To me this reflects the large variety and volume of content out there today. As the amount of content grows, people with less mainstream tastes spread out their consumption, but people with more mainstream tastes stick with popular choices.
For example, music. Let's say 50% of people like mainstream music and the rest have more obscure preferences. In the past, when music was harder to access, you might be exposed to 100 artists. Now, you might be exposed to over 1,000. The 50% who like more obscure music used to spread their listening out over 100, but now it's spread out over 1,000. Those who like mainstream music still mostly listen to the top 100 or so. The end result is that the top 100 is more solid than before, even though music is diversifying.
For multiplicities, I see a snowball effect: each subsequent release in a multiplicity adds more people to the snowball. As long as the quality is good enough -- and people who enjoy mainstream content arguably have a lower bar -- the audience grows with each release. I think this effect, combined with the author's "proliferation" theory and major producers wanting to make safe investments, explains the dominance of multiplicities.
Mid-price movies are the ones that have mostly gone extinct.
We have the Disney-level Mega Movies with ONE BILLION DOLLAR budgets. These are the ones that are made by a committee of producers and executive producers and shareholders. They're too big to fail, so they'll be tested and re-tested and re-shot until they WILL make a profit. Currently they will also include a Chinese movie star and won't touch any subjects too sensitive for China, because multiple tens of percents of profit will be made in there.
Then we have the Blumhouse[0] type 5-20 million dollar movies. They give a hard budget limit and won't pay the actors much - they'll get a share of the profits instead. They're cheap enough to not bankrupt the production company if it flops, but will make immense profits if they succeed. The Company won't usually affect the production much, giving the director free reign to do what they want.
What's missing in today's world are the $10-$100M, movies. These have a big enough budget to not have to cut corners much, but still small enough to not draw the attention of The Executives who want their favourite things in the movie - letting the director enact their vision. The only mid-budget movie I can think of in the recent years is Michael Bay's Ambulance[1], shot with $40M.
Everything Everywhere All At Once, currently in theaters, had a $25 million budget, and has made a respectable $38 million in the theater so far, enough that some articles are calling it a box office hit.
Also in 2019 there was Knives Out, which had a budget of $40 million and made $311 million in the box office.
I agree with your overall point, just giving a couple more examples.
>What's missing in today's world are the $10-$100M, movies.
You're 70 years too late. Life magazine in 1957 talked about how one of the consequences of the Hollywood studio system (from both TV, and the 1948 Paramount antitrust case) was the death of the "million-dollar mediocrity" (<https://books.google.com/books?id=Nz8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA146>):
"It wasn't good entertainment and it wasn't art, and most of the movies produced had a uniform mediocrity, but they were also uniformly profitable ... The million-dollar mediocrity was the very backbone of Hollywood".
The "million-dollar mediocrity" died because the Paramount case forbade block booking, in which studios required that theaters purchase said mediocrities to also buy big films. Original TV movies appeared in the 1960s but their budgets and production values were too low to really fill the hole in Hollywood, but today's streaming companies' insatiable appetite for content has opened a new outlet for middle-tier films (and, more importantly, series).
The Northman is a 70M-90M budget movie. I guess that's how it got that kind of budget without ever having a chance at making back the money lol (it's just too weird).
>
Fortunately, there’s a cure for our cultural anemia. While the top of the charts has been oligopolized, the bottom remains a vibrant anarchy. There are weird books and funky movies and bangers from across the sea. Two of the most interesting video games of the past decade put you in the role of an immigration officer and an insurance claims adjuster. Every strange thing, wonderful and terrible, is available to you, but they’ll die out if you don’t nourish them with your attention.
This is the romantic view of the hundred (million) flowers blooming of a gatekeeper-liberated internet. I don't think it's a realistic "cure" given human nature.
Rather, I think David Foster Wallace's prediction has been proven out:
> ...this idea that the internet’s gonna become incredibly democratic? I mean if you’ve spent any time on the web, you know that it’s not gonna be, because that’s completely overwhelming. There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99% of them are shit, and it’s too much work to do triage to decide...We’re going to beg for [curation]. We are literally gonna pay for it.
After all...here we are on HN, hoping someone has curated the seething froth of new content into something manageable.
I don’t tend to consume curated art, other than the odd friend passing me musical recommendations.
Reviews and playlists are suspect to me. I also enjoy discovering and combing and deciding.
I’m extremely picky about music and cinema and books. Curated media rarely works out.
