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Comment by phillryu | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but the burden is now on you to sift through the garbage to find the good stuff, especially since it's mostly mixed together in recommendations or search results etc. It feels more limited to me the other way around, like yes we have added some more good stuff, but good luck finding it.

If my favorite hobby store kept on expanding and expanding and the ratio of great stuff to garbage kept going down, I would definitely perceive the overall quality as being well into some death spiral.

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Youtube makes it pretty easy for me. The algorithm recommends videos nd channels, and I say 'not interested' to the garbage, the result: a high quality subscription tab.

I do the same thing, but they just show me more garbage.

My "subscriptions" tab is pretty good, though.

There seems to be a few topics which will cause your recommendations to spiral into conspiracy theory nonsense pretty quickly. Unfortunately you’ve got to be very careful with any gun content in YouTube as they almost always lead to bullshit in your feed.

Garand Thumb videos I've seen have been very good. Like the one about what supersonic rounds sound like going overhead. I'd guess there's somewhat less overlap with his content and conspiracy stuff.

Content aside, I hate the click bait titles a lot of big channels employ. Garand thumb included.

I click "don't show this channel" on those

There's a browser extension that replaces them, but I feel that just highlights how the default experiemce is targeted at stealing people's attention.

This has always been the case since the printing press practically. There's always been way too much quality 'content' to manage and you have to sift your way through it. What has changed is that everything is now at our fingertips and we expose ourselves to the recommendation feed. I guess I'm saying that the problem hasn't changed, just our awareness of it.

The pulp mills must run, that capacity is already paid for. Let us convince the chattering classes of their value to the human enterprise in putting words down to keep the presses running.

"Romance" literature is honest in its own provincial way. No pretensions to much besides entertainment and consuming printing capacity.

Is it really on you to sort and sift, or is it on you to find a good guide? In the hobby store example, there are other people around to ask, and I think that is similar as well.

The future is more content, not less, so finding mechanisms to cope with that is well worth the effort.

Not exactly. Assuming the number of people in the hobby store didn’t grow exponentially, you would be completely empty in your favorite isle, most of the time.

And the guides do increase in the 5 crappy to 1 good ratio also. Eventually it’s infinite crap even thought there is gold in there.

But you aren't, because there's really only a few stores, not thousands, so people congregate at the same ones, and if there's nobody in those aisles continuously, they stop getting stocked (people create less content if nobody consumes it).

The problem is almost never that there's nobody in your aisle, it's about finding the right way to connect with them. There are numerous ways to do this. Even just leaving a comment on a video asking a question or responding to someone else's comment. That's about as low effort as you can get, but actually works.

This affects the other end too.

Quality niche creators are partially motivated (and sometimes supported) by viewers. The bigger the sea of garbage they are swimming against, the less inclined they will be to start or continue.

People are motivated by viewers, but once it gets above a certain amount I think it becomes a different motivation. When I write things on reddit on a specific topic subreddit that have few posts in it, and those things get a few upvotes, I am more motivated to continue than posts in huge subs which get boatloads of upvotes. Because in order to get those one or two important ones, you need to know something specific and valuable, but to get thousands you have to find a way to appeal to a lot of people in a broad way.

Trying to chase the broad appeal will lead, in my experience, to a downslide where content gets less and less useful and more pop-culture oriented, or it becomes outright fraud or manipulation.

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