How many of these images are there? I cycled through a few and ended up hitting at least one duplicate [1] that I do actually enjoy (but I can't find the name of it now that I refreshed the page, I know it had the verrazzano narrows bridge in the title)
Is there a chance a site like this could ruin their metric by inflating all the views for these lowest viewed items? Or do these not count?
I read that some people are having trouble with cloudflare and VPNs. Being an art school, I imagine they’re disinclined to make it easier for a bazillion people every day to thoughtlessly point a scraper at their site to vacuum everything up for training data.
it keeps saying "failed to load" for me. through the magic of the developer console, i can see that the api calls are working but the actual image requests are not. it seems that this is a case of an overzealous cloudflare turnstile setup since if i open the image links in a new tab and pass a challenge i can view them.
I used to borrow the books which had "to be disposed if not lent in the next 3 months" slip in them. Never regretted reading them. The best one included a very odd short story by Flann OBrien about a carpenter who walls himself inside the oak panelling of a build he is working on, and a woman convinced Sago farming will cure Ireland's famine.
A surprise to see Flann O'Brien pop up in the comments. While we're here, I will say that At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman are fantastic books, I highly recommend them.
There’s something about resurrecting underloved media, isn’t there? I recently did a Catherine Louisa Pirkis collection[1] for Standard Ebooks; most of her stories had scans on archive.org / Hathi that I could use, but “Trooping with Crows”[2] was only available from the British Library as a physical copy. We paid for it to be scanned and I’ve uploaded those to archive.org now.[3] I’d be surprised if anyone had read it in the last decade, if not longer, yet it’s a perfectly good Victorian genre romance with a strong lead.
I understand the romantic appeal of discovering "abandoned" books and forgotten ideas.
However I suspect my reaction to your anecdote is very different to the one that most people might have, because I think that behaviour is harmful to the library. ( A very minor harm, but a harm nonetheless. )
They have identified books that people don't borrow, and have made it clear they want to get rid of them. That's to benefit the library, catalogue and storage isn't free and endless.
So they have a signal that no-one is borrowing these books, and they can replace it with books that do get borrowed.
Along you come and interrupt that signal, in a way that doesn't have underlying desire to borrow that book. So the clock gets reset, and so it goes.
In software development terms, imagine you develop a product with a number of features with a public API, and telemetry points that a feature goes unused. You want to clean up the code so you mark some endpoints as deprecated and list that in your change log.
Now imagine there's a developer who looks at the changelog for deprecation warnings, then goes out their way to develop apps that call them.
"Unloved books" might seem more romantic than un-called API endpoints, but the library needs to rotate and refresh to stay healthy.
If you want unloved books, then pick them up for next to nothing from the sale outside the library, most libraries will practically give away books they've rotated out, and you're actually doing them a favour "disposing" of them while likely giving them a token amount of money for it.
Interesting! I'm surprised to hear you've had that experience. I pick out books at the library largely by the cover & back blurb, not by whether they're popular or well reviewed or whatever. And to be honest, I've picked out a lot of crap this way, where I turn it back in after just a chapter or two. I suspect that frequency of being checked out & popularity/well-reviewed-ness are correlated. So I also suspect (admittedly without evidence) that my algorithm of picking somewhat randomly means I pick out books that are not popular with some frequency, and I've definitely regretted many of my choices. So it's surprising to me that you haven't had any that were terrible.
Sounds similar to the aspiration of randomly picking an out-of-the way restaurant in hopes that you are going to discover a great little hole-in-the-wall. Needless to say, I suspect any lack of regret in either case might be attributable to cognitive biases.
There used to be a site called Forgotify that would only play songs from Spotify that had zero listens. So each song played, of course, removed that song from the set that could ever be played by Forgotify. Doesn't look like it's around any more, sadly.
This is awesome. It's interesting to me how it messes with my incentives. At first I was just pulling the lever on the slot machine, then I went back and clicked on the pieces I really liked (to mark them as "viewed" for the Art Institute and show some love), but finally realized that I was systematically working to remove my favorites from the pool of images people would see.
In the end I just clicked on the "refresh" button a few more times.
My first art work was a drawing of a bunch of couches flying. I loved it. I came back here to comment about it without noticing I’d lose track of it. I tried searching in the collection but I couldn’t find it, so if anyone finds a sketch of a bunch of couches, I’d appreciate a link.
Somehow this made this experience even more wonderful.
I opened this and thought hoooooooold on, I know that; I have a framed A2 print of it on the wall to my left.
