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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

Really interesting and spot-on article, I really liked this insight, though:

> But the Stream, mobile applications, and moving images: They all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. (...) When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos.

Never had thought about it that way.

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When I first put video on 'the web' I got a really nasty email from one of the backbone maintainers that what I was doing was 'improper use' of the internet. I actually agreed, but it was an un-stoppable thing from a technology point of view.

We've been trending away from the 'web as a collection of books' to 'the web as a series of TV channels' for many years now. The ease of consumption is a very large factor in this, video is much more passive than reading.

"When I first put video on 'the web' I got a really nasty email from one of the backbone maintainers that what I was doing was 'improper use' of the internet"

not trying to pry but i can't even imagine a context under which that is an appropriate response.

Well, look at it this way: at the time the intercontinental backbone was an absolute straw compared to the gigantic capacity that we have today. Within a few weeks of launching I took over a good chunk of that capacity and with the trend being what it was I would have saturated the backbone within another couple of months without even trying. This eventually led to relocating my company to Canada where we had access to a half decent connection to MAE-East and MAE-West through Front 151. It was either that or be seriously penalized.

At the time a European start-up getting the majority of its visitors from the US was not a common thing and that start-up being video related was unheard of entirely.

There's similar behavior today with the Bitcoin network. People are guided by community norms alone to stop doing things that are destructive in the short term but with which there's nothing theoretically wrong (e.g. Tons of tiny transactions). As the network overcomes the technical limitations, people will start to do those currently problematic things again without the need to use the work-arounds they're currently resorting to.

Kind of want reply both to you and @pjc50:

I think moving images with sound as part of hypertext/hypermedia is a given -- and has been since (at least) the 60s. That's not just "TV". And "TV" isn't just video.

We've only recently entered the era where users can reasonably make live and recorded video, and use that as a form of expression (from video chat, to youtube/vimeo to snapchat etc). And just like you could take a tv camera and use that for video conferencing in the 60s[1] -- video-the-medium is much more than "TV".

"TV" is indeed very pacifying. For myself, I can on days off, do two very different things that are very immersive: watch tv series, or play Star Wars: Online Galaxies. Now, I mostly play SWTOR solo, so for the purpose of this discussion, lets just use "play a single-player computer game". I enjoy both, but if I read a book or play a computer game -- I'm mentally invigorated. If I watch a TV series, even something interesting like "Humans"[h], "Mr. Robot"[r] -- or more interesting drama like "True Detective"[t] -- I always end up more passive. Even watching documentaries, or news -- TV ends up a very passive medium.

And that's (IMNHO) just the good "TV". I find that a good movie is usually between "book" and "TV" -- something with the format/runtime that drives a different expression both in writing and directing.

> We've been trending away from the 'web as a collection of books' to 'the web as a series of TV channels' for many years now.

I don't think the web has ever been much like a "collection of books". It might have been "a collection of essays" -- and I don't think we're really trending towards "a series of TV channels". I think we'll still see video expression and communication evolve, and I think user generated communiques ("content" is more something that oozes from a (corporate) organization) will continue to dominate.

It is my impression that young people (~3-20) are much more inclined to use video than I am -- I don't much like it. But I expect rich media images/sound/video will continue to increase, as bandwidth/storage gets cheaper.

I think that trend in media is different from the trend in centralization, commercialization though. There's nothing wrong with videologs (other than that I prefer a well-written text...) -- as long as we can host them in a more distributed manner than we do today.

I think we'll see interesting times ahead, as the people that are now 5 years old grow up to master both rich media and various forms of programming/automation as a natural part of their life. We've seen nothing yet. Nothing.

A post-script on quality: I think many of us want quality. And I think we'll continue to make it, and find it. Be that small Internet radio-stations that do curated music (as opposed to things like soundcloud that I also like, but unfortunately is just as hopelessly centralized as youtube) -- or "real" blogs -- or whatever.

