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.
baxtr · 1h ago
I am not sure if I agree.
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.
smackeyacky · 1h ago
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Sure the shared cultural experience of being limited to a handful of TV channels is gone, but it's been replaced by a handful of streaming services.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.
No comments yet
crm9125 · 26m ago
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.
kaonwarb · 8m ago
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.
curun1r · 2h ago
> 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.
jedberg · 1h ago
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.
iknowstuff · 1h ago
there are definitely still cultural experiences like that around release time. The last of us is huge right now.
cpburns2009 · 19m ago
Isn't that an old video game? Was it recently remastered like Oblivion?
jedberg · 1h ago
> The last of us
Never seen it. Not even sure what it's about.
ghaff · 26m ago
They're much more limited though. Heard of the series, but it's not Must see Thursday because I'm not in an office and know I can pretty much tune in whenever I want.
rout39574 · 2h ago
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.
withzombies · 3h ago
When we were kids, just knowing music that wasn't on the radio made you "into music". Things were very different! The internet has really allowed music choices to be much more personal and I think it's a good thing. We have such a wide variety of music available to us now.
I've had some luck finding some TikTok creators who curate specific "vibes" and publish Spotify playlists. I think that's just how it's done now.
jedberg · 2h ago
I love the variety for sure, I just miss the curation and the shared culture. It's harder to find people in person who know the same music and TV that you do.
bobthepanda · 1h ago
Is it hard because of the media landscape or is it hard because you are older?
As someone who is still listening to today’s pop acts and whatnot, there are still tons of people you can talk to in person who probably listen to similar music, concerts are well-attended, etc. If anything the definition of popular has broadened to include new stuff like KPop, Latin pop, Afrobeats, etc. and I don’t have an issue finding people who like that music in person.
aspenmayer · 1h ago
Every silver lining has its cloud. Shared cultural touchstones came hand in hand with tastemakers and gatekeepers. We’re more directly connected to the movers and shakers than ever before, but it’s largely parasocial interaction, mediated by platforms and gated by subscriptions. We’re increasingly disintermediated with respect to creators so that we can be separated and reconstituted into our profit-bearing parts.
We’re old wine poured into new wineskins.
acomjean · 2h ago
I always think it would be useful for radio stations to keep logs of their playlists.
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..
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.
ta12653421 · 3h ago
i like how you frame "shared cultural experience" which was mainly scarcity and lack of access due to less distribution channels as nowadays :-)
jedberg · 2h ago
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.
romankolpak · 4h ago
When I was younger I had a few different sources for finding music - a couple of friends who were really into music and I knew they were investing time and searching for it, so I always wanted to hear what they recommend, even if it didn’t match my taste. There was also a curated website and a forum dedicated to alternative genres, like hardcore or post rock and other “edgy” stuff, where I liked to hang out. I knew this is where people really passionate about music gathered and it was interesting to see what they like and what they recommend. It was always driven my community, by people I liked or loved, or trusted their judgement.
Needless to say you get none of that with algorithms. Spotify does recommend some good songs for me regularly and I often add them to “liked” but it’s much lonelier now. Music used to connect me with other people and now it’s just me and my Spotify.
ghaff · 3h ago
Pretty much listened to what "my crowd" in college listened to. It spanned out in various other directions over time--some by organic discovery via music festivals and the like, some via friends. Mostly don't concern myself too much with "discovery" these days.
namenumber · 3h ago
mixcloud has been great for this for me. so many people post their mixes and their radio shows there that there is always something new to explore, and searching for something slightly off that i know i like leads to people using that in a mix so i know we're at least partly on the same wavelength when i start to listen.
And then eventually you end up with a list of mixtape makers/DJ's/radio show hosts you trust which is cool, really feels like a world radio show at times.
lucasfdacunha · 35m ago
I've been a subscriber for the hacker newsletter [1] for years and it does a great job of curating content from this website.
This inspired me to create The Gaming Pub [2] which is a similar kind of curated newsletter but for gaming content.
I believe newsletters like that are a great way to find interesting stuff.
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.
john2x · 42m ago
I’ve been thinking about this in the context of my kids.
I am a bit of a snob (a huge one if I’m being honest) about media I consume. Naturally I guide the content my kids watch quite closely, much closer than my peers. I am their curator.
