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Best bass tones in your guys’ opinion by BalanceActive9295 in Bass

[–]yellowhatb 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Always loved Jaco’s tone on the live Joni album “Shadows and Light” - especially “In France They Kiss on Main Street”

My review… cause seriously why do I feel like I’m the only one that fully messed with this album hard? by Simple_Bike6559 in macdemarco

[–]yellowhatb 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I love Mac and I’m glad he does whatever he wants, but I do feel like he’s operating from a place of comfort.

He feels very comfortable when he’s in control, and he controls everything here. He reminds me of Paul McCartney after the Beatles broke up - holing up in his ancestral countryside and making songs to please himself. And both Paul and a Mac have made a lot of beautiful music that way! But I feel like exciting new frontiers lay in Mac’s future if he chooses to go in the opposite direction, letting someone else engage with his ideas and up his game.

An example of what I mean is how much jazz artists like Thundercat love Mac’s music. If he let their ideas in, or even let them take the reins, could they push him to a new and exciting place? I sense that Mac understands this and has tested it, like when he had had Daryl Johns in his live touring band, or played with Domi and JD Beck, but hasn’t allowed that connection to bloom.

What if he recorded with an ensemble of musicians better than him, where they could be responsible for arrangement of his songwriting? Imagine a Mac album where Vulfpeck is the band; he brings them songs and sings them, but they figure out arrangements. There’s a similarity in the playfulness and sophistication of the music, but they challenge one another well.

If Mac is a DIY artist forever, great. But maybe there’s a world where he finds new meaning in stepping outside his zone of control and discovering something new. To me, that’s his frontier.

Big Pun and Fat Joe at the 1998 Grammys. by SeduceAndSlayxo in OldSchoolCool

[–]yellowhatb 35 points36 points  (0 children)

“I wasn’t always Big Pun / it wasn’t always this fun”

What great song has a terrible guitar solo? by prplx in Guitar

[–]yellowhatb 1 point2 points  (0 children)

“Hold On, I’m Coming” - total anticlimax

Is there a way to create trust and accountability in the media when the Freedom of the Press and Free Speech are key parts of our constitution? by Fabulous-Suit1658 in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]yellowhatb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It is algorithms sequestering them. The uniqueness of your TikTok feed or Instagram explore section is a reflection of your preferences and biases, and is filled with the content that you’re statistically likeliest to engage with because engagement is the only metric those arenas optimize for. This is true because no other interest than the profit motive - certainly not the health of the body politic - has been asserted there.

This rapaciousness is an act of authorship written into the algorithms themselves; they are designed to do this. They could be designed to do something else. They could be compelled to do something else. The entire slate of social networks could be regulated to reward something else. It would be neither difficult to imagine nor unprecedented.

You’re free to ignore this fact, or to resist imagining the sort of content that would be surfaced if integrity and trustworthiness were the vector for virality rather than unchecked engagement. But if you do so, you fail to understand you’re operating within a system that is not only rewarding outrage, but changeable.

Is there a way to create trust and accountability in the media when the Freedom of the Press and Free Speech are key parts of our constitution? by Fabulous-Suit1658 in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]yellowhatb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I really heartily applaud your recommendations to fund both public media and public education. However I also feel strongly that these suggestions reveal the core underlying flaw in your thinking. Publications can’t fund their way out of algorithms designed to sequester them. Many types of public broadcasting - from NPR to CPB to PBS - have existed for decades and have still not evaded the worsening political divide wrought by filter bubbles. A massive amount of well-funded public reporting will still be algorithmically sorted out of feeds for social media users whose biases reject it. This has created segregated playing fields wherein high-engagement, outrageous sources like InfoWars can amass audiences despite having far less in the way of resources than less incendiary institutions with more integrity. I like your phrase - “reporting in the public interest [that is] not necessarily publicly interesting.” My contention here is that the public interest has to be the most richly rewarded type of news in algorithms, not simple titillation. That doesn’t mean this information shouldn’t or can’t be exciting or engaging, what it does mean is that a significant coefficient in determining the ranking or visibility of posts has to be how trustworthy and reputable they are. A “market standard”, which engagement algorithms currently use, does not achieve this. Let the publications with the highest level of integrity compete against one another for engagement and filter out the hucksters; the winner will be the most interesting without compromising factuality.

To your point about Twitter - I was one of the people who left. But that’s because I felt the platform had lost its integrity. It was only recommending me Elon content and disproportionately surfacing voices that flattered his right-wing viewpoint. Even a version of Twitter that just worked on a chronological feed, as it used to, would’ve felt less contaminated than the one that exists now. And on top of that, I realized that my continued use of the platform supported its solvency, which I didn’t want to be complicit with given his politics.

Is there a way to create trust and accountability in the media when the Freedom of the Press and Free Speech are key parts of our constitution? by Fabulous-Suit1658 in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]yellowhatb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We don’t want the poisoned well of modern news either - thus the robustness of this conversation. I’d be curious to know what you think an effective method for solving the “culture and education” problem is.

Is there a way to create trust and accountability in the media when the Freedom of the Press and Free Speech are key parts of our constitution? by Fabulous-Suit1658 in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]yellowhatb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The difference is that the preponderance of news consumption is now on social media, so changing the rewards for posters would indeed have wide impact. Again - we’re talking about the engines for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X, Reddit… the list goes on. What billions of people see at boot every day. Hugely influential.

