add them to “liked” but it’s much lonelier now. Music used to connect me with other people and now it’s just me and my Spotify.

namenumber 1y ago
mixcloud has been great for this for me. so many people post their mixes and their radio shows there that there is always something new to explore, and searching for something slightly off that i know i like leads to people using that in a mix so i know we're at least partly on the same wavelength when i start to listen. And then eventually you end up with a list of mixtape makers/DJ's/radio show hosts you trust which is cool, really feels like a world radio show at times.
ghaff 1y ago
Pretty much listened to what "my crowd" in college listened to. It spanned out in various other directions over time--some by organic discovery via music festivals and the like, some via friends. Mostly don't concern myself too much with "discovery" these days.

Papazsazsa 1y ago

Curation is the uncrossable moat for AGI/ASI as an inherently human-to-human behavior. Trends, tastes, and language evolve in real time, driven by social signaling, novelty bias, and the human instinct for signaling to preserve individuality and status within a group and against the algorithm. One need only rabbit hole down various corners of the internet to see this, but its even more pronounced in personal fashion, indie bookstores and art galleries, and even inside people's homes. It is immensely gratifying to me because it means humans will always need humans, no matter how hard tech tries. In trying to financialize, map, or otherwise algorithmically diagnose taste, effort impeaches itself.

ukuina 1y ago
> Curation is the uncrossable moat for AGI/ASI as an inherently human-to-human behavior. Infinite context models will understand everything about your life. Combined with real-time lookup of all content ever created alongside the ability to generate new content on demand, curation seems destined to be solved.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago
  Please tell me this is sarcasm. I mean, I know people love to extrapolate current LLM capabilities into arbitrary future capabilities via magical thinking, but "infinite context" really takes the cake.
- fallinditch 1y ago
  If that's true it would be a sad outcome, I believe people would react against such an artificial world. In a music DJ context: even if an AI was able to mimic the dopest turntablist moves and factor in layers of depth and groove and create unique mixes, it would still be an artificial mix made by AI, and so not as valuable or worthwhile as a human DJ. That doesn't mean that AI DJs or musicians won't be successful, they just won't be human and can never be human, and that means something.
- Papazsazsa 1y ago
  This will never happen without the destruction of the individual. Humans will simply opt out and create their own islands of ideology or taste, and have been doing exactly that for millennia.

larodi 1y ago

This article resonates so bad with me, like as if I did write it. This all the author writes about is called collapse of context. And people been waking up to noticing it, writing about it, eventually becoming victims. Everyone who previously had a natural sect of some subculture is failing victing the moment they move the member base into faang social media. It kills the opportunity to mold your community around itself - it gets molded for monetization. I dream the day when using social media would be considered as bad as a smoking or drinking habit, the endless scroll of mostly irrelevant content. Because even curated accounts are bombarded with advertised noised. In recent years I wake up to the fact that I keep meeting people who are totally supposed to be in my bubble, very similar, lived in the same city, not a big one, 2m, but we have not found each other because of media noise, and technological alienation. Its amazing as if living in the black mirror already and for a while. I keep investing massive efforts to get any public events gathering people spending hundreds of euros for promotion, prominent artists, in a time when delivery of information is supposed to be immediate. The audience, which includes all of us, fail to notice the information as there is so much of it. faang is milking everyone like crazy for the right to get to people supposed to be subscribed to our own content, which we don't own. it totally makes sense to have vanilla html at this point as i did with my event yesterday (tickets.dubigxbi.com), but then again - i need to submit a bribe to techbros to even let me emerge in the information sphere. like, I started considering running a bot farm, because this is what they deserve. 500$ of ads gets me mostly bot traffic, it is insane, paid advertising has never been so ineffective. Besides, the way many grow to behave, and not only the young generation, is that they get addicted to endless scrollers in tiktok/insta/x and it is not us/them anymore searching the information. It is algorithms packing it for everyone, which is amazing way to put tubes in everyone's eyes and minds and feed it hallucinations of all sorts. But it is the world we woke into.

citizenkeen 1y ago
I’m curious about your vernacular/cadence.
- larodi 1y ago
  my French is not much better, sorry. still hoping I was able to get a point through. let me reiterate - total collapse of context. and I did not invent it. we are back to selling culture at bazaars.

