Seems like almost every creative industry (music, video games, art, writing) is having the same issue: Creation & publication tools are getting cheaper & easier to use, which means a lot more people can publish their creative ideas. With such a huge number of choices, discovery is now the issue.
IMO discovery of what is truly high quality is still an unsolved problem. Seems like recommendation systems generally just recommend things that are already popular. For someone that has zero following, but an interesting creative product, there's not much they can do. You're kind of relying on either "going viral" or hoping that someone with a lot of followers takes notice of your work and draws other people in.
> With such a huge number of choices, discovery is now the issue.
It's frustrating if people don't see that this is almost always a manufactured problem, not some an inevitable outcome of simply having more choices. Platforms want to disable the ability for users to differentiate between organic, self-directed discovery vs advertised or promoted content.
Discovery needs to be just good enough so that users won't leave, and if there's no alternatives in a space, even that doesn't matter. Having poor discoverability directly increases engagement and nevermind that engagement is high because doing simple things is painful, the take-away for your stock-price here will just be that you're explicitly user hostile and no one leaves, so you must have a captive audience.
Every notice how when you're looking for something obscure, you can only find something popular, and when you're looking for something popular, you can only find something obscure? It's not random, it's just the platform working out what profits the company the most.
In the case of streaming content for platforms like spotify/amazon prime, some content is cheaper for them to offer. The perfect user is someone who wants low-royalty or completely unencumbered content, because it's cheaper for the platform to license, but the end-user sees the same number of ads for the same length of time. The average user is also someone who can be tricked into being a perfect customer. Suppose the user is searching for RoboCop, and it is missing from the catalog. Terminator might be a better recc, but why not just offer the user some shitty CyborgCopIII instead, just to cut your costs and bump your profits, just in case the user is a sucker? If the user is not a sucker.. great, they'll type more searches, engagement is up, and platforms win either way.
Think about how much more data FAANG has than say, GoodReads. GoodReads is small enough that people just rank stuff and it works fine, and people curate lists, and you find what you like that way. It's not working because GoodReads has AI super-powers, it's working because they don't sabotage it away from working.
> Platforms want to disable the ability for users to differentiate between organic, self-directed discovery vs advertised or promoted content.
It's not just that platforms don't want you to know if what they're showing you is an ad or an organic result/recommendation, if they made it easy for people to find what they want then companies wouldn't have to pay them for prominent placement in the first place.
There's still a real problem (that AI will only make worse) with really good things being drowned out by a sea of garbage, but people wanting to act as gatekeepers (and collect tolls) only make the problem worse.
The problem isn’t manufactured or conspiratorial, it’s just baked into sorting so much content on so few metrics. And needing to account for what the user is currently in the mood for something specific, something generic.
My point is that GoodReads isn't popular enough for it to be profitable to sabotage (yet). And there's still a threat of something more relevant coming along. If they actually wanted to improve discovery for something like prime video/shopping, then they could/would copy what works from GoodReads.
Trusted (human) reviewers and critics are more important than ever to me. Like you said, lists of whatever's popular or trending are just... things that are trending. For good reasons or otherwise.
Meanwhile if I read a Richard Brody review I get a sense of whether a movie might be worth watching—even though we don't have identical taste, I've learned a lot about his, and now I know how his taste translates into reviews. Curation is totally the name of the game now.
The problem with that arrangement is that it doesn't scale: a tiny number of popular critics become the gatekeepers. Success in the field then depends entirely on somehow gaining the notice -- and good reviews -- of one of these few critics.
Countless other pieces of art are never noticed by anyone, countless talented artists are forced into day jobs and eventually abandon art -- no matter how high quality (for whatever definition of "quality" you prefer) -- simply because they were not able to catch the attention of one of the elite critics, for a variety of reasons, almost all unrelated to the quality of the work itself.
Back in the day there were some movie critics who I felt I could generally rely on, some I either mostly aligned with or realized we had different tastes in specific ways, and a few who I could reliably count on to be a counter-indication of what I would like.
But it may be a reflection of the modern media landscape but I don't have critics that I gravitate to any longer. Admittedly I couldn't even name the critics at publications I actually subscribe to.
Good discovery wouldn't solve this problem. One one hand, you have an ever-increasing pile of good content (all of the games, books, blogs, videos, podcasts, films that were created in the past) but people only have 24 hours per day to consume.
For example I've spent a huge amount of time playing a game that's over a decade old. And I'm reading a book that's from 1952.
