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.
> But what's missing is a shared cultural experience
This is my problem with the proliferation of streaming platforms when it comes to movies and TV. We’ve arguably got more and better content than we’ve ever had. But I find myself far less motivated to watch it. I used to watch content anticipating the conversations I’d have with friends and colleagues. Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it’s 30 seconds of, “Have you seen …?” “No, have you seen …?” “No.” Until we give up and talk about something else.
It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.
> It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.
Perhaps this is a factor in the rise of reaction videos where people consume the content with you and react to it. A somewhat shallow experience, but someone pretending to genuinely like the same music video as I do is - in the vastness of the internet - slightly better than consuming completely alone.
I find that I've mostly made up for that part by participating in online discussions.
But that leads to a different problem -- When Netflix drops an entire season of something, I feel like I have to have time to watch the whole thing, or I don't watch at all. Because I don't want participate in the online discussion having seen less than everyone else.
I end up watching the shows that drop one episode a week far more often than whole seasons at once.
With the recent surge in mindshare around language models and generative AI in general, one of the ideas that keeps coming up is unique content and experiences that are either tailored to the consumer or are at least unique for that person in some way.
But I wonder if this is missing something that you've touched on, the function of cultural artefacts as a means of connection (and perhaps trust building) through a known shared experience. Whether it's watching a TV show, reading a book, listening to music, playing a game, all of these activities essentially have two functions. The first is the thing itself (I'm enjoying this book, song, game, etc.) but the second is the opportunity to _connect with others_ around that, which only really works when some majority of the thing is known by everyone.
This doesn't say that there isn't value in unique experiences, except that these unique experiences are always unique _in the context_ of a shared and known thing.
Roguelikes are perhaps a good example of this. Every run is unique to a player and essentially unique across all players (seeded runs aside), but you can always talk with others about the specific events that happened in any single run because everyone understands them in the context of the game as a whole. The 'crazy thing that happened in my last run' still works because other people know how rare the event or combination of events might be, so it's still a valid shared experience but also unique.
Another more lightweight example might be the amount of NPC dialogue in Supergiant Game' Hades. I believe there's something like 80,000 unique lines of dialogue in the game, so players can go a long time without hearing the same thing again, and unless you play for a long time you might never hear certain lines that other people will have heard.
As for your example about conversations going nowhere when there's no shared experience, perhaps there's even an argument that the connection aspect of the experiences is actually the primary function even if we think it's a secondary function.
Tangential point related to generative models, but perhaps there's even a third function at play, which is that the the _process_ of creating the work may have been its own value for the creator, but this is more about the value of spending time and energy making a thing for yourself or others to experience (to connect over).
What you describe is and has always been everyday life for me. Finding people with shared interests is pretty rare. Even then, there's usually minimal overlap.
Internet improved this but it won't last. Communities are temporary, they all die at some point. I just got used to enjoying things alone.
You can always watch it with them. Especially if it's great enough to re-watch, or plan to finish watching together (or is old enough to re-watch anyway).
At this point YOU have to watch the content of the people that you want to mingle with.
However, the "standard" of shows that you watch is higher (for you, as its more curated for your).
Therefore, you do have to struggle with more subpar shows.
Not sure what to do with that.
> Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it’s 30 seconds of, “Have you seen …?” “No, have you seen …?” “No.” Until we give up and talk about something else.
Outside of dedicated assignments for book clubs and schooling, this has always been the case for literature discussions.
I've had some luck with lists on imdb of things I'm interested in. It's not a slam dunk but some are good. Much better than flipping through 10000 possibilities on netflix.
When TV came to American homes in the 1950s, it was a revolution in our national shared consciousness (for better or worse). Obviously there are problems with this - it gives the advertisers and businesses enormous unchecked power to shape society. But we've likely never seen so many people so deeply in sync with the dominant cultural messages.
When streaming became the norm, that dynamic was destroyed. We lurched back to private media consumption (for better or worse). There is no shared cultural narrative to tune into at 8:00 each night. There's millions of disparate voices, screaming into the void 24/7. More freedom and diversity for sure, but nothing coherent you can point to as a culture.
I think kids nowadays likely still have a shared cultural experience like we did when we were young. We're just, separated from that experience. Just like our parents were when we were young.
Maybe they can't (or don't want to, out of fear of being embarrassed or feeling uncool/uncertain perhaps) explain to you how they find things, but when they are hanging out with their friends and are talking about similar interests, discovering they know about similar things, and sharing things they know about that their friends don't yet/learning similar things from their friends, that's where the magic happens.
Anyone with, say, a fifth grader in the US can compare notes with parents elsewhere in the country. If your experience is at all like mine you'll be startled at the (odd to me!) shared culture. Especially if they spend time online.
This.
When we become adults we tend to forget how it worked when we were children. Plus, you think you remember but you what you remember has been already filtered by the adult's mind.
Reminds me of a dynamic I heard about with the rise of music backlog availability. Instead of just 80's kids listening to 80's music you would see a wider array of eras that kids would see more internet era kids having a more diverse amount of preferred eras. Because they have more of a choice now.
Gianmarco Soresi discussed this on an episode of his podcast.
He says how there used to be a number of nationally known comedians who could make jokes that appealed to everyone's shared cultural experience, but now that's effectively impossible because a) culture isn't tied to geography / location, and b) niches are much more prevalent. I loved the example that huge venues can now often be sold out for artists you've never heard of.
On one hand it's not neccessarily a bad thing since individuals are getting more of what truly appeals to them, but I also think that the result could be increasing the barrier to connect with others because it decreases the chances that you'll have interests in common.
I heavily disagree with this one. On first glance what you say feels true, but there are so many mega popular people now that you will never know of despite even being from the same country. People with dozens of millions of fans, selling out arenas doing multinational tours and you won’t know them at all.
