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I dimly remember a time in the 90s when I thought technology was supposed to free us from the tyranny of "judging a book by its cover" and "following the crowd", when you could carry around a personalized algorithm to help you identify things you would like even if they were obscure or un-marketed.

It feels like that didn't happen, and we're still stuck with the same issue of promotions and gatekeepers and tastemakers, because those who control the algorithms (centralized, proprietary, remotely hosted) find it more profitable that way.

> It feels like that didn't happen

Any time it happens, things get twisted, or shut down. Reddit used to be good. Twitter used to be good. But the money people come in, the bots, the astroturfers, the guerrilla marketers, the spammers... If they stay alive regardless, in come the billionaires to offer ridiculous sums.

People complained that TikTok's algorithm was too good at finding niche and interesting content. The marketing was somewhat balanced, and tailored to people's actual tastes. That was before lobbyists and politicians discovered that it was severely interfering with their propaganda. Now I hear you can't so much as post 'Free Palestine', and kids are supposed to be grateful that we're allowed to have it on our phones at all.

All that said, for people with the right skills there is no shortage of entertaining content to discover; far more than could ever be consumed in a lifetime. It's really the most important news and views that gets suppressed the most.

Reddit was good, various forums were good for that too. The best way to get recommendation is through curated lists and you need people that are genuinely involved for that. You can still find some, but they can be very off the beaten path.

I don't think it is just money. Twitter had slight right wing bias and that was not enough. Musk wanted it to have hard right bias so he destroyed it.

It is simple, money peoppe use money to destroy spaces that don't have their preferred bias.

That's nonsense. If anything, for the prior decade, Twitter was well-known as the extreme left's judge, jury and executioner. All the cancellations people argue about? Overblown or not, Twitter was always at the center of it, and it was what made them possible.

(Though, to be honest, it wasn't a bias in the service itself, IMHO. Twitter was nothing but a resonance chamber. The bias was in what the outside world reacted to, and how.)

What Musk did to Twitter is unusual. The typical way "money people use money to destroy spaces" is through sterilization of the place to placate advertisers, and then through ongoing enshittification to extract as much as possible from what little users there are left. Other common ways are: buying up and merging with a shittier platform in the same or adjacent space, and a weird-ass pivot that makes business sense to everyone except the actual user base.

Bullshit, frankly. That was what your self imposed bubble was telling to themselves. Whenever measured, twitter bias was right wing - it took much more for them to stop right accounts then left ones.

> What Musk did to Twitter is unusual.

Yes, it is unusual to destroy financial value of a company that fast. I assume he will do the same to the country economics too. And you will blame everyone but musk and yourself for that.

He personally will maybe come off more rich this time, because you can steal from the government but he could really not from twitter. Corruption works for him.

> Whenever measured, twitter bias was right wing - it took much more for them to stop right accounts then left ones.

Was that why a chunk of left-leaning users famously left to form Bag, a "safe space" alternative to Twitter? Oh wait it was right wing and it was called Gab.

Doesn't really matter anyway. Twitter wasn't killed by bias, it was killed by a bored billionaire, but it would've been half-dead by now anyway like all social media sites, thanks to the usual cycle of enshittification.

> And you will blame everyone but musk and yourself for that.

You confuse me with someone else. I'm from the other side of the world, and my only interest in US economy is that the rest of the world kind of depends on the US keeping its shit together.

If you want to blame someone, blame people who have nothing better to do than to get endlessly polarized over non-issues, thus failing to come together to deal with the issues - and blame the industry that makes money off stoking this fire.

(And yes, we have the same thing over here, too.)

Yeah, Gab is super nice example of the asymmetry - the sort of behavior right wing Gab members displayed was much much less prominent on the left. So yeah, this is nice example of right wing extreme behaving in the worst way and then complaining it is fair people who behave better are not treated the same. When right wing harasses more, it is ok to kick them out more. The reality was that right wing harasses more, they get kicked, so services would kick off comparatively better behaved left wing people just to make right wing happy. That is right wing bias.

> Twitter wasn't killed by bias, it was killed by a bored billionaire [...] thanks to the usual cycle of enshittification.

