A machine learning algorithm that summarizes and hallucinates information is arguably worse than a machine learning algorithm that decides which social media posts you see. They're both controlled by corporations, but at least on social media you (still) have the option to read content written by humans.
I do sort of think Pandora feels like better algorithmic song finding—maybe it is just that I have an old profile so it has learned enough about me to do good matching, though.
But, it is notable for being a pretty old site, from back before the algorithmic feeds really exploded and took control of everything… I often wonder if we actually don’t like algorithmic (non)curation, or if we just don’t like the shitty version of it has developed.
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What’s the story behind the Bjork thing? I’ve always found celebrities that just sort of stay hidden between releases endearing. I mean isn’t that what the rest of us would do?
I used Pandora from inception, but swapped to Spotify because the algo stopped working completely for me, and they ran into licensing issues with a lot of content and a lot of the oddball music I was listening to or used as a seed for stations just vanished completely.
I think it goes far deeper than curation, it's that all tooling that encourages self determination and discovery has been stripped out of UIs.
Every influencer or algo is some one/corp curating content (ultimately for their own profit motive, not for their followes)
The only place to get lost is wikipedia or tvtropes, there is no sense that you can discover things and this is tied to profit motives.
We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed platforms behind logins but with open source codebases, but open platforms, where data is free, where the focus is on having all the data from all the sources and surfacing it in any way a person can imagine.
We used to have tools curators could use, powerful search functionality, there was a sense that with infinite things to do some people wanted the wiki and some people wanted to create articles from the wiki and some people liked the article or the broadcast and didn't care to look at the wiki.
But now we have only curation and all the data itself is hidden behind walled gardens.
So now we look at jpgs posted on instagram to figure out what might be fun to do this weekend and that's just dumb.
We have curation to our specific tastes and we grow less and less tolerant of the shocking and surprising because even when we radically change our views it's because an algorithm has slowly steared us that way, and so nothing is new or surprising and there is no discovery anymore.
I honestly think we have more tools and they are more powerful than "before".
I would give an example: find a weekend hike.
Before (20-30 years ago): you need to have a book (for profit, curated) or a map (for profit, less info). You needed to rely on other people or on previous experience. Hard to know what changed since the info was collected.
Now: multiple websites both hike focused and more generic that give you reviews, photos, comments. Generic websites (openstreetmap, google maps) that allow you to check further details if you wish so, some with open data.
I think people should take more responsibility and stop blaming so much "the algorithm" and "the profit". It's the same as with smoking. Even if most people agree it is bad for health, 1 in 5 people still smoke.
> Before (20-30 years ago): you need to have a book (for profit, curated) or a map (for profit, less info). You needed to rely on other people or on previous experience. Hard to know what changed since the info was collected.
Counterargument: the hiking app was good 10-12 years ago when it was used by the overlap of tech enthusiasts and hiking enthusiasts, which provided good routes made by expert people (just like the books and maps before). Now you have a cacophony of tracks recorded by anyone, with lot of back and forths because they got lost as well while recording it. Oh and you need a monthly subscription to properly follow the hike!
Not all areas had a hiking app 10 years ago. I doubt is the case even today.
And then, if you were "different" than the average preference, you had to put the effort to select the stuff good for you. Not that different to "fighting" an algorithm.
The difference might be now that more people have a "chance" to find what they want, and "before" there was just a "specific group" that was happy. I get that "the specific group" might feel "is worse" in such a case.
Regarding the quality, I hate "following the hike" (I mean people complain about "algorithms" but then following a hike is fine ...?) - I just have some markers and look each 15 minutes on the map (which also means back and forths are not an issue).
What I would love to see more often (and maybe would fit with the use-cases described here of curation) would be finding "favorite" people and getting their "content" across applications. Like, now I can't check the google maps reviews of people that I follow on strava or on Instagram or of editors of openstreetmap... Everybody does their own little walled garden (which I am fine with) but I need to find again and again the reasonable people.
>We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed platforms behind logins
No. Not really, no. We have like 20 open source platforms already. Nobody uses most of them. The ones that people do use are extremely boring compared to any closed platform because they were created for the worst possible use of social media: letting people post their opinions online. For the average user they often lack highly requested features like making profiles private because the open source platforms decided to be decentralized as well adding enormous complexity to them. That also comes with privacy issues like making all your likes public.