But everyone knows Britney Spears, even if you were never in her target demographic. This sort of global fame now requires so much more to reach because of how many are really locked into hyper personalized online experiences. I used to be able to reference the latest big movie or show and people would know, now that’s mostly turned into an explanation that the movie or show even came out and exists.
I think you're both right. Relative to the past, any given locale is more culturally fragmented, but the globe is simultaneously more culturally unified. We've hit a weird midpoint: You might have more cultural common ground with someone on the other side of the globe who follows the same people on social media, than with your next-door neighbor.
Consider this thought experiment. Imagine you're going to get coffee with either a random person in your neighborhood, or a random HN user. Which conversation will have more shared topics of interest?
This is the "global village" which was prophesied in the 1960s. It won't go away until interstellar colonization creates communication delays and a new era of cultural fragmentation.
> The entire world was talking about the same thing.
What you’re describing is an echo chamber. Which is what most sites optimize to produce (when optimizing for engagement and). I switch between bsky where it frequently feels that way “everyone is talking about Y” and mastodon where the chronological timeline makes it clear that a lot of people might be talking about it, but they’re also talking about other things.
I feel that one of the most broken things about our current reality (with so many social sites) is that it feels so singular and shared, but turns out that’s not the case at all. My partner and I have started to use the phrase “my internet” to refer to the general vibe we are taking in as in “is your internet talking about scandal Z?” I’m frequently surprised stuff that totally flys under their radar (and vice versa).
Not just headlines being shared, but culture is still being shared.
Sure the shared cultural experience of being limited to a handful of TV channels is gone, but it's been replaced by a handful of streaming services. The world has shared the Marvel Cinematic Universe and 800lb sisters and Taylor Swift.
> Take the news for example. Last weeks it was tariffs. The entire world was talking about the same thing.
... I mean, that's because it's a global economic crisis. In the early 70s, the entire world was talking about the oil crisis, another induced economic shock. Late noughties? The Great Financial Crisis. That sort of thing is _always_ going to be news everywhere.
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
You observe correctly but the conclusion is incorrect. You fail to take into account that year-, location- and interest-based cohorts of kids tend to follow the same influencers, and thereby consume the same content.
The problem for outside observers is that without the platform's data we cannot identify the cohorts and thereby cannot distinguish between the groups.
This logic follows a set-based approach to social media analytics called social set analysis pioneered by a research group at which I later did my PhD.
I've had this conversation with my friends before about how valuable it would be to understand our different perspectives if we could swap/share our full "algorithmic experience" from our apps.
A hundred years ago, everyone used the King James Version of the Bible.¹ Poorly though it reflected the common language², it was a shared experience, and things like memorisation and making and recognising scriptural allusions were straightforward, because everyone used the same words. Now, a wide variety of Bible translations are in common use, some more accurate than the KJV, some more loose paraphrases, all more understandable. There are some big advantages in this variety and modernity—but we have lost something. The shared experience had a virtue of its own, quite a significant one.
—⁂—
¹ OK, by a hundred years ago the RV and ASV were used in some areas, but it was mostly as a distant extra to the KJV, not replacing it.
² I understand that some of it was already becoming archaic, or at least overly formal, when it was published, such as thee/thou (singular you). The fact is, it was “appointed to be read in Churches”, and they wanted it to sound impressive. Compare it with Tyndale’s translation almost a hundred years earlier, and Tyndale’s generally reads much more easily—because Tyndale wanted uneducated people to be able to understand the Bible.³
³ “And sone after Maister Tyndall happened to be in the companie of a learned man, and in communing and disputing with him, drove him to that issue that the learned manne sayde, we were better be without Gods lawe, then the Popes: Maister Tyndall hearing that, answered hym, I defie the Pope and all his lawes, and sayde, if God spare my lyfe ere many yeares, I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall knowe more of the scripture then thou doest.” — John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), page 570.
The Catholic Church had similar tradeoffs with Latin, though I suspect the language and style were less motivated by majesty (though bias of use by the educated might have entered early — I am ignorant of the history). The New Testament Koine (Common) Greek was similarly a lingua franca. When the once common language is no longer broadly used, the language can become a class-oriented separating factor.
Even more recent translations seem to retain significant similarity in a lot of "famous" texts (e.g., the Beatitudes — people also seem to use the archaic pronunciation of "blessed" as two syllables), presumably to ease acceptance of the change. This hints that some commonality is preserved. (Some words are also jargon, so not modernizing the word is more reasonable.)
Story outlines and concepts can also be preserved even though the "poetry" of earlier versions is lost in translation. Yet as contexts change even concepts may be less understandable and shared; "go to the ant thou sluggard" may be unclear not merely from language but from unfamiliarity with concepts. Aesop's "The Ant and the Grasshopper" has lasted thousands of years, but is not a fundamentally human metaphor and even the human concepts diligence and foresight can have different cultural tones.
"A sluggard is someone who does not work hard." "Oh, you mean someone who works smarter not harder?" "No. It means someone who does not accomplish much." "Oh, you mean someone who is burnt out?" "No. It means someone who chooses not to do things that are profitable." "Oh, you mean someone who has recognized the futility of striving for accomplishments and has learned to be content with a simple life?" "No!"
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.
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.
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
Of course they do. The music director is now the recommendation algorithm of each platform (as mentioned), and so what you'll find is that like-minded people have very similar recommendations in their feeds. There are also meta profiles on these platforms who instead of making their own content, "curate" and reshare content within (or from out of) the platform. And what disparities do arise, people undo them organically by sharing content with each other in different channels anyways. This is how things go "viral".
