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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

Very well put!

I have another related theory that goes: Over time, everything converges into mediocrity. By everything I mean products sold to us, entertainment, media, the Internet itself. Look at the car designs of the 1970s and now. Look at cinematography then and now. As soon as marketing steps in and start telling otherwise innovative companies or artists how to sell, things begin slowly converging into mediocrity.

The semi-formal proof is that because the humanity as a whole is mediocre almost by definition, hence if you want to expand your markets (the ice-cream saleman's problem) you'd grab the middle of the bell curve first: it's where the bigger part of the market is!

I don't know if it makes sense, just something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

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I was driving to work (a foreign experience) and Joe Walsh was singing about a Maserati. And it made me thing “man, if you grew up in middle America, hearing about a Maserati, you might not even know what it was, let alone that it existed”. Now you can hit Google and see millions of pictures, join the fan club, watch hours of videos and reviews, and become an arm chair Maserati expert. Which is cool, but if sort of takes away the mystique behind things. You wouldn’t even know how it was spelled unless you had the album itself and the artist included lyrics.

Similarly with guitar, it would have been almost impossible to figure out what type of pedal someone was using to get “that sound” without interacting with other humans in person. And I think that served as a filter for people who cared and also led to interesting introductions and local experts (music shops and store owners, etc).

I think that’s what we lose. And while I think converging to average makes sense, I think peoples tastes have shifted to quality in more areas, because they can quickly google and see what the best looks like. And most people will use debt to get there.

> I think peoples tastes have shifted to quality in more areas,

I'm genuinely curious if there's any data or research to support this. Because in my view the tastes remain more or less the same, just the information noise around us is now bigger.

More people believe the earth is flat now than did 100 years ago. That's an impact.

> More people believe the earth is flat now than did 100 years ago. That's an impact.

There are more blacksmiths now too. Don't underestimate the effects of population growth.

I can identify with the guitar example. I started learning to play in high school, right before internet access became common for average folks in the US (I knew some kids who had CompuServe at home and I was aware of some BBSes, but nothing like today).

I remember going to the music store where they had a room with sound dampening and a giant pedal board hooked up to an amp. Some friends and I would head over after school, guitars in gig bags, and plug in to "try out the pedals". I'm sure the staff loved us since we couldn't really afford to buy them ever. But we got to hear what they all did.

Other times I'd think I invented something, only to realize it had already been done. I had this little headphone-amp that ran off a 9V battery and plugged into the 1/4" jack on your guitar. It was great to play loud (through headphones) and not annoy my family.

But one time, I had some old broken headphones plugged into it and found that I could wedge the driver in the corner of my mouth, play distorted guitar through it, and shape the sounds with my mouth. Do it in front of a mic and whoa! How cool is this??

Later on I learned talkboxes were already a thing. Do you feel like I do, indeed.

One of the cognitive hacks I suggest running on yourself is when you create something, then later discover that it is in fact something already well known, rather than being disappointed that you didn't invent something new, take it as validation that you were on the right track instead.

“man, if you grew up in middle America, hearing about a Maserati, you might not even know what it was, let alone that it existed”

I assure you that even a rural kid like me knew what a Maserati was. We had movies, TV, and car magazines. People's assumptions about information delivery pre-internet are horribly warped.

Kids actually read Car & Driver or Guitar World cover to cover!

Fair - I think my point is more along the lines of seeing one and getting a detailed look at the features. That was reserved for car shows, but now there are hundreds of YouTube videos that go into a lot of depth.

And immediacy - before you’d have to wait if you didn’t have car and driver handy or the movie with the Maserati in it wasn’t rewound. Now it’s 30 seconds and you’ve got more information about them than you could look at in a lifetime.

Growing up, I didn’t know what certain words in songs were (because I couldn’t hear them clearly or just hadn’t heard the word). It meant finding album notes, looking for the lyrics (if they were there), then trying to use context clues to put it together.

Thank you for sharing. These are good examples of Albert Borgmann's focal things and the device paradigm.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_paradigm

> I think peoples tastes have shifted to quality in more areas, because they can quickly google and see what the best looks like.

I've noticed that I do a lot more min/maxing. I'm always optimizing my purchases for the best available at the lowest cost. Which means hundreds of hours of research. Research which often makes no real difference in the end.

I'm reminded of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZK8Z8hulFg

If you're into the mechanical keyboard community or subreddit you know the meme of an "end game" keyboard.

This borders on mental illness at times. Preparing to do the thing you want to do rather than actually doing the thing.

I agree with the sentiment that designing a product for mainstream appeal can make it seem bland, but I don't think that goes all the way to "Over time, everything converges into mediocrity."

There are so many things today that are better than in decades past. Computers are unbelievably faster. Electric guitars are much more consistently high quality. Cars don't break down as often.

Maybe the problem is that the word "mediocrity" is too big. It encompasses both quality (which I think is mostly improving) and uniqueness vs blandness.

Is the quality really improving though? People complain about how washing machines and other appliances last shorter these days, so that you buy/upgrade more often.

As for cars, a lot of the times they look so similar that you can't tell the brand at a distance. They were certainly more distinguishable decades ago. Today it's also the high-end mobile phones - they all look like the iPhone, which isn't bad per se, but if you can't innovate (or don't want to) that's mediocrity.

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