But I can’t help but feel I am isolating my kids when I do this. The things they watch and listen and play and read at home are vastly different than other kids their age.
tacker2000 · 4h ago
Just thought about this in the context of searching for products.
Nowadays there is so much stuff and also so much information available, one just gets lost in this huge sea and spends countless hours trying to find the “best” product… back in the days you would have only one or two choices and that would be it. But was it better? Im actually not so sure…
paleotrope · 6h ago
Seems there are two things going on here that is being conflated.
1. The amount of "culture" being created has to be like a magnitude of order greater than 25 years ago. Of course you can't watch all those shows and movies't now. There are too many and it's too much.
2. The algorithms were developed to help with this problem. They are just a poor match for the problem.
whilenot-dev · 3h ago
I would make a different list of points:
1. The "new" of today is no match for the "new" of back then: Breaking Bad is as good for a first binge today as it was 2008. I'm currently watching Mad Men for the first time and can't see how anything could've been made differently 18 years(!) ago. That's 7 seasons of a well-made show and I couldn't care less for any Netflix production that gets cancelled after its 2nd season. The change in quality from Star Trek: TNG to Breaking Bad seems like a huge leap, do these leaps exist anymore?
2. There is no discussion about any current Zeitgeist, everything feels intermixed and nothing is ever finished. Leaving politics aside here, consumers are beta testers without any way to provide direct feedback to producers (one that isn't public outrage of some kind) - every other usual customer interaction is just a waste of your time. Big studios are busy milking "universes" that have been created pre-social media.
3. Algorithms are part of the creation for these problems, not their solution. Big tech just doesn't like this take, creative work is risky, businesses need to scale up quickly and efficiently.
pimlottc · 5h ago
The algorithms are a poor match because they were primarily developed to benefit content providers, not users.
paleotrope · 1h ago
Oh that's definitely true. I mean you can definitely see the conflict of interest between say you know HBO Max trying to get their content viewed versus any other streamer
Papazsazsa · 3h ago
Curation is the uncrossable moat for AGI/ASI as an inherently human-to-human behavior.
Trends, tastes, and language evolve in real time, driven by social signaling, novelty bias, and the human instinct for signaling to preserve individuality and status within a group and against the algorithm. One need only rabbit hole down various corners of the internet to see this, but its even more pronounced in personal fashion, indie bookstores and art galleries, and even inside people's homes.
It is immensely gratifying to me because it means humans will always need humans, no matter how hard tech tries.
In trying to financialize, map, or otherwise algorithmically diagnose taste, effort impeaches itself.
Terr_ · 3h ago
The problem is that the economic forces here aren't nearly as interested in discovering human taste/interests as opposed to causing them.
For them, the lack of authenticity is not a bug, but a feature.
autobodie · 3h ago
>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???
ukuina · 3h ago
> Curation is the uncrossable moat for AGI/ASI as an inherently human-to-human behavior.
Infinite context models will understand everything about your life. Combined with real-time lookup of all content ever created alongside the ability to generate new content on demand, curation seems destined to be solved.
fallinditch · 1h ago
If that's true it would be a sad outcome, I believe people would react against such an artificial world.
In a music DJ context: even if an AI was able to mimic the dopest turntablist moves and factor in layers of depth and groove and create unique mixes, it would still be an artificial mix made by AI, and so not as valuable or worthwhile as a human DJ. That doesn't mean that AI DJs or musicians won't be successful, they just won't be human and can never be human, and that means something.
mtlmtlmtlmtl · 2h ago
Please tell me this is sarcasm. I mean, I know people love to extrapolate current LLM capabilities into arbitrary future capabilities via magical thinking, but "infinite context" really takes the cake.
WarOnPrivacy · 6h ago
Corollary: If everything is curated, how do we find helpful curation?
If we fill the void indicated in the article - that is, we post and host useful information, how do we get it noticed by the audience that's looking for it?
As far as we believe we can't rise above the noise, we're unlikely to assemble info and make it available.
herrherrmann · 3h ago
There are some explicit efforts to surface smaller/indie websites, like web rings and e.g. Kagi’s small web features[1]. These kinds of things might help.
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.
thejeswi · 1h ago
Maybe IPTV is an interesting source of curated entertainment
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.
ryandrake · 4h ago
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.
Henchman21 · 5h ago
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.
whytaka · 2h ago
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.
vladms · 5h ago
I honestly think we have more tools and they are more powerful than "before".