It's actually kind of scary how people can convince themselves into ideas like yours here. One would think you live in a different world or something. This is the same world where memes and viral social media posts are everyday news topics. It's where blockbuster movies and TV shows continue to exist, where GTA6's release will cause a billion dollar revenue loss to the economy in lost workhours, and so on.
Jerry Pournelle wrote about this, I think I recall reading in USENET; how with the burgeoning availability of media, the role of the editor, the curator, would become critical.
He thought well and deeply about the challenges of the growing net.
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
I tend to think that humans historically have had very isolated, independent experiences. It is only recently with mass media that we all share a collective experience.
I take your point that kids today are not having a shared one-directional (tv to person) experience. However, they are sharing apps, with that data being intermediated. It is uni-directional too, so more immersive.
I tend to see technology, and the direction of travel, as highly collectivising rather less of a shared cultural experience. Everyone is endlessly exposed to exciting ideas and content that are not self-generated.
So, collectivised thinking UP, independent thinking DOWN.
This is completely true. But there is something to be said for expert curation. Someone who spends their whole life studying these things so I don't have to.
I am confused. Spotify and Netflix both have recommendation engines that include a wide variety of factors, including popularity with other users and "closeness" to your favourite musical styles. I assume these are AI/ML models of some sort. Essentially, these automated engines have replaced the music director from 1990s radio stations.
That's "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson. It's 8:21 and quotes both the Tao Te Ching and the US Postal Service. It peaked at number two on the UK Singles Chart in 1981. Why? Because John Peel curated a radio show on BBC Radio 1 and happened to like it. That's the advantage of human curation: Every so often you get a John Peel in the booth and hear something so off-the-wall no well-written algorithm would ever mix it in with everything else you listen to.
That's precisely the problem. Everyone gets a different experience. No shared cultural experience. Until recently, everyone in the same village/town/city/country had the same experience, and could talk about it.
> Essentially, these automated engines have replaced the music director from 1990s radio stations.
They haven't. A nearest neighbor pseudo random walk from one viral song to the next doesn't replace a music director who could give you thematically, aesthetically or conceptually coherent selections of music.
There's an interesting observation about this at the individual album level, the death of the concept album. Albums that tell coherent two hour long narratives are effectively dead because the almighty algorithm favors the exact opposite. Disjointed, catchy , viral, hook centric music that's short enough to fit over a TikTok clip.
The medium is the message, thinking the Spotify algorithm replaces a music director is like thinking the Youtube short algorithm replaces a film director.
"Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did."
they did, they just have different algos for that. I found italian brainrot meme and what surprising it was so popular for kids, like tens of millions of views
seems like Trends are more personalize now, what popular song that adult like is different with younger audience like
its like having different Trends that live on bubble
Every kid having their own tailored algorithm means there is no shared cultural experience by design.
A shared cultural experience means there are people in it who don't like it or don't engage with it, even though they are aware of it, and they can engage with their peers about it.
Tailored algorithms means maximal enjoyment and engagement at all times, but it's engagement with the software, not engagement with peers.
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
Heh, I told my kid this today on the way to dropping him off with a friend. We were listening to The Rest is History, about the Rolling Stones. They made the point that this common cultural experience started to become a thing roughly in the 60s.
When I was a kid, there were things that you just could not avoid. It was the same in many places: there was a national broadcaster, and maybe a second and third TV station. There were only so many things you could watch. Whatever TV series, music, or sports were on, you could be sure everyone else was also watching it.
It started changing in the 1990s where I grew up, completely changing from the start to the end. You got a bunch of channels. You could watch news from America and other places, which maybe deserves a footnote about immigrants being able to watch something from faraway for the first time. More options everywhere, but there was still momentum. You still watched the national news on the main stations, and sports was still there too. They also tended to curate the "best" foreign shows, so you didn't have to wait to get your dose of America.
Now that's finished. Everything is private now, you can watch whatever you want on your own screen (TVs got really cheap. When I was a kid, people would congratulate you when you bought a new one, like it was a car. Now I have more TVs than I can use.) You don't have to watch things at the scheduled time anymore, and you don't have to arrange your life around when the episodes come out.
The kids now watch a wider variety of content. There's still "local" fads that are maybe restricted to friendship groups, instead of being national phenomena. For instance my kid and his friends ended up watching One Piece, a Japanese production. But I never ran into other kids who were into it.
I also dare to say that the kids now watch lower quality content. This was already a thing when we got flooded with channels in the 1990s. There was a heck of a lot of mediocre crap on those 100 extra channels. But now it's a whole new world of terrible. Yes, I'm an old man. But it does seem like having curation would mostly bubble the good things to the top, and so when the curation went away, you got more stuff, but worse stuff. Similar to consumer products, the items at your department store tended to be reasonable, but when there's a webshop where you can buy anything at all, you have to sort through a pile of low quality stuff yourself.
Didn't our parents also think our content was objectively inferior to theirs? I would personally agree with you but it may also be that we don't understand the new content well enough to properly value it.
And, I do think even for me personally that mediocre content today is much better than the mediocre content of the past. The average is higher even if the peaks are not (and those peaks are probably overestimated due to survivorship bias).
Tldr, there used to be a lot of crap and we forgot about it.
Interesting you mentioned movies because I think movies are resurgent now where it seems like everyone is seeing all the new releases. I can hardly book imax anymore because they book up a month in advance and are booked up a month out and then they pull it from the imax theater to make room for the next thing to be fully booked out a month out. There is serious demand it seems to keep up with the latest movies especially when it is offered in higher fidelity like imax and 70mm releases.
Disagree. Eberyone is on the same websites, seeing the same memes, listening to the same music. Its just not from a radio. The curation process happens via social media consumption where the most popular sthff floats to the top. There is absolutely still a shared cultural experience, youre just not hip to it.
