> You cannot rely on people being responsible with substances and mechanisms that make them behave irresponsibly. That's the whole point of regulating addictive things.
This statement is so profoundly simple and rational and true.
My childhood was severely impacted by addiction in the family, and “It’s A Disease” is a refrain I’ve heard from every doctor and group therapist and concerned friend and public health official.
The problem with “It’s A Disease” is that when you have a drug-addicted family member, you spend years or decades being trapped in extremely emotionally complicated and potentially catastrophic situations over and over again, and often the ONLY way to break free of it is to do things, say things, and make decisions that are very deeply hurtful to both you and your own family. Things you’re not proud of, that no reasonable or kind or loving person would ever say or do to somebody merely for having a disease.
“It’s A Disease” turns the addict into an innocent victim of their own family.
Anyway, I’ve always thought the cyclic part of drug addiction was desire -> gratification -> withdrawal, with negative behaviors as a consequence of that. Seeing drug addiction as a cycle of one’s behavior toward a substance being altered by that very same substance, literally never even occurred to me. I can accept that and not blame myself or my family. Thank you.
> b) To attempt to diversify from this single source of income. Except this will never happen, nothing will ever come close to the income ads generate for them. They know this, but they have to look like they’re trying, both internally and externally.
I’ve heard a lot of people repeat this, and I don’t think I understand where it’s coming from.
Advertising is just a revenue model, it’s not something a company necessarily needs to diversify. This seems to me like saying Walmart is in a precarious position because all their revenue comes from sales.
It’s the product offering that needs diversification. Walmart can’t only sell coconuts.
The ad revenue is coming from pretty diversified sources: search, video/tv, maps, email, calendar, web browser, mobile …
My point is that all their eggs are in one basket, in an industry that is particularly prone to disruption. Additionally, as others have since commented, they are also at risk of regulation. So if they want to protect themselves they need to diversify, find other revenue streams.
Former Pokémon TCG enthusiast (circa 1999) here! Kids back then had the same approach, large and heavy coin, flip from a consistent height, consistent strength. Heads every time.
There were popular coins made specifically for Pokémon TCG then, and they happened to be large and thick and plastic and heavy, so the cheating was widespread.
I was one of the many kids who did this routinely. But there was one kid who took first place nearly every week, out of a field of 50+ entrants. “He must cheat the coin, AND be an amazing deck builder and card player on top of that”, I thought.
Then one week I was matched against him, winner goes to top 8.
Our decks were nearly identical, I could flip heads every time, I was a strong player. “50-50” I thought.
Turn one. Retreat Scyther, in Electabuzz, Thundershock. I flip my giant coin, and before it flattens, he picks it up and hands it back to me. “Flip it higher please.”
He must know I’m cheating. I assumed he must be cheating too though, every other kid is, and he wins this tournament every week!
Guilty, I flipped the coin fair this time, higher. Before it flattens he picks it up again, hands it back to me. “Higher please.”
I lost every coin flip that match. He won, went to the top 8, later won the tournament for the nth week in a row.
It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized how he was winning every tournament. In a field full of cheaters trying to flip heads every time, all he had to do was wait for the coin to enter that terminal spinning motion every coin does right before it flattens. Well practiced at this, if he sees that it’s about to flatten heads, he quickly grabs it and hands it back to you. “Higher please.” Repeat until the coin flattens tails.
His tactic was a silver bullet in a field full of flip cheaters. Nobody ever questioned his intentions when he grabbed the coin and asked for a higher flip.
Funny, but I was hoping this might provide some insight into why my Spotify is so bad, even by my own tastes.
Spotify constantly queues and recommends songs to me that are so bad, I can’t even imagine how there could possibly exist any data indicating that any significant sample of listeners has ever enjoyed hearing them. Spotify has 5+ years of my listening history, and orders of magnitude more data from listeners all over the world, and yet every time I set it to recommend anything to me I just sit there pressing “skip” repeatedly until I give up.
I always blamed myself, thought I was just becoming old and curmudgeonly in my 30s. But yesterday I finally discovered the problem isn’t with me. I switched to Apple Music, and it queued up 50 songs I’d never heard, and I enjoyed almost all of them.
I can use my HomePod now, too. I’m really loving Apple Music so far, highly recommend it to anyone who thinks their Spotify account is permanently broken like mine was.
I'm not typically one to buy into conspiracy theories, but I really can't help but wonder if the Spotify algorithm favors songs that have more favorable licensing terms.
Two years ago they were already shoving Drake all over paid subscribers' playlists[0]
I've paid for spotify for more than a decade and I definitely wasn't pleased to have every single playlist recommending an artist I don't like, and it was just ridiculous how EVERY[1] playlist had his photo regardless of the genre.
I had exactly the same feeling. The daily recommendations contain 80% from albums I've either already downloaded or liked (or auto-liked, which was also a very annoying thing I had for a while). The remaining 20% is recommendations of different songs of the same artists mostly.
With New releases it is different. If I ever play, say, a song someone else sent me to listen to in a different genre, then it screws up my recommendations here for months, sometimes forever.
I'm surprised that they haven't taken a page out of Netflix's book: sign small artists that sound close enough to what's popular to their own internal record label and push them in playlists?
Don't wonder. Just be realistic. Did you ever work in an IT business environment? Remember the situations when good taste slowly morphed into business interests? Yeah, that's natural in a capitalist environment.
By no chance spotify dodged that bullet. Positivity and goodwill is fine but don't spare anyone from corruption.
Counter anecdote: I've built up playlists full of tracks from good recommendations from Spotify. The genres are relatively niche and electronic (sub-genres of house, techno, uk garage, electronica, etc). The only downside is it gets a bit too eager to recommend the most played few tracks from a given artist, but I've discovered a lot of new artists this way though.
