Discovery is the original sin of the modern age

The elephant in the room is the ad-driven world we live. People need to be manipulated into constantly buying things in order to create an illusion of progress and doing work that matters. If facebook, spotify, youtube etc... did not exist, nothing of value would be lost. Even without the megacorps, the technology was already available for people to connect, create and share. In such a world, discoverability is not a problem. Communities would have been small and fragmented. There would be no winner takes all dynamic, sucking up the creative air from other people. The early decades of Internet held a promise of such a world. But then the smartphone came along and lead to market consolidation and created the discoverability problem.

I do like this article, but it seems like he's reaching a conclusion of aggregators and just calling them "taste makers".

Reddit is ultimately the solution, but it was ruined because of the corporate clown car needing everything to be advertiser data consumer friendly. What I mean is that by creating a subreddit, you are creating your own aggregator. If your content is edgy, niche, etc. then it's almost impossible to find if not outright banned. And god forbid your niche actually does get popular, because then suddenly it must change by virtue of forced moderation, what's allowed, outsider influence, etc. All in the name of ads and getting a piece.

Advertising needs more regulation. In the West's 80s and 90s, we did get on track to crackdowns, but this was focused on children and protecting them. Now YouTube/Google/Alphabet is somehow able to avoid that legislation because..... ?

In terms of media I think a good approach to this is, ironically, to skew consumption towards the old. Something that’s been held as valuable for generations, or even centuries, is probably worth your time.

Today you don’t have to seek out the new, it’ll find you. It makes sense then to default to the things proven to be good, at least when you find yourself actively looking for something to read, watch, or listen to.

I have had more than a few "smart" people reiterate that they like suggested contents and they want suggestions to get better, at the cost of privacy. So yeah I agree with the author here.

This is why Google ranks responses, then added the side box and tries to answer the question directly. Most people just want the answer and click on the first link. A negligible number ever move to the next page.

This is of course the opposite motivation to that of the people who write the pages. They (mostly) want you to go to their page.

But those authors aren’t Google’s target audience; they want to show an ad to their real audience.

I’d rather have a page of links but I know I’m an outlier so I don’t bother to get upset.

> Now, the traditional way to solve this has been through algorithms. We rely on them to find patterns in what you read or listened to or watched and then identify other things which you might like to read or listen to or watch.

That's an odd use of "traditional". Maybe I come from an older tradition, but my solution is to forget passive discovery. Instead of hoping someone else's algorithm will identify things for you, actively search for it yourself.

I don't think the issue with finding something suitable is that there are too many options to choose from. The problem is that search engines hate you, the data is shit (unsearchable) anyway, and people spent the last century brainwashing themselves into accepting ads and marketing saturating every facet of life.

> sifting through twenty five types of tomato sauce

The examples here are strange. For the everyday products, you can't find out which one is the good one because they are no meaningful differences between most of them. The range of variants/colours/labels were cynically engineered to overwhelm you, occupy more display space, etc.

> Discovery trumps creativity in the era of abundance.

It always did -- before this 'era', I mean. e.g. You can't get your novel published without getting the publisher to read it first. It doesn't matter if its good if you can't get it discovered.

> We need some way of navigating this, because total available information’s not going to go back down.

Large AI models are the solution. We invented something that can more or less understand the impossible amount of content out there, and distill it in ways specific to each individual.

well, "find a friend to be your senses", circa 1999.

Even more true today.

Anyone who helps your senses stay sensible, becomes a kind of friend..

The irony of discovering this on a links agregator

No.

It is wrong