Most do now. Most radio stations have a "now playing" window on their website, where you can see the last few songs played. If you dig in, it's a JSON with the last 10 or so songs. If you grab that JSON every 30 minutes, you'll get a full playlist.
That doesn’t change the shared cultural experience. Decades had “sounds”, disco was a thing in the 70s because everyone heard it. Today there’s no shared cultural zeitgeist. You might find communities on reddit etc, but they aren’t local.
"Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did."
I think this is two claims -- AFAICT kids do have a shared cultural experience, but it is true it's not like yours, or mine. The Spotify playlists are one way they find new music, TikTok being another, movies/TV shows, or word of mouth.
What some folks may have found useful about radio playing gatekeeper and music directors choosing 40 songs per week (they didn't) others of us found stifling.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s in a small town on outskirts of St. Louis. We could get a few classic rock/AOR stations (KSHE, KSD) and starting in the early 80s there was "hit radio" KHTR which almost quite literally followed the 40 songs per week model...
There's tons of music I
didn't* discover in the early 80s, such as The Smiths, that I only happened on later because of strong gatekeeping via radio.
In the 90s we got KPNT ("the point") which was alternative rock and more adventurous than KHTR, and by then I also had a car and access to the good record stores in St. Louis. I amassed a large CD collection and stopped listening to the radio almost entirely excepting some college radio, and kept up with new music via Rolling Stone, Spin, etc. Even bought some albums based entirely on their reviews without having heard them at all.
All of that long and rambly comment to say... I like music discovery today far more than I did in my youth, 20s, and early 30s. I skim Bandcamp regularly for new music, watch questions about music on Ask Metafilter, and have found YouTube Music's algorithm to be decent. (e.g., pick a song, make it a "radio" station and add songs I haven't heard before but like to my library.)
It is true that I rarely find folks to discuss music with because I am not listening to mainstream music much. That part sucks -- but few people my age seem to care about music deeply.
* Almost certainly the music director for your local station was subscribed to a service that provided a weekly list of songs to program, rather than choosing them themselves. I worked part-time in radio while in college, taking weekend and evening/midnight-6 a.m. shifts, in Washington MO and Kirksville MO. KSLQ (adult contemporary), KRXL (classic rock/AOR), KTUF (country) and KIRX (talk, sports) were all largely getting program direction from national syndicated programming. The local music director might have used some discretion in choosing / filtering out some songs, but they were likely getting the direction from a service.
> 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.
I mean, there's certainly greater diversity (particularly for music, stuff outside of the mainstream always existed, of course, but the barrier to entry was far higher then than now), but there's still a large shared _core_ of content.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 1. The amount of "culture" being created has to be like a magnitude of order greater than 25 years ago.
For music, I'm not even sure the cultural creation has increased.
A few decades ago, there were scores of indie bands. In high school I knew a few friends that were playing in amateur rock bands. Later on, when I traveled in foreign lands, most people I met listened to local music, e.g. Turkish songs which were a mix of tradition and modern influence. In my latest travel, everyone was listening to the same globbish junk.
I don't have any stats, but I suspect the music production is more homogeneous and less creative. There is less geographic variation. At least one source of creation has disappeared: musical bands are dead, except for the industrial kind, à la K-pop. Overall, I don't think the creation level is higher than 25 years ago.
> 2. The algorithms were developed to help with this problem. They are just a poor match for the problem.
I disagree with the OP that the algorithms are necessarily bad. For instance, once in a while, they could suggest a very different style to help broaden your tastes. Some already do that.
But algorithms can't compare with recommendations by friends. There were music that I would have instantly rejected if the CD hadn't been given by a friend. And sometimes you have to persevere and learn to like a music. When the curator is a human I like, I try harder.
I'm sorry, but by what metric are musical bands "dead"? I'm asking because I follow a lot of bands that are actively releasing new music and touring across the US and Europe. Not to mention the musical festivals.
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.
We have ground breaking amazing shows like The Rehearsal (which could really only be made now), Resevoir Dogs, Shogun, Fleabag, The Bear, Severance, For All Mankind, Peaky Blinders…to name a few.There is so much good tv.
Some either you don’t know about any of these which is the fault of the algo I guess, or you’re stuck in a bubble of 15 years ago, in which the algo failed.
>The "new" of today is no match for the "new" of back then
Breaking Bad is almost certainly one of the best series of all time that started strong and ended strong. There were a TON of shows in that period that were weak or that, at a minimum, sort of petered out. Yes, a lot of shows probably get canceled too quickly. Then there's Grey's Anatomy because it still apparently has lazy viewers who will tune in each week.
Re: 2, That's definitely another part of it. There's this timelessness about the current culture that I am not sure where it's coming from.
I find myself encountering bits of culture (tv/movies/music/books) that could be from today, or from 10 years ago, and little way to determine from when. And there's so much of it now.
Having watched TNG and BB for the first time roughly at the same time, I disagree it's that of a huge leap. (Quality is about much more than cinematography, and these two shows are just too different anyway.)
Also we have probably reached almost the top of what is possible for a TV show, especially in what matters the most (writing, acting).
for point 1, i think this example is a bit biased. its not really fair to compare random shows made now to some of the greatest shows ever made.
although, i will say, it is a lot better of an experience watching old, well reviewed shows / movies, than it is to watch whatever comes out now. but again thats mainly because i can choose from some of the best productions ever.
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
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/)
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.
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.
Message boards and niche sites worked really well for me in the early 2000. What made them useful though was that astroturfing was non existing at the time.
There was a very famous case in my country of a preppy kid who took the whole rap world by storm getting stupid numbers in a niche site, and only after he had gotten big contracts with multinational labels it came out that he had just set a bot to download the music and inflate numbers, that’s how trust based the system was.