I remember that my suggestions were pretty obscure the last time I tried the spotify algo. But actually it is pretty natural that they suggest niche or less known artists because those have shittier deals and are less expensive to stream. Also, in that position you don't want to promote the top artists for free.
> might provide some insight into why my Spotify is so bad, even by my own tastes.
That's just Spotify. The AI did a better job of figuring out what I like (138 and uplifting trance) than Spotify does (EDM). I blame it in Armin van Buuren: he is an extremely popular EDM DJ and he plays a very wide variety of EDM. If you listen to EDM chances are he has at least a few dozen sets you'd enjoy. That's the problem: he's prolific and he connects every genre of EDM to every other genre of EDM. He's a "super-connector" and I could easily see how this wrecks recommendation algorithms, all roads lead to Armin.
Basically: recommending music is not the same as recommending goods, and I think the same approach is being used.
Good point. I started to notice a lot of the Spotify recommendations sounded like half of an EDM track I might like, mixed with half of something that it should’ve never been mixed with.
Spotify also seems to think I’ll like literally anything with a house kick.
It’s an extremely difficult problem to solve though so they have my sympathy!
Nobody can really explain why they love one song and hate another, and the overlap of the Venn diagram between any two people is usually very small.
I can eat any dish at a restaurant and think it’s not very good, just ok, pretty good, great, or amazing. The same for any movie, TV show, painting, drink, book, article, ... but for a song, I either like it, love it, or hate it so much that I can’t stand it.
Music recommendation algorithms have such a narrow surface area to land on, and when they miss, they go right into a volcano.
Wow, a mention of Armin van Buren! I wonder how much discovery of his work is just happenstance. His track is the first thing on Google and Bing that gets thrust into your face when you search for "this is a test".
That's my default browser bar search term for checking that my interwebs are still wired up, and I've often thought that this was either genius or a really happy accident.
I don't think that's a bad thing per se, if the algorithm correctly identifies that you like EDM. We then come to the micro-genre discussion - how specific are you in your tastes, and how precise is the algorithm required to be?
Fans of any genre say this. If you don't like metal then it's all loud guitars and screaming. When you do like metal there is fractal complexity of subgenres all the way down.
Same here. Wonderful playlists. Constant exposure to new music. This discussion seemed to get people in the mood for the airing of grievances, so here we are.
Just a couple of months ago Spotify temporarily blocked playlist exporting and there was an uproar. And it turned out that a lot of the uproar was about those Spotify automagically created playlists. Read some sentiments, coupled with some Apple Music comparative opinions, here-
I guess it just turns out that maybe Spotify isn't for all people. Nor is Apple Music. Some discussions just draw out the edges from whatever side and it becomes the narrative.
If I remember correctly, they blocked API access for one user because that user was violating the API usage terms, namely exporting Spotify's content (their playlists) to competing services. I actually though that was pretty reasonable of them.
I wasn't aware that playlists can be copyrighted. And what's the difference between someone mechanically scraping playlists (because, quite frankly, spotify alter their playlists all the time -- I've experienced this with the Soul playlists they have), and someone hiring people via mechanical turk or getting 3 other people together to make text-based lists?
> I wasn't aware that playlists can be copyrighted.
I Am Not A Lawyer, but "a curated collection of units-of-art" seems like a very reasonable thing to protect access to, independently of ownership of the actual units-of-art themselves (overly-generic terminology is intentional, since although we're discussing playlists here, the same argument could be made for, for instance, "a particular framing/hanging of visual arts")
> And what's the difference between someone mechanically scraping playlists [...], and someone hiring people via mechanical turk or getting 3 other people together to make text-based lists?
What type of difference are you interested in?
* Effective difference in terms of output? None.
* Spotify's desire to prevent people from doing so? None (they would want to provide both - and justifiably so, IMO, since, again, the playlist _itself_ is their own (algorithm's) creation).
* Likelihood of evading prevention? The MTurk solution is less likely to get shut down, for sure. That doesn't mean that you have magically gotcha'd copyright and that corporation will cease trying to protect their IP, it just means that you have found the next step in the arms race.
> I Am Not A Lawyer, but "a curated collection of units-of-art" seems like a very reasonable thing to protect access to
I'm going to need a citation on playlists specifically being protected under copyright. I'm not sure how you can claim that what is effectually a simple plaintext list of things can be copyrighted. What original content there is being put under copyright?
As you already stated, they do not alter the music itself in the way that a rearrangement would, most media players provide fade-in/out functionality so they cannot claim that is unique, and they do not provide any supplimentary content to enhance the experience, at least not in the same way that a book published list, or internet top ten list would ordinarily provide some kind of commentary on the items.
What you're claiming here is effectually that, not even the content, but the mere titles of every single "top 50 foos" list on the internet can be copyrighted. Or that the rearranging of a book's chapters without any change to the contents, can itself fall under copyright
I'm not sure how anyone could think that this is at all a reasonable position to have? It's baffling, to be quite honest.
> I'm going to need a citation on playlists specifically being protected under copyright
And I'm not going to give you one, because, as I said, I Am Not A Lawyer (and even if I was, you're not paying me to be). But, regardless, note that I made no reference to copyright whatsoever - I said "this seems like a very reasonable thing to protect access to". I'm making no reference to law whatsoever - just to what _I_ think is reasonable for a corporation to protect. You are free to disagree.
> they do not provide any supplimentary content to enhance the experience, at least not in the same way that a book published list, or internet top ten list would ordinarily provide some kind of commentary on the items.
