I asked o3 about bjorks latest releases and news — it did a great job.

I do sort of think Pandora feels like better algorithmic song finding—maybe it is just that I have an old profile so it has learned enough about me to do good matching, though.

But, it is notable for being a pretty old site, from back before the algorithmic feeds really exploded and took control of everything… I often wonder if we actually don’t like algorithmic (non)curation, or if we just don’t like the shitty version of it has developed.

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What’s the story behind the Bjork thing? I’ve always found celebrities that just sort of stay hidden between releases endearing. I mean isn’t that what the rest of us would do?

Enya, obviously, has it all figured out.

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.

Well, originally, the answer to this question was "search engines, like Google"

And, for a while, this worked pretty well. The breaking point for me was when Google bought pompous-restaurant-ranker Zagat and proceeded to disappear their curated reviews into something that would nowadays best be described as "an AI blackhole". And that was in 2011, mind you.

Of course, Zagat going away was an entirely elitist event with no consequence to the Internet-or-society-as-a-whole whatsoever, but for me, it was the moment I realized that democratized data-ranking would never provide any real value.

And the whole "AI" story is pretty much history repeating: unless actual-humans-with-distinguisable options feed "the algorithm", the output will be... well, slop.

TL;DR: curation by actual living, thinking and critical humans (which automatically excludes most "best of" repositories on Github, BTW) is still the way forward.

Corollary: If everything is curated, how do we find helpful curation?

If we fill the void indicated in the article - that is, we post and host useful information, how do we get it noticed by the audience that's looking for it?

As far as we believe we can't rise above the noise, we're unlikely to assemble info and make it available.

In the real world.

> 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.

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.

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'd agree with the jist of this article. Social media has been less "wisdom of crowds" and more endless algorithmic slop and pay-to-play influencers.

Sure there was always PR dealmaking & money behinds the scenes previously I'm sure, but there were actual magazines/websites/etc in every genre publishing numerical reviews for cars/cameras/games/movies/shows/albums/etc. If you paid attention you could figure out which curators scoring aligned with what you tended to like.

Now every reviewer is a YouTube influencer who loves every product put in front of them, no product is every bad, no scores are assigned because then you can cross compare, etc.

The acquisition, death, resurrection and mundane ongoing existence of dpreview is a good example of this.

What we had before wasn't perfect, but what has followed is worse.

I agree with the sentiment completely. From link directories to search engines, and now with AI, and from reblogging to recommendation algorithms, I think what is being lost is the ability to "browse" the web. To look at a list of things that may not interest you. Because sometimes among those things you do find something that piques your interest.

> And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen before. It'll never surprise you with something different. It keeps you in a little bubble.

This is not true at all, algorithms can predict things you haven't seen before, and can take you well outside your bubble. A lot of the existing recommendation algorithms on social media etc. do keep you in a bubble, but that's a very specific choice 'cause apparently that's where the money is at. There's enough work in multi-armed-bandit explore/exploit systems that we definitely could have excellent algorithms that do exactly the kind of curation the author would like. The issue is not algorithms, but rather incentives on media recommendation and consumption. People say they would like something new, but they keep going back to the places that feed them more of the comfortable same.

The argument for curation goes against the argument for democratization. We collectively said “enough” with Hollywood gatekeeping which means you must bring your own audience.

Movies roles are based on your followers. Music gigs, based on your followers. Any creative event, based on your followers. So known named artists like Bjork have to build a following for an event for promoters to green light it.

It sucks, but that’s the nature of the business. Sell tickets, upsell merchandise, sell records, repeat.

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.

you dont. youre brought things inside your algo bubble. kind of a bummer of an evolution of the net.

What most people refer to as "culture" or "art" are products that are vectors for identity in a fractured society. If the author feels malaise over not being able to find to find new things to watch and listen to, imagine how hard it must be to just be yourself these days and foster communities around the likes and dislikes that you share with other people. Curating/taste-making is identity politics.

I miss Entertainment Weekly having a print subscription. I loved tearing out blurbs about stuff that was coming out and sticking them to my pin board. Feels more real than adding something to a watchlist (which I NEVER look at) in an app.

If everything is curated to only include what pays the highest affiliate commission, how will we find good things that don't include a large marketing expense in their cost?

> It makes art (music, film, tv, etc.) seem like one big sludge pile. It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of things that you'll never get to the end of.

If that is not hyperbole and the author is not taking steps to distance themselves from those feelings, that is extremely unhealthy. Like an addiction or something.

The only thing that should feel like that is laundry.

Perhaps the author should rebalance their leisure activities portfolio to include more things that aren't pop culture media.

> 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".

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…

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.