Now that you mention magazines, I recall that there was a lot of obscure music I discovered only by reading the guitar player magazines. But these were specialty publications, not for a general audience. And their primary advertisers were not record labels but rather instrument manufacturers.
> 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.
Not so much of a tangent as just the relevant argument not being made clearly. The Bjork example demonstrates the value of a central, canonical source for information in overcoming the costs of friction from direct messaging, which creates a chaotic cacophony of tiny bite-sized messages which are difficult and exhausting to piece together into a final meaningful message, and result in the interested Bjork fans living in their own little information-universes: in one universe, it's a film+documentary, in another, it's a film. So they can't even manage to agree on the most basic facts. (Which has downstream effects: a Bjork fan may not know they have access to the documentary or that they can assume most of the film-watchers saw the documentary and they can invoke it without confusion or spoilers.) The 'advantage' of social media and disintermediation proved to be illusory as they came with too much overhead and destruction of any canon or commons.
> 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.
In what way is that a tangent? In both cases, the author argues that a centralized authoritative source of information is better than scattershot posts on social media.
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.
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.
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".
Yes, people noticed it's good. But that's not how I heard about the game. That's not how anyone in the three separate groups of friends I heard about the game from heard about it. In fact, the only person I knew who really follows that sort of stuff is the only person I know who wasn't interested.
I think you're confusing cause and effect. If you look at steam's concurrent player counts, you see that the number of concurrent players kept increasing for the first 10 days after the game's release. That's not consistent with curators instructing people to buy a game at release. That's consistent with massive word-of-mouth spread. Everyone is talking about it and rating it highly because it's good, not because they were told to.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're not wrong, but eventually they'll run out of old ideas or consumers will grow tired of them. See Marvel/superhero burnout. The macrocycle will force the microcycle back into gear.
>immensely gratifying to me because it means humans will always need humans
Just to confirm, this is sarcasm, right? It's hard to tell, and it's terrifying to me that so many people don't comprehend this as a basic fact at least by grade school.
Also, is it still gratifying if humans won't have other humans? Curation is harder to come by than ever before because it's less profitable. What is gratifying about that???
My comment is a reaction to this idea that a ChatGPT-generated image has the same value as one done by a Picasso. It's still art and it still can have artistic value, but it'll never possess the intangibles carried by, say, Guernica.
I think curation, in the age of procedurally-generated content, will be one of the most gratifying or at least profitable jobs to have. It already is, if you think about it; film studio heads, music producers like Rick Rubin, Anna Wintour/Vogue, and the MoMA... all wield curatorial power (for better or for worse).
> 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.
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.
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.
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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.
This is my problem with the proliferation of streaming platforms when it comes to movies and TV. We’ve arguably got more and better content than we’ve ever had. But I find myself far less motivated to watch it. I used to watch content anticipating the conversations I’d have with friends and colleagues. Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it’s 30 seconds of, “Have you seen …?” “No, have you seen …?” “No.” Until we give up and talk about something else.
It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.
Perhaps this is a factor in the rise of reaction videos where people consume the content with you and react to it. A somewhat shallow experience, but someone pretending to genuinely like the same music video as I do is - in the vastness of the internet - slightly better than consuming completely alone.
But that leads to a different problem -- When Netflix drops an entire season of something, I feel like I have to have time to watch the whole thing, or I don't watch at all. Because I don't want participate in the online discussion having seen less than everyone else.
I end up watching the shows that drop one episode a week far more often than whole seasons at once.
But I wonder if this is missing something that you've touched on, the function of cultural artefacts as a means of connection (and perhaps trust building) through a known shared experience. Whether it's watching a TV show, reading a book, listening to music, playing a game, all of these activities essentially have two functions. The first is the thing itself (I'm enjoying this book, song, game, etc.) but the second is the opportunity to _connect with others_ around that, which only really works when some majority of the thing is known by everyone.
This doesn't say that there isn't value in unique experiences, except that these unique experiences are always unique _in the context_ of a shared and known thing.
Roguelikes are perhaps a good example of this. Every run is unique to a player and essentially unique across all players (seeded runs aside), but you can always talk with others about the specific events that happened in any single run because everyone understands them in the context of the game as a whole. The 'crazy thing that happened in my last run' still works because other people know how rare the event or combination of events might be, so it's still a valid shared experience but also unique.
Another more lightweight example might be the amount of NPC dialogue in Supergiant Game' Hades. I believe there's something like 80,000 unique lines of dialogue in the game, so players can go a long time without hearing the same thing again, and unless you play for a long time you might never hear certain lines that other people will have heard.
As for your example about conversations going nowhere when there's no shared experience, perhaps there's even an argument that the connection aspect of the experiences is actually the primary function even if we think it's a secondary function.
Tangential point related to generative models, but perhaps there's even a third function at play, which is that the the _process_ of creating the work may have been its own value for the creator, but this is more about the value of spending time and energy making a thing for yourself or others to experience (to connect over).
Internet improved this but it won't last. Communities are temporary, they all die at some point. I just got used to enjoying things alone.
Outside of dedicated assignments for book clubs and schooling, this has always been the case for literature discussions.
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When streaming became the norm, that dynamic was destroyed. We lurched back to private media consumption (for better or worse). There is no shared cultural narrative to tune into at 8:00 each night. There's millions of disparate voices, screaming into the void 24/7. More freedom and diversity for sure, but nothing coherent you can point to as a culture.
Maybe they can't (or don't want to, out of fear of being embarrassed or feeling uncool/uncertain perhaps) explain to you how they find things, but when they are hanging out with their friends and are talking about similar interests, discovering they know about similar things, and sharing things they know about that their friends don't yet/learning similar things from their friends, that's where the magic happens.