jedberg 1y ago

I've been saying this forever!! When I was a teen in the 90s, I got new music from the radio. The music director picked 40ish songs a week and that's what we listened to. I still like to listen to the radio for the curation. I even wrote a program to scrape the websites of my favorite radio stations (well the stations of my favorite music directors) and add the songs to a Spotify playlist. Whenever I meet a teenager today, one of the first things I ask them is "what apps do you use most", but the next thing I ask is "how do you find new music". The answer is usually something like "I don't know, I just sort of find stuff I guess?". Some have said they follow influencer's playlists on YouTube or Spotify, which I guess is the new version of the music director? Or they just get it from Spotify playlists. But what's missing is a shared cultural experience. In the 90s, everyone at my school knew those 40 songs that the local stations played. They might know other stuff too, but you couldn't avoid those top songs. It's not the same today. And it's the same problem for visual media. We all knew the top movies at the theater, because it was the only place to see new movies. And we all knew the top TV shows because they were only on four major networks. Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.

withzombies 1y ago
When we were kids, just knowing music that wasn't on the radio made you "into music". Things were very different! The internet has really allowed music choices to be much more personal and I think it's a good thing. We have such a wide variety of music available to us now. I've had some luck finding some TikTok creators who curate specific "vibes" and publish Spotify playlists. I think that's just how it's done now.
- jedberg 1y ago
  I love the variety for sure, I just miss the curation and the shared culture. It's harder to find people in person who know the same music and TV that you do.
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    Every silver lining has its cloud. Shared cultural touchstones came hand in hand with tastemakers and gatekeepers. We’re more directly connected to the movers and shakers than ever before, but it’s largely parasocial interaction, mediated by platforms and gated by subscriptions. We’re increasingly disintermediated with respect to creators so that we can be separated and reconstituted into our profit-bearing parts. We’re old wine poured into new wineskins.

bmink 1y ago

> I discovered interesting music like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Portishead, Tricky, Orbital, Takako Minekawa, Hooverphonic, Poe, Veruca Salt all from sporadically listening to one college radio station in my hometown and, once a week, watching one music program on MTV (usually 120 Minutes or AMP). Then, once a month, I would sometimes flip through a music magazine while at the hair salon (usually Rolling Stone or Spin). And that was literally it. This section contains two types of curation that have to be separated: college radio is good curation, it is nonprofit, done by people for the love of the medium and will help you broaden your horizon. Rolling Stone et. al. is bad curation, a form of gatekeeping really, very commercial, requiring lots of connections and resources to get featured in.

chowells 1y ago

I don't really disagree with the idea that there's value in curation. And I even think there's some value in gatekeeping. Sometimes, at least. But the timing is really funny here, given the massive success Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is currently experiencing. People have found this game - and it's not by curation. It's by massive word of mouth, as people who try the game tend to tell all their friends about it. In the case where something is really good, people find out about it without curators. Curators are good for finding some stuff. But the ones so good that everyone talks about? You'll find them anyway.

_Algernon_ 1y ago
Word of mouth is a form of curation.
thombles 1y ago
I'll take your word for it but I have to chuckle, since I'm adjacent to some groups of gamers and I've never seen the name of this game in my life. So it goes!
BlueTemplar 1y ago
It was also partially through marketing and curation (which overlap). But these, as well as word of mouth, are the least needed for something so popular.
Falell 1y ago
This doesn't follow at all. The game received _excellent_ reviews prior to release. It's currently the second best reviewed PC game of the year on metacritic [1] (an aggregator with some problems but I don't think this is controversial). Exactly contrary to your point, both Clair Obscur and Blue Prince (#1) got excellent reviews in the days leading up to release leading to people on e.g. Reddit saying "this game came out of nowhere and it has amazing reviews, I'm excited". https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/pc/all/all-time/metascore/?releaseYearMin=2025&releaseYearMax=2025&platform=pc&page=1 https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/pc/all/all-time/metas...
- 1y ago

ferguess_k 1y ago

Not entirely related, but back in the 80s we "found" PC games by getting a 5 inch diskette from my father's colleagues, with the bonuses of getting computer viruses at the same time. In the 90s I "found" PC games by reading magazines and borrowing a un-labeled CD from a classmate who owns every Japanese gaming consoles from NES to Saturn.

