If nothing is curated, how do we find things

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.