He says how there used to be a number of nationally known comedians who could make jokes that appealed to everyone's shared cultural experience, but now that's effectively impossible because a) culture isn't tied to geography / location, and b) niches are much more prevalent. I loved the example that huge venues can now often be sold out for artists you've never heard of.
On one hand it's not neccessarily a bad thing since individuals are getting more of what truly appeals to them, but I also think that the result could be increasing the barrier to connect with others because it decreases the chances that you'll have interests in common.
I feel like social media trough its amplification has lead to a global sync in topics and experiences.
I’d argue a kid growing up India or China shares much more culturally today with a western Kid than 30 years ago.
Take the news for example. Last weeks it was tariffs. The entire world was talking about the same thing.
To the contrary I feel like we are living more and more in the same global reality going from one headline to the next every week.
But everyone knows Britney Spears, even if you were never in her target demographic. This sort of global fame now requires so much more to reach because of how many are really locked into hyper personalized online experiences. I used to be able to reference the latest big movie or show and people would know, now that’s mostly turned into an explanation that the movie or show even came out and exists.
Consider this thought experiment. Imagine you're going to get coffee with either a random person in your neighborhood, or a random HN user. Which conversation will have more shared topics of interest?
This is the "global village" which was prophesied in the 1960s. It won't go away until interstellar colonization creates communication delays and a new era of cultural fragmentation.
What you’re describing is an echo chamber. Which is what most sites optimize to produce (when optimizing for engagement and). I switch between bsky where it frequently feels that way “everyone is talking about Y” and mastodon where the chronological timeline makes it clear that a lot of people might be talking about it, but they’re also talking about other things.
I feel that one of the most broken things about our current reality (with so many social sites) is that it feels so singular and shared, but turns out that’s not the case at all. My partner and I have started to use the phrase “my internet” to refer to the general vibe we are taking in as in “is your internet talking about scandal Z?” I’m frequently surprised stuff that totally flys under their radar (and vice versa).
Sure the shared cultural experience of being limited to a handful of TV channels is gone, but it's been replaced by a handful of streaming services. The world has shared the Marvel Cinematic Universe and 800lb sisters and Taylor Swift.
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... I mean, that's because it's a global economic crisis. In the early 70s, the entire world was talking about the oil crisis, another induced economic shock. Late noughties? The Great Financial Crisis. That sort of thing is _always_ going to be news everywhere.
The whole world was talking about tariffs? Nope. They were talking whatever they saw on their personalised feed.
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You observe correctly but the conclusion is incorrect. You fail to take into account that year-, location- and interest-based cohorts of kids tend to follow the same influencers, and thereby consume the same content.
The problem for outside observers is that without the platform's data we cannot identify the cohorts and thereby cannot distinguish between the groups.
This logic follows a set-based approach to social media analytics called social set analysis pioneered by a research group at which I later did my PhD.
What conclusions did your research find?
A hundred years ago, everyone used the King James Version of the Bible.¹ Poorly though it reflected the common language², it was a shared experience, and things like memorisation and making and recognising scriptural allusions were straightforward, because everyone used the same words. Now, a wide variety of Bible translations are in common use, some more accurate than the KJV, some more loose paraphrases, all more understandable. There are some big advantages in this variety and modernity—but we have lost something. The shared experience had a virtue of its own, quite a significant one.
—⁂—
¹ OK, by a hundred years ago the RV and ASV were used in some areas, but it was mostly as a distant extra to the KJV, not replacing it.
² I understand that some of it was already becoming archaic, or at least overly formal, when it was published, such as thee/thou (singular you). The fact is, it was “appointed to be read in Churches”, and they wanted it to sound impressive. Compare it with Tyndale’s translation almost a hundred years earlier, and Tyndale’s generally reads much more easily—because Tyndale wanted uneducated people to be able to understand the Bible.³
³ “And sone after Maister Tyndall happened to be in the companie of a learned man, and in communing and disputing with him, drove him to that issue that the learned manne sayde, we were better be without Gods lawe, then the Popes: Maister Tyndall hearing that, answered hym, I defie the Pope and all his lawes, and sayde, if God spare my lyfe ere many yeares, I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall knowe more of the scripture then thou doest.” — John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), page 570.
Even more recent translations seem to retain significant similarity in a lot of "famous" texts (e.g., the Beatitudes — people also seem to use the archaic pronunciation of "blessed" as two syllables), presumably to ease acceptance of the change. This hints that some commonality is preserved. (Some words are also jargon, so not modernizing the word is more reasonable.)
Story outlines and concepts can also be preserved even though the "poetry" of earlier versions is lost in translation. Yet as contexts change even concepts may be less understandable and shared; "go to the ant thou sluggard" may be unclear not merely from language but from unfamiliarity with concepts. Aesop's "The Ant and the Grasshopper" has lasted thousands of years, but is not a fundamentally human metaphor and even the human concepts diligence and foresight can have different cultural tones.
"A sluggard is someone who does not work hard." "Oh, you mean someone who works smarter not harder?" "No. It means someone who does not accomplish much." "Oh, you mean someone who is burnt out?" "No. It means someone who chooses not to do things that are profitable." "Oh, you mean someone who has recognized the futility of striving for accomplishments and has learned to be content with a simple life?" "No!"
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.
Of course they do. The music director is now the recommendation algorithm of each platform (as mentioned), and so what you'll find is that like-minded people have very similar recommendations in their feeds. There are also meta profiles on these platforms who instead of making their own content, "curate" and reshare content within (or from out of) the platform. And what disparities do arise, people undo them organically by sharing content with each other in different channels anyways. This is how things go "viral".
It's actually kind of scary how people can convince themselves into ideas like yours here. One would think you live in a different world or something. This is the same world where memes and viral social media posts are everyday news topics. It's where blockbuster movies and TV shows continue to exist, where GTA6's release will cause a billion dollar revenue loss to the economy in lost workhours, and so on.
