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Comment by FullstakBlogger

7 months ago

> 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