Comment by jedberg

Music YouTubers are the curation now. Anthony Fantano is most famous in this scene but there are many others

> But what's missing is a shared cultural experience

This is my problem with the proliferation of streaming platforms when it comes to movies and TV. We’ve arguably got more and better content than we’ve ever had. But I find myself far less motivated to watch it. I used to watch content anticipating the conversations I’d have with friends and colleagues. Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it’s 30 seconds of, “Have you seen …?” “No, have you seen …?” “No.” Until we give up and talk about something else.

It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.

> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.

Of course they do. The music director is now the recommendation algorithm of each platform (as mentioned), and so what you'll find is that like-minded people have very similar recommendations in their feeds. There are also meta profiles on these platforms who instead of making their own content, "curate" and reshare content within (or from out of) the platform. And what disparities do arise, people undo them organically by sharing content with each other in different channels anyways. This is how things go "viral".

It's actually kind of scary how people can convince themselves into ideas like yours here. One would think you live in a different world or something. This is the same world where memes and viral social media posts are everyday news topics. It's where blockbuster movies and TV shows continue to exist, where GTA6's release will cause a billion dollar revenue loss to the economy in lost workhours, and so on.

> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.

You observe correctly but the conclusion is incorrect. You fail to take into account that year-, location- and interest-based cohorts of kids tend to follow the same influencers, and thereby consume the same content.

The problem for outside observers is that without the platform's data we cannot identify the cohorts and thereby cannot distinguish between the groups.

This logic follows a set-based approach to social media analytics called social set analysis pioneered by a research group at which I later did my PhD.

I think kids nowadays likely still have a shared cultural experience like we did when we were young. We're just, separated from that experience. Just like our parents were when we were young.

Maybe they can't (or don't want to, out of fear of being embarrassed or feeling uncool/uncertain perhaps) explain to you how they find things, but when they are hanging out with their friends and are talking about similar interests, discovering they know about similar things, and sharing things they know about that their friends don't yet/learning similar things from their friends, that's where the magic happens.

Gianmarco Soresi discussed this on an episode of his podcast.

He says how there used to be a number of nationally known comedians who could make jokes that appealed to everyone's shared cultural experience, but now that's effectively impossible because a) culture isn't tied to geography / location, and b) niches are much more prevalent. I loved the example that huge venues can now often be sold out for artists you've never heard of.

On one hand it's not neccessarily a bad thing since individuals are getting more of what truly appeals to them, but I also think that the result could be increasing the barrier to connect with others because it decreases the chances that you'll have interests in common.

Among those that read and study the Bible:

A hundred years ago, everyone used the King James Version of the Bible.¹ Poorly though it reflected the common language², it was a shared experience, and things like memorisation and making and recognising scriptural allusions were straightforward, because everyone used the same words. Now, a wide variety of Bible translations are in common use, some more accurate than the KJV, some more loose paraphrases, all more understandable. There are some big advantages in this variety and modernity—but we have lost something. The shared experience had a virtue of its own, quite a significant one.

—⁂—

¹ OK, by a hundred years ago the RV and ASV were used in some areas, but it was mostly as a distant extra to the KJV, not replacing it.

² I understand that some of it was already becoming archaic, or at least overly formal, when it was published, such as thee/thou (singular you). The fact is, it was “appointed to be read in Churches”, and they wanted it to sound impressive. Compare it with Tyndale’s translation almost a hundred years earlier, and Tyndale’s generally reads much more easily—because Tyndale wanted uneducated people to be able to understand the Bible.³

³ “And sone after Maister Tyndall happened to be in the companie of a learned man, and in communing and disputing with him, drove him to that issue that the learned manne sayde, we were better be without Gods lawe, then the Popes: Maister Tyndall hearing that, answered hym, I defie the Pope and all his lawes, and sayde, if God spare my lyfe ere many yeares, I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall knowe more of the scripture then thou doest.” — John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), page 570.

I am not sure if I agree.

