Comment by fractionalhare | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fractionalhare | Hacker News Reader

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The beauty of this comment is that it's probably serious, but it also perfectly satirizes HN's nostalgia for the 90s internet and software.

We started with Spotify pulling a douchey anticompetitive move, and ended up at

> Spotify doesn't really add anything. The only convenience over Winamp is social sharing.

Somewhere along the way we've gotten lost. The only convenience of Spotify over Winamp is "social sharing"? Am I taking the bait here or do you actually believe this? How can you believe this?

What about the convenience of being able to play a massive amount of music without having to download and store it on your device? What about facilitating new music discovery? How did you come up with social sharing of all things as the honorable mention Spotify has over Winamp, when the latter is desktop software that requires you to manage all your music on your own?

I can understand if you don't personally value Spotify because you like owning media with no restrictions. But I can't understand being in denial about inarguable, significant conveniences offered by the platform.

Completely agree but you’re missing the one thing that makes it really classic HN.

> What’s so great about New Thing? It’s just Existing Technology but with a Small Improvement.

This is exemplified in the best HN comment of all time where someone showed their new product called “Dropbox” and this dude was like “but I can get the same with FTPFS and versioning with a version control system”.

Technically correct, but completely missing the point. OP is worse, because he can’t even acknowledge the value that Spotify brings to hundreds of millions of people. Implicit is the claim that they’re only using it because they don’t know any better. If they were as intelligent as OP they would use Winamp and share songs manually.

> Technically correct, but completely missing the point. OP is worse, because he can’t even acknowledge the value that Spotify brings to hundreds of millions of people. Implicit is the claim that they’re only using it because they don’t know any better. If they were as intelligent as OP they would use Winamp and share songs manually.

Clearly this was my intent, and I'm glad you appreciate the intelligence of my remarks.

The substance of my argument isn't to point out that WinAmp should have a 50 billion dollar market cap instead of Spotify. It's an observation that the trends in our industry are disappointing because they favor lock-in, simple interfaces for non-power users, monopoly, and consolidation.

You get "sharing" with a whole lot of bad.

A hypothetical "good" company could provide much more than what Spotify does and in the same breath not monopolize all the podcasters or prevent data export. But why do that when you can capture 90% of the market, hold them completely captive, and not do these things which take effort or risk your stranglehold?

I dislike the future we found ourselves in. There was a lot of promise, I suppose wholly imagined, that never panned out.

I'm angry because I imagine better. This shit sucks.

> You get "sharing" with a whole lot of bad.

I really doubt the anemic social sharing they offer is all that compelling to that many people. Sure, it has its uses, but if did nothing else, I doubt it would see much use. What's extremely, extremely compelling to me personally, though, is that for the price of half a CD a month, I get access to almost everything I'd ever want to listen to, on all my devices, everywhere, without any friction whatsoever. Even if I really wanted, I could never replicate that with Winamp on my own.

As to the rest for your argument, I'm basically with you and I think you have an important point, I guess you've just made it in a needlessly incendiary way. There are many things to be said in favor of capitalism, but I'm severely disillusioned with the way the currently-favored brand of capitalism is shaping out on the internet and in computing in general.

Yeah that's fine. I'll take Dropbox and Spotify over "curl + ftpfs + git" and Winamp any day. If that makes me less intelligent than you, that's fine.

I'm not going to bother explaining why I think either of those services is superior to these handrolled solutions. But fortunately, both have 100 million+ paying users. You can ask one of them why they're foolishly paying for something when a superior alternative exists.

I only mentioned intelligence in jest because you did. (It seemed snarky.)

I'm not talking about hand-rolling solutions. WinAmp was just an analogy. An analogy.

Spotify sucks because it's a draconian walled garden. Yes, they have millions of customers. But there are no alternatives. They all want to lock you in. It sucks.

Back in the day, people were building tools left and right that were interoperable. They were writing importers and exporters and playlist managers.

It wasn't just music - there were tools for RSS and everything else you could imagine. It wasn't as "easy" as things are today, but there were so many novel things you could do.

Now it's all shrink-wrapped plastic that's rented to us. And we don't get to change the paint.

The world is less flexible, less free. Want another analogy? Look at modern Reddit and the disappearance of the 3rd party Twitter clients.

