Comment by r3vrse
7 months ago
Neat! I have wondered how much of a foothold "retrograde" tech will take in the next 10-20 years.
Decision fatigue, nostalgia, attenuation — call it what you will. At some level we're tacitly acknowledging that the vast ocean of content and complexity we've created is beyond what is desirable or even healthy to effectively evaluate.
A very modern malaise. Excuse the armchair philosophizing.
> At some level we're tacitly acknowledging that the vast ocean of content and complexity we've created is beyond what is desirable or even healthy to effectively evaluate.
I don't think there's enough useful and organized information to evaluate. There's no reason for everyone to be stuck in a vast ocean of content labeled with a handful of vague categories, except that that's just the way that someone decided to make it.
If I want to figure out if I want to try a game, I can go to steam and watch a trailer, look at the tags, and still have no idea if the game is worth playing. How do I make a decision?
If I just watch 3 minutes of a lets play, or a live stream, I can get an idea of what the game is like. This youtube channels thing is giving us exactly that experience.
Opening a youtube video directly, on the other hand, is an entire ordeal. It's slow to load, takes up a bunch of ram, puts the video in your history and messes up the minigame of trying to micromanage the algorithm so you don't end up with bad recommendations. It's hard to just simply watch a few seconds of a bunch of videos to get a vibe.
There's so much low hanging fruit in terms of content organization/discovery, it drives me insane that the experience is generally so bad, and getting worse.
Clay Shirky gave a talk on this years ago (also I think it's a blog post) called "It's not information overload, it's filter failure". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI
There's certainly a market for it among the older crowd, but for those who've spent their formative years consuming content in the Netflix / Youtube era ... you can't miss what you've never had. I do echo the decision fatigue complaint - there is simply too much content out there to meaningfully engage with. The downsides of living in such a connected world ...
This is actually very untrue. It sound right but it's not. A lot of the younger crowd takes to analogue devices as bees to honey when they've had a chance to use it. Vinyl is a growth market. Tapes are being collected. Even film roll companies are experiencing year over year growth. Since their demise 10 years earlier. I think it's because all these things are not "nothing" you can destroy them, lose them, sell them, buy them, own them, give them away, hold them, they are unique and hard to copy.
I'm fairly young. One of the first things I want to do now that I start to get grown-up money is buying a decent record player and some vinyls.
This is actually making me think about how I watch programs when I dont really need to focus in on anything. I wonder if there is a plug-in where you can spin the wheel between types of media to watch and it selects one for you.