What we have today are the same problems with a new wrapper, created by a not dissimilar group of people from the past.
Well, if the top 100 tracks from, say, 1961 to 2021 progressively get less musically diverse, with simpler chords, less harmonies, less timbral variety, lesser melodies, more repeatition, less dynamics, less genre variety, more infantile lyrics (something that has been studied and measured several time, e.g: ), etc, then it's not some "survival bias".
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346997561_Why_are_s...
https://newatlas.com/pop-music-trends/23535/
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00521
https://www.res.org.uk/resources-page/economics-of-music-cha...
If we increase the number of tracks to ten thousand, there are a couple of ways we can go. We could increase the number of types of music to 500, and in that case, we'd see better music rising to the top. (Or at least more popular music, which may or may not coincide with being better.) Or we could increase the number of tracks per type to 200, in which case a random half of the tracks of the most popular 4.95-star music type will be the "top 100" for the year.† Or we could go for the middle of the road: maybe now we have 150 types of music and 67 tracks of each one. Or we could have musicians and record companies that respond to incentives by trying to produce more music of the popular types, somewhat handicapped by the fact that those popular types change every year, and however much Nickelback might try it, recording the same song under twenty different titles doesn't actually give you twenty top-ten hits.
Regardless, there are a lot of ways that more published music could both provide more variety and less varied top hits.
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†Of course the Billboard Hot 100 is per week, not per year, but that's the least of the oversimplifications in this model!
More common variants of more popular genres could easily crowd out moderately popular genres. The long tail has been a long noted issue at Spotify with several attempts at fixing.
50-100 years ago when parents were deciding what pie to make or buy, parent’s favorite was X, eldest kids favorite was Y, youngest kid’s favorite was Z.
Parents instead bought Apple Pie, because it was in everyone’s top 5 favorite pies.
Top 50 is an average of all of the world wide listeners. No one’s favorite songs are in the Top 50, but they are the average top 50.
They for example look at a really small subset of music "Million song dataset" and only analysed basic metrics that could be automatically measured. To be honest I think the linked Spanish paper and the senationalist "Science proves modern music is bad" should be retracted since the methodology is flawed.
Don't take my word for it, take Tantacrul's - composer, video creator, Design Lead for MuseScore [0].
It's such a complex topic to study "music" - you have to narrow it down - genre, country of origin, purpose - it's a major simplification to say that "all music is worse now", there are a lot of types of music that didn't exist in 1961 (synths, electronic, hip-hop) - how can you compare it?
Synth began in the 70's, and Moroder/Jarre is far better than the 90% of today's crap.
That's a lot!
Citation needed. The articles are actual proof and measurements, whereas Tantacrul's take is just an opinion.
>They for example look at a really small subset of music "Million song dataset" and only analysed basic metrics that could be automatically measured.
The "small subset of music" is the most popular music of any year. That is what reveals music tastes over time, and this is the kind of music that permeates culture.
As for the "basic metrics" there's not basic as in trite/insignificant but basic as fundamental.
It's just that some people want so much to cling to "each period is the same, there are no ups and downs in cultural production" to not be seen as backwards oldsters, whereas milenia of history teaches that that there are absolutely ups and downs in cultural production (periods of stagnation, etc).
>it's a major simplification to say that "all music is worse now"
It's also a strawman. Nobody said that here.
This is not about whether or not this or that particular song is better, is the top (most listened/streamed/talked about) music in general losing variety in all these aspects (harmony, melody, timbre, lyrics, genres, dynamics, etc).
That's not subjective, that's objective, and has been measured to get worse.
The "subjective experience" could be good, the same way people can prefer McDonalds over a wholesome meal by the best chef. Doesn't mean its also good by other metrics, and I for one don't believe individual taste is everything. There are people with shit taste, loads of them.
Even saying someone has “shit taste” is subjective.
But to the degree that we have a culture, though, we also have a non-100%-exact but nonetheless existing hierarchy of artistic works. There might be disagreements, even strong ones, but there's also some general agreement, that not everything is a fuzzy blob of equal value, left for the individual taste to sort or not, and this just for itself.
Is the idea that the Beatles are better than The Monkeys or Oasis, that Aphex Twin is better than Skrillex, that Dua Lipa is better than Justin Bieber, that Michael Jackson is better than Milli Vanilly, in some non-measurable but tangible way really that difficult?
That this, once a common and well accepted idea (related to the idea of the "canon"), appears like beyond the pale for the 21st century solipsistic individual, where only the subjective taste matters, is not really the fault of the idea itself.
If you can't find more diverse modern music than the top 100 offers today you're not trying that hard.
This is not about being able to find this or that niche musician that's great or even greater than any in the past, but about what the masses listen getting worse.
Music isn't just a solitary experience, but also a part of general culture.
As streamed music is getting cruder over time, the majority of the people are listening to increasingly shitty songs. That's chilling, regardless of whether someone can find 10000s of niche bands to listen themselves.
Your data might be objective, but it's still a narrow slice of a much broader ecosystem.
And indeed everybody agrees that JavaScript itself is now better as it is the modern web APIs. If the rest is so controversial there must be a reason.