I would give an example: find a weekend hike.
Before (20-30 years ago): you need to have a book (for profit, curated) or a map (for profit, less info). You needed to rely on other people or on previous experience. Hard to know what changed since the info was collected.
Now: multiple websites both hike focused and more generic that give you reviews, photos, comments. Generic websites (openstreetmap, google maps) that allow you to check further details if you wish so, some with open data.
I think people should take more responsibility and stop blaming so much "the algorithm" and "the profit". It's the same as with smoking. Even if most people agree it is bad for health, 1 in 5 people still smoke.
darkwater · 5h ago
> 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!
(Yes, I know you can still find books and maps)
vladms · 5h ago
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.
th0ma5 · 6h ago
Kinda wild to read a post on here so true it stops you in your tracks. People are missing a lot of opportunities.
AlienRobot · 5h ago
>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.
yhager · 2h ago
I had similar feeling over the past few years, trying futilely to escape the algorithm.. I recently discovered radiop aradise[1] which is exactly what I needed - free, old style, very little talk, human-curated radio. They have a vast selection of titles, and they simply play good music - stuff I know, stuff I don't.. it's just great.
They also have a world music channel, which I couldn't find any parallel anywhere else. They have wonderful music there when I'm in my "world music" mood. All in all, it's a gem, highly recommended for any music lovers who prefer curated over algorithmic.
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.
bmink · 3h ago
> I discovered interesting music like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Portishead, Tricky, Orbital, Takako Minekawa, Hooverphonic, Poe, Veruca Salt all from sporadically listening to one college radio station in my hometown and, once a week, watching one music program on MTV (usually 120 Minutes or AMP). Then, once a month, I would sometimes flip through a music magazine while at the hair salon (usually Rolling Stone or Spin). And that was literally it.
This section contains two types of curation that have to be separated: college radio is good curation, it is nonprofit, done by people for the love of the medium and will help you broaden your horizon. Rolling Stone et. al. is bad curation, a form of gatekeeping really, very commercial, requiring lots of connections and resources to get featured in.
lapcat · 5h ago
It felt like the first 3 (or 2.5) paragraphs, which were arguing that Bjork needed an official website, were a bit of a tangent from the main argument of the article, which was that we need more professional critics, but social media has essentially defunded and dethroned them.
I'm personally ambivalent about the argument. I'm old enough to have lived in a time before the rise of the web and social media. However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure content without the web. Nowadays I'm not a big fan of popular culture, but on the other hand my taste doesn't seem to match well with professional critics either. So how do I find stuff? My "process" is very hit-and-miss. I sample a bunch of stuff that sounds interesting to me, and if I don't actually find it interesting, I bail out ASAP. Streaming media sites are good for this kind of scattershot approach. I also go the public library, browse the shelves, and just randomly check out several books that I might like. Perhaps the majority turn out to be duds, but I've found a number of diamonds in the rough that way, books that I never would have read otherwise. (Incidentally, the library also provides access to sites such as https://www.kanopy.com/)
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.
gwern · 2h ago
> It felt like the first 3 (or 2.5) paragraphs, which were arguing that Bjork needed an official website, were a bit of a tangent from the main argument of the article, which was that we need more professional critics, but social media has essentially defunded and dethroned them.
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.
danieldk · 5h ago
However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure content without the web.
I was very deep into non-mainstream music when I was in my teenage years (90ies) and magazines and (the little access I had to) the web were not very useful. Even outside the mainstream, a lot of magazines were mostly into the big alternative acts and mostly fed by leads by music companies.
The best way to discover music was to go to small alternative music shops. I would hang there for hours and would listen as many records as the owners tolerated. And since they were music buffs themselves and pretty much knew every obscure record they were selling, they could often point you to interesting records.
I don't think much has changed for my peers, back then they would listen what the top-40, MTV, and TMF would give them, and now they listen what record companies are pushing or astroturfing. (I don't mean this in a denigrating way, there are other media where I am more into mainstream stuff, like TV shows.)
I don't go to record shops anymore, but I still find music based on 'browsing' and word of mouth mostly. The good thing of 2025 is that I can get my hands on every bit of obscure music, whereas in 1995, some albums would have to be imported by a record store and it was way out of my budget as a teen.
kace91 · 4h ago
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.
lapcat · 5h ago
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.
pmarreck · 1h ago
Machine learning algorithms.