He was not bored, he had political project. The enshittificationwas entrirely on Musk personal decisions, not on some impersonal rules.

> If you want to blame someone, blame people who have nothing better to do than to get endlessly polarized over non-issues, thus failing to come together to deal with the issues - and blame the industry that makes money off stoking this fire

I will blame people currently in power and those who voted for them. And nice to complain about polarization while talking about Gab as if it was not the group of people responsible for it.

>Twitter had slight right wing bias

this is absurd

The problem is, as usual, capitalism. The goal of people making stuff isn't to make good stuff, it's to sell lots of their stuff, at the highest price they can.

Certainly sometimes making bad stuff does make it so people don't want to buy it, and those who do buy it will only buy it for a low price, but surprisingly that's the case less often than you'd expect. (Blame the field of psychological manipulation that is advertising?)

And so on top of that, the algorithms that recommend things are eventually going to be subverted by the people who want to sell you things, so you end up with stuff pushed at you that "sells well" even if much of it doesn't actually match what you want.

One thing that might work is to decouple the recommendation algorithm from the entity trying to sell you stuff. I'd want an independent third party to give me recommendations on what to buy on Amazon, for example, rather than Amazon themselves recommending products to me. But you have to also somehow ensure that this third party isn't motivated by profit in a way that's related to what products you eventually buy.

On top of that, the problem with every good service is that once it gets to a certain size, it attracts the sort of people who will make it a bad service, because bad services can make them more money.

Seems pretty clear that if you want someone to do work for you (e.g. recommend you books you will like) they might need paying somehow.

> Seems pretty clear that if you want someone to do work for you

Yup, thats clear for everyone.

Whats not clear to me is how you got what parent was writing into saying that people shouldnt get paid for their work?

It is obviously true that the problem of massive amounts of shitty media being sold to consumers is capitalism.

You do understand that critizising capitalism is not the same as saying ”lets all be communists”, right?

Well, like everyone who "criticizes capitalism" online, they leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine the concrete entailments of what they vaguely propose.

And when you try to, it’s always “um where did they say that?”

If you're going to bring up capitalism in your crusade against... recommendation systems... I think it's fair to ask you to workshop your genius idea a little more past the shower thought stage.

Thats a quite ignorant conclusion.

You can critizise something without having to provide alternatives. I dont know why people like you or gp feel the need to become so defensive about it.

Capitalism is the status quo. Like any other system ruling us it should be discussed in order to keep an intellectually honest discourse [1].

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_honesty

Did they ever make last.fm for books? Or other things? One of my ideas back in the day was "last.fm for meeting people", i.e. you could connect based on overlapping interests or aesthetic preferences in any dimension of life. That seems to have still not been invented yet?

I'm unconvinced by the profit motive argument: there's plenty of money to be made in the "long tail" of selling weird things (or experiences) to weird people!

Last.fm for books sounds like Goodreads, but not sure how Amazon buying it bodes for its future. It does attempt to make recommendations.

Amazon has owned goodreads since 2013.I have been using thr platform for many years, and the service has been good. Having said that, I haven't seen much innovation being built but that might be a good thing with this product.

Maybe not for books, but my taste in music benefitted tremendously from streaming and discovery algorithms.

This is kind of how The Locked Tomb series got around - "lesbian necromancers in space" has a sort of hook to it. :)

It’s a weird tagline because the books are basically sexless. But the first one was definitely fun and original so who cares. Unfortunately, the next two simply weren’t good. I wonder if the series will see a conclusion.

I disagree. The follow-ups definitely wasn't more of the same thing if that's what you were expecting, but I feel they were interesting, challenging and original, and I enjoyed them. YMMV.

Similar for Signalis fans with games ;)

The fame of the book is strong correlated to the marketing spend behind it and little else.

Much like anything in an established market.

When something truly new gets invented, its value is directly apparent and obvious. Subsequent iterations yields smaller and smaller incremental improvements, and at some point, the ROI on marketing becomes greater than ROI on actual improvements, and from then on, fame stops being correlated with quality.

The success of major bestsellers depends entirely on how they trigger the fantasies and wish fulfilments specific demographics.