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rufus_foreman 1y ago

I listened to punk in the 70's and hardcore from 80 to 84, nothing was curated by some authoritative source. It was all word of mouth. Hardcore wasn't on the radio, it wasn't on TV (OK, "TV Party" and "Institutionalized" were on MTV, both of which were "joke" hardcore songs), you couldn't buy the records in the record stores in my town until the mid-80s, you couldn't buy the zines in my town. There was a tiny amount of it played on college radio, but it would be something like one show a week from 2 AM to 3 AM on Sunday morning. Kids would drive from where I lived to the "city" and drive around in their cars taping that show from the car radio to a boombox and then pass those tapes around to get copied. It was samizdat. And most hardcore they couldn't even play on those radio shows anyway. "We don't care what you say, fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you! FUCK YOU!!!" Great song, can't hear it on the radio. Can't hear it anywhere you go. We found things. You had to really dig, but we found things. No one curated it for us. I hate the very idea of it. I mean my friend Joe "curated" music for me when he made me a tape of the Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, and DOA in 6th grade in 1981, but I don't think that is the meaning of curation that the title is referring to. If a kid got a record, it got passed around and taped. Then those tapes got passed around and taped. Etc. No one tells me what music I should listen to, we told the musicians what kind of music we wanted to hear when we were in the pit. Many of them noped out from that. They were artists, not enablers of the violent tendencies of poorly parented 14 year olds. Fair enough. But we were finding things out.

quesera 1y ago
> There was a tiny amount of it played on college radio, but it would be something like one show a week from 2 AM to 3 AM on Sunday morning > We found things. ... No one curated it for us. I think you're getting to the essence of good curation. That college radio show is exactly curation. The record label that put out the hardcore 7"s is curation. The record store is curation. The kid who bought a record and made copies for friends is a curator. Word of mouth is the strongest curation. What's missing today is the human. The college radio DJ is a human curator, and is much more idiosyncratic and humanely engaging than an optimized-for-content-or-cost algorithmic curator. Algorithms might work for very mainstream (or nonspecific) tastes -- and actually it is self-reinforcing on that level. But it fails badly for nichier stuff. And it is in direct opposition to those of us for whom "different" is/was part of our personal or group identity. :)

yhager 1y ago

I had similar feeling over the past few years, trying futilely to escape the algorithm.. I recently discovered radiop aradise[1] which is exactly what I needed - free, old style, very little talk, human-curated radio. They have a vast selection of titles, and they simply play good music - stuff I know, stuff I don't.. it's just great. They also have a world music channel, which I couldn't find any parallel anywhere else. They have wonderful music there when I'm in my "world music" mood. All in all, it's a gem, highly recommended for any music lovers who prefer curated over algorithmic. [1] https://radioparadise.com/home https://radioparadise.com/home

arguflow 1y ago
Thank you this is great!

j45 1y ago

LLMs will be able to learn what we do and don't like. And try to serve that. Or try to serve it's agenda despite those likes.

smallpipe 1y ago

Curation is still around, it’s just a bit less easy to get. The local venues are filling that role now. Take a listen on the “what’s on” page.

pmarreck 1y ago

Machine learning algorithms. And they're doing a fine job of it too, even if they remove the shared cultural experience. (Which is a big loss, to be sure. I grew up listening to Casey Kasem cover the American Top 40 on the radio...)

tossandthrow 1y ago
Which is also curation

thejeswi 1y ago

Maybe IPTV is an interesting source of curated entertainment This playlist has hundreds of channels: https://iptv-org.github.io/iptv/index.m3u https://iptv-org.github.io/iptv/index.m3u Github page: https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv Another source could be following respected critics who have similar tastes to you, like the film critic Roger Ebert: https://rogerebert.com/reviews https://rogerebert.com/reviews

john2x 1y ago

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of my kids. I am a bit of a snob (a huge one if I’m being honest) about media I consume. Naturally I guide the content my kids watch quite closely, much closer than my peers. I am their curator. But I can’t help but feel I am isolating my kids when I do this. The things they watch and listen and play and read at home are vastly different than other kids their age.

Jordan-117 1y ago
Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation https://theonion.com/cool-dad-raising-daughter-on-media-that-will-put-her-en-1819572981/ https://theonion.com/cool-dad-raising-daughter-on-media-that...
- john2x 1y ago
  That’s amazing. The post date is cherry on top.

lucasfdacunha 1y ago

I've been a subscriber for the hacker newsletter [1] for years and it does a great job of curating content from this website. This inspired me to create The Gaming Pub [2] which is a similar kind of curated newsletter but for gaming content. I believe newsletters like that are a great way to find interesting stuff. 1. https://hackernewsletter.com/ https://hackernewsletter.com/ 2. https://www.thegamingpub.com/ https://www.thegamingpub.com/

duck 1y ago
Thanks for the HNL mention and nice job with The Gaming Pub!
- lucasfdacunha 1y ago
  Hey Kyle, your work on the Hacker Newsletter is awesome. Thanks for that and for the kind words regarding The Gaming Pub. I hope I grow the newsletter to be as big as yours in someday.