And they're doing a fine job of it too, even if they remove the shared cultural experience. (Which is a big loss, to be sure. I grew up listening to Casey Kasem cover the American Top 40 on the radio...)
tossandthrow · 1h ago
Which is also curation
tolerance · 5h ago
What most people refer to as "culture" or "art" are products that are vectors for identity in a fractured society. If the author feels malaise over not being able to find to find new things to watch and listen to, imagine how hard it must be to just be yourself these days and foster communities around the likes and dislikes that you share with other people. Curating/taste-making is identity politics.
bee_rider · 7h ago
I do sort of think Pandora feels like better algorithmic song finding—maybe it is just that I have an old profile so it has learned enough about me to do good matching, though.
But, it is notable for being a pretty old site, from back before the algorithmic feeds really exploded and took control of everything… I often wonder if we actually don’t like algorithmic (non)curation, or if we just don’t like the shitty version of it has developed.
—
What’s the story behind the Bjork thing? I’ve always found celebrities that just sort of stay hidden between releases endearing. I mean isn’t that what the rest of us would do?
Enya, obviously, has it all figured out.
Sleaker · 27m ago
I used Pandora from inception, but swapped to Spotify because the algo stopped working completely for me, and they ran into licensing issues with a lot of content and a lot of the oddball music I was listening to or used as a seed for stations just vanished completely.
ferguess_k · 2h ago
Not entirely related, but back in the 80s we "found" PC games by getting a 5 inch diskette from my father's colleagues, with the bonuses of getting computer viruses at the same time.
In the 90s I "found" PC games by reading magazines and borrowing a un-labeled CD from a classmate who owns every Japanese gaming consoles from NES to Saturn.
smallpipe · 1h ago
Curation is still around, it’s just a bit less easy to get. The local venues are filling that role now. Take a listen on the “what’s on” page.
steveBK123 · 5h ago
I'd agree with the jist of this article.
Social media has been less "wisdom of crowds" and more endless algorithmic slop and pay-to-play influencers.
Sure there was always PR dealmaking & money behinds the scenes previously I'm sure, but there were actual magazines/websites/etc in every genre publishing numerical reviews for cars/cameras/games/movies/shows/albums/etc. If you paid attention you could figure out which curators scoring aligned with what you tended to like.
Now every reviewer is a YouTube influencer who loves every product put in front of them, no product is every bad, no scores are assigned because then you can cross compare, etc.
The acquisition, death, resurrection and mundane ongoing existence of dpreview is a good example of this.
What we had before wasn't perfect, but what has followed is worse.
chrisallick · 5h ago
you dont. youre brought things inside your algo bubble. kind of a bummer of an evolution of the net.
anywhichway · 4h ago
> You then have to hunt around for the info
Have you considered that that might be the goal of releasing trickles of information about the film prior to its official release? It makes collected information feel more exclusive to super fans and encourages fans to interact with each other on social media providing fuel for Bjork focused communities. If collecting this information feels exhausting instead of exciting to you... why are you trying so hard to collect it? Just wait for the actual release.
> We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't.
I don't understand how you expect a critic to tell you whether its worth your time based on a collection of pre-release rumors and interviews. For deciding if its worth my time, I mainly want to hear from critics who have seen the upcoming media and I want to hear their opinion on what they saw. Why would I care to hear Ebert and Roeper's opinion on what the actors said in their press release tour? Unless it was something especially newsworthy and they wouldn't need to go digging for that. I just don't see how a critic's review would be enhanced by "devoting their lives to browsing through the piles".
larodi · 3h ago
This article resonates so bad with me, like as if I did write it.
This all the author writes about is called collapse of context. And people been waking up to noticing it, writing about it, eventually becoming victims. Everyone who previously had a natural sect of some subculture is failing victing the moment they move the member base into faang social media. It kills the opportunity to mold your community around itself - it gets molded for monetization.
I dream the day when using social media would be considered as bad as a smoking or drinking habit, the endless scroll of mostly irrelevant content. Because even curated accounts are bombarded with advertised noised.
In recent years I wake up to the fact that I keep meeting people who are totally supposed to be in my bubble, very similar, lived in the same city, not a big one, 2m, but we have not found each other because of media noise, and technological alienation. Its amazing as if living in the black mirror already and for a while.