He thought well and deeply about the challenges of the growing net.
I tend to think that humans historically have had very isolated, independent experiences. It is only recently with mass media that we all share a collective experience.
I take your point that kids today are not having a shared one-directional (tv to person) experience. However, they are sharing apps, with that data being intermediated. It is uni-directional too, so more immersive.
I tend to see technology, and the direction of travel, as highly collectivising rather less of a shared cultural experience. Everyone is endlessly exposed to exciting ideas and content that are not self-generated.
So, collectivised thinking UP, independent thinking DOWN.
That's "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson. It's 8:21 and quotes both the Tao Te Ching and the US Postal Service. It peaked at number two on the UK Singles Chart in 1981. Why? Because John Peel curated a radio show on BBC Radio 1 and happened to like it. That's the advantage of human curation: Every so often you get a John Peel in the booth and hear something so off-the-wall no well-written algorithm would ever mix it in with everything else you listen to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Superman
They haven't. A nearest neighbor pseudo random walk from one viral song to the next doesn't replace a music director who could give you thematically, aesthetically or conceptually coherent selections of music.
There's an interesting observation about this at the individual album level, the death of the concept album. Albums that tell coherent two hour long narratives are effectively dead because the almighty algorithm favors the exact opposite. Disjointed, catchy , viral, hook centric music that's short enough to fit over a TikTok clip.
The medium is the message, thinking the Spotify algorithm replaces a music director is like thinking the Youtube short algorithm replaces a film director.
they did, they just have different algos for that. I found italian brainrot meme and what surprising it was so popular for kids, like tens of millions of views
seems like Trends are more personalize now, what popular song that adult like is different with younger audience like
its like having different Trends that live on bubble
Every kid having their own tailored algorithm means there is no shared cultural experience by design.
A shared cultural experience means there are people in it who don't like it or don't engage with it, even though they are aware of it, and they can engage with their peers about it.
Tailored algorithms means maximal enjoyment and engagement at all times, but it's engagement with the software, not engagement with peers.
Heh, I told my kid this today on the way to dropping him off with a friend. We were listening to The Rest is History, about the Rolling Stones. They made the point that this common cultural experience started to become a thing roughly in the 60s.
When I was a kid, there were things that you just could not avoid. It was the same in many places: there was a national broadcaster, and maybe a second and third TV station. There were only so many things you could watch. Whatever TV series, music, or sports were on, you could be sure everyone else was also watching it.
It started changing in the 1990s where I grew up, completely changing from the start to the end. You got a bunch of channels. You could watch news from America and other places, which maybe deserves a footnote about immigrants being able to watch something from faraway for the first time. More options everywhere, but there was still momentum. You still watched the national news on the main stations, and sports was still there too. They also tended to curate the "best" foreign shows, so you didn't have to wait to get your dose of America.
Now that's finished. Everything is private now, you can watch whatever you want on your own screen (TVs got really cheap. When I was a kid, people would congratulate you when you bought a new one, like it was a car. Now I have more TVs than I can use.) You don't have to watch things at the scheduled time anymore, and you don't have to arrange your life around when the episodes come out.
The kids now watch a wider variety of content. There's still "local" fads that are maybe restricted to friendship groups, instead of being national phenomena. For instance my kid and his friends ended up watching One Piece, a Japanese production. But I never ran into other kids who were into it.
I also dare to say that the kids now watch lower quality content. This was already a thing when we got flooded with channels in the 1990s. There was a heck of a lot of mediocre crap on those 100 extra channels. But now it's a whole new world of terrible. Yes, I'm an old man. But it does seem like having curation would mostly bubble the good things to the top, and so when the curation went away, you got more stuff, but worse stuff. Similar to consumer products, the items at your department store tended to be reasonable, but when there's a webshop where you can buy anything at all, you have to sort through a pile of low quality stuff yourself.
And, I do think even for me personally that mediocre content today is much better than the mediocre content of the past. The average is higher even if the peaks are not (and those peaks are probably overestimated due to survivorship bias).
Tldr, there used to be a lot of crap and we forgot about it.
I suppose you didn't have the same cultural experience as your parents. That's how culture works - it changes over time.
Schools don't have bullies?
That's the extent of my shared cultural experience as a kid.
I do check out mit radios list from time to time. It’s somewhat useful to know the names of the shows that play music you like..
https://track-blaster.com/wmbr/
Those Top 40 singles were spoon-fed to you by Clear Channel within a very limited selection from the Top 5 major record labels.
That doesn’t change the shared cultural experience. Decades had “sounds”, disco was a thing in the 70s because everyone heard it. Today there’s no shared cultural zeitgeist. You might find communities on reddit etc, but they aren’t local.
I think this is two claims -- AFAICT kids do have a shared cultural experience, but it is true it's not like yours, or mine. The Spotify playlists are one way they find new music, TikTok being another, movies/TV shows, or word of mouth.
What some folks may have found useful about radio playing gatekeeper and music directors choosing 40 songs per week (they didn't) others of us found stifling.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s in a small town on outskirts of St. Louis. We could get a few classic rock/AOR stations (KSHE, KSD) and starting in the early 80s there was "hit radio" KHTR which almost quite literally followed the 40 songs per week model...
There's tons of music I
didn't* discover in the early 80s, such as The Smiths, that I only happened on later because of strong gatekeeping via radio.In the 90s we got KPNT ("the point") which was alternative rock and more adventurous than KHTR, and by then I also had a car and access to the good record stores in St. Louis. I amassed a large CD collection and stopped listening to the radio almost entirely excepting some college radio, and kept up with new music via Rolling Stone, Spin, etc. Even bought some albums based entirely on their reviews without having heard them at all.