The collection _is_ the supplementary content. If a Spotify playlist was a quasi-random collection of tracks from across the entire catalogue, then you'd be right, but they're not - the playlists are curated and specifically chosen to fit some niche (genre, artist-relation, time period, etc.). By virtue of _being in a playlist called_ (e.g.) "1940's Smooth Jazz", the songs are demarcated as being a) relevant to the particular criteria, and b) of a high-enough "quality" (whatever that means) that they have been chosen. So, yes, the plaintext-listing of those song titles _would_ have some value, just like a list of "(only the titles of the) top ten sci-fi novels of 2019" would have some value. I would, for instance, value such a list more-highly if it came from someone whose taste in sci-fi I respect and resonate with.
> What you're claiming here is effectually that, not even the content, but the mere titles of every single "top 50 foos" list on the internet can be copyrighted
Again, I'm intentionally _not_ touching on issues of copyright as legal status - but, yes, I am absolutely suggesting that someone who has gone to the effort of curating a "top 50 foos" list, _and_ of associating it with a powerful taste-making brand like Spotify's, would be justified in perceiving that list _itself_ as a valuable and protection-worthy creation.
---
After the cut because it's less relevant to the discussion, but:
> that the rearranging of a book's chapters without any change to the contents, can itself fall under copyright
I mean...if you _don't_ see how it could be possible for someone to remix the content of an existing artwork into a conceptually-new work, by making statements _with_ the playing-with-form, then I think we're just looking at art from fundamentally different perspectives and are never going to agree. If you truly _do_ want to understand my perspective, you might try thinking about how the consumption of art is affect by the context of how it is consumed and presented, not just the sequence of bytes/soundwaves/visual-elements that compose it.
+1 for the general fantasticness. I use the app on my iphone - no problems whatsoever. They even recently updated their watch app to stream directly (without the phone being nearby). Apple music has had this feature for a while.
It feels like it's a self-fulfilling spiral of bad music. The more I listen to the recommended music, the more of the same crap keeps getting recommended to me. Even if I skip them.
I remember that Spotify actually had pretty good recommendations when I first started using it at the start of this year, because I had only listened to the songs I actually liked so far. But now I'm lucky if I find one decent song out of a hundred recommended ones.
Seems there is exactly the same sort of discussion on another HN thread about poor recommendations from YouTube, also leading into a spiralling decline to more and more rubbish
Yeah. I've commented about this in the past. I have two YouTube accounts in different languages. One has great recommendations. One is terrible.
I wonder for the one with terrible recommendations if I fell into a particular failure spiral: YouTube tried to give me some new stuff for a period, but I happened to not like any of it. The AI noted I was just clicking suggestions from my subscriptions. It eventually tried different recommendations. I didn't like those either, and clicked videos I'd seen before from my subscriptions. Eventually the AI decided I only like watching videos for channels I'm subscribed to, and now doesn't recommend me stuff outside of that. Even when I branch out into a new area, it no longer suggests related channels or anything like that.
It's not just media. Every year or so I reinstall the Swype keyboard and it works great. But after about a month or two it 'learns' from my jokey misspellings or starts learning a lot of my more obscure vocabulary and starts muddying up the very basic level of Swyping I actually want it to do.
It works great when it types out phrases as I swype and I go back and edit in whatever jokes, memes, or 10 dollar words I want to include. It starts to suck when it starts trying to include those into its predictions.
There's like a sweet spot of machine learning beyond which the machine gets more annoying than helpful.
Hilariously I just switched from Apple Music to Spotify and had the exact opposite experience! I wonder if recommendations get "stale" so you get bad ones, where as if you switch services you get recommendations based on different data sets so they're temporarily better.
In my experience Spotify's recommendations for my big anything-goes playlist are terrible, but the one's for my smaller playlist for mostly British D&B music (https://open.spotify.com/track/22Z4p2gRkDPqmw8DgVixML?si=jeb... - for a taste of the genre) can give very specific and quite good recommendations of smaller artists.
I can't speak to Spotify but YouTube Music seems to do a good job with recommendations. If I start by seeding it with a "radio station" built off an artist I enjoy a lot of the follow-up music is enjoyable and helps me to discover new bands. YouTube Music even has a free ad-supported tier, which is nice.
Hahahaha YouTube has 8 years of my Google Play Music listening history, as well as my entire music library I uploaded back in 2012 when Zune (later XBM/Groove) got killed.
I started it on "The Little Things Give You Away" by Linkin Park, and let it play. For a while it was alright, it gave me chill downtempo kinda emo music selections with some like newer stuff from Linkin Park and like Green Day.
Normally I listen to slow/soft shit from bands like 3 Days Grace, Breaking Ben, 3 Doors Down, My Chemical Romance, Good Charlotte and so on with my Linkin Park (especially the Minutes to Midnight album), so Green Day and Fall Out Boy aren't bad per se even though I like my older stuff. And I do have lots of playlists with GD + LP + FOB + other random pop punk bands.
But then it started throwing in shit like NF, Machine Gun Kelley, Eminem, Logic, then D12, Run DMC, DMX. The Smart DJ on my decade old Zune HD does a better job at building a playlist and recommending music (with the same library).
Pandora, Last.fm, GPM (after 8 years it finally started to "get" me FUCK YOU GOOGLE), Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, etc. They have all done this to me, they all inevitably end up playing some sort of rap, or move to super modern pop music. I do not understand it at all beyond 'it makes them money'.
I do listen to rap music, and I do like listening to those groups and artists. I have quite a few playlists built with just that music, and aside from Eminem, they do not intersect with my emo/punk/rock playlists. If I start listening to Linkin Park, I am never going to want to go from there to early 2000s rap.