protocolture 1y ago

Good curation is amazing. When I first signed on to Netflix it worked me out and suggested a bunch of stuff that I love to this day. But then it ran out of stuff, or they borked the algorithm and now it sucks. And all its competitors suck. One thing I have noticed is that if you ask a human for a specific recommendation like "Suggest me a novel like The Martian" if they dont have a specific recommendation, you just get their favourite instead. Which makes reddit threads and similar completely useless. The signal to noise ratio is awful.

robertlutece 1y ago
off topic, but I recently read Alfred Lansing's "Endurance" and felt that was in spirit like "The Martian" although I remember the latter more from the film than the book.
9dev 1y ago
Actually with Netflix, I'd argue that they used to produce a few shows that were great, novel, and interesting to watch. But over time, as their revenue (and shareholder expectations) grew, they started to crunch out targeted content created for specific audiences at a budget (ever noticed how the set is practically empty save for the show's protagonists at all times?). These shows suck because they're not works of art, but metric-driven checklists of features that the target group enjoys. I assume there's a small sliver of budget available for actually interesting productions, kind of similar to Google's moonshots, but the vast majority of Netflix' catalog is just algorithmic crap by now, so the recommendations are probably solid, there's just nothing good to recommend.
- protocolture 1y ago
  The things I enjoyed that netflix curated for me all preexisted netflix. I bought in to netflix for the good content productions, but I stayed as long as I did for the recommendation engine.

abrahadabra 1y ago

I don't see the problem. When it comes to music, who exactly is stopping you from easily, quickly, and comfortably exploring new albums in any genre or style you want via Bandcamp, RateYourMusic, Last.fm, Discogs, or Spotify?

nop_slide 1y ago
Peep Soma FM too

pmkary 1y ago

Thanks for the great post.

andirk 1y ago

Cant find the OG quoter but "Wikipedia doesn't work in theory but does work IRL"

Hard_Space 1y ago

I get a lot of movie recommendations from Trakt, for Stremio, at the moment. Besides this, my wife uses Facebook a lot to find new shows and movies for us to watch, which is good, as I only got to FB when my work sometimes demands it. I do agree with the sentiment expressed in comments here that human>human curation is something AI can't replace. It doesn't understand the relation (or lack of relation) between songs, shows or movies for any one user. The choices we make for these things are usually underpinned by many factors specific to us, and don't represent valid or meaningful 'trends' to be discerned and applied to others.

arguflow 1y ago

I feel like this is one of the big reasons I find myself coming back to hackernews recently. The content I see is THE SAME content everyone sees. As a collective there is a consensus around what is happening in the community however small.

PicassoCTs 1y ago

Word of mouth annotated by chains of trust. If somebody is unknown, unless somebody else vouches for him - he is silenced, his links invisible. Vouching is somebody else giving him trust- and disappearing, if that was unearned. Your grandpa forwarding fb-pigfeed - his links invisible, except to his conspiracy cloud, that wants all and sees all. If you want new things, you temporary lift bans on curators- people who venture and search for new things. This is all that remains of the feed, the algos die. The social media parasites are purged and will become a warning footnote in history books.

kgwxd 1y ago

I find it way easier to find interesting things, and communities based around them, these days. Looking back, the curators of old were highly pretentious, and the kids obsessed with being one of the first to discover something, mostly so they could gatekeep, were exactly as unbearable as they’re portrayed in shows about those times.

billfruit 1y ago

Curation isn't that big of a problem as is stated. Especially when it becomes gatekeeping. It is more important that there is possibility of unrestricted discoverability and exploration than having curation.

Jgrubb 1y ago

At a beach rental house this week and they have some sort of internet television and no cable with a guide of channels playing whatever right now. I can stream anything I want at any time but I can't just watch the hockey game that's on right now without signing into something. It shouldn't be this hard. We keep a Sirius subscription even though it occurred to me 10 years ago that Apple Music has largely everything I need. I want, however, to hear stuff I don't like that forces me to change the channel to another station or to be exposed to something new that's not like the last thing the algorithm already knows I like. Infinite choice is horrible.