People could just use Tumblr if they wanted. Text posts of any length, add as many images as you want anywhere in the post you want, share music, videos, reblog other's posts. But people don't go to Tumblr.
You could create the perfect platform but people still wouldn't use it because they are too addicted to drama, arguing online, and doomscrolling to calmly scroll through a curated catalog of music that someone spend 3 years publishing on their blog.
This comment was down voted but it's right. We don't need more open source platforms - we need more successful open (source code doesn't matter) platforms.
Actual businesspeople are pretty ruthless in getting people to using their product. Open source people aren't, by nature (except for Lennart Poettering).
Also open source people tend to make software instead of services. Mastodon isn't a Twitter clone - it's software you can install on a server to make your own Twitter clone. Mastodon is software and Twitter is a service. mastodon.social is a Twitter clone. The only exceptions to this are highly P2P softwares like Bitcoin, where the software and the service merge into one.
>Actual businesspeople are pretty ruthless in getting people to using their product. Open source people aren't, by nature (except for Lennart Poettering)
I watched that PewDiePie video[1] of him using Linux and I found it extremely funny that this guy was like "Linux is awesome! Freedom! (literal USA flag in the background) You are a god now!" and then every Linux-focused channel reacting to that video was like "yeah, you can play games, but not all of them. Yeah, it works, except... Yeah, you can customize but he will grow out of it when he needs to get work done..."
Linux people are downers. It's like I was watching the second coming of Stallman selling to everyone the idea that you get to control what your computer does, unlike on Windows. You can customize it, you can optimize it yourself, you can remove everything and add anything. And that he had been having so much fun doing it. The man literally told his audience that everyone should use Linux so Linux gets better. While the people who should be promoting it the most insist that "Linux is not for everyone."
It really feels like I peered into some sort of alternative reality in that video and it was really refreshing.
And I think that's the problem with FLOSS, what FLOSS truly lacks.
FLOSS tends to be merely "an alternative." It should be more than that. It should be freedom. It's absolutely ridiculous to me that I can change the font and color of the text of my post on Tumblr, a proprietary closed source social media, but I can't do that on Mastodon, on Bluesky, on Lemmy, and I bet not even on Pixelfed or Peertube although I never really used them. Where is the freedom? I don't have the freedom to change my text color? I don't have the freedom to opt into an algorithmic feed in Mastodon because the developers have opinions about that? I don't have the freedom to follow someone from Threads because my instance's administrator wants to LARP as Internet police? Richard Stallman would be spinning in his grave if he had one.
You make a solid case for abandoning the web. To be clear, in my mind I separate “the web” from “the net”; the web exists on top of the ‘net!
The web has become a cesspool of AI slop, SEO trash, walled gardens, and of course, bots of all kinds seeking entry points to everything. The dead internet theory seems more real every day.
I think humanity will ultimately abandon the web. The day cannot come soon enough for me.
It's no complete solution against AI slop but I've been working on www.webring.gg which is a democratic webring manager. To join, websites are invited and voted on by current members to keep slop from polluting the integrity of the webring.
Even when we do have the search tools, we have no assurance that the output of the tools is trustworthy and not biased towards whatever brings the most money to the toolmaker. And we have a lot of history with reasons to believe that our tools are not trustworthy. The software industry has shit its own bed and thoroughly lost all credibility. To the point where I have zero doubt that any new software is acting in its own best interests and not the user's.
Tv tropes seems an undervalued platform for "finding media that engages with a specific idea", however the downside is that once it starts to get used for that purpose, someone will learn how to use it to push their content and then it will be worthless.
For curation to work, you have to trust the currator.
Personal blogs are also a fun place to discover things. They often recommend other interesting, hidden sites. I have luck with WordPress, Tumblr and Substack.
Well, originally, the answer to this question was "search engines, like Google"
And, for a while, this worked pretty well. The breaking point for me was when Google bought pompous-restaurant-ranker Zagat and proceeded to disappear their curated reviews into something that would nowadays best be described as "an AI blackhole". And that was in 2011, mind you.
Of course, Zagat going away was an entirely elitist event with no consequence to the Internet-or-society-as-a-whole whatsoever, but for me, it was the moment I realized that democratized data-ranking would never provide any real value.
And the whole "AI" story is pretty much history repeating: unless actual-humans-with-distinguisable options feed "the algorithm", the output will be... well, slop.