I. Don't. Give. A. Rats. Ass. if every other person on the planet listens to Linkin Park with Eminem and DMX. I don't and I tell them every time I play a song or build a playlist, or skip, or remove a recommendation what I like and don't like.
Why can my deprecated Zune appreciate that and keep my genre interests separate and accurate and a billion dollar AI algo can't?
I made the same assumption about what the link was going to be about.
My solution to terrible music algorithms this year has been to, well, give up on them entirely, and go back to the world of curated music. When Google Play Music died, and YouTube Music left an even worse experience in its place, I was done. So now people curate my music instad of machines. Whether that's in the form of letting the artist curate it for me with albums, letting myself curate my favorites with playlists, or letting a DJ curate music discovery on a streaming radio station, I find that humans do it better.
College radio stations (and their streams) are great, by the way. I can't evangelize them enough. Minimal or no ads, and some of the most interesting and creative sets I've heard in my life.
Music algorithms didn't use to (or seem to) be terrible when the initial data they fed on was already curated music collections. It allowed the algorithm to really learn what you liked then provide recommendations from people with very similar music libraries.
Now it seems that everyone is listening to songs and albums based on recommendations based on what everyone else is listening to, which is also based on recommendations, so you don't find what you really like, you find what everyone else likes and it creates a feedback loop of mediocre garbage totally unspecific to your tastes. And if you try to break out of the loop you land in a loop with people who "broke out of the loop" and you get caught in the cycle again with weirder shit. Rinse and repeat until it pigeonholes you into some inescapable nether of music you might nearly but not really be into.
I would also like to plug Green River College's radio station 89.9 KGRG FM. It has an app and I've never heard a better modern Rock/Metal station
Their recommendation engine is really bad IMO. I was hoping for a futuristic machine learning + listening based recommendation engine that could find similar songs based on what they actually sound like. Mostly they just find songs based on what other playlists your song exists in. It's really boring and not good at finding new music for me. It does OKAY and it isn't why I use Spotify, but I can't help but feel like they are missing the boat here. I remember working with Gracenote software like 15 years ago and it could fingerprint songs and find similar music at least that long ago.
e: my overall sentiment on Spotify is very positive, I just wish recommendations were better.
Pretty good! I tried it with some random cross-genre combinations of stuff I like and it found a bunch of other fairly niche bands I like. Looking forward to trying out the other recommendations. Works fine for genres other than punk & metal btw.
Blog post below on how the hate5six creator made this algorithm. Boils down to using the lyrics and community listening habits from last.fm to build a similarity graph for artists, then community detection to group similar artists.
Similar experience for me - they always shuffle me most awful songs ever - I could never rely on their algorithms to the extent that no matter the mood/kind/playlist I choose, I end up skipping 20 songs that are just horrible and I just quit Spotify.
I wonder how much better algorithm could be if they'd recognise a skip within 10 seconds of a song as "no, bad choice, never play it again".
After playing an album I select (usually soundtracks), Spotify falls into a tiny selection of 10-20 tracks that it plays on shuffle forever. It appears music discovery is incredibly poor.
...I'm also afraid to play something for my son, then the recommendations while coding will surely be polluted by that; just like if you play one or two kid's videos on youtube.
FWIW, I’ve had the exact same experience. Started a 3 month Apple Music trial and was so blown away by the number of bands I’d never heard of and absolutely loved that I am ditching Spotify. I somehow found my Spotify account recommendations either recommending songs of bands I’d already told it I liked (duh!) or new bands that I absolutely detested.
It seems to always give me the best songs first and last in the Discover Weekly and Release Radar auto generated playlists. But in the middle there are sometimes unbelievably ill suited songs for me. Maybe it’s the artificial intelligence attempting to probe the boundaries a bit.
I think it just gets stuck on old songs you played. My kids played "The Bacon Song" a few times on my spotify, you can imagine what my recommendations are like now. I wish Spotify had a way to remove "bad songs" from whatever algorithm is used.
I always thought my recommendations are that broken because I listen to two very different music directions. For now, I fixed it by finding new Music via YouTube and using artists playlists etc.. Apple Music is probably no option, though, as I'm exclusively on Android.
I've had the same problem. I like multiple genres but Spotify recommendations tend ever more toward overly harsh and angular electronica. I've tried retraining it multiple times by intentionally listening in a different direction but it never fixes the problem for long. Really frustrating.
Android does have an app for Apple Music though it's been years since I've used it. I was quite happy to pay the subscription fee but an update broke the whole app for me. It would play only a part of the song and then suddenly skip to the next one.
My music taste also diverges drastically but Apple seemed to handle it quite well IIRC.
sometimes spotify recommends songs that are so bad it makes me wonder is it some sort of test to check if i am even paying attention :)
i get good results from discover weekly for the most part though. I used to spend a lot of hours on social music sites like thisismyjam and the like, where I would stumble across a gem every 1 in 50, but with spotify it feels more like every 1 in 20 or 30, so I'm happy with that and it's also less work not switching between multiple services
other people I know have nothing good to say about discover weekly so I dunno. maybe I just have low standards!
Directly responding to the film by name is such an obviously terrible idea PR-wise, I’m shocked to even be seeing this from Facebook. It must be an accident.
I’ll be honest, mostly I just think that this is a very idealistic and naive reaction.
The world is extremely complicated and full of unfortunate realities that humanity just doesn’t have any solutions for.
There are people who can recognize that, and who try to do the best they can.
Then there are people who can’t recognize that, adopt an overly simplistic model of the problem and its environment, become convinced that there’s a simple and obvious solution, and then start attributing malice and blame to anyone who refuses to go along with their terrible idea.