It remains to be seen how/if this will all be funded. Maybe we won't have as much paid-for content/art -- maybe we'll all have more free time -- assuming we don't kill each others as jobs are automated away, and those who own the robots keep all the riches.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

[h] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series)

[r] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot_(TV_series)

[t] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Detective_(TV_series)

Re: Essay vs Blog -- I had the good fortune to come across "American Essays"[1] edited by Charles B. Shaw in a thrift shop some years ago. Shaw opens the book with, in-part:

"The Essay In America (...) There is no literary form that embraces so wide a variety of inclusions. Adjectives commonly used to describe the sorts of essays indicate this diversity: familiar, critical, didactic, informal, nature, expository, historical, reflective, travel, personal, descriptive, and humorous are a dozen of these qualifiers. The noun, too, is varied: article, character sketch, causerie, feuilleton, fantasy, anecdote, paper, satire, miscellany, ephemera, impressions, and reverie are another dozen terms applied to the multiformity of the essay. The composition that can be thus diversely denoted cannot be rigidly defined. The essay may be as personal as a toupee or as austere and sublime as a Himalayan peak; it may be as light as the foam on faery seas or erudite as the disquisitions of him whose

"... words of learned length and thundering sound amaz'd the gazing rustics rang'd around';

it may be fun or the prickliest sort of intellectual stimulation; its ideas may be straws which build bridges or rugged ores polished to the texture of satin. Its range of subject matter is infinite. One might substitute "essay" for "man" in the sentence from Terence's The Self-Tormentor: "I am a man, and nothing that concerns humanity do I deem a matter of indifference to me." In place of a sedate definition perhaps we may compromise on the analogy of the twentieth-century American essayist, Stuart Pratt Sherman: "The ordinary life indeed is itself an essay, starting from nowhere in particular and arriving at no definite destination this side of death, but picking its way, like a little river, now with 'bright speed', and now with reluctance and fond lingerings over all sorts of obstacles and through all sorts of channels, which would be merely humdrum but for the shifting moods and humours that play over a bottom of commonplace with the transient magic of shadow and light."

Words from 1954 that I think are a fine lens with which to view both the "blogosphere" and our evolving social media in general.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/American-Essays-Charles-B-Shaw/dp/B001...

I think the sheer volume of content plays a part too. In the early days of blogging (2000 to, say, 2005) there weren't many bloggers, and while they didn't quite all know each other they crosslinked from sidebar to sidebar into communities. There wasn't much content, it was all generally high quality, the discovery process worked well as a result, and few people were monetising it.

Now we have to ask an awkward question: do people actually want quality, as we define it? Does the undiscriminating mass consumer result in a low quality market, or is it the other way round? To what extent is media there to support identity/belonging needs rather than informational ones?

There's no such thing as people. There are demographics, and they all have different interests.

I think it's clear there's a huge demographic with no interest in anything beyond celebrity trivia.

There's also a HN demographic, and there may even be some overlap (probably not much...) between both.

The useful question is whether or not there's a demographic willing to support the content you want to create, and if so, how do you find it/them?

There's always been a subculture of niche print/book publishing which squeaks by on a subscription model, and the web hasn't killed that. I keep finding sites that work in that way. So I don't think the web is killing that model.

Obviously Buzzfeed does a lot better, and it's adorable. [tm]

As for monetisation - a lot of personal blogs are there to support a professional portfolio, especially in tech. I'm just fine with that.

But there are also new opportunities. I was talking to someone last week about their teenager, who runs a mini-business on Instagram. She has 300k followers, and people pay her to promote their work.

She's fifteen. The site is an art site. It's not quite super-abstract conceptual gallery art, but it's not low quality cheese either.

All kinds of things are possible now that weren't possible before.

>There's no such thing as people. There are demographics, and they all have different interests.

Ouch! Your comment literally hurt me. I upvoted you anyway, as I think the rest of your comment is excellent.

But I want to address that first line. I know where you're coming from and it is the reality we find ourselves in nowadays. But.

In my opinion, we are at the cusp of having the technology to break that mindset. Demographics are an antiquated way of dealing with the "there are too many people to deal with!" problem, so we put them into buckets. But here's the rub: privacy.

