They need to find a way reinvent "channel surfing". Discovery via "flipping" has lead me to watch things I'd otherwise never would click in an app interface.
I've always been surprised that Netflix, and other services, don't create "live channels" (e.g "The Office" channel) of their libraries.
This is a fantastic point, and you've hit on something fundamental that's been lost in the shift to on-demand: the joy of discovery through serendipity and low commitment.
You're describing the exploration/exploitation trade-off in a very concrete way. Algorithmic recommendations are pure exploitation (based on your known likes). Endless scrolling is a frustrating middle ground. But "channel surfing" or "flipping" was a form of low-stakes exploration. You weren't making a choice to invest 90 minutes; you were dipping in for 30 seconds. If it didn't grab you, there was zero cost to leaving, which is psychologically liberating and led to finding unexpected gems.
Netflix's "Play Something" button and "Shuffle Play" for shows like The Office are direct, if clumsy, acknowledgments of this need. But you're right, why not a live "80s Action" channel or an "A24 Indie" channel? The technical barrier is near-zero.
Our take at lumigo.tv is that the modern equivalent shouldn't be tied to a linear broadcast schedule. The core experience to replicate is the low-friction, zero-commitment sampling.
One experiment we're considering is a "Mood Stream": you pick a vibe ("Cult Classic," "Mind-Bending Sci-Fi," "90s Comfort"), and it starts a never-ending, autoplaying stream of trailers or key 2-minute scenes from films in that category. You lean back and "flip" with a pause button. If a clip hooks you, you click to see the full title and where to stream it. It’s on-demand channel surfing.
The UI challenge is huge—how do you make it feel effortless, not just another menu? But your comment validates that solving this might be more valuable than another slightly-better recommendation algorithm. Thanks for this; it’s a much clearer design goal than “better search.”
It’s much easier for someone who has literally made a career of it to keep making new claims faster than other people can debunk them. The Gish Gallop is real and the assumption of good faith shouldn’t outlast the signs that this is in fact not a good faith discussion.
Regardless of whether it's from second-order effects created by Covid policies (e.g drug overdoses) or other unrelated causes, it's a substantial figure worth investigating.
Hopefully more reputable sources will start investigating such claims -- until then I hope people can be open-minded to the fact that "the worst person you know might have just made a good point"
I've gotten around this by disabling cookies and javascript on a per site basis.
These sites require blocking both javascript and cookies:
NYT, Washington Post, MIT Technology Review, Wired, National Geographic and LA Times
These sites require only blocking cookies:
Medium, Scientific American, Quartz, The Atlantic, Bloomberg and Harvard Business Review
The one downside is when the linked article is an "interactive feature/story" and it's a site which requires blocking javascript. It's an annoyance to temporarily allow such an article's source, but I'd rather have to deal with that than reaching their "free limit".
I'd much prefer if submitters choose more user-respecting sources, but until then I refuse to feel guilty over stopping these intrusive sites and their dark patterns.
The only source I wish was permanently banned is Financial Times -- every article is paywalled and provides no snippet.
Do you assume all HN users would reach the paywalls' read-limits through organic everyday use?
I felt forced to disable cookies and javascript on the following sites just after exclusively clicking on links submitted to HN: NYT, Medium, Washington Post, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and Harvard Business Review.
I'd prefer if submitters choose more user-respecting sources, but until then I refuse to feel guilty over stopping these intrusive sites and their dark patterns.
Chromium is the only app I compile that still uses Python 2, but I do know Google utilize's it in many repos. I'd love to read anything that would cover how they're planning to handle EOL. Will they maintain a legacy hard-fork, upgrade to 3 or ditch Python for a different scripting language for their build systems?
I'm always left perplexed when projects like these don't make F-Droid distribution a priority over the Play store. Regardless, I'll check it out if it ever finds its way to F-Droid.
Blocking cookies from the paywall content providers' domain is alternative approach that doesn't require an extension.
I've done this successfully for medium.com and nytimes.com. If those content providers' start being more aggressive on the client-side via JS, you could go with the nuclear option of disabling JS for the provider as well.
If you want to trial this approach on Medium, an easy test-case is to click through some of the "Recent Stories That Members Loved" located on https://medium.com/creators before and after blocking cookie
As a catch-all you could start regexing messages' content and deny the abuser if one of their common patterns matched -- you'll still be in a never-ending game of cat and mouse.
There's also the possibility of false positives, which might mean some of your users' beign messages get rejected. Over time you could event start to integrate ML and NLP, which would hopefully limit the amount of manual oversight needed to detect spam in the future