I also think: “If they worked here they would know better.” The people here are by and large very good and thoughtful people genuinely trying to make the world a better place, and whatever negative feelings you have about how Google uses its power, if Google were gone it would create a power vacuum in the market that would be filled by companies that were 100x worse.
That’s how I feel about the mission and the morality of it all.
I also feel genuinely concerned for the future of anyone who would deprive themselves like this, as a vague form of protest that nobody ever notices, in the hopes that it might aggregate to something meaningful someday. That seems like a very ineffective and sad approach to living your life.
Don't know what you meant when you divided "people" into those two categories, but it's either truism or irrelevant.
Google is just a name, the point is it has a lot of power and even if a lot of people are "good" that doesn't mean they won't change, fuck up or be replaced at some point with a team that is less ethical. It's like it is with nukes. No one should have a weapon capable of such destruction.
Yep! Lawyers basically just look for legal entities with money, and exploit the justice system to take as much of it as they can without bankrupting the source. Constant flow.
They’re like a tax paid by every person or company with a significant sum of money in America. Doesn’t matter if they’re right or wrong, grounds or no grounds, there will still be a team of lawyers on your side taking your money to “defend” you.
Does your lawyer’s $20,000 motion really have any chance of succeeding? Did he really have to pay that company $12,000 to convert all your files to TIFFs? Did he really spend 16 hours on that letter, or does he have 95% of it saved in a template somewhere?
At first you’re happy to have lawyers on your side. But eventually you realize even the ones defending you are in on the same game, and are just there to rob you.
Don’t ever tell anyone you have money or that your company is successful.
This is an extremely bitter take. I'm sorry you apparently have had one or more negative experiences. Speaking as an ex-lawyer who left the profession, there are definitely myriad things wrong with it.
However, your statement is a dangerous one. It's a ludicrous thought to try to run a company of any size/complexity without at least occasional legal support. As expensive as lawyers can be, trying to navigate legal obligations & requirements without counsel can be disastrously more expensive.
As with anything, it comes down to who you hire and for what purpose. With your mention of motions and such it seems you're mostly talking about litigation. Yeah, litigation can be extremely expensive and there are absolutely firms that appear to want to drag out cases to charge more fees. A lot of this is a problem more with our civil legal system here in the US (civil as in civil vs. criminal, not civil vs. common law). Litigation has become nearly pay-to-win -- but a lot of the fault for that can be laid at the feet of megacorps and tort """reform""".
So yes, litigation can be eye-wateringly expensive. But the best way to avoid litigation is to judiciously use the services of legal professionals. This may shock you, but the vast majority of lawyers are in it for nothing more than a 9-5 career and out of the satisfaction of navigating tricky situations, and the vast majority of lawyers in the US make significantly under six figures -- which doesn't go very far when paired with shocking student loan burdens.
So by all means, avoid keeping megafirms on retainer. They certainly have motivations to find work for themselves.
But luckily, there's a fairly good alternative -- in-house counsel. If your lawyer is on your payroll, they have zero incentive to do anything extraneous. Furthermore, you can rely upon them to keep an eye on any additional outside counsel you may need -- to tip you off if they think you're being charged for make-work. If you can't afford the payroll hit of in-house (which does not have to be enormous, we're talking in the 70k - 110k range for a good, experienced counsel), then seek out recs for smaller firms with track records of representing small businesses.
I know this comment has come across as defensive, but trust me, I have nothing to be defensive over. I left the profession for good reasons and have nothing positive to say (and plenty negative) about what we call biglaw. I guess it's just the vestigial shell of a lawyer still living inside of me that cringes whenever I see someone strongly recommending businesses avoid legal representation. It's just asking for disaster.
Just to be clear, none of what I wrote is legal advice and I would never recommend avoiding legal representation. My point wasn’t that you should avoid it, my point was that in America you often don’t have any choice but to retain counsel, even when you know your own counsel are just additional parties to the game of robbing you.
> But luckily, there's a fairly good alternative -- in-house counsel. If your lawyer is on your payroll, they have zero incentive to do anything extraneous.
This sounds like a good way for companies to mitigate the issue of perverse incentives, but how can individuals benefit from this?
The first time the media reported on an event and subject where I knew more than them, I was in my late 20s (I think you have to be at least that old to know a lot about something ... could explain why younger people seem to have such blind faith in popular narratives).
I was absolutely shocked by the basic inaccuracy and skewed writing in literally every single story that was written, every single video that was recorded, everything.
I mean it was all complete and utter nonsense and bullshit. Basic facts, the names of people involved, their roles, the applicable laws, EVERYTHING was wrong EVERYWHERE.
They’ve reported on 3 more events I was deeply familiar with since then, different subjects/industries, same story. Everything is wrong everywhere.
They’re always wrong in the same way and for the same reasons: A more scandalous narrative, with more compelling villains and heroes. If a legal entity with a lot of money is involved, attribute the misinformation to another source so you won’t get sued.
They do the same thing for simple he said, she said, non-technical reporting.
Something being a complex topic doesn't help, but the problem often isn't one of not being able to understand, but choosing not to understand before even making an attempt.
Even when that's not the case, any professional needs to know the limits of their capabilities. Reporters that don't understand a subject shouldn't be reporting on it (without help, at least). That they do is a reflection in their professional judgement.
This is controversial for some reason, but I don’t think there’s ever been a significant demand or market for music production. The entire notion that musicians get paid to make music is a false premise.