I never use Spotify and consider that sort of thing to be bad for music as an art for many reasons I won’t get into in this comment.
I’m a lifelong musician, multi instrumentalist etc… I have my tastes and preferences and desired directions of expansion of both (all, lol)
To me, as a former DJ, I drop the needle 3-4 times, skip around in the song, if I like some harmonic scenarios I am hearing I may stick around to hear how it develops and progresses.
Given the harmonic constraints of an instrument etc, is there any variety of tone, harmonic structure, technique , texture, or is it just skulking away in a corner looking at its own navel… etc…
I realize that I’m atypical, but I’m also precisely a “music power user”. We don’t matter. The industry doesn’t care about progrock, jazz fusion, afrobeat, bebop, acid jazz, classical (except the Messiah on Christmas) samba, salsa, cumbia, or music in general, it cares about tracking armies of fan consumers across the internet, tabloid entertainment news, clothing, photos, videos, good looking people posing. Forget the music, these days it’s all image…
Only in art are experts thrown on the garbage heap while moneyed interests court the brains of those more easily duped simply due to less experience.
I think this is where the competitive thing in music comes crashing hard into the reality that a good song and a really bad song can share the charts, but the bad song often remains longer…
Objectively bad, low effort, poorly structured, lacking a hook, etc, but marketing can keep it there as number one… unlike in UFC where your actual ability to fight matters.
This clearly illustrates that we went from a competency and competition of musical skill to one of marketing skill. Fair enough, but call a spade a spade
Does this mean I am old? Only if one disrespects the human race and human intellect so much that you would cheer the death of a sonic world from the warlike hand of visual glamour and stylized imagery.
A musician is just a kind of fashion photography model capable of making erudite hand gestures and choosing sponsors
So, question to all -- how have you found success at locating the fruits of this "vibrant anarchy?"
Here's an interesting, related link, that's very obviously coming from a certain perspective but still has things you can take [0].
Here are some strategies I use for books:
Go to the library and walk down a random shelf until a book calls to you. You can run your fingers down the spines and feel for the energy of the right book.
The opposite (however, somewhat sideways, rather than top-down) is pulling books from the "someone just returned this" section. And the books suggested by librarians.
I will also do full-text searches of my somewhat large library of ebooks, which gives equal weight to popular and unknown authors.
Randomness, with uncommon items weighted somewhat equal to common ones, and direct recommendations that bypass algorithmic feeds seem to work somewhat well for me as general strategies.
> So, question to all -- how have you found success at locating the fruits of this "vibrant anarchy?"
I've found that live music offers one of the best mechanisms for this. You start out with interest in <major band>, and go see their show. They're on tour with <midsize band> opening for them. You like <midsize band>'s set, so you go see them when they headline a show a few months later. Since they're a smaller band, it's a smaller show, so they have <small band> opening for them. You like <small band>'s set so you later go see them play with <local band>, and so forth.
As the shows get smaller it becomes more common for there to be 3-4 bands on the bill, so the rate of exposure increases. Combine that with the greater sense of community that's common at smaller shows as well as mechanisms like Spotify's related artists and it becomes easier and easier to find new music the deeper you get.
It would be cool if a similar thing was more common with other art forms. What if more movies were preceded by a short from an up and coming director (like Pixar tends to do)? Trailers fill a similar role, but not quite the same. Or what if books included a few recommendations from the author rather than just a list of other books from the publisher?
I have resorted to find individual curators of vibrant anarchy. Reddit and Youtube are the most common sources.
RedLetterMedia helps me find weird movies without any mainstream appeal. r/NearProg, r/ListenToThis and r/progmetal are how I find weird experimental rock artists.
For books, some subreddits has a 'I have finished book X, what should I read next?' thread. That's a good way to do Markov-Chain-esque random walk. Another is to simply rely on my favorite podcasters and bloggers. Books are a long commitment and hard to 'figure out' in a minute or an hour. So, I rarely resort to low quality and high coverage searchers like I do with music or TV media.
I did a project where I worked my way through the Dewey Decimal System, reading one book from each decade along the way. Other than the arbitrary choices of the first and last book on the shelves as I read through the DDC and one stretch of ten DDC classifications where there were only two choices of book to read, I did let myself choose from the books rather than making it purely random, but it was a great way to experience a wide variety of different topics over the course of seven(!) years.¹ https://www.dahosek.com/category/dewey-decimal-project/
⸻
1. It’s possible that I might have finished a few months sooner had Covid-related library closures not slowed me down a bit in 2020.