To break the idea of demographics we would have to be even more intrusive on how we track and profile individual users. Or maybe not...

Going back to the original article, maybe it is centralisation that sucks. If I want one place to give me want it thinks I need, or even what I really need, then yes, privacy suffers. But how about if I just have the tools to find what I like, and not have them all under the same umbrella? The way it was a long time ago, where I could be involved in various different communities, and there was no link between them except for my own list of links.

/rant

Ya know, I can't help but think of MTV. Back in the late '70s all of the radio stations in the US were turning corporate, being bought up by chains and switching to boring, top 40s styles, playing the same songs all the time in order to rack up the ad revenue. MTV was launched at this same time but when it hit the air it had a problem, most songs didn't have music videos. So they ended up playing a lot of songs they wouldn't have otherwise, and accidentally played an eclectic mix of music. Which was like a breath of fresh air to the youth of the day, who had been abandoned by radio. MTV became hugely popular and helped gain popularity for a wide variety of different music that might not have become nearly as popular otherwise.

In general, corporate interests will result in less risk taking and thus less diversity and less eccentric content. You see the same thing in hollywood, where there is massive risk aversion.

Which reminds me of the Space Shuttle. People thought that the Shuttle was well tested near the end of its run of 130-odd flights, but it really wasn't. Because those were operational flights, not test flights, every single one of them attempted to stay as much in the center of the performance envelope as possible. So the performance envelope of the Shuttle was not actually well known, despite having flown over 100 flights. The vast majority of content producers who rely on ad revenue make the same estimations about risk, and try to stay away from the edges of the "risk envelope" for profitable content, with obvious implications for diversity and quality. The only real solution is to greater enable individual content creation. In some respects the modern web is great at that, but for content such as existed back when the web was young and weird it is less so.

It's a risk-reward scenario.

When there wasn't as much content, the reward of finding a new blogger who would write about interesting things was worth the risk of reading boring tripe, because there weren't that many better options risk-reward wise.

Now, the choice is either a) read something completely unknown, which is just as likely to obey Sturgeon's Law as anything else, or b) read something from The Stream, which has been pre-vetted, and hence is likely to be of higher perceived quality.

Of course, the knock-on effect from that is that established writers and sites with an existing fanbase have a huge advantage, because they'll get into The Stream 100x as often.

The second effect is that the headline becomes far more important than the article, because there are two reasons that people check out an article that isn't already in The Stream - either because they recognise the author, or because they're intrigued by the headline. (On FB, you can add "or the image is really interesting"). A somewhat bland article with a great headline will get more views 99% of the time than a great article with a bland headline, in our current ecosystem. That was always the case, but The Stream amplifies it considerably.

The ongoing issues that Hacker News has with /new and actually enabling interesting content to bubble up is a microcosm of the larger issue. And if the HN team manage to solve those problems, that'll be a very, VERY interesting day...

I've got notes/ideas from 2011 that revolve around building a personalized online TV station. YouTube leanback from 2010 was the first major attempt at that. Load it up, videos start playing. Though it looks like they've opted for the choose-your-thumbnail layout now.

Once we're able to nail recommendation algorithms such that near-100% of all suggested content is perfect and desired by that user, game over. Just show them a stream of content. Don't let them pick and choose or require scrolling. Would be like turning on the TV and just getting constant dopamine triggers with no downtime. Videos, photos, text, whatever, perfectly tuned to your desires in that moment.

Internet drugs.

It's basically just a BCI short from wireheading.

It's a line of argument explored in 'Television is the New Television' by Michael Wolff; it more or less demolishes the narrative that television 'lost' the Internet.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Television-Is-New-Unexpected-Triumph...

Aye. When I hear people talking about "watching less television" (including myself), I substitute in "surfing social media" one-for-one with television time.

The internet becomes more mainstream and the more average person begins to engage. There will still be places like HN and the DW, just don't expect your article written for HN to get 50 likes and 7 shares.

This just makes me treasure the opinions of those that actually make it to HN.

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