The Da Vinci Code hit the religious/occult conspiracy theory market, which was huge at the time, and added feminist overtones about the "divine feminine" which appealed to most female New Agers and a good few male ones.

His other books didn't have those ingredients, and they were less successful.

More recently we've had Fifty Shades and Romantasy. Working out the demographics and the reader appeal is left as an (easy) exercise for the reader.

Harry Potter and Young Adult classics like The Hunger Games are a little harder to analyse, but not much.

Someone like Stephen King is less obvious. (For most of the books "horror" is the hook, but American small town relatability is at least as important.)

Writing quality isn't quite incidental. But it only needs to be above a certain minimal level of competence, nowhere near what's usually called "good writing."

Books which have "good writing" but don't trigger a large demographic of readers with specific fears and/or fantasies - of any kind - do not do well.

I don't remember who originally stated it, but there is an old axiom that "There are three stages of Reading: 1. Infantile - to learn about the world, 2. Adolescent - to learn about oneself, and 3. Adult - to read simply for enjoyment".

I think a lot of the current market for (adult) books reflects the second stage. It would be interesting to ask the person(s) sitting next to you on the next plane ride why they are reading, e.g. Malcolm Gladwell vs Dan Brown vs Ian McEwan.

> What I've realized is that the fame of the book is closely related to how interesting and unique the "elevator pitch” of the book. Which makes sense when you think about it; It's the elevator pitch that's spreading by word of mouth, not the book.

They call this "high concept"

"High concept" doesn't refer to the elevator pitch being interesting or unique. The less interesting or unique the movie is, the more high-concept it is.

"High concept" refers to the elevator pitch being a complete description of the movie. Nothing in the plot that might take more than a couple of seconds to describe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_concept

> High concept is a type of artistic work that can be easily pitched with a succinctly stated premise. It can be contrasted with low concept, which is more concerned with character development and other subtleties that are not as easily summarized.

> Extreme examples of high-concept films are Snakes on a Plane and Sharknado, which describe their entire premises in their titles.

Interestingly, this is exactly the opposite of what everyone assumes the phrase must mean, based on the ordinary meanings of "high" and "concept". Such is life.

> this is exactly the opposite of what everyone assumes the phrase must mean

Huh, yeah, that's surprising. I always assumed "high concept" meant that a work was more "cerebral" or something like that, while "low concept" is something lowbrow or simple to understand.

I had no idea that the term referred to how succinctly the work can be described or pitched.

"I don't really know any high level programming languages, I really only know python."

I was surprised by this as well.

It doesn't help that in some cases, it would actually correlate. Take the example from the Wiki:

> high-concept idea, such as "what if we could clone dinosaurs?" as in Jurassic Park.

"What if we could clone dinosaurs?" can unroll into anything between some extremely cerebral biopunk (think "Change Agent" but written by Greg Egan) and sharknando with raptors instead of sharks. In either case, the "elevator pitch" would be good, succinct summary - but, if you were to give that line to people and ask them to imagine what the book is like, the answer would depend entirely on the level of interests and sophistication of individual responders.

Or, in short: if you like cerebral stuff and you hear a "high-concept" pitch, you're likely to assume the work is "high concept" in terms of being full of deep ideas.

For 44 years my misunderstanding of 'character actors' was that they are good at acting like other characters.

"High concept" is a bit of a different case in that nobody ever knows the actual meaning. It's too obvious that, in the absence of the existing meaning, it would mean "conceptually complex". It's not at all obvious why you would use a phrase meaning "conceptually complex" when what you want to say is "conceptually trivial".

Agree. For example, Dragon's Egg by Forward is not a well written book by most of those metrics, and yet I very much enjoyed the novel due to the creative story.

> What I've realized is that the fame of the book is closely related to how interesting and unique the "elevator pitch” of the book.

Really? I don't find that at all. It certainly helps, but books that have enduring appeal are, usually, ones that are good, within their niche at least. Especially books that are actual bestsellers, not books people are "forced to read" in school or something (they can also be great books, but they continue to be "popular" for reasons other than "people chose to read them").