Your ideas could potentially be encoded in a better ranking/recommender _algorithm_ ..
ie. recommenders using something akin to page-rank could/should inject some random items so as to allow new content to bubble up and good new content to be voted up.
It seems nature does something similar - copying DNA pretty accurately, yet allowing for some mutations to advance things and adapt to a changing environment.
That's why I love it when people find their weird media niche. You're a big fan of serialized LitRPG stories? Cool, I'm glad you found your thing out there! You like visual novels games? Neat. It's kind of sad that some obscure media interests are considered classy (ooo, old French art films!) and some are considered deeply embarrassing (eww, Harry Potter fanfic).
The system is so laser focused on very specific bits of media (these movies, these songs, these books, and that's it there is no other form of entertainment), that when people find something they really like in the big long tail of content, it's a cause for celebration.
Copyright lasting 1XX years probably has a substantial amount to do with it. If you are a media company, and you already spent the marketing budget building up the idea of Avengers, or Mario, or whatever pop culture icon you are selling, making a sequel means you get to lean on it. Should your company spend lots of extra money advertising your new video game, or just a little reminding people the next Call of Duty is coming out in a month?
Alternatively, flip this around. Would Disney spend so much on Marvel movies if other studios could make movies about the same super heroes? No way! Why should Disney let the other studios ride on their coat tails? They would need to make all new stories and heroes.
Minor nit, the Walt Disney Corporation was founded October 16, 1923 and US copyright has anything published in 1926 or earlier in the public domain.
I rather doubt, though, that the fact that The Great Gatsby just entered the public domain this year has anything to do with the concentration of the market in the hands of a declining number of producers.
In his article [1] he mentions the Internet as part of a possible explanation in terms of it being easier for amateurs to create and distribute material.
But I think the Internet also plays a huge part in the consolidation of fandom. Before the internet, the majority of us could really only share our opinions with those physically nearby, so there were less connections per each node. Enter the internet, now each node has 1000000x more connections, naturally pooling together the ranges of an opinion's influence. The spheres of influence expand while the overall number of spheres shrinks. Just a thought, anyway.
It's easier to distribute material. But it is not - at all - easier to market and promote material. Especially not in a persistent and effective way.
That's the real difference now. People can make near-professional movies on iPhones, musicians can make professional-quality music at home, but no amateur has access to the huge industrial PR, social, and trad ad networks that the major labels/studios can roll out to promote their projects.
I think their paper they linked in the blog post is a bit like that too, maybe even more so, although I found both interesting.
I do agree some of the trends are more convincing than others, although they're generally consistent with the overall direction the author is suggesting.
It's notable that the lower error bar for the 1920s and the upper error bar for the 2020s only differ by about 2%. Aside from the fact the plot sure looks like random noise, even the trend line is consistent with no change.
>How much does it dull our ambitions to watch 2021’s The Matrix: Resurrections, where the most interesting scene is just Neo watching the original Matrix from 1999?
Perceptions are subjective, but I don’t know how anyone wouldn’t consider the most interesting scene to be the one where Neo (and therefore the audience) is told point blank: “our beloved parent company Warner Bros. has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy.”
I’m surprised it wasn’t quoted in TFA because it’s an unusual fourth wall break that aligns with exactly the points the author is making about the inherent emptiness of endless franchises.
Readit News
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31245559, but we merged that thread hither)
For example, music. Let's say 50% of people like mainstream music and the rest have more obscure preferences. In the past, when music was harder to access, you might be exposed to 100 artists. Now, you might be exposed to over 1,000. The 50% who like more obscure music used to spread their listening out over 100, but now it's spread out over 1,000. Those who like mainstream music still mostly listen to the top 100 or so. The end result is that the top 100 is more solid than before, even though music is diversifying.
For multiplicities, I see a snowball effect: each subsequent release in a multiplicity adds more people to the snowball. As long as the quality is good enough -- and people who enjoy mainstream content arguably have a lower bar -- the audience grows with each release. I think this effect, combined with the author's "proliferation" theory and major producers wanting to make safe investments, explains the dominance of multiplicities.
We have the Disney-level Mega Movies with ONE BILLION DOLLAR budgets. These are the ones that are made by a committee of producers and executive producers and shareholders. They're too big to fail, so they'll be tested and re-tested and re-shot until they WILL make a profit. Currently they will also include a Chinese movie star and won't touch any subjects too sensitive for China, because multiple tens of percents of profit will be made in there.