There was a market for records, not for music. What people were actually paying for was the technology to play music, and the distribution of music. When that became digitized, no significant market formed around music production for reasons that seem pretty obvious to me: 1. It is absolutely impossible for the market to ever reach a state where new music is not produced, regardless of the existence or absence of any monetary factor; and 2. I will be just as happy regardless of what is produced because my brain naturally adjusts that emotion to the scale of whatever I am perceiving.
There was a huge market around distribution and licensing and technology related to music, and a lot of that went away. But that doesn’t mean musicians are entitled to a 50-billion-dollar industry around music production that never existed to begin with.
This isn't "controversial", it's just a kneejerk contrarian position from an armchair expert. It's actually hard to understate the demand for music production. You walk through any major retail store, they're playing music that is generally designed (and proven) to make you purchase more. Advertising, movies, basically any form of audio-visual entertainment would be devoid of life without music. And people demand novelty. Just because you don't personally see the value because of your "automatic brain adjustment" problem doesn't mean it isn't there. These of course, are consumerist arguments, let alone the fact that say, personal expression has been a major feature of popular music for over 500 years, and that people from all walks of life have proven time and again that they are willing to pay for the experience of live entertainment, even to change their entire life to accommodate it (think festivalgoers, Deadheads, other diehards, etc.). I mean you may as well be arguing that the economy doesn't exist—like, yeah it sort of doesn't, because currency is all just an illusion we have to agree upon to grease the wheels, but acting like that invalidates the clear societal value of music... is some willful ignorance. The music industry has grown over the past decade. I implore you to do some reading on this, maybe start with Tin Pan Alley.
I think his comment is insightful and thought-provoking. You might be dismissing it too eagerly. To me, the argument primarily revolves around the notion that music's supply is unquenchable regardless of demand since people naturally want to produce music. They will do it even if there is no financial incentive so there will always be music to listen to.
You should be wary of things that are said confidently by someone with no expertise, for example, this is a flat out lie:
> There was a huge market around distribution and licensing and technology related to music, and a lot of that went away
As I pointed out, distribution and licensing has not gone away, that segment of the industry has grown.
Likewise, you have to ignore everything but the direct-to-consumer parts of the market to have that comment begin to make any sense. Video games, commercials and movies are all being produced with increasing efficiency as well, and thus, sync placements and licensing are more important than ever.
I actually think I disagree with your premise here as well, which is still more cogent and direct than GP, who said "the market doesn't exist". Yet, I think demand has kept up with the supply, I mean, I think the demand is almost infinite. Yes, people naturally want to produce music, much in the same way that some people want to make delicious meals for their friends, and when their dinner parties become popular enough to warrant pop-up level sizes, they might consider commercializing and commodifying their product because there isn't an option to continue doing it at a loss for most people. The financial incentive, in most cases is—how do I keep creating a thing people enjoy without dying? Likewise, people might want to eat at the same 5 restaurants their whole life, or hear the same 5 artists, but even that latter group are going to be enthusiastic when one of those 5 artists releases new content. Think about the fact that whoever happens to own The Beatles catalog can release a remastered version of any of their albums and have consumers ready to buy, what is to the layperson, a nearly identical product. Now, remember your favorite meal you've had out? Have you ever tried to recreate that experience?
I guess what I'm getting at is, you can't think of music in purely economic terms, because it tends to behave in unexpected and unpredictable ways that don't align cleanly with the dry notions "supply and demand".
This is absurd. Why are people who insist on couching everything in economic terms refusing to believe that new music is a commodity that people demand? People don't need cars with new features, and yet the market exists for it. Loads of people throw out their wardrobes every 3 months and buy a whole new set. If that's not demand, what is it? If you can only apply "demand" to basic necessities, and literally no luxury goods, then what is the point of the term? That's not to say the commodification of art is a good thing for artists or listeners, in my estimation, in fact I'd say the artificially induced demand of mainstream music is feeding into the current crisis. Marketers push a homogenized sound and then the force of the industry moves to capture that segment of the market. In fact I'd argue there's unmet demand that exists for quality alternative music that won't be satiated by these models.
I figured this out a few years ago and completely stopped all news watching/reading entirely. I have nothing but positive things to say about that decision, and surprisingly I seem to be better-informed and feel like I have a worldview that more accurately reflects reality than most of the people who follow news daily.
Daily news watchers now seem like such ineffective people to me, and I’m reminded of the know-nothings from my teenage years rambling about conspiracy theories. The entire time they’re talking about whatever is happening in the news, I’m just thinking: “Who decided that this was important to you, and why did you let them decide that?”
I have family members that can’t pay their rent on time or remember to feed their kids breakfast, but they’ve got the geopolitical dynamics of the US and Russia all figured out. They solved it.
Others talk endlessly about their opinions about all subjects deemed important by the news. They speak with passion as if the opinions and convictions are their own, yet every single stance they take conveniently mirrors whatever was favored in whatever media they consumed.
None of them ever express an original thought. Every single one of them just chooses a selection of things they heard and repeats it.
I’ve been doing this long enough that I think I can see how this is going to turn out for me long-term. Name anything that happened 5 years ago. If it’s significant, I remember it. If it isn’t, I never heard about it at all, and nobody else remembers it either.
I’m by farrrrrrrr the happiest person I know, to the point that I literally feel guilty about it sometimes. I just have so much time for my career that I’ve zipped past everybody, so much time for family.
It might be the single best decision I’ve ever made in my life. I’m really thankful that I figured it out this young.
Definitely cheating and I’m not the GP, but I would argue HN is curated enough to filter out most guilty pleasure outrage news cycles. Still in the same realm though.
For example, the Twitter hack has made its rounds here but, say, Kanye having a political meltdown hasn’t necessarily (or at least I haven’t seen it) despite it being a prominent trend on Twitter.