Some of those seasoned old-school engineers have, believe it or not, embraced modern FE frameworks and architectures and wouldn’t go back to the old thing if you paid them to do so. I’ve seen testimonials here on HN and surely it must be a factor in the world moving in this direction - it was not the juniors who made these decisions after all.
HTML has been the wrong place to make creating UIs (as opposed to marked up text) for such a long time. Things are getting better from multiple angles, but it's still very uneven.
If all you're doing is building forms for an application then it's acceptable, but that's an easy problem solved with elegant solutions today as well. HTML can immediately deliver the styled application without installation to every device regardless of OS. It can propagate changes without reinstallation. It is accessible for every kind of user. And it does this while looking miles better than any VB application.
Far less usable too.
> It was difficult and unsafe to deliver over the internet
No one cared, we had physical media.
> And again, there were a LOT of really bad VB applications that hurt usability and performance.
Most of them were fast enough.
in music’s case, one of the replies to this comment describes decline in musical complexity/sophistication, which i’d personally attribute to democratization of the tools (which are also much more powerful, allowing kids w computers to do what took whole teams and studios full of equipment before).
so i think only seeing high quality UIs in the wild is more of a mixed bag than is intuitive to us — a world absent of shitty soundcloud rap is a world with worse music tooling.
But I’m curious, what are the examples of great websites “back in the day” that have stood the test of time and would be considered good web development today?
Not "just" survival bias.
I think it's quite reasonable to take a position that there was more innovation and creativity in pop music in 1950-2000.
As the genre has matured, popular/commercially successful music has depended more and more on fewer and fewer producers.
Indeed, there are fewer commercially successful artists: the US Billboard Hot 100 Top 20 this week contains 3 tracks by Justin Bieber, 2 by the Weeknd, and 2 by Drake. That would have been unheard of.
A lot of people said the same in 1990, except their cutoff was 1980. All that synth is just rubbish, man, what about Led Zeppelin, that was new! Except they were just raiding blues and laying some electric guitar on top, of course, so really the cutoff is 1960; but to be honest them bluesmen were just recording stuff that had been sung in the cotton fields forever, so really the cutoff is the beginning of the slave trade; but really those melodies were just brought all the way from Africa, so really... etc etc etc
I appreciate the reminder that a lot of pop music has a longer history as it developed from Black music styles. Thanks.
I don't claim that these examples have the same history as music.
Tangentially, if (like me) you find this "long tail" interesting but don't know where to start, I've enjoyed going through Ted Gioia's "100 Best Albums of [previous year]" [1] each year. It's obviously subjective and subject to whatever biases he has, but the sheer diversity of the list is quite cool. Listening to a few albums per week is a pretty easy way to sample -- most of the albums are on YouTube or Bandcamp for free.
I honestly don't even understand the impulse to listen to new music. The quality of "newness" is not a desirable one for me in music; I prefer qualities relating to sound. To me it seems like a distorted version of the impulse to be cool in high school.
The real problem is that commercial, recorded music crowds out local, live music. For local music I understand wanting to know what's new - you may miss out because bands aren't live forever.
Source?
I reckon every decade had a handful of artists dominate the charts, so it wasn’t unheard of at all to see multiple chart toppers by the same artists at any given time. In fact, given the gatekeepers of popular music largely were concentrated around radio DJs and the “industry machine” of record labels, I’d hypothesize there’s a larger on average number of unique artists in the top 100 since the 2000s than before.
https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100
You can change the week yourself.
If you pick a few random weeks before 2000, you likely won't find this pattern that I identified, with the same artist in the Top 20 multiple times.
If that's not enough evidence then there is a Python web scraper: https://github.com/jocelyn-ong/data-science-projects/blob/ma...
Amazon is commercially successful but few would argue their UX is good.
And AWS.
The web store UX has become appallingly bad - unreliable/fake reviews, tens/hundreds of sellers all roboselling the same identical items from China, poor quality items, unreliable/poor product search ("10TB external hard drive" shows... not many 10TB external hard drives). And so on.
Ahh, you want "clean" design where maybe there is just one box with beautiful font and not all these options "cluttering" things. You want those options buried in an option tree maybe 8 levels deep.
Well, I'm pretty sick of this minimalist design philosophy that requires 10x more clicks to accomplish anything because a designer decided the original was just too easy to use and wasn't "engaging enough" to generate enough clicks. They have made the web a much worse place for getting stuff done online, and it's no wonder that Amazon, the home of one-click purchasing, has continued optimizing for having the UI get out of your way and accomplish the most with the least effort rather than building attention-seeking UI "experiences" that require lots of interactivity to get simple things done.
NNG often say to follow conventions and Amazon has been leader for so long now that I can't help but think they have established many conventions now that might have been viewed negatively 16 years ago.
Personally, there are some things I have found difficult to do (getting a chat going with a customer service agent) and some things that are very easy (checkout process, making a return). It's no surprise to me that they would make it slightly more difficult to find a live person to chat with since they probably want me to exhaust the other automated methods of solving my problem before doing that. Is that bad UX? I don't think so.