Essay: The Digital Death of Collecting | Hacker News Reader

Essay: The Digital Death of Collecting

kylechayka.substack.com

18 pointsbenbreen11 comments

My biggest issue with all digital is that it makes discovery more difficult.

I recall as a child seeing books of my relatives and family friends and having my imagination sparked by them. Or just flipping through a book, not being able to read or understand it, but just looking at the pictures.

I've gone so far as to buy some coffee table books and visual dictionary books and atlases for my son just to spark that same feeling of discovery.

I think we are going to lose something important there when everything is in a digital playlist locked up into a proprietary platform that may not be around for more that a dozen years or so.

I know that my comments are more specific to books, but this also applies I think to music, and art, any visual medium.

The problem with digital discovery is lack of good curation. Physical objects can be curated by your parents, friends, etc and are easily accessed.

Whereas most digital discovery algos just chum my recommendations with what's overall popular in a category. I don't want the "latest smash hits", I want to see a respected curator with excellent taste uncovering new gems.

I'm glad you mention this because I forgot all about it. My dad had a cupboard full of CDs. I would go through them as a child and listen to albums just based on the covers. I can still recall a few of them.

> I've gone so far as to buy some coffee table books and visual dictionary books and atlases for my son just to spark that same feeling of discovery.

I very much like that!

That's also why I prefer physical retail to Amazon: discovery.

Especially for "engineering" components or systems.

A physical electronics shop with bins of components is FAR SUPERIOR to finding both new and correct components than online sources like Digikey. You often "find what you didn't know you needed" for the same or different project or discover a new project idea from what you find by accident.

This also is why physical libraries and bookstores are superior to Amazon: you can discover books you weren't looking for and quickly assess the "breadth of a subject" in ways that can never be done (or at least never ARE DONE) online.

The internet is in many ways the worst invention ever that we really have never truly needed. I saw a reality "Super CME risk to internet" story and honestly I DO NOT SEE A DOWNSIDE to this! Being cut off for some months would be as healthy to people and society as COVID and lockdowns were to people realizing they DO NOT need their old jobs (and now there's a labor shortage for marginal, low-paying work - which is probably mostly a good thing overall).

I have discovered so much more music in recent years than I did in record stores (I'm an age that straddles the line between CDs, iTunes and streaming - iPod generation?), mostly through YouTube. One video leads to another, leads to a comment, leads to a blog post ... I love it! I can lose hours exploring music this way.

Equally, I can see how collecting had been ruined by the Internet. In fact, I rarely even collect what music I discover, since access is so easy on-demand. And who is satisfied by a stamp collection in a world with eBay etc?

Perhaps collection has been replaced by curation?

I switched to digital books, almost totally, several years ago. That's when my bookshelf stopped growing. I could no longer display my erudition (or lack of it) to the world. My Kindle collection is long but no one in their right mind would want to scroll through it. It does not have, as the author points out, the immediacy and tacit tactile interactivity of a library shelf. Still, out of a sense of responsibility to sustainability and the welfare of the young, I have stayed with the non-physical version, with a deep sense of regret about the loss of touch-me, feel-me reading matter.

While I think playing vinyl records or CDs is inconvenient, I know that the interface is not going to change. I can quickly learn how it works and integrate it into my subconscious mind. There are no impending updates, UI changes, new formats, missing codecs etc. that I have to think about.

If you own non-IoT hardware, it really is yours and you can feel the difference.

So those of us with Plex/envy/jellyfin servers are collecting digitally. I have my physical books, could never make the leap to digital. But my multimedia collection is something I take great pride in- it includes every bit of SGI software I can get my hands on digitally imaged. Same thing for classic Macintosh software for the 68k series systems. Everything cataloged and stored for my personal use. Hell you can buy any album just about drm free, finally, on places like Amazon. I stream from my own system, with my own library that I curate.

Some collections are little more than hoarding. Bring on digital

Seems very judgmental. Try collecting coins digitally.

Hoarding is collecting without curation, organization, or pruning.

Instead of filling a house, now you can fill a hard drive. At least you don't leave a huge physical mess for the kids when you pass... but sorting through all the files isn't a nice mess to leave either.

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