Discussion
I'm just so tired of this Regression to the Mean in every aspect of society.
Can't have interesting looking buildings, too hard to re-sell.
Can't have fun colored cars, fleets only want black or white or grey.
Can't have any personality, personalization, human curation, have to trust the algorithm.
Can't have art, gotta have statically generated slop.
@ajroach42 When I first heard the term "write to market" I cringed. Why would I spend a year or more of my life inventing the most generic & mediocre version of a story & its characters just because it's more likely to sell?
The best creative work is messy. Iconoclastic. It reflects the creator & touches something inside the reader/viewer.
I don't want the art equivalent of fast food.
@LJ Hell, I miss when Fast Food had personality.
We still have some Cookouts around here, and it's fine. It's not great, it's a fast food burger joint. But it's still independently owned, they still build their weird personalized buildings and their weird menu.
It's trash, but it's unique.
@ajroach42 Didn't TISM already cover this in their track "X-Treme Sports Can Kiss My Arse" ?
@bms Two people can't talk about the same thing?
@ajroach42 Funny you say that about cars because I was talking to someone the other day and pointed out how you never see yellow cars anymore.
When I first learned to drive, getting close to Oh Dear God 40 years ago, I had a yellow Fiat and there were yellow cars on the road and I remember hearing experts say that yellow was the safest car on the road.
Now, unless it's the occasional fancy Lamborghini or Ferrari, you just don't see regular yellow road cars anymore. It's just not a thing.
@retrosponge or green!
Sometimes Orange or Blue or Red, but rarely!
@ajroach42 I was out today and I'd say blue, brown, with the occasional white car was the most common.
I did see a Porsche that was a very shiny gold which was very cool to see.
@retrosponge Interesting. I haven't seen many brown cars locally. We have some blue occasionally, but it's mostly black or grey and off fleet.
Remember how good the "trending" section on Etsy used to be?
@ajroach42, haha, what's Etsy?
@Antigrav Is this a sincere question, or a joke?
I can't find the fucking blog post because search is garbage now, but circa 2019 or so there was a blog post going around about how Etsy's trending algorithm worked.
It was a person.
It was a person who was supported by some statistics, but it was a person.
And then it wasn't a person, and it got worse, and sales dropped.
@ajroach42 I swear I remember the post you're talking about and it's so frustrating not to be able to find it. I think this twitter thread is about the same thing, but I don't know if this was elaborated on elsewhere, or if I'm conflating a tweet thread and a blog post https://web.archive.org/web/20220722002138/https://twitter.com/mcfunley/status/1550219636464967680
"Treasuries were selected and promoted to homepages via human cron. There was one poor employee living the Leonardo Da Vinci lifestyle, waking up every hour around the clock to turn over the homepage. "
@minterpunct Yes! I think that's it.
@ajroach42
I actually got an email from Etsy the other day that was noticeably less garbage than usual, it seemed to be a hand-curated collection of blue and nautical things that wasn't quite what I had been recently looking at, but was probably built around a few keywords, instead of the normal drop-ship 'related' items auto email.
And it struck me how sad it was that being advertised to *correctly* for the first time in a decade felt like a good thing.
@ajroach42 this reminds me of what happened to Digg. They were really popular for a while. They had a great front page. And the way it worked was a crappy algorithm and then one guy supervising the algorithm. So if someone figured out how to spam to get to the top of the page, he’d figure out how they did it and thwart it.
At times he was working 22 hour days
I suspect that you are looking for a post on the blog at https://www.cindylouwho2.com/
This post from 2021 references a 2019 post
https://www.cindylouwho2.com/blog/2021/8/3/changes-to-etsy-search-since-2019
I hope that find the above helpful
@happy That's not the one, but I appreciate it.
This was written from the perspective of the person or people who had been responsible for the "algorithm"
@ajroach42 ooh, ooh - is this the article? https://www.etsy.com/blog/talking-trends-with-etsys-in-house-expert
@mitten Unfortunately not, but that was an interesting read.
Bring back personality.
Leave fingerprints.
GOOSE IS NOT VALUED
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@ajroach42 agreed
The mundane in culture is fascisms desaturating of identity and creativity