I keep investing massive efforts to get any public events gathering people spending hundreds of euros for promotion, prominent artists, in a time when delivery of information is supposed to be immediate. The audience, which includes all of us, fail to notice the information as there is so much of it. faang is milking everyone like crazy for the right to get to people supposed to be subscribed to our own content, which we don't own. it totally makes sense to have vanilla html at this point as i did with my event yesterday (tickets.dubigxbi.com), but then again - i need to submit a bribe to techbros to even let me emerge in the information sphere. like, I started considering running a bot farm, because this is what they deserve. 500$ of ads gets me mostly bot traffic, it is insane, paid advertising has never been so ineffective.
Besides, the way many grow to behave, and not only the young generation, is that they get addicted to endless scrollers in tiktok/insta/x and it is not us/them anymore searching the information. It is algorithms packing it for everyone, which is amazing way to put tubes in everyone's eyes and minds and feed it hallucinations of all sorts. But it is the world we woke into.
citizenkeen · 3h ago
I’m curious about your vernacular/cadence.
os2warpman · 4h ago
> It makes art (music, film, tv, etc.) seem like one big sludge pile. It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of things that you'll never get to the end of.
If that is not hyperbole and the author is not taking steps to distance themselves from those feelings, that is extremely unhealthy. Like an addiction or something.
The only thing that should feel like that is laundry.
Perhaps the author should rebalance their leisure activities portfolio to include more things that aren't pop culture media.
lmcinnes · 5h ago
> And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen before. It'll never surprise you with something different. It keeps you in a little bubble.
This is not true at all, algorithms can predict things you haven't seen before, and can take you well outside your bubble. A lot of the existing recommendation algorithms on social media etc. do keep you in a bubble, but that's a very specific choice 'cause apparently that's where the money is at. There's enough work in multi-armed-bandit explore/exploit systems that we definitely could have excellent algorithms that do exactly the kind of curation the author would like. The issue is not algorithms, but rather incentives on media recommendation and consumption. People say they would like something new, but they keep going back to the places that feed them more of the comfortable same.
AlienRobot · 5h ago
I agree with the sentiment completely. From link directories to search engines, and now with AI, and from reblogging to recommendation algorithms, I think what is being lost is the ability to "browse" the web. To look at a list of things that may not interest you. Because sometimes among those things you do find something that piques your interest.
pigeons · 4h ago
If everything is curated to only include what pays the highest affiliate commission, how will we find good things that don't include a large marketing expense in their cost?
flappyeagle · 7h ago
I asked o3 about bjorks latest releases and news — it did a great job.
imiric · 5h ago
A machine learning algorithm that summarizes and hallucinates information is arguably worse than a machine learning algorithm that decides which social media posts you see. They're both controlled by corporations, but at least on social media you (still) have the option to read content written by humans.
j45 · 2h ago
LLMs will be able to learn what we do and don't like.
And try to serve that.
Or try to serve it's agenda despite those likes.
ZeroConcerns · 7h ago
Well, originally, the answer to this question was "search engines, like Google"
And, for a while, this worked pretty well. The breaking point for me was when Google bought pompous-restaurant-ranker Zagat and proceeded to disappear their curated reviews into something that would nowadays best be described as "an AI blackhole". And that was in 2011, mind you.
Of course, Zagat going away was an entirely elitist event with no consequence to the Internet-or-society-as-a-whole whatsoever, but for me, it was the moment I realized that democratized data-ranking would never provide any real value.
And the whole "AI" story is pretty much history repeating: unless actual-humans-with-distinguisable options feed "the algorithm", the output will be... well, slop.
TL;DR: curation by actual living, thinking and critical humans (which automatically excludes most "best of" repositories on Github, BTW) is still the way forward.
neuroelectron · 6h ago
In the real world.
rufus_foreman · 2h ago
I listened to punk in the 70's and hardcore from 80 to 84, nothing was curated by some authoritative source. It was all word of mouth.
Hardcore wasn't on the radio, it wasn't on TV (OK, "TV Party" and "Institutionalized" were on MTV, both of which were "joke" hardcore songs), you couldn't buy the records in the record stores in my town until the mid-80s, you couldn't buy the zines in my town.