I feel like social media trough its amplification has lead to a global sync in topics and experiences.

I’d argue a kid growing up India or China shares much more culturally today with a western Kid than 30 years ago.

Take the news for example. Last weeks it was tariffs. The entire world was talking about the same thing.

To the contrary I feel like we are living more and more in the same global reality going from one headline to the next every week.

Disagree. Eberyone is on the same websites, seeing the same memes, listening to the same music. Its just not from a radio. The curation process happens via social media consumption where the most popular sthff floats to the top. There is absolutely still a shared cultural experience, youre just not hip to it.

When we were kids, just knowing music that wasn't on the radio made you "into music". Things were very different! The internet has really allowed music choices to be much more personal and I think it's a good thing. We have such a wide variety of music available to us now.

I've had some luck finding some TikTok creators who curate specific "vibes" and publish Spotify playlists. I think that's just how it's done now.

Jerry Pournelle wrote about this, I think I recall reading in USENET; how with the burgeoning availability of media, the role of the editor, the curator, would become critical.

He thought well and deeply about the challenges of the growing net.

> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.

Heh, I told my kid this today on the way to dropping him off with a friend. We were listening to The Rest is History, about the Rolling Stones. They made the point that this common cultural experience started to become a thing roughly in the 60s.

When I was a kid, there were things that you just could not avoid. It was the same in many places: there was a national broadcaster, and maybe a second and third TV station. There were only so many things you could watch. Whatever TV series, music, or sports were on, you could be sure everyone else was also watching it.

It started changing in the 1990s where I grew up, completely changing from the start to the end. You got a bunch of channels. You could watch news from America and other places, which maybe deserves a footnote about immigrants being able to watch something from faraway for the first time. More options everywhere, but there was still momentum. You still watched the national news on the main stations, and sports was still there too. They also tended to curate the "best" foreign shows, so you didn't have to wait to get your dose of America.

Now that's finished. Everything is private now, you can watch whatever you want on your own screen (TVs got really cheap. When I was a kid, people would congratulate you when you bought a new one, like it was a car. Now I have more TVs than I can use.) You don't have to watch things at the scheduled time anymore, and you don't have to arrange your life around when the episodes come out.

The kids now watch a wider variety of content. There's still "local" fads that are maybe restricted to friendship groups, instead of being national phenomena. For instance my kid and his friends ended up watching One Piece, a Japanese production. But I never ran into other kids who were into it.

I also dare to say that the kids now watch lower quality content. This was already a thing when we got flooded with channels in the 1990s. There was a heck of a lot of mediocre crap on those 100 extra channels. But now it's a whole new world of terrible. Yes, I'm an old man. But it does seem like having curation would mostly bubble the good things to the top, and so when the curation went away, you got more stuff, but worse stuff. Similar to consumer products, the items at your department store tended to be reasonable, but when there's a webshop where you can buy anything at all, you have to sort through a pile of low quality stuff yourself.

There are plenty of internet radios like NTS which are all about curated discovery. It's worth checking out if that's your thing!

I am confused. Spotify and Netflix both have recommendation engines that include a wide variety of factors, including popularity with other users and "closeness" to your favourite musical styles. I assume these are AI/ML models of some sort. Essentially, these automated engines have replaced the music director from 1990s radio stations.

"Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did."

they did, they just have different algos for that. I found italian brainrot meme and what surprising it was so popular for kids, like tens of millions of views

seems like Trends are more personalize now, what popular song that adult like is different with younger audience like

its like having different Trends that live on bubble

i like how you frame "shared cultural experience" which was mainly scarcity and lack of access due to less distribution channels as nowadays :-)

"Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did."

I think this is two claims -- AFAICT kids do have a shared cultural experience, but it is true it's not like yours, or mine. The Spotify playlists are one way they find new music, TikTok being another, movies/TV shows, or word of mouth.