All of that long and rambly comment to say... I like music discovery today far more than I did in my youth, 20s, and early 30s. I skim Bandcamp regularly for new music, watch questions about music on Ask Metafilter, and have found YouTube Music's algorithm to be decent. (e.g., pick a song, make it a "radio" station and add songs I haven't heard before but like to my library.)
It is true that I rarely find folks to discuss music with because I am not listening to mainstream music much. That part sucks -- but few people my age seem to care about music deeply.
* Almost certainly the music director for your local station was subscribed to a service that provided a weekly list of songs to program, rather than choosing them themselves. I worked part-time in radio while in college, taking weekend and evening/midnight-6 a.m. shifts, in Washington MO and Kirksville MO. KSLQ (adult contemporary), KRXL (classic rock/AOR), KTUF (country) and KIRX (talk, sports) were all largely getting program direction from national syndicated programming. The local music director might have used some discretion in choosing / filtering out some songs, but they were likely getting the direction from a service.
I mean, there's certainly greater diversity (particularly for music, stuff outside of the mainstream always existed, of course, but the barrier to entry was far higher then than now), but there's still a large shared _core_ of content.
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No fancy algorithm or AI tool will replace human curation with good tastes (or what you think is good taste)
I dig this for music curation: https://ghostly.com/
If anyone has other similar links I'd love to see them.
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.
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.
For music, I'm not even sure the cultural creation has increased.
A few decades ago, there were scores of indie bands. In high school I knew a few friends that were playing in amateur rock bands. Later on, when I traveled in foreign lands, most people I met listened to local music, e.g. Turkish songs which were a mix of tradition and modern influence. In my latest travel, everyone was listening to the same globbish junk.
I don't have any stats, but I suspect the music production is more homogeneous and less creative. There is less geographic variation. At least one source of creation has disappeared: musical bands are dead, except for the industrial kind, à la K-pop. Overall, I don't think the creation level is higher than 25 years ago.
> 2. The algorithms were developed to help with this problem. They are just a poor match for the problem.
I disagree with the OP that the algorithms are necessarily bad. For instance, once in a while, they could suggest a very different style to help broaden your tastes. Some already do that.
But algorithms can't compare with recommendations by friends. There were music that I would have instantly rejected if the CD hadn't been given by a friend. And sometimes you have to persevere and learn to like a music. When the curator is a human I like, I try harder.
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.
Some either you don’t know about any of these which is the fault of the algo I guess, or you’re stuck in a bubble of 15 years ago, in which the algo failed.
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Breaking Bad is almost certainly one of the best series of all time that started strong and ended strong. There were a TON of shows in that period that were weak or that, at a minimum, sort of petered out. Yes, a lot of shows probably get canceled too quickly. Then there's Grey's Anatomy because it still apparently has lazy viewers who will tune in each week.
I find myself encountering bits of culture (tv/movies/music/books) that could be from today, or from 10 years ago, and little way to determine from when. And there's so much of it now.
Also we have probably reached almost the top of what is possible for a TV show, especially in what matters the most (writing, acting).
although, i will say, it is a lot better of an experience watching old, well reviewed shows / movies, than it is to watch whatever comes out now. but again thats mainly because i can choose from some of the best productions ever.
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/)
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.
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.
There was a very famous case in my country of a preppy kid who took the whole rap world by storm getting stupid numbers in a niche site, and only after he had gotten big contracts with multinational labels it came out that he had just set a bot to download the music and inflate numbers, that’s how trust based the system was.
If you were someone living in a provincial town you were SoL on alternative music.
Not so much of a tangent as just the relevant argument not being made clearly. The Bjork example demonstrates the value of a central, canonical source for information in overcoming the costs of friction from direct messaging, which creates a chaotic cacophony of tiny bite-sized messages which are difficult and exhausting to piece together into a final meaningful message, and result in the interested Bjork fans living in their own little information-universes: in one universe, it's a film+documentary, in another, it's a film. So they can't even manage to agree on the most basic facts. (Which has downstream effects: a Bjork fan may not know they have access to the documentary or that they can assume most of the film-watchers saw the documentary and they can invoke it without confusion or spoilers.) The 'advantage' of social media and disintermediation proved to be illusory as they came with too much overhead and destruction of any canon or commons.
In what way is that a tangent? In both cases, the author argues that a centralized authoritative source of information is better than scattershot posts on social media.
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.
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/metas...
I think you're confusing cause and effect. If you look at steam's concurrent player counts, you see that the number of concurrent players kept increasing for the first 10 days after the game's release. That's not consistent with curators instructing people to buy a game at release. That's consistent with massive word-of-mouth spread. Everyone is talking about it and rating it highly because it's good, not because they were told to.
https://steamdb.info/app/1903340/charts/
But these, as well as word of mouth, are the least needed for something so popular.
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.
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.
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.
For them, the lack of authenticity is not a bug, but a feature.
Just to confirm, this is sarcasm, right? It's hard to tell, and it's terrifying to me that so many people don't comprehend this as a basic fact at least by grade school.
Also, is it still gratifying if humans won't have other humans? Curation is harder to come by than ever before because it's less profitable. What is gratifying about that???
My comment is a reaction to this idea that a ChatGPT-generated image has the same value as one done by a Picasso. It's still art and it still can have artistic value, but it'll never possess the intangibles carried by, say, Guernica.
I think curation, in the age of procedurally-generated content, will be one of the most gratifying or at least profitable jobs to have. It already is, if you think about it; film studio heads, music producers like Rick Rubin, Anna Wintour/Vogue, and the MoMA... all wield curatorial power (for better or for worse).
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.
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.
Humans will simply opt out and create their own islands of ideology or taste, and have been doing exactly that for millennia.