There was a tiny amount of it played on college radio, but it would be something like one show a week from 2 AM to 3 AM on Sunday morning. Kids would drive from where I lived to the "city" and drive around in their cars taping that show from the car radio to a boombox and then pass those tapes around to get copied. It was samizdat. And most hardcore they couldn't even play on those radio shows anyway. "We don't care what you say, fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you! FUCK YOU!!!" Great song, can't hear it on the radio. Can't hear it anywhere you go.
We found things. You had to really dig, but we found things. No one curated it for us. I hate the very idea of it. I mean my friend Joe "curated" music for me when he made me a tape of the Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, and DOA in 6th grade in 1981, but I don't think that is the meaning of curation that the title is referring to. If a kid got a record, it got passed around and taped. Then those tapes got passed around and taped. Etc.
No one tells me what music I should listen to, we told the musicians what kind of music we wanted to hear when we were in the pit. Many of them noped out from that. They were artists, not enablers of the violent tendencies of poorly parented 14 year olds. Fair enough. But we were finding things out.
behnamoh · 6h ago
> We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't.
No thanks. The last time this happened we ended up with opinionated articles, hidden promotions, and censorship in news, media, newspapers, etc.
A good example:
try searching for "fluoride residue in brain" on Google vs Yandex and see how they tell totally opposite stories.
noduerme · 5h ago
And now that no one trusts any kind of expert, we've ended up with millions of various conspiracy peddlers believed by billions too uneducated to even begin to parse fact from fiction. Sort of like taking the centralized religion/opinion/censorship problem and smashing it into tiny shards that get on everything.
At least when there were 2, 3, or 10 curated sides to a story, with sources and expertise to draw on, a somewhat literate person could draw some conclusions on which parts of each were valid.
eastbound · 5h ago
Uh… no. What made me look into a subject that it often called a conspiracy theory (men’s rights) was the several levels of obvious bullshit that newspapers were delivering. Think about it: The only thing they had to do was to say lies that seem right, and they didn’t even succeed at that.
So no, it’s not the mediatization of the opposite point of view that gives it an audience, but the sheer lack of truthfulness of the dominating class.
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watwut · 5h ago
It was easier to find good stuff back then tho. For all complains about hidden promotions, situation now is worst.
reactordev · 5h ago
The argument for curation goes against the argument for democratization. We collectively said “enough” with Hollywood gatekeeping which means you must bring your own audience.
Movies roles are based on your followers. Music gigs, based on your followers. Any creative event, based on your followers. So known named artists like Bjork have to build a following for an event for promoters to green light it.
It sucks, but that’s the nature of the business. Sell tickets, upsell merchandise, sell records, repeat.
layer8 · 4h ago
Curation is more like representative democracy. You elect the curators you trust the most.
h2zizzle · 5h ago
Democratization is micro-curation. What we have now is not that. We have monolithic platforms - the richest companies in the world, or companies owned by the richest people in the world - serving content as they see fit, with a veneer of what your friends, family, and favorite celebrities want to to show you. We are back to, "Brought to you by GE!", for all intents and purposes. Right down to them telling us who to vote for.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
Never seen it. Not even sure what it's about.
He thought well and deeply about the challenges of the growing net.
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.
As someone who is still listening to today’s pop acts and whatnot, there are still tons of people you can talk to in person who probably listen to similar music, concerts are well-attended, etc. If anything the definition of popular has broadened to include new stuff like KPop, Latin pop, Afrobeats, etc. and I don’t have an issue finding people who like that music in person.
We’re old wine poured into new wineskins.
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/
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.
This inspired me to create The Gaming Pub [2] which is a similar kind of curated newsletter but for gaming content.
I believe newsletters like that are a great way to find interesting stuff.
1. https://hackernewsletter.com/
2. https://www.thegamingpub.com/
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.
I am a bit of a snob (a huge one if I’m being honest) about media I consume. Naturally I guide the content my kids watch quite closely, much closer than my peers. I am their curator.
But I can’t help but feel I am isolating my kids when I do this. The things they watch and listen and play and read at home are vastly different than other kids their age.
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.
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???
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.
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
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.
This playlist has hundreds of channels: https://iptv-org.github.io/iptv/index.m3u
Github page: https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv
Another source could be following respected critics who have similar tastes to you, like the film critic Roger Ebert:
https://rogerebert.com/reviews
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.
