Comment by citruscomputing
2 years ago
So, question to all -- how have you found success at locating the fruits of this "vibrant anarchy?"
Here's an interesting, related link, that's very obviously coming from a certain perspective but still has things you can take [0].
Here are some strategies I use for books:
Go to the library and walk down a random shelf until a book calls to you. You can run your fingers down the spines and feel for the energy of the right book.
The opposite (however, somewhat sideways, rather than top-down) is pulling books from the "someone just returned this" section. And the books suggested by librarians.
I will also do full-text searches of my somewhat large library of ebooks, which gives equal weight to popular and unknown authors.
Randomness, with uncommon items weighted somewhat equal to common ones, and direct recommendations that bypass algorithmic feeds seem to work somewhat well for me as general strategies.
[0] https://www.epsilontheory.com/25-anti-mimetic-tactics-for-li...
> So, question to all -- how have you found success at locating the fruits of this "vibrant anarchy?"
I've found that live music offers one of the best mechanisms for this. You start out with interest in <major band>, and go see their show. They're on tour with <midsize band> opening for them. You like <midsize band>'s set, so you go see them when they headline a show a few months later. Since they're a smaller band, it's a smaller show, so they have <small band> opening for them. You like <small band>'s set so you later go see them play with <local band>, and so forth.
As the shows get smaller it becomes more common for there to be 3-4 bands on the bill, so the rate of exposure increases. Combine that with the greater sense of community that's common at smaller shows as well as mechanisms like Spotify's related artists and it becomes easier and easier to find new music the deeper you get.
It would be cool if a similar thing was more common with other art forms. What if more movies were preceded by a short from an up and coming director (like Pixar tends to do)? Trailers fill a similar role, but not quite the same. Or what if books included a few recommendations from the author rather than just a list of other books from the publisher?
That is a fantastic idea.
I always thought it would be interesting to have a compendium of "artists' artists." Like, ask some of the most talented people in a given genre to give their recommendations.
Sometimes you get this with longer-form interviews of artists, but those often have a lot of details to sift through.
For books, literary magazines are good: the good ones publish good authors, who recommend good authors. But they're clique-y and only sort of fill the role.
I have resorted to find individual curators of vibrant anarchy. Reddit and Youtube are the most common sources.
RedLetterMedia helps me find weird movies without any mainstream appeal. r/NearProg, r/ListenToThis and r/progmetal are how I find weird experimental rock artists.
For books, some subreddits has a 'I have finished book X, what should I read next?' thread. That's a good way to do Markov-Chain-esque random walk. Another is to simply rely on my favorite podcasters and bloggers. Books are a long commitment and hard to 'figure out' in a minute or an hour. So, I rarely resort to low quality and high coverage searchers like I do with music or TV media.
I did a project where I worked my way through the Dewey Decimal System, reading one book from each decade along the way. Other than the arbitrary choices of the first and last book on the shelves as I read through the DDC and one stretch of ten DDC classifications where there were only two choices of book to read, I did let myself choose from the books rather than making it purely random, but it was a great way to experience a wide variety of different topics over the course of seven(!) years.¹ https://www.dahosek.com/category/dewey-decimal-project/
⸻
1. It’s possible that I might have finished a few months sooner had Covid-related library closures not slowed me down a bit in 2020.
Your ideas could potentially be encoded in a better ranking/recommender _algorithm_ ..
ie. recommenders using something akin to page-rank could/should inject some random items so as to allow new content to bubble up and good new content to be voted up.
It seems nature does something similar - copying DNA pretty accurately, yet allowing for some mutations to advance things and adapt to a changing environment.