That's an odd use of "traditional". Maybe I come from an older tradition, but my solution is to forget passive discovery. Instead of hoping someone else's algorithm will identify things for you, actively search for it yourself.
But.
How can I possibly sift through the MOUNTAINS of garbage on the internet to find good stuff? Who has that time?
If you don't know what you're looking for, wait and do something creative until you do have something to search out.
I would actually love to have a good algorithm that would scour all of the content of the web and recommend just the things I would like, but all the algorithms that exist seem bad at doing that.
oh, well... my two cents:
Before smartphones was the browser web. We had discoverability issues because very few search engines had a near monopoly (to put it politely), and there was no univerally good method to filter the magnitude of sites out there
Before that near monopoly we had a multitude of search engines, we even had engines-of-engines (look up "meta search"). Back then, we suffered from discoverability issues because of the sheer magnitude of web sites out there (to put it briefly)
Before those search engines we had a multitude of indexes, or lists. We even had lists-of-lists. Back then we suffered from discoverability probems because, well, even if we had only a minuscule fraction of the sites we had now, there was still no univerally good method to filter the magnitude of sites out there
And before that we had archives (essentially FTP servers), BBSes, and even physical paper based magazines. Even back then we had discoverability issues...
Go all the way back to physical libraries, and you had discoverability problems still. Paper scrolls? same. Mud bricks? same.
And way before writing, finding that wise person who was in the know about something would also be considered a "discoverability problem" methinks...
(when I was a child, I guessed the local library had more books than I could ever hope to read. Say 300k books at 2 books/day ~= 4 centuries)
Large AI models are the solution. We invented something that can more or less understand the impossible amount of content out there, and distill it in ways specific to each individual.
> It has to be local, it has to know you, and it has to be smart enough to navigate the world that’s thrown at it. There’s only one real answer.
there are minimally invasive mechanisms, like kongregate and that .io game site use, "people also played ..."; most aggregators suck, though. Netflix has always recommended stuff ("For you" or whatever) that i have no interest in, amazon recommends things that i would never buy - or have already bought, including from amazon. Pandora was awesome before everyone uploaded every song to youtube, now it's just a collection of playlists that play the same 20 songs over and over each time you start it.
I don't use and haven't used spotify or any other "music" service, because of pandora experiences and youtube. Also in my car i prefer to listen to old time radio which is easily discoverable* enough for at least a few years of content. Just copy to a USB stick and plug into the car. And my big issue with podcasts is i don't enjoy listening to most (nearly all) people just "talking", especially if they're chewing the scenery to make it more of a "captivating" experience.
I do miss mp3 streaming sites, though. My favorite one went dark during the pandemic, is still dark, and shoutcast dot com has sucked for discovery for at least half a decade if not longer. I think it's mostly popular in non-english speaking countries these days, at a glance.
* OTRR - old time radio researchers, there's otrrpedia and an online player available, the content itself lives on archive.org - i have about a TB of radioplays/content from there that i rotate through (only) in the car.
Reddit is ultimately the solution, but it was ruined because of the corporate clown car needing everything to be advertiser data consumer friendly. What I mean is that by creating a subreddit, you are creating your own aggregator. If your content is edgy, niche, etc. then it's almost impossible to find if not outright banned. And god forbid your niche actually does get popular, because then suddenly it must change by virtue of forced moderation, what's allowed, outsider influence, etc. All in the name of ads and getting a piece.
Advertising needs more regulation. In the West's 80s and 90s, we did get on track to crackdowns, but this was focused on children and protecting them. Now YouTube/Google/Alphabet is somehow able to avoid that legislation because..... ?
Today you don’t have to seek out the new, it’ll find you. It makes sense then to default to the things proven to be good, at least when you find yourself actively looking for something to read, watch, or listen to.
This is of course the opposite motivation to that of the people who write the pages. They (mostly) want you to go to their page.
But those authors aren’t Google’s target audience; they want to show an ad to their real audience.
I’d rather have a page of links but I know I’m an outlier so I don’t bother to get upset.
> sifting through twenty five types of tomato sauce
The examples here are strange. For the everyday products, you can't find out which one is the good one because they are no meaningful differences between most of them. The range of variants/colours/labels were cynically engineered to overwhelm you, occupy more display space, etc.
> Discovery trumps creativity in the era of abundance.
It always did -- before this 'era', I mean. e.g. You can't get your novel published without getting the publisher to read it first. It doesn't matter if its good if you can't get it discovered.
Even more true today.
Anyone who helps your senses stay sensible, becomes a kind of friend..
No.
It is wrong