One of my favourite parts of my trip to Japan (only been once so far), the tide was out at the time so I stood under that Torii gate and have a few photos of it of my own that I use as wallpapers.
I remember reading a post by soneone who really liked imusic, i think, and the filter options it used to have.
They had a playlist that was "all songs with four or five stars that i haven't listened to in 4 years or more" or something like that. This person apparently had a massive music collection, so there were always a few nostalgic hits to listen to.
That cheesy Renaissance marble table not only hasn't been viewed much, but all the views were from a White House IP address 2017-2021 and 2025 to present.
This feels like I am violating something that is sacred.
The last time I felt the same was when I accidentally found a Japanese Youtube channel that had tons of clips of konbini storefronts, a few seconds long each, most of them with zero views.
But why? Seems like there's way more art than people need, just as there's way more music than people need. As a consequence, most artists aren't earning much (just as it's always been). Why would author welcomes us to artificially inflate click counts? For example, e-commerce stores don't like artificial reviews.
The irony is, that by drawing attention to these, especially on HN, they are likely to have the view numbers artificially increased, to a point where they no longer has_not_been_viewed_much
57 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 64.4 ms ] threadIs there a chance a site like this could ruin their metric by inflating all the views for these lowest viewed items? Or do these not count?
[1] https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/67395c18-c83c-865f-b0db-4736574...
(I'm deliberately not posting the direct API call in case it's expensive for them to run. Documentation is found here: https://api.artic.edu/docs/#fields-collections-artworks)
See:
In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia (2022)
https://colinmorris.github.io/blog/unpopular-wiki-articles
(Some discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31524943, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37955600)
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/catherine-louisa-pirkis/sh...
[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/catherine-louisa-pirkis/sh...
[3] https://archive.org/details/12641-cc-26-001
However I suspect my reaction to your anecdote is very different to the one that most people might have, because I think that behaviour is harmful to the library. ( A very minor harm, but a harm nonetheless. )
They have identified books that people don't borrow, and have made it clear they want to get rid of them. That's to benefit the library, catalogue and storage isn't free and endless.
So they have a signal that no-one is borrowing these books, and they can replace it with books that do get borrowed.
Along you come and interrupt that signal, in a way that doesn't have underlying desire to borrow that book. So the clock gets reset, and so it goes.
In software development terms, imagine you develop a product with a number of features with a public API, and telemetry points that a feature goes unused. You want to clean up the code so you mark some endpoints as deprecated and list that in your change log.
Now imagine there's a developer who looks at the changelog for deprecation warnings, then goes out their way to develop apps that call them.
"Unloved books" might seem more romantic than un-called API endpoints, but the library needs to rotate and refresh to stay healthy.
If you want unloved books, then pick them up for next to nothing from the sale outside the library, most libraries will practically give away books they've rotated out, and you're actually doing them a favour "disposing" of them while likely giving them a token amount of money for it.
Interesting! I'm surprised to hear you've had that experience. I pick out books at the library largely by the cover & back blurb, not by whether they're popular or well reviewed or whatever. And to be honest, I've picked out a lot of crap this way, where I turn it back in after just a chapter or two. I suspect that frequency of being checked out & popularity/well-reviewed-ness are correlated. So I also suspect (admittedly without evidence) that my algorithm of picking somewhat randomly means I pick out books that are not popular with some frequency, and I've definitely regretted many of my choices. So it's surprising to me that you haven't had any that were terrible.
https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/813984c9-f0a6-c340-5e89-f1c00af...
Really moving piece. Great idea on the part of the API devs!
In the end I just clicked on the "refresh" button a few more times.
Somehow this made this experience even more wonderful.
https://nipponprints.com/images/tsuchiya-koitsu/summer-moon-...
(non-deeplink: https://nipponprints.com/tsuchiya-koitsu/summer-moon-at-miya... )
One of my favourite parts of my trip to Japan (only been once so far), the tide was out at the time so I stood under that Torii gate and have a few photos of it of my own that I use as wallpapers.
They had a playlist that was "all songs with four or five stars that i haven't listened to in 4 years or more" or something like that. This person apparently had a massive music collection, so there were always a few nostalgic hits to listen to.
Is this person trying to get hired at Google?
I think I have an interest in Peruvian blackware now!! I mean... Look at this guy: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/6911/stirrup-spout-vessel-in-...
The last time I felt the same was when I accidentally found a Japanese Youtube channel that had tons of clips of konbini storefronts, a few seconds long each, most of them with zero views.
A new field is required…