TL;DR: curation by actual living, thinking and critical humans (which automatically excludes most "best of" repositories on Github, BTW) is still the way forward.
Corollary: If everything is curated, how do we find helpful curation?
If we fill the void indicated in the article - that is, we post and host useful information, how do we get it noticed by the audience that's looking for it?
As far as we believe we can't rise above the noise, we're unlikely to assemble info and make it available.
There are some explicit efforts to surface smaller/indie websites, like web rings and e.g. Kagi’s small web features[1]. These kinds of things might help.
And now that no one trusts any kind of expert, we've ended up with millions of various conspiracy peddlers believed by billions too uneducated to even begin to parse fact from fiction. Sort of like taking the centralized religion/opinion/censorship problem and smashing it into tiny shards that get on everything.
At least when there were 2, 3, or 10 curated sides to a story, with sources and expertise to draw on, a somewhat literate person could draw some conclusions on which parts of each were valid.
Uh… no. What made me look into a subject that it often called a conspiracy theory (men’s rights) was the several levels of obvious bullshit that newspapers were delivering. Think about it: The only thing they had to do was to say lies that seem right, and they didn’t even succeed at that.
So no, it’s not the mediatization of the opposite point of view that gives it an audience, but the sheer lack of truthfulness of the dominating class.
I'm not saying that legacy media outlets don't deserve the criticism they get. They abused their position for a century - mostly to support government war propaganda and the arms industry. But also to support liberal-sounding causes to distract from those things, some of which turned out to be hypocritical or didn't show the full picture.
What I'm saying is that what has replaced the traditional media system - tiktok, youtube and reddit - is way, way worse in terms of breeding a population of crazy and paranoid people who can't get a handle on anything at all that's happening in the world.
In your instance, for every person who's been redpilled about men's rights there's two people who hear that phrase and have a nearly hysterical response that it's toxic and evil. So all that has been accomplished is that everyone's fucking nuts now.
If you started with enough historical understanding and grounding to be able to tell when the media was lying, you didn't need social media to explain it to you. If you didn't start with that, and went straight to social media, you are going to become a sociopath with a completely disoriented understanding of the world, guided only by what other random sociopaths online tell you is true in your feed.
This is infinitely worse than having your information gate-kept by people who you can judge are sometimes lying to you, and having to work hard and put in some research to seek your own answers. This is dumbasses with bullhorns telling you whatever lies they just came up with, to sell you vitamin supplements. Who will take both sides of every issue just for clicks and likes.
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.
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
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.
>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).
I wasn't referring to the cinematography. While that one's certainly noticeable, I think the way the shows narrative is structured and builds up over time is the true leap. The X-Files or Twin Peaks were maybe more cohesive, but that's also because mystery box shows wouldn't work very well any other way. Maybe that's it... cohesiveness found its way into TV productions, and it took mystery box shows to make that quality really obvious as a recipe?
Deep Space 9. Star Trek starting in late in TNG's. It had actually overarching narrative and story going beyond a few episode. Though still had those self-containt episodes.
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.
I think my point didn't quite come across... Comedy got way more serious and certainly made that (necessary) leap after a big dive in quality during the 00s (thanks Chuck Lorre!). Writers of other genres learned from the successful HBO and AMC productions that TV shows are more than just a fixed universe with a static cast and a dynamic part, and that each episode could be more than one short story told in this staged universe - that is the main part in the leap that makes old shows feel old now.
Thanks for the recommendations, didn't know about The Rehearsal, Shogun, and Reservation Dogs (you wrote "Resevoir Dogs"?). Our tastes may wary, but I think For All Mankind fell back to some 90s formula after season 2.
Slightly OT, but it's been a long time since I've been as disappointed with anything as I was with the last season (3) of The Bear. I made it three episodes in, then deleted it. The first seasons were so good.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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'd agree with the jist of this article.
Social media has been less "wisdom of crowds" and more endless algorithmic slop and pay-to-play influencers.
Sure there was always PR dealmaking & money behinds the scenes previously I'm sure, but there were actual magazines/websites/etc in every genre publishing numerical reviews for cars/cameras/games/movies/shows/albums/etc. If you paid attention you could figure out which curators scoring aligned with what you tended to like.