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.
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.
They also have a world music channel, which I couldn't find any parallel anywhere else. They have wonderful music there when I'm in my "world music" mood. All in all, it's a gem, highly recommended for any music lovers who prefer curated over algorithmic.
[1] https://radioparadise.com/home
This section contains two types of curation that have to be separated: college radio is good curation, it is nonprofit, done by people for the love of the medium and will help you broaden your horizon. Rolling Stone et. al. is bad curation, a form of gatekeeping really, very commercial, requiring lots of connections and resources to get featured in.
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.
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.
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.
And they're doing a fine job of it too, even if they remove the shared cultural experience. (Which is a big loss, to be sure. I grew up listening to Casey Kasem cover the American Top 40 on the radio...)
But, it is notable for being a pretty old site, from back before the algorithmic feeds really exploded and took control of everything… I often wonder if we actually don’t like algorithmic (non)curation, or if we just don’t like the shitty version of it has developed.
—
What’s the story behind the Bjork thing? I’ve always found celebrities that just sort of stay hidden between releases endearing. I mean isn’t that what the rest of us would do?
Enya, obviously, has it all figured out.
In the 90s I "found" PC games by reading magazines and borrowing a un-labeled CD from a classmate who owns every Japanese gaming consoles from NES to Saturn.
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.
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".
This all the author writes about is called collapse of context. And people been waking up to noticing it, writing about it, eventually becoming victims. Everyone who previously had a natural sect of some subculture is failing victing the moment they move the member base into faang social media. It kills the opportunity to mold your community around itself - it gets molded for monetization.
I dream the day when using social media would be considered as bad as a smoking or drinking habit, the endless scroll of mostly irrelevant content. Because even curated accounts are bombarded with advertised noised.
In recent years I wake up to the fact that I keep meeting people who are totally supposed to be in my bubble, very similar, lived in the same city, not a big one, 2m, but we have not found each other because of media noise, and technological alienation. Its amazing as if living in the black mirror already and for a while.
I keep investing massive efforts to get any public events gathering people spending hundreds of euros for promotion, prominent artists, in a time when delivery of information is supposed to be immediate. The audience, which includes all of us, fail to notice the information as there is so much of it. faang is milking everyone like crazy for the right to get to people supposed to be subscribed to our own content, which we don't own. it totally makes sense to have vanilla html at this point as i did with my event yesterday (tickets.dubigxbi.com), but then again - i need to submit a bribe to techbros to even let me emerge in the information sphere. like, I started considering running a bot farm, because this is what they deserve. 500$ of ads gets me mostly bot traffic, it is insane, paid advertising has never been so ineffective.
Besides, the way many grow to behave, and not only the young generation, is that they get addicted to endless scrollers in tiktok/insta/x and it is not us/them anymore searching the information. It is algorithms packing it for everyone, which is amazing way to put tubes in everyone's eyes and minds and feed it hallucinations of all sorts. But it is the world we woke into.
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.
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.
And try to serve that.
Or try to serve it's agenda despite those likes.
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.
Hardcore wasn't on the radio, it wasn't on TV (OK, "TV Party" and "Institutionalized" were on MTV, both of which were "joke" hardcore songs), you couldn't buy the records in the record stores in my town until the mid-80s, you couldn't buy the zines in my town.
There was a tiny amount of it played on college radio, but it would be something like one show a week from 2 AM to 3 AM on Sunday morning. Kids would drive from where I lived to the "city" and drive around in their cars taping that show from the car radio to a boombox and then pass those tapes around to get copied. It was samizdat. And most hardcore they couldn't even play on those radio shows anyway. "We don't care what you say, fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you! FUCK YOU!!!" Great song, can't hear it on the radio. Can't hear it anywhere you go.
We found things. You had to really dig, but we found things. No one curated it for us. I hate the very idea of it. I mean my friend Joe "curated" music for me when he made me a tape of the Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, and DOA in 6th grade in 1981, but I don't think that is the meaning of curation that the title is referring to. If a kid got a record, it got passed around and taped. Then those tapes got passed around and taped. Etc.
No one tells me what music I should listen to, we told the musicians what kind of music we wanted to hear when we were in the pit. Many of them noped out from that. They were artists, not enablers of the violent tendencies of poorly parented 14 year olds. Fair enough. But we were finding things out.
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.
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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.