What some folks may have found useful about radio playing gatekeeper and music directors choosing 40 songs per week (they didn't) others of us found stifling.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s in a small town on outskirts of St. Louis. We could get a few classic rock/AOR stations (KSHE, KSD) and starting in the early 80s there was "hit radio" KHTR which almost quite literally followed the 40 songs per week model...

There's tons of music I didn't* discover in the early 80s, such as The Smiths, that I only happened on later because of strong gatekeeping via radio.

In the 90s we got KPNT ("the point") which was alternative rock and more adventurous than KHTR, and by then I also had a car and access to the good record stores in St. Louis. I amassed a large CD collection and stopped listening to the radio almost entirely excepting some college radio, and kept up with new music via Rolling Stone, Spin, etc. Even bought some albums based entirely on their reviews without having heard them at all.

All of that long and rambly comment to say... I like music discovery today far more than I did in my youth, 20s, and early 30s. I skim Bandcamp regularly for new music, watch questions about music on Ask Metafilter, and have found YouTube Music's algorithm to be decent. (e.g., pick a song, make it a "radio" station and add songs I haven't heard before but like to my library.)

It is true that I rarely find folks to discuss music with because I am not listening to mainstream music much. That part sucks -- but few people my age seem to care about music deeply.

* Almost certainly the music director for your local station was subscribed to a service that provided a weekly list of songs to program, rather than choosing them themselves. I worked part-time in radio while in college, taking weekend and evening/midnight-6 a.m. shifts, in Washington MO and Kirksville MO. KSLQ (adult contemporary), KRXL (classic rock/AOR), KTUF (country) and KIRX (talk, sports) were all largely getting program direction from national syndicated programming. The local music director might have used some discretion in choosing / filtering out some songs, but they were likely getting the direction from a service.

I always think it would be useful for radio stations to keep logs of their playlists.

I do check out mit radios list from time to time. It’s somewhat useful to know the names of the shows that play music you like..

https://track-blaster.com/wmbr/

> But what's missing is a shared cultural experience. In the 90s, everyone at my school knew those 40 songs that the local stations played. They might know other stuff too, but you couldn't avoid those top songs. It's not the same today. And it's the same problem for visual media. We all knew the top movies at the theater, because it was the only place to see new movies. And we all knew the top TV shows because they were only on four major networks.

I mean, there's certainly greater diversity (particularly for music, stuff outside of the mainstream always existed, of course, but the barrier to entry was far higher then than now), but there's still a large shared _core_ of content.

> When I was a teen in the 90s, I got new music from the radio. The music director picked 40ish songs a week and that's what we listened to.

Those Top 40 singles were spoon-fed to you by Clear Channel within a very limited selection from the Top 5 major record labels.

> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.

I tend to think that humans historically have had very isolated, independent experiences. It is only recently with mass media that we all share a collective experience.

I take your point that kids today are not having a shared one-directional (tv to person) experience. However, they are sharing apps, with that data being intermediated. It is uni-directional too, so more immersive.

I tend to see technology, and the direction of travel, as highly collectivising rather less of a shared cultural experience. Everyone is endlessly exposed to exciting ideas and content that are not self-generated.

So, collectivised thinking UP, independent thinking DOWN.

Yes, I agree. I think we're at the point where tastes are more important than ever and how to differentiate in this new AI slop world.

No fancy algorithm or AI tool will replace human curation with good tastes (or what you think is good taste)

I dig this for music curation: https://ghostly.com/

If anyone has other similar links I'd love to see them.

> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.

Schools don't have bullies?

That's the extent of my shared cultural experience as a kid.

> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.

I suppose you didn't have the same cultural experience as your parents. That's how culture works - it changes over time.

Interesting you mentioned movies because I think movies are resurgent now where it seems like everyone is seeing all the new releases. I can hardly book imax anymore because they book up a month in advance and are booked up a month out and then they pull it from the imax theater to make room for the next thing to be fully booked out a month out. There is serious demand it seems to keep up with the latest movies especially when it is offered in higher fidelity like imax and 70mm releases.