|
|
|
|
|
|
by Wesmax27
6409 days ago
|
|
|
Thanks for the insightful post. One question though: don't you think your highlight about last.fm and approach to HN is a little too homogenous? While I can appreciate music suggestions that are in line with my taste, that is easy enough to find on my own (through the methods you suggested). What isn't easy to find are bands that sound nothing like what I've heard, but could be just as brilliant as the bands I know and love. This is where I think the suggestions in this thread are most useful. And I would go even further to argue that because music is subjective and immeasurable it would make an even more interesting discussion. Thanks too for North of America - I haven't heard them but will definitely check them out. |
|
|
The long story short of it is that in my experiences, a real life discussion about music among 5 knowledgeable people always turns into a festival of egos. I think if you put it on the internet, it's going to magnify that worse than what you could see in the hacker community because everybody who loves music thinks they like the music they do because their perception is unique and more insightful than yours (I'm guilty of this too). We could talk music for hours but as soon as you namedrop that band that I think is trash, I no longer believe your opinion counts.
If you can solve that problem, then by all means, I'll be a believer. I think that's why last.fm is so good. Yes, there's alot of echo, put in a band like Mono into the 'radio station' feed without logging in and you'll see there's not a whole lot of variety. However where it excels is if you listen, for example, to a lot of classical music, when you put in a post-rock band, it will find the post-rock music that appeals to you as a classical music fan and will inspire you to dig deeper into the genre.
This is what I think news sites need. The problem with them is that as more people sign up, you see the lowest common denominator trickle to the front page. What would be better is if, for example, I'm a big rails fan and I upmod an article that shouts the greatness of PHP, I'd like to then start seeing more php related articles on MY (not THE) front page. Initially they would start off being very rails influenced, but as I upmod more php articles, the system would wean me away from the ror crowd and more towards the php crowd, unless I'm the type who only upmods articles titled "php is great when it's like ruby", in which case I don't really care for other opinions anyways, so who's losing?
... in a nutshell