I can't know precisely how good of a filter it is but I'm not interested in finding out a definite figure.
I have read enough great stuff from picking up a book from 300 BCE or so and I've seen enough BS ghost written flavor of the month non-fiction to know it's good enough heuristics to suggest it in this forum.
A filter can be good in a couple of ways: it can filter out ~all of what you don't want, and/or ~none of what you do want.
Time is a good filter in the first way, which makes it a good filter. Because a filter which doesn't substantially do the first of these things isn't actually filtering: the null filter filters none of what you do want, by failing to reduce the data stream in any way.
Great point. Editors are filters for what the general public sees. The analog here is probably BookTok or whatever the social media version of book influencers is. They similarly can be expected to promote what they like, or eventually lose authenticity and viewership. Or just start including cartoon sounds into every video.
Sometimes nobody really tries. It doesn't help that there are a lot of perverse incentive systems out there. I'm approaching this from mostly an Internet-centric perspective:
One observation I've made is that any story I first see by advertising is probably bad, even if I later see it elsewhere - if it were actually any good, I would've seen it in one of the non-advertising-based mechanisms first. But sites have a strong incentive to promote advertisements to the detriment of quality (and the inaccuracy of "hot" lists).
The "zero-initial-following" problem can be solved by showing each story to a random small subset of active readers (since, as big as the supply of crappy stories is, the demand is always higher). This should be smeared across time-of-day, rather than having a "new" queue subject to gamification. There also needs to be a quick "I'm not interested" feedback, with reasons including "breaks site rules", "bad story", "bad grammar", "bad initial hook", "bad continuation", "I just don't like it" (featured prominently), and "this story is badly tagged" (because both positive and negative tag searches should be the primary way of using any reading site).
Some particular ways that tagging implementations can fail:
* categories and tags are different things, thus a tag is often missing
* no tagging for things like "this a fanfiction of", "this is translated from", "author is not a native English speaker", ...
* tag names are ambiguous, meaning completely different things in different contexts
* tag names are contextual, providing a different shade of meaning depending on other tags
* tags are not prominently displayed when actually looking at a work
* user-made tags are permitted, so duplicates and typos are common
* user-made tags are not permitted and essential tags that people wish to search for (or hide) are missing
* hierarchial (DAG, not tree) tags are not supported, thus a tag is often missing (or if present the list takes up too much space)
* no way to specify tag degree (does this just show up in the background, or is it the focus of the work?)
* number of tags is artificially limited to a very small number
* tag is applied but applicable content doesn't appear yet (mostly relevant for when published serially)
Obviously with outright malicious actors, simply fixing these won't fix everything, but they are absolutely needed to function at scale for the honest actors.
> One observation I've made is that any story I first see by advertising is probably bad, even if I later see it elsewhere - if it were actually any good, I would've seen it in one of the non-advertising-based mechanisms first
A similar observation I've been finding lately is that if something is highly rated by critics and lowly rated by audiences, it probably sucks
I think the current batch of book/movie/game critics out there writing reviews are largely out of touch with what many people enjoy. They don't write useful reviews for consumers anymore
There's always accusations of review bombing being the culprit of such skewed scores, but even after sites claim they've culled all of the bad faith reviews, the ratio almost always still exists
>A similar observation I've been finding lately is that if something is highly rated by critics and lowly rated by audiences, it probably sucks
Perhaps there is less skew today given that film critics are probably less a high-brow big city newspaper thing overall. But certainly I wouldn't expect the average Friday night young cinema-goer to have the same tastes as the film critic for the New York Times.
I would expect the New York Times film reviewer to be able to deliver a review that would give the average Friday night young cinema goer a good idea if a film is worth their time, even if they aren't a film snob
From my readings of many film reviews lately, a lot of them really talk down towards people who are not as into cinema as they are
There certainly are review-bombing campaigns, which can be known with certainty when caught at the same time and from the same source as review-boosting campaigns.
Most bad reviews are well-deserved, even if they make the author feel bad. In particular, "people shouldn't downvote if they've only read 5 chapters" is an invalid complaint - as an author, your duty is to write a strong start! (I suspect some of these are actually tagging/description failures, but that's also the author's responsibility)
IMO discovery of what is truly high quality is still an unsolved problem. Seems like recommendation systems generally just recommend things that are already popular. For someone that has zero following, but an interesting creative product, there's not much they can do. You're kind of relying on either "going viral" or hoping that someone with a lot of followers takes notice of your work and draws other people in.