Now every reviewer is a YouTube influencer who loves every product put in front of them, no product is every bad, no scores are assigned because then you can cross compare, etc.
The acquisition, death, resurrection and mundane ongoing existence of dpreview is a good example of this.
What we had before wasn't perfect, but what has followed is worse.
I agree with the sentiment completely. From link directories to search engines, and now with AI, and from reblogging to recommendation algorithms, I think what is being lost is the ability to "browse" the web. To look at a list of things that may not interest you. Because sometimes among those things you do find something that piques your interest.
> And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen before. It'll never surprise you with something different. It keeps you in a little bubble.
This is not true at all, algorithms can predict things you haven't seen before, and can take you well outside your bubble. A lot of the existing recommendation algorithms on social media etc. do keep you in a bubble, but that's a very specific choice 'cause apparently that's where the money is at. There's enough work in multi-armed-bandit explore/exploit systems that we definitely could have excellent algorithms that do exactly the kind of curation the author would like. The issue is not algorithms, but rather incentives on media recommendation and consumption. People say they would like something new, but they keep going back to the places that feed them more of the comfortable same.
The argument for curation goes against the argument for democratization. We collectively said “enough” with Hollywood gatekeeping which means you must bring your own audience.
Movies roles are based on your followers. Music gigs, based on your followers. Any creative event, based on your followers. So known named artists like Bjork have to build a following for an event for promoters to green light it.
It sucks, but that’s the nature of the business. Sell tickets, upsell merchandise, sell records, repeat.
Democratization is micro-curation. What we have now is not that. We have monolithic platforms - the richest companies in the world, or companies owned by the richest people in the world - serving content as they see fit, with a veneer of what your friends, family, and favorite celebrities want to to show you. We are back to, "Brought to you by GE!", for all intents and purposes. Right down to them telling us who to vote for.
>The argument for curation goes against the argument for democratization.
Unless you are going to read every book, watch every movie, listen to every song you are going to consult others about their own experiences, or have an algorithm or radio station feed it to you in their own curated order.
You didnt defeat trust, you just trust different people now.
No, they're right. If you have "democratization", you don't necessarily read every book yourself, but there are lots of competent or incompetent people you can choose to trust to review them for you and suggest which ones to read.
Which means people who choose to trust different sources will get different cultural experiences.
We have tools today that are uniquely good at wading through disparate sources and aggregating things into a format that we can easily digest. The worry of course - is that these tools are generally on offer from huge tech giants (google, openai, etc). The good news is, we have open-source versions of these tools that perform almost as well as the closed-source versions for these types of categorization and aggregation.
I would agree that information is now more scattered (like bread for ducks as the author notes) than ever before -- but we now have the unprecedented ability to wrangle it ourselves.
What most people refer to as "culture" or "art" are products that are vectors for identity in a fractured society. If the author feels malaise over not being able to find to find new things to watch and listen to, imagine how hard it must be to just be yourself these days and foster communities around the likes and dislikes that you share with other people. Curating/taste-making is identity politics.
I miss Entertainment Weekly having a print subscription. I loved tearing out blurbs about stuff that was coming out and sticking them to my pin board. Feels more real than adding something to a watchlist (which I NEVER look at) in an app.
If everything is curated to only include what pays the highest affiliate commission, how will we find good things that don't include a large marketing expense in their cost?
> It makes art (music, film, tv, etc.) seem like one big sludge pile. It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of things that you'll never get to the end of.
If that is not hyperbole and the author is not taking steps to distance themselves from those feelings, that is extremely unhealthy. Like an addiction or something.
The only thing that should feel like that is laundry.
Perhaps the author should rebalance their leisure activities portfolio to include more things that aren't pop culture media.
Have you considered that that might be the goal of releasing trickles of information about the film prior to its official release? It makes collected information feel more exclusive to super fans and encourages fans to interact with each other on social media providing fuel for Bjork focused communities. If collecting this information feels exhausting instead of exciting to you... why are you trying so hard to collect it? Just wait for the actual release.
> We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't.
I don't understand how you expect a critic to tell you whether its worth your time based on a collection of pre-release rumors and interviews. For deciding if its worth my time, I mainly want to hear from critics who have seen the upcoming media and I want to hear their opinion on what they saw. Why would I care to hear Ebert and Roeper's opinion on what the actors said in their press release tour? Unless it was something especially newsworthy and they wouldn't need to go digging for that. I just don't see how a critic's review would be enhanced by "devoting their lives to browsing through the piles".