I'm going to be blunt here and say that you're wrong. There is no difference. The news may be curated and may be for a specific audience but the odds that it's just as useless to you as mainstream news is still very high. I don't say this to criticize, mind you. I'm here as well.
Perfectly fine — I’m only arguing for the sake of discussion. When I have gone on no-information binges, I included HN in them. Over time, I realized HN upsets (upsets may not be the right word — maybe mentally clouds or distracts?) me a considerable amount less. The links I look at are informative and inspire creativity; the discussions push me towards explaining my thoughts carefully rather than resorting to status games, false sense of superiority, and mob rule. HN is news, and as such, it is addicting and sometimes does upset me depending on the subject matter and how many people take on views that oppose mine, but I still think it’s an order of magnitude less so than things like Twitter.
I have read HN every morning for the last ten years, and I think for the first 5 years of my HN life I felt a huge rush when _something_ new came out. That could be a new "groundbreaking" app, JS library, Mac distro etc.
About 5 years ago it just started to fade.. probably as I started to click less on the new JS libraries etc, and more on the obscure interesting learnings (but also could be due to the content that makes the front page.
Every once and a while I jump on, look at a few links, read a few articles, and feel a bit disappointed that I don't have my rush anymore... I think its healthier, less addictive, but what happened to my good ol' junkie-hit days? :)
I started with slashdot, it was ok until I realized I couldn’t comment and have anyone reply. I went to Reddit when it started but I never found a community. Maybe b/c HN became that community.. kind of. I actually have an earlier account I abandoned because I had been so addicted. But HN has similar slashdot issues and other issues too. I never took to digg.. did anyone? Twitter for me is a new thing but it has similar issues... no engagement. And anywhere I am expert or have a contribution I get downvoted. That’s weird. Kinda like how people feel if they’ve been profiled in the newspaper. Some of it is right but specific details and nuance are wrong. I can see why people feel it’s fake news in some sense. But that’s the nature of the fame.
I’m actually glad the engagement is minimal. It helps me disengage. It feels like a FPS game against all the youngsters.
The moral of the story is to never read the comments. So what does that really mean? It means, be the article, not a comment.
I find myself doing that as well. To my taste, the discussion is much more valuable than the article. In fact, for most cases, I see the article as simply a prompt for discussion with very little valuable insight found in the article itself.
HN has the word “news” in its name, but I think that’s where most of the similarities end.
Looking at the front page right now, I count maybe 4 items that are attempts at journalism. The rest are interesting subjects resurrected from 6+ years ago, tech guides, user-submitted questions/content, etc. The ones that seem like news items don’t really pertain to today’s hot news, they’re press releases from NASA etc.
HN is a discussion board, and the topics are almost always relevant to my career and interests. I mostly read the comments though. HN informs discussions I have with people at work and tech-related decisions in and out of work. I think it’s worthwhile.
For me, HN counts too. Yes, the quality is different compared to classical news pages, but I think it serves the same desire to find something new.
From my perspective, giving in to this desire is part of the problem. When I start my day consuming content, the whole day becomes a lot less productive (concentrating becomes very hard). But if I start the day engaging my brain in a concentrated mode, the first few hours become very productive.
So my solution for avoiding to constantly visit HN in the search for something new, is that I have a new tab page in my browser, that lists, the top 3 HN news from the best list, if I haven't read them already. That way I fight the fear of missing out.
Maybe I should add that it always shows an empty list for the first 12 hours of the day ;-)
I would say that an important distinction is that there are enough interesting articles posted in here which are not news related that make it worth while. But obviously I am biased here.
I feel the exact same way. If there's something really important, it'll make its way to me. If there's something I want to know, I'll make my way to it. Otherwise it probably wasn't worth my time. Like you, I read about and hear acquaintances talk about anxiety, etc from the news so often, and just feel like I'm talking to someone complaining about sunburn and continuing to go out without sun protection
Better-informed implies useful knowledge. Stop with the news for a month and you'll realize that 98% of it doesn't provide you with any information that stays with you for more than a day or so. It doesn't matter that you read it. It only has negative effects on you.
This opens up a lot more time and effort to explore the 2% that does matter.
One way that I could imagine is having long-form discussions about it with friends rather than getting a journalist’s opinion and settling on it as fact.
But then you just had a discussion about your friends understanding of the issue, which is going to be another step removed from the journalist. And you're either relying on the friend to have done all the work for you, or you're just two people who haven't taken the time to look at the issue discussing it.
To me, it seems that was lies strong opinions and without context.
There’s the rub. Your friend is more likely to have a similar point of view as you on a given topic so they can relay the necessary details for you, if the topic is important enough. No matter the topic, there will always be multiple spins on it so getting your friend’s spin is no better or worse than a journalist’s — or worse, the mob’s.
I would argue the friends spin is probably more reliable, depending on the friend of course, as at least they would not be motivated by ratings or money and probably are not intentionally trying to cultivate any certain biased viewpoint in you.
Well, I'm guessing this whole conversation them hinges on what we mean by "informed."
I'm doubting that a person could be well-informed by what's going on recently with the Trump adminstration, or BLM protests, or recent Covid news, from reading books alone.
I'm guessing that people who don't read the news might respond that the latest scandal from the government isn't important, and why they stopped reading the news.
At which point, "informed" might simply mean "the things I know about, because I think they're important."
I don't agree in your main argument, which seems to be based on the idea that whatever makes you feel better is good. I, for one, prefer to read the news and watch the occasional clip online. It makes you better informed, which is essential for many things, including business and informed voting.