We're serfs.

It sucks. I hate it. Period. That's my argument.

It's still possible not to be a serf imo. If you look into self-hosted alternatives to these things the communities online still have a lot of the vibrant and open spirit you're describing, built on collaboration, open protocols, and basic tools.

I very strongly felt the way you do until a couple years ago when I started following those communities and eventually started hearing non-technical people IRL start asking about how to cut toxic centralized products out of their lives. I think the internet that inspired you is still out there, maybe even the same or bigger in size, it's just harder to see because the larger centralized serf net is so distracting.

Sometimes conveniences ruin things. I've heard it said "Having everything feels a lot like having nothing at all."

The comparison of how we used to do things, to how we do them now are often just a marketing tactic, because old and new are relative regarding value. E.g., an old violin is better.

What's lacking with the new internet is about this and that, or lack of options. So the entirety of the culture is flavored by an oligopoly in their respective market.And Spotify is missing loads of music.

Music needs to change its perspective to a this and that view. Is "this" what you want over "that"? How old or new something is, is irrelevant.

No musician that I know, and I know lots as a lifelong musician, is enthusiastic about Spotify. Most of us feel we just have no choice. Same with Facebook etc. Most people don't even like it.

Also, everyone has anxiety and/or depression right now. I’m trying my best to take everything everyone is saying with a grain of salt. Everyone appears to be having a hard time right now.

Thank you, I was shocked by OP saying the only difference between Winamp and Spotify was social sharing...

The only reason that Spotify is a "convenience" is because of the laws that the record companies bought for themselves.

Here's the answer.

In twenty years, ML is going to wipe the slate clean.

What ML even has to do with it? Assuming you mean "Machine Learning".

> What ML even has to do with it? Assuming you mean "Machine Learning".

That's exactly what I mean. There's a change coming that will disrupt everything. Generative music will replace musicians and art will become dirt cheap - effectively valued the same as the memes on Reddit and Twitter. The same thing that happened to photography is coming to music, film, and games.

https://github.com/r9y9/nnsvs

https://github.com/NVIDIA/mellotron

https://github.com/xushengyuan/FastSing2

https://github.com/jik876/hifi-gan-demo

https://github.com/bshall/VectorQuantizedCPC

And I can keep going. It's such a fertile field.

Vocalists can and will be improved upon, duplicated, and generated. Instruments played to match any style or theme desired. Entire albums generated in seconds. The latent space will yield more than any human could conceive.

Of course artists will still exist, but they'll exist in a space that is much bigger and more complicated than today. The tooling will also help them make more and become more productive.

I think the cheapness of it all will erode copyright. Companies like Spotify will simply be selling bandwidth, which doesn't sound like a profitable venture.

I give it a twenty year time horizon to be safe, but it'll probably be faster.

I don't understand, do you think people only care about music? Or do they care about the artist behind the music, seeing them on tour, connecting with them on a human level, etc.

Nothing makes me think that the average person would ever choose music they know is generated over another human being creating something they want to create. It will be nothing more than a novelty

The only ML I can picture wiping away copyright laws is Marxism-Leninism.

> How can you believe this?

Perhaps for some people the process of discovering music, downloading it and storing on their device is super trivial.

Did you know you can only listen 24 hours of music per day and that's only if you don't sleep at all ? You don't need a "massive amount" of music and you never will.

Perhaps the "massive amount" out there is the reason you need the likes of Spotify to consume it in a meaningful way.

Yes definitely this kind of service can be helpful if you don't know what you want to listen to and/or don't know where/how to find new music.

> You don't need a "massive amount" of music and you never will.

This cracked me up!

Perhaps it's the tradeoffs that bother HN. For example, accepting "douchey anticompetitive moves" in exchange for utilising inevitable progress of the internet. One common response could be that the tradeoff isn't worth it; HN would be willing to sacrifice utilising the progress being made in exchange for avoiding the neverending "douchey anticompetitive moves". As I read these "nostalgic" comments, HN is not denying that progress is occurring. HN is questioning whether the tradeoff for utilising the progress, under "douchey anticompetitive" terms, is actually worth it. HN does not long for the level of progress of the 90/00's, it reminisces about the time before every iota of progress was extricably linked to "douchey anticompetitive moves".

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