Just thought about this in the context of searching for products.
Nowadays there is so much stuff and also so much information available, one just gets lost in this huge sea and spends countless hours trying to find the “best” product… back in the days you would have only one or two choices and that would be it. But was it better? Im actually not so sure…
The consumer landscape has gotten so hostile. Once upon a time you could use price as a proxy for evaluating quality. More expensive versions of a product were generally better.
Nowadays it's all smoke and mirrors; marketing, branding and lies. In general I find even the more expensive versions of consumer products are still garbage quality which end up in a landfill all to quickly. It's hard to buy something good even if you're willing to spend the money. Our current capitalism doesn't care about providing value for the money, no it's all about how much money to can squeeze out of people and how low you can make your production costs.
It’s so difficult to tell the quality of things online, I’ve returned to buying almost exclusively from brick-and-mortar stores. If they don’t have it, I just don’t buy it. It’s less frustrating to live without than to own something that’s not right.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadBut, it is notable for being a pretty old site, from back before the algorithmic feeds really exploded and took control of everything… I often wonder if we actually don’t like algorithmic (non)curation, or if we just don’t like the shitty version of it has developed.
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What’s the story behind the Bjork thing? I’ve always found celebrities that just sort of stay hidden between releases endearing. I mean isn’t that what the rest of us would do?
Enya, obviously, has it all figured out.
Every influencer or algo is some one/corp curating content (ultimately for their own profit motive, not for their followes)
The only place to get lost is wikipedia or tvtropes, there is no sense that you can discover things and this is tied to profit motives.
We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed platforms behind logins but with open source codebases, but open platforms, where data is free, where the focus is on having all the data from all the sources and surfacing it in any way a person can imagine.
We used to have tools curators could use, powerful search functionality, there was a sense that with infinite things to do some people wanted the wiki and some people wanted to create articles from the wiki and some people liked the article or the broadcast and didn't care to look at the wiki.
But now we have only curation and all the data itself is hidden behind walled gardens.
So now we look at jpgs posted on instagram to figure out what might be fun to do this weekend and that's just dumb.
We have curation to our specific tastes and we grow less and less tolerant of the shocking and surprising because even when we radically change our views it's because an algorithm has slowly steared us that way, and so nothing is new or surprising and there is no discovery anymore.
I would give an example: find a weekend hike.
Before (20-30 years ago): you need to have a book (for profit, curated) or a map (for profit, less info). You needed to rely on other people or on previous experience. Hard to know what changed since the info was collected.
Now: multiple websites both hike focused and more generic that give you reviews, photos, comments. Generic websites (openstreetmap, google maps) that allow you to check further details if you wish so, some with open data.
I think people should take more responsibility and stop blaming so much "the algorithm" and "the profit". It's the same as with smoking. Even if most people agree it is bad for health, 1 in 5 people still smoke.
Counterargument: the hiking app was good 10-12 years ago when it was used by the overlap of tech enthusiasts and hiking enthusiasts, which provided good routes made by expert people (just like the books and maps before). Now you have a cacophony of tracks recorded by anyone, with lot of back and forths because they got lost as well while recording it. Oh and you need a monthly subscription to properly follow the hike!
(Yes, I know you can still find books and maps)
And then, if you were "different" than the average preference, you had to put the effort to select the stuff good for you. Not that different to "fighting" an algorithm.
The difference might be now that more people have a "chance" to find what they want, and "before" there was just a "specific group" that was happy. I get that "the specific group" might feel "is worse" in such a case.
Regarding the quality, I hate "following the hike" (I mean people complain about "algorithms" but then following a hike is fine ...?) - I just have some markers and look each 15 minutes on the map (which also means back and forths are not an issue).
What I would love to see more often (and maybe would fit with the use-cases described here of curation) would be finding "favorite" people and getting their "content" across applications. Like, now I can't check the google maps reviews of people that I follow on strava or on Instagram or of editors of openstreetmap... Everybody does their own little walled garden (which I am fine with) but I need to find again and again the reasonable people.
No. Not really, no. We have like 20 open source platforms already. Nobody uses most of them. The ones that people do use are extremely boring compared to any closed platform because they were created for the worst possible use of social media: letting people post their opinions online. For the average user they often lack highly requested features like making profiles private because the open source platforms decided to be decentralized as well adding enormous complexity to them. That also comes with privacy issues like making all your likes public.