“[B]y restoring grief to soul work, we are freed from our one-dimensional obsession with emotional progress. This “psychological moralism” places enormous pressure on us to always be improving, feeling good, and rising above our problems.2 Happiness has become the new mecca, and anything short of that often leaves us feeling that we have done something wrong or failed to live up to the acknowledged standard. This forces sorrow, pain, fear, weakness, and vulnerability into the underworld, where they fester and mutate into contorted expressions of themselves, often coated in a mantle of shame. People in my practice routinely apologize for their tears or for feeling sad.
I am an advocate for a soul psychology that senses vitality in every emotion, whatever life offers to us in the moment. We will have times of being happy, which is cause for celebration. We will, however, also have times of sorrow and loneliness. Moods will come upon us and events will occur that evoke anger and outrage in us. In fact, archetypal psychologist James Hillman once noted that being outraged is a sure sign that our soul is awake. Each of these emotions and experiences has vitality in it, and that is our work: to be alive and to be a good host to whoever arrives at the door of our house. Happiness, then, becomes a reflection of our ability to hold complexity and contradiction, to stay fluid and accept whatever arises, even sorrow.”
—Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
I loved that the Onion article, thanks for sharing it!
“Who decided that this was important to you, and why did you let them decide that?”
I love this, thanks.
However, it is possible to have a view contrarian to whatever is being published. For the life of me, I cannot seem to find any news source that I feel comfortable with or even trust.
Also - it's actually important that some people pay attention. The 'real news' is in the details, and it takes attention. Right now, there's a minor scandal in the Canadian government, but really it cuts very deep, to the point where the PM and the Minister of Finance are compromised, the later possibly in point blank illegal graft. These are the kinds of things that rot democratic institutions, and the manner in which they are conceived is usually quite subtle. The government sponsored news in Canada, is somewhat compromised by the fact that their source of funding comes from the source - and very unfortunately, some of the most detailed reporting is coming from the otherwise, low-grade daily tabloids. The only way to parse through the scandal is to read it all - and the only way for the electorate to solve the problem is to put enough political pressure, or, to vote them out. This is an unfortunate paradox, it does take quite a lot of attention on the part of the plebes to make sure things work well.
It's really surprising how vague sometimes corruption can be: if the oversight board doesn't raise a huge fuss, and neither do the mainstream press - then it's simply 'not corruption'. It's weirdly a matter of interpretation and spin, sadly. 'Friends doing business with friends' is normal, the line that gets crossed is sometimes very grey.
> “Who decided that this was important to you, and why did you let them decide that?”
Thank you for that comment... I'm now going to turn on my news blackhole hosts file, which I disabled long ago. I remember being far more content back then so I'm not sure why I reverted back.
I use the leechblock plugin and have it redirect any site like twitter/reddit/hn to my todo list instead. I also have it setup so I can only view hackernews on Fridays so I'm not constantly loading it.
I also subscribe to https://hackernewsletter.com/ which is a list of all the interesting articles from hacker news from that week. (it comes out on Friday, thus I unblock on the site on my computer on Fridays)
As soon as I entered the workforce @ 21 I cut out 2 things from my diet, sugar and news.
This habit has compounded so much, not saying its been 100% perfect because I still read reddit, twitter (very selective following and blocking all outlets that end up on my TL) and HN (this place is a total bubble of smart, high IQ people, I enjoy the comments here, I don't get to interact with such smart people on a day to day).
Any interesting developments will filter through my social circle, someone will bring it up.
I stopped watching TV altogether, I stream the occasional show though.
Can I ask _how_ you did this? I've done some things like block sites on various devices, etc. But I do find myself still - when I'm waiting for a build to complete or whatever - sliding over to whateveroutragesite.com almost compulsively.
This is somehow correlated with the idea of knowing 'about' a thing vs knowing a thing. News, in a large majority of cases, is something that you learn about. Its not something you experience directly. In most cases, the most useful knowledge pertains to those things that you do or likely would soon experience directly, so news is therefore a mostly useless pastime.
And if there's an upcoming election, you can always just read the candidate's stated policies and record of voting.
> Name anything that happened 5 years ago. If it’s significant, I remember it. If it isn’t, I never heard about it at all, and nobody else remembers it either.
OP has heard of COVID. It would be impossible not to. I follow a similar approach (avoiding news as much as possible) and I still am exposed to much more information about COVID than is useful.
The later, the parroting of facts and the inability to go into deep detail besides being told information tidbits and repeating them is what makes the NPC so chilling in todays world. Especially when a few people get that high level of norieity and trust.
It's kind of weird that this is attributed to 'memeculture', given that I can recall people referring to others (in a denigrating fashion) as NPCs back in the 90s, before 'meme' was part of our lexicon.
This statement is so profoundly simple and rational and true.
My childhood was severely impacted by addiction in the family, and “It’s A Disease” is a refrain I’ve heard from every doctor and group therapist and concerned friend and public health official.
The problem with “It’s A Disease” is that when you have a drug-addicted family member, you spend years or decades being trapped in extremely emotionally complicated and potentially catastrophic situations over and over again, and often the ONLY way to break free of it is to do things, say things, and make decisions that are very deeply hurtful to both you and your own family. Things you’re not proud of, that no reasonable or kind or loving person would ever say or do to somebody merely for having a disease.
“It’s A Disease” turns the addict into an innocent victim of their own family.
Anyway, I’ve always thought the cyclic part of drug addiction was desire -> gratification -> withdrawal, with negative behaviors as a consequence of that. Seeing drug addiction as a cycle of one’s behavior toward a substance being altered by that very same substance, literally never even occurred to me. I can accept that and not blame myself or my family. Thank you.