AngryData 1y ago

You look at the what the people you enjoy listen to or read or watch. Want more of a certain music? Find a streaming radio of that music and its just like the old radio DJ except its not 95% pop unless you want pop. Like particular videos? Look at what those video creators are subscribed to. Like certain books? Read what other people who liked that book call out or suggest om forums.

djhworld 1y ago

I still do listen to the radio to discover new music, not live shows though but catch-up episodes. It's definitely worth it, yes some of the songs might not be to my taste but at least you get the chance to make that determination yourself and you get exposed to different stuff. In my experience the algorithmic recommendation systems don't do this, I mean they might throw you a wildcard in here or there but I tend to find they overfit on some niche and it just becomes tiresome, and you don't get the commentary from the DJ who might add something like describing who the artist is, what the song's name is and maybe some flavour on the DJs interactions with the artist over time.

NonHyloMorph 1y ago

"..Feels like a job" Seems to be the case, that someone hasn't made the latent fact manifest to themselves, that they are actually on the way to become what they are missing.

shanesnotes 1y ago

i built www.codecrawl.co to solve this exact problem for engineering blogs

jpc0 1y ago
https://www.codecrawl.co/ https://www.codecrawl.co/ Because clickable links are nicer…
immibis 1y ago
Nice!

justincarter 1y ago

It's so odd to read a take like this. I agree with the problem but I do think there are ways to fix it, it's just going against the tide. For music I intentionally listen to local independent radio and also somafm, where I'm not "picking" the exact music. I read the NYTimes and the Economist and both of them do movie reviews and the Economist has good book reviews.

cratermoon 1y ago

The big platforms aren't geared for finding things, they're set up to keep you searching, staying on the platform/feed/scroll/whatever looking for your interests, feeding you things they think might catch your attention for a few seconds in between ads or as ads. Even Google search stopped helping you find things and started pushing to keep looking https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

CommenterPerson 1y ago

OP: "How do I fix this?". One small step is to vote for better data privacy rules. That might reduce some of what feeds this enshittification. EU is making some progress with this. I'm optimistic this would eventually happen but maybe not in my lifetime.

gorfian_robot 1y ago

for those seeking a curated experience trying listening to new orlean's fantastic WWOZ online https://www.wwoz.org/listen/player/ https://www.wwoz.org/listen/player/ I also used to listen to McMurdo Station's radio (AFAN) but it seems offline now KLAP from Gerlach NV is also good if Jeff has it up and running (lol). https://streema.com/radios/KLAP https://streema.com/radios/KLAP

yunwal 1y ago
NTS.live is great and has a show for pretty much any music fan
- MitPitt 1y ago
  You only get the live tracklist if you pay? This sucks!

jtwoodhouse 1y ago

Word of mouth has been and will be always the most reliable form of curation.

zoomTo125 1y ago

From a collector's perspective, the way to do is simple. You sort by new or sort by most viewed in day/week. If you don't have time, sort by category and sort by new/most viewed again. That is how people discovered things and hobbyists curate stuff for broader audience. Sadly, they're dying because platforms can't even get that simple concept. Legal platform can't even tag properly.

robust-cactus 1y ago

Btw, these social media giants curate content wayyyy more than you'd expect. TikTok curates it's trends and gets it's biggest influencers to engage first. Pinterest seeded it's network with a few noteworthy creators. Even Airbnb famously took pictures for the top stays in NY. Curation is now just more opaque. Even in the AI age, human in the middle is going to be pervasive.

perching_aix 1y ago

I think this post misconstrues how social media platforms work and why critics are less relevant today than ever, in order to excuse a simple lack of popularity and poor marketing practices on their favorite musician's side. For example... > And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen before. It'll never surprise you with something different. ... this is both nonsensical (recommendation algorithms don't predict content, but that you'll want to engage and will remain engaged by a given content), and to the extent it isn't, is just blatantly and demonstrably false, since there's at least one counterexample available, and that is my own anecdotal one. Or... > It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of things that you'll never get to the end of. ... because it is. The sheer notion that back in the day you could have enumerated and gone through "all the local and foreign music releases" borders on comical. What you exhausted back then I'm pretty sure were the curated lists you were provided. Nothing less, nothing more. The only "area" I follow with this much determination is anime, and one season (the year is split into four seasons that the entire industry aligns with) I decided to try and watch every show that releases, just to see what I've been missing out on, and if I had misjudged anything like people would often tell me. It's actually possible there, as it is very centralized and localized. Turns out that no, I was perfectly right on the money with my watch decisions, the people who were loudly gloating and hating indeed were loudly (and mindlessly) just gloating and hating, and that while it was technically viable to follow every release next to a full time job, it would suck me and all my free time completely dry, rendering the experience borderline tortureous. And this is still a relatively niche area of entertainment. Imagine "following the entirety of film and music". Ridiculous.