People could just use Tumblr if they wanted. Text posts of any length, add as many images as you want anywhere in the post you want, share music, videos, reblog other's posts. But people don't go to Tumblr.
You could create the perfect platform but people still wouldn't use it because they are too addicted to drama, arguing online, and doomscrolling to calmly scroll through a curated catalog of music that someone spend 3 years publishing on their blog.
Actual businesspeople are pretty ruthless in getting people to using their product. Open source people aren't, by nature (except for Lennart Poettering).
Also open source people tend to make software instead of services. Mastodon isn't a Twitter clone - it's software you can install on a server to make your own Twitter clone. Mastodon is software and Twitter is a service. mastodon.social is a Twitter clone. The only exceptions to this are highly P2P softwares like Bitcoin, where the software and the service merge into one.
I watched that PewDiePie video[1] of him using Linux and I found it extremely funny that this guy was like "Linux is awesome! Freedom! (literal USA flag in the background) You are a god now!" and then every Linux-focused channel reacting to that video was like "yeah, you can play games, but not all of them. Yeah, it works, except... Yeah, you can customize but he will grow out of it when he needs to get work done..."
Linux people are downers. It's like I was watching the second coming of Stallman selling to everyone the idea that you get to control what your computer does, unlike on Windows. You can customize it, you can optimize it yourself, you can remove everything and add anything. And that he had been having so much fun doing it. The man literally told his audience that everyone should use Linux so Linux gets better. While the people who should be promoting it the most insist that "Linux is not for everyone."
It really feels like I peered into some sort of alternative reality in that video and it was really refreshing.
And I think that's the problem with FLOSS, what FLOSS truly lacks.
FLOSS tends to be merely "an alternative." It should be more than that. It should be freedom. It's absolutely ridiculous to me that I can change the font and color of the text of my post on Tumblr, a proprietary closed source social media, but I can't do that on Mastodon, on Bluesky, on Lemmy, and I bet not even on Pixelfed or Peertube although I never really used them. Where is the freedom? I don't have the freedom to change my text color? I don't have the freedom to opt into an algorithmic feed in Mastodon because the developers have opinions about that? I don't have the freedom to follow someone from Threads because my instance's administrator wants to LARP as Internet police? Richard Stallman would be spinning in his grave if he had one.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0
The web has become a cesspool of AI slop, SEO trash, walled gardens, and of course, bots of all kinds seeking entry points to everything. The dead internet theory seems more real every day.
I think humanity will ultimately abandon the web. The day cannot come soon enough for me.
For curation to work, you have to trust the currator.
And, for a while, this worked pretty well. The breaking point for me was when Google bought pompous-restaurant-ranker Zagat and proceeded to disappear their curated reviews into something that would nowadays best be described as "an AI blackhole". And that was in 2011, mind you.
Of course, Zagat going away was an entirely elitist event with no consequence to the Internet-or-society-as-a-whole whatsoever, but for me, it was the moment I realized that democratized data-ranking would never provide any real value.
And the whole "AI" story is pretty much history repeating: unless actual-humans-with-distinguisable options feed "the algorithm", the output will be... well, slop.
TL;DR: curation by actual living, thinking and critical humans (which automatically excludes most "best of" repositories on Github, BTW) is still the way forward.
If we fill the void indicated in the article - that is, we post and host useful information, how do we get it noticed by the audience that's looking for it?
As far as we believe we can't rise above the noise, we're unlikely to assemble info and make it available.
1: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
No thanks. The last time this happened we ended up with opinionated articles, hidden promotions, and censorship in news, media, newspapers, etc.
A good example:
try searching for "fluoride residue in brain" on Google vs Yandex and see how they tell totally opposite stories.
At least when there were 2, 3, or 10 curated sides to a story, with sources and expertise to draw on, a somewhat literate person could draw some conclusions on which parts of each were valid.
So no, it’s not the mediatization of the opposite point of view that gives it an audience, but the sheer lack of truthfulness of the dominating class.
It sucks because theres a group local to me that does free information sessions and bbq meet ups in front of the local family court house.
But online MRA's have given them such a bad name with terrible behaviour.
