We have a content quality problem, not a content quantity problem | Hacker News Reader

We have a content quality problem, not a content quantity problem

coryd.dev

14 pointscdme11 comments

This article is a bit all over the place. It doesn't really support it's own thesis - interesting topic nevertheless.

I actually do believe we have a quantity problem. There's a lot of good stuff when it comes to movies, music, games, media in general. AI might skew proportions towards "junk food" but I already don't have enough time to enjoy the "good stuff".

It might just be nostalgia, but it feels like we used to chew through new media. We had space to think about it. Now everything moves so quickly. I wonder if we can even see it in less fandom communities - no one stays long enough on a single thing to build a devote fan base around it (maybe that's actually good...). Great movies are a thing for a few weeks and then they're gone. Do we still have artists like Queen, Prince, Metallica? Can any artist expect to be relevant for more than a few years?

We produce so much nowadays. It used to be that an artist worked on their craft because they wanted to express something. Now you might witness an artist working on their craft, peak on social media (or on Netflix or Bandcamp) during that development stage and disappear before they ever reached the point of wanting to say something.

Maybe its just getting older, nostalgia, overwhelm relating to tech moving so fast.

When Steam opened up the marketplace it was a few new games at most per week (some of which were just getting their additional Steam release).

Now, and since some years already, you have dozens (even up to 50!) of game releases every day on there. Much of which garbage of course, but even a small decent slice is easily overwhelming at this velocity.

It's the same commoditization that happened to books, music and movies. Kind of sad to see really, as this not only kills the magic, it also tends to impair our collective ability to evaluate and build on it.

Well, here I go play Gmod...

The only way someone can make money from content is if somebody else is willing to pay money for it. (No, companies don't actually get into black by "writing off taxes" of failed or cancelled shows, it doesn't work like that). I dislike a lot of modern content, too — to me, it feels like majority of shows on Netflix are made for people on heavy doses of anti-depressants. However, I just accept that there's a lot of these people who have different tastes than me instead of putting the blame on a corporate machine that just follows demand.

Have you considered the possibility that the things that people like could be influenced by the corporate machine?

Of course, but mostly in direction of less friction. You have $1m marketing budget. Do you spend it on content that people are naturally less or more prone to react positively to?

Check out https://www.criterionchannel.com

Personally, I prefer crime (torrents).

Haha, fair enough. In this particular case the films are typically harder find at your favourite port.

Huge corporations like Warner actually can and do gain percentage points on their bottom line by deleting "content" and writing it off as a loss. Having to pay several million less in taxes can actually make the company more profitable than it already was.

The executives at these companies care about the spreadsheets. Not about the people making or watching the shows. Sometimes the spreadsheets come out better in the short term for deliberately chucking a show into the fire. It is the short term incentives that are the problem in that respect.

> We're discarding quality in pursuit of scale.

Actually, we have been discarding non-free for free. We only look for free; quality is not a target.

I'm reminded of that time that Netflix held a million dollar competition to find the best algorithm for predicting movie ratings, and then didn't use it.

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