Then we have the Blumhouse[0] type 5-20 million dollar movies. They give a hard budget limit and won't pay the actors much - they'll get a share of the profits instead. They're cheap enough to not bankrupt the production company if it flops, but will make immense profits if they succeed. The Company won't usually affect the production much, giving the director free reign to do what they want.
What's missing in today's world are the $10-$100M, movies. These have a big enough budget to not have to cut corners much, but still small enough to not draw the attention of The Executives who want their favourite things in the movie - letting the director enact their vision. The only mid-budget movie I can think of in the recent years is Michael Bay's Ambulance[1], shot with $40M.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blumhouse_Productions [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambulance_(film)
Also in 2019 there was Knives Out, which had a budget of $40 million and made $311 million in the box office.
I agree with your overall point, just giving a couple more examples.
* Prisoners: US$ 46M
* Sicario: US$ 30M
* Arrival: US$ 47M
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Villeneuve#Reception
His first three movies were <$7M. He went up market (>$160M) with BR2049 and Dune.
You're 70 years too late. Life magazine in 1957 talked about how one of the consequences of the Hollywood studio system (from both TV, and the 1948 Paramount antitrust case) was the death of the "million-dollar mediocrity" (<https://books.google.com/books?id=Nz8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA146>):
"It wasn't good entertainment and it wasn't art, and most of the movies produced had a uniform mediocrity, but they were also uniformly profitable ... The million-dollar mediocrity was the very backbone of Hollywood".
The "million-dollar mediocrity" died because the Paramount case forbade block booking, in which studios required that theaters purchase said mediocrities to also buy big films. Original TV movies appeared in the 1960s but their budgets and production values were too low to really fill the hole in Hollywood, but today's streaming companies' insatiable appetite for content has opened a new outlet for middle-tier films (and, more importantly, series).
https://youtu.be/yaXma6K9mzo?t=837
I've got a ton of movies in my collection I would've never watched in a theatre setting, but have enjoyed on DVD multiple times.
I very much agree with one of the conclusions:
> Fortunately, there’s a cure for our cultural anemia. While the top of the charts has been oligopolized, the bottom remains a vibrant anarchy. There are weird books and funky movies and bangers from across the sea. Two of the most interesting video games of the past decade put you in the role of an immigration officer and an insurance claims adjuster. Every strange thing, wonderful and terrible, is available to you, but they’ll die out if you don’t nourish them with your attention.
(This is the only time I can share this with you, but beware, spoiler alert. Papers Please - The Short Film: https://youtu.be/YFHHGETsxkE)
Maybe Papers Please and Undertale would make better examples.
Rather, I think David Foster Wallace's prediction has been proven out:
> ...this idea that the internet’s gonna become incredibly democratic? I mean if you’ve spent any time on the web, you know that it’s not gonna be, because that’s completely overwhelming. There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99% of them are shit, and it’s too much work to do triage to decide...We’re going to beg for [curation]. We are literally gonna pay for it.
After all...here we are on HN, hoping someone has curated the seething froth of new content into something manageable.
Reviews and playlists are suspect to me. I also enjoy discovering and combing and deciding.
I’m extremely picky about music and cinema and books. Curated media rarely works out.
I never use Spotify and consider that sort of thing to be bad for music as an art for many reasons I won’t get into in this comment.
I’m a lifelong musician, multi instrumentalist etc… I have my tastes and preferences and desired directions of expansion of both (all, lol)
To me, as a former DJ, I drop the needle 3-4 times, skip around in the song, if I like some harmonic scenarios I am hearing I may stick around to hear how it develops and progresses. Given the harmonic constraints of an instrument etc, is there any variety of tone, harmonic structure, technique , texture, or is it just skulking away in a corner looking at its own navel… etc…
I realize that I’m atypical, but I’m also precisely a “music power user”. We don’t matter. The industry doesn’t care about progrock, jazz fusion, afrobeat, bebop, acid jazz, classical (except the Messiah on Christmas) samba, salsa, cumbia, or music in general, it cares about tracking armies of fan consumers across the internet, tabloid entertainment news, clothing, photos, videos, good looking people posing. Forget the music, these days it’s all image…
Only in art are experts thrown on the garbage heap while moneyed interests court the brains of those more easily duped simply due to less experience. I think this is where the competitive thing in music comes crashing hard into the reality that a good song and a really bad song can share the charts, but the bad song often remains longer…
Objectively bad, low effort, poorly structured, lacking a hook, etc, but marketing can keep it there as number one… unlike in UFC where your actual ability to fight matters.
