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Comment by notRobot | Hacker News Reader

> while looking for another old Shirky essay which, as far as I can tell, is now entirely gone from the Web.

Do you remember the title or subject or any key words/phrases?

He explained that an expanding __________ (I can't remember this word. Maybe he said "network"?) meant that each person in the __________ was exposed to a greater variety of choices, however, the total number of choices decreased. His point was that separate niches each maintained some unique offerings, but when everything was combined together into a single market, and attention focused on certain items, there would be a winnowing effect. The paradox was that everyone could legitimately feel they were enjoying an abundance of options, greater than ever before, while the total number of options decreased.

Good summary. The other day I was hearing a political example mentioning that every little local detail, now with social-media, it becomes potentially "a national issue" but that never happen before. Surprisingly, the Founding Fathers were aware of this issue back then and tried to solve (actually mitigate) the problem by keeping the central power as small as possible.

I was just thinking about this - I can go to the store and have fifty variations of peanut butter at my fingertips - but I get basically the same fifty variations anywhere in the US, and much of them anywhere in the world.

Whereas in the past, my store might have 1 or even 0 options on peanut butter, but travel 10/50 miles away and there'd be an entirely different option.

We have a little bit left of this with beer, as most places have a "local" beer available.

Sadly most places outside the US get one, two maybe 4 options but that leaves room for other products.

Ever stopped to ponder the laundry detergent aisle at your local grocery store? Or the potato chip aisle? Especially on detergent, what's there is a huge proportion of the shelf space devoted to a couple of brands (which may, in fact, be from the same parent company) with very large containers taking up a lot of space for relatively little actual product, but lots of different choices for those brands. Or, as I like to say, 31 flavors of Tide Pods. Same goes for potato and corn chips. Lays and Ruffles dominate, which oversize bags that are half air, relegating other brands to lower shelves on one end. But consumers can "choose" from half a dozen different flavors of the same brands.

And it's the same all over the US. The only variation tends to be that some flavors Flamin' Hot Dill Pickle or Wasabi Ginger, e.g., appear more often in some markets than others.

Someone once described the general difference between European and U.S. grocery stores: They said that in Europe, a store would have every kind of product, but not very many brands of any particular thing, maybe two or three for most non-staple products. But in the U.S., a store would either have like 20 brands of something or have none of them; i.e. not carry that kind of product at all. It seems to me like this points to “choice” being an important scale by which stores are measured in the U.S., but no, or little, negative associations are made with no products of a particular kind being available at all.

There's some of that European approach creeping into US markets thanks to Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud - we now have both Aldi and Trader Joe's which primarily have their own versions of products and carry only that brand (or occasionally a second 'mainstream' brand as special items). Costco is similar as well in typically having only a single brand of any given type of product.

Was this it:

https://www.wired.com/2006/11/meganiche/

"Now that more than a billion people have access to the Web, there is no longer a trade-off between size and specificity. The basic math is simple: A tiny piece of an immense pie is huge. A decade ago, reaching one-tenth of 1 percent of Web users amounted to 36,000 people, a number that compared favorably with the circulation of, say, the daily newspaper in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Back then, reaching a million users required a decidedly mainstream offering (Amazon.com and MSN come to mind). Now, getting niche can be the path to getting big; one-tenth of 1 percent of today's Web audience is a million people."

Thank you.

I don't know if it's the one that the GP has in mind, but this is a classic:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060210230250/http://www.shirky... "Help, The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can't Get Up"

Wow this guy was straight up prescient. I’ve never read his blogs until today - thanks for sharing this.

I would honestly start with his presentations, they are amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=clay+shirky

I wasn't quite sure when he wrote this. The earliest capture in the Internet Archive was January 2000, but it could be from earlier than that maybe? I do remember that it was quite prescient when I first read it, although it's sort of obvious in 2022.

Yeah that’s sort of what I’m driving at. He called a lot of stuff that wasn’t exactly an easy take.

Highly recommended:

http://web.archive.org/web/20140117014453/http://www.shirky....

Classic essay.

> People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done.

> And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.

That part really resonated with me too. Lots to unpack.

I wonder what Clay Shirky thinks about blockchains and cryptocurrency.

The title of that article is now itself a comment on the passage of time and the fading of things. How old do you have to be today to get the "I've fallen and I can't get up!" reference?

Sitting on the elbow of the curve describing the risk of not getting back up after a fall.

My 27yo ("reference Millennial") even has a mental image of the video (although has never seen it on a Tele-Vision Device). It may have entered the meme reservoir on its own at this point.

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