What I'm saying is that what has replaced the traditional media system - tiktok, youtube and reddit - is way, way worse in terms of breeding a population of crazy and paranoid people who can't get a handle on anything at all that's happening in the world.
In your instance, for every person who's been redpilled about men's rights there's two people who hear that phrase and have a nearly hysterical response that it's toxic and evil. So all that has been accomplished is that everyone's fucking nuts now.
If you started with enough historical understanding and grounding to be able to tell when the media was lying, you didn't need social media to explain it to you. If you didn't start with that, and went straight to social media, you are going to become a sociopath with a completely disoriented understanding of the world, guided only by what other random sociopaths online tell you is true in your feed.
This is infinitely worse than having your information gate-kept by people who you can judge are sometimes lying to you, and having to work hard and put in some research to seek your own answers. This is dumbasses with bullhorns telling you whatever lies they just came up with, to sell you vitamin supplements. Who will take both sides of every issue just for clicks and likes.
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 "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.
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).
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.
Thanks for the recommendations, didn't know about The Rehearsal, Shogun, and Reservation Dogs (you wrote "Resevoir Dogs"?). Our tastes may wary, but I think For All Mankind fell back to some 90s formula after season 2.
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.
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 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.
Sure there was always PR dealmaking & money behinds the scenes previously I'm sure, but there were actual magazines/websites/etc in every genre publishing numerical reviews for cars/cameras/games/movies/shows/albums/etc. If you paid attention you could figure out which curators scoring aligned with what you tended to like.
Now every reviewer is a YouTube influencer who loves every product put in front of them, no product is every bad, no scores are assigned because then you can cross compare, etc.
The acquisition, death, resurrection and mundane ongoing existence of dpreview is a good example of this.
What we had before wasn't perfect, but what has followed is worse.
This is not true at all, algorithms can predict things you haven't seen before, and can take you well outside your bubble. A lot of the existing recommendation algorithms on social media etc. do keep you in a bubble, but that's a very specific choice 'cause apparently that's where the money is at. There's enough work in multi-armed-bandit explore/exploit systems that we definitely could have excellent algorithms that do exactly the kind of curation the author would like. The issue is not algorithms, but rather incentives on media recommendation and consumption. People say they would like something new, but they keep going back to the places that feed them more of the comfortable same.
Movies roles are based on your followers. Music gigs, based on your followers. Any creative event, based on your followers. So known named artists like Bjork have to build a following for an event for promoters to green light it.
It sucks, but that’s the nature of the business. Sell tickets, upsell merchandise, sell records, repeat.
Unless you are going to read every book, watch every movie, listen to every song you are going to consult others about their own experiences, or have an algorithm or radio station feed it to you in their own curated order.
You didnt defeat trust, you just trust different people now.
Which means people who choose to trust different sources will get different cultural experiences.
Congratulations, you have invented curation.
I would agree that information is now more scattered (like bread for ducks as the author notes) than ever before -- but we now have the unprecedented ability to wrangle it ourselves.
If that is not hyperbole and the author is not taking steps to distance themselves from those feelings, that is extremely unhealthy. Like an addiction or something.
The only thing that should feel like that is laundry.
Perhaps the author should rebalance their leisure activities portfolio to include more things that aren't pop culture media.
Have you considered that that might be the goal of releasing trickles of information about the film prior to its official release? It makes collected information feel more exclusive to super fans and encourages fans to interact with each other on social media providing fuel for Bjork focused communities. If collecting this information feels exhausting instead of exciting to you... why are you trying so hard to collect it? Just wait for the actual release.
> We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't.
I don't understand how you expect a critic to tell you whether its worth your time based on a collection of pre-release rumors and interviews. For deciding if its worth my time, I mainly want to hear from critics who have seen the upcoming media and I want to hear their opinion on what they saw. Why would I care to hear Ebert and Roeper's opinion on what the actors said in their press release tour? Unless it was something especially newsworthy and they wouldn't need to go digging for that. I just don't see how a critic's review would be enhanced by "devoting their lives to browsing through the piles".
Nowadays it's all smoke and mirrors; marketing, branding and lies. In general I find even the more expensive versions of consumer products are still garbage quality which end up in a landfill all to quickly. It's hard to buy something good even if you're willing to spend the money. Our current capitalism doesn't care about providing value for the money, no it's all about how much money to can squeeze out of people and how low you can make your production costs.