This clearly illustrates that we went from a competency and competition of musical skill to one of marketing skill. Fair enough, but call a spade a spade
Does this mean I am old? Only if one disrespects the human race and human intellect so much that you would cheer the death of a sonic world from the warlike hand of visual glamour and stylized imagery.
A musician is just a kind of fashion photography model capable of making erudite hand gestures and choosing sponsors
Here's an interesting, related link, that's very obviously coming from a certain perspective but still has things you can take [0].
Here are some strategies I use for books:
Go to the library and walk down a random shelf until a book calls to you. You can run your fingers down the spines and feel for the energy of the right book.
The opposite (however, somewhat sideways, rather than top-down) is pulling books from the "someone just returned this" section. And the books suggested by librarians.
I will also do full-text searches of my somewhat large library of ebooks, which gives equal weight to popular and unknown authors.
Randomness, with uncommon items weighted somewhat equal to common ones, and direct recommendations that bypass algorithmic feeds seem to work somewhat well for me as general strategies.
[0] https://www.epsilontheory.com/25-anti-mimetic-tactics-for-li...
I've found that live music offers one of the best mechanisms for this. You start out with interest in <major band>, and go see their show. They're on tour with <midsize band> opening for them. You like <midsize band>'s set, so you go see them when they headline a show a few months later. Since they're a smaller band, it's a smaller show, so they have <small band> opening for them. You like <small band>'s set so you later go see them play with <local band>, and so forth.
As the shows get smaller it becomes more common for there to be 3-4 bands on the bill, so the rate of exposure increases. Combine that with the greater sense of community that's common at smaller shows as well as mechanisms like Spotify's related artists and it becomes easier and easier to find new music the deeper you get.
It would be cool if a similar thing was more common with other art forms. What if more movies were preceded by a short from an up and coming director (like Pixar tends to do)? Trailers fill a similar role, but not quite the same. Or what if books included a few recommendations from the author rather than just a list of other books from the publisher?
RedLetterMedia helps me find weird movies without any mainstream appeal. r/NearProg, r/ListenToThis and r/progmetal are how I find weird experimental rock artists.
For books, some subreddits has a 'I have finished book X, what should I read next?' thread. That's a good way to do Markov-Chain-esque random walk. Another is to simply rely on my favorite podcasters and bloggers. Books are a long commitment and hard to 'figure out' in a minute or an hour. So, I rarely resort to low quality and high coverage searchers like I do with music or TV media.
⸻
1. It’s possible that I might have finished a few months sooner had Covid-related library closures not slowed me down a bit in 2020.
ie. recommenders using something akin to page-rank could/should inject some random items so as to allow new content to bubble up and good new content to be voted up.
It seems nature does something similar - copying DNA pretty accurately, yet allowing for some mutations to advance things and adapt to a changing environment.
The system is so laser focused on very specific bits of media (these movies, these songs, these books, and that's it there is no other form of entertainment), that when people find something they really like in the big long tail of content, it's a cause for celebration.
Alternatively, flip this around. Would Disney spend so much on Marvel movies if other studios could make movies about the same super heroes? No way! Why should Disney let the other studios ride on their coat tails? They would need to make all new stories and heroes.
I rather doubt, though, that the fact that The Great Gatsby just entered the public domain this year has anything to do with the concentration of the market in the hands of a declining number of producers.
But I think the Internet also plays a huge part in the consolidation of fandom. Before the internet, the majority of us could really only share our opinions with those physically nearby, so there were less connections per each node. Enter the internet, now each node has 1000000x more connections, naturally pooling together the ranges of an opinion's influence. The spheres of influence expand while the overall number of spheres shrinks. Just a thought, anyway.
[1] https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/pop-culture-has-b...
That's the real difference now. People can make near-professional movies on iPhones, musicians can make professional-quality music at home, but no amateur has access to the huge industrial PR, social, and trad ad networks that the major labels/studios can roll out to promote their projects.
https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p...
I do agree some of the trends are more convincing than others, although they're generally consistent with the overall direction the author is suggesting.
Perceptions are subjective, but I don’t know how anyone wouldn’t consider the most interesting scene to be the one where Neo (and therefore the audience) is told point blank: “our beloved parent company Warner Bros. has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy.”
I’m surprised it wasn’t quoted in TFA because it’s an unusual fourth wall break that aligns with exactly the points the author is making about the inherent emptiness of endless franchises.