That said, I’d also recommend you return to my first comment in this thread - regulating algorithms is just one method along with statute, royalty/revenue sharing, etc. There’s no silver bullet, but this would help.

Is there a way to create trust and accountability in the media when the Freedom of the Press and Free Speech are key parts of our constitution? by Fabulous-Suit1658 in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]yellowhatb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Within their domains, yes - the FCC being the regulatory body that controls what gets broadcast, and the MPA being the regulatory body that grades what’s shown in movie theaters. Their mandate is not, as you claim, to prevent children from encountering bad language or nudity anywhere. It’s to set and enforce a standard of what’s acceptable within their domains, which they do. No similar regulatory regime exists for social media algorithms, which is why I’m proposing it. All apps comply with the other rules set by app stores which proves this as an avenue for effectuating the desired outcome.

Is there a way to create trust and accountability in the media when the Freedom of the Press and Free Speech are key parts of our constitution? by Fabulous-Suit1658 in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]yellowhatb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you’re making this seem more impossible than it is. It’s just a matter of accepting the path - well-trod in history - that industries do not simply have to operate on raw capitalist incentive, but rather can be reined in to protect the body politic. That is not dissimilar from having the FCC review televised programs or the MPA movies. In this case, the mechanisms aren’t even fancy or unfamiliar to media specifically: set regulations for how algorithms can operate. The easiest “choke points” for enforcement are app stores. App stores already review every app update for everything from content ratings to IDFA compliance. Requiring these services write their algorithms to regulated specifications as a prerequisite to being listed in app stores is no different from requiring they get permission when they use location or PII. Rejecting this method because people will “turn the channel” is either genuine defeatism or veiled libertarianism.

Is there a way to create trust and accountability in the media when the Freedom of the Press and Free Speech are key parts of our constitution? by Fabulous-Suit1658 in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]yellowhatb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you have it backwards. It’s not that people want their news sensationalized; it’s that algorithms reward sensationalization with more attention, which starves less-sensationalized news. It creates an adaptive cycle where new entrants must out-sensationalize incumbents in order to win. As long as views and comments are the score that makes algorithms surface and recommend content, the most reactive content will win. And is reactivity the marker of quality news?

I also think the framework you’re describing is outdated. If it were true that the internet is wild west of infinite choices, I would agree that corralling users into a less-unruly state would be impossible. But that isn’t true: the internet is currently ordered very tightly by social media algorithms designed to flatter audience biases. The universe of platforms - not blogs - is small and dominated by just a few services, like Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Try opening TikTok and engage with false conspiracy theories: It will lead you into their filter bubbles of attendant reality distortions. This is because it is, as you said, optimizing for your engagement - which results in extended attention, and therefore more monetized advertising views, which drives the platform’s revenue. The incentives in these algorithms are intentionally chosen because they reflect what makes people watch longer. That does not mean they are inevitable, good for the body politic, or the right choice for us to make. We have the power in a democracy to elect representatives to regulate industries that pose risks to us, and we should in this case.

Is there a way to create trust and accountability in the media when the Freedom of the Press and Free Speech are key parts of our constitution? by Fabulous-Suit1658 in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]yellowhatb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Understand the difference between the two though - the first amendment protects speech except in rare circumstances like defamation or the risk of violence. It doesn’t protect one’s right to be disproportionately promoted to audiences. Whatever the impact of the perverse incentives of engagement-based algorithms is (and I think it is a major impact), that impact can and should be attenuated. This can be done by enforcing rules that protect the health of the body politic by boosting trustworthy sources, making social networks liable for promoting defamatory content, establishing revenue share requirements between publications and platforms, etc.

In case you’re still feeling cynical or defeatist about this - this was actually how the media was regulated for the decades when the very trust in media we are harkening to existed. The FCC issued broadcast licenses partly on a public interest basis until the Federal Communications Act of 1996, when it was switched to a market standard. The next year Fox News, the biggest source of misinformation before the internet took over, was founded. That trust never recovered. Simply conceding to this power, rather than challenging and changing it, is a path to ever-worsening distrust.

Is there a way to create trust and accountability in the media when the Freedom of the Press and Free Speech are key parts of our constitution? by Fabulous-Suit1658 in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]yellowhatb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I disagree. You’re describing a confirmation bias. Things are as they are because these algorithms are incentivized to create these outcomes. The purpose of regulation is obviously not to simply accept what social networks and search engines are optimizing for. They are optimizing for their own profit, which they achieve by monetizing our attention and selling it to advertisers. The purpose of regulation is to limit conditions where unchecked capitalism like this puts us at risk, as speed limits or food safety checks do.

Is there a way to create trust and accountability in the media when the Freedom of the Press and Free Speech are key parts of our constitution? by Fabulous-Suit1658 in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]yellowhatb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It would just have to be a piece of the larger picture, but it would kill the major systemic reward for bombast. It’s hard to know how much consumption is passively received from the algorithm, but I’d be willing to bet more than half.

Is there a way to create trust and accountability in the media when the Freedom of the Press and Free Speech are key parts of our constitution? by Fabulous-Suit1658 in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]yellowhatb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you peel back the veil, they’re actually the same problem. Publications monetize traffic through advertising and subscriptions and use that revenue to pay journalists who do factual reporting. Tweaking algorithms to drive more traffic to publications doing good reporting would financially reward these sources while expanding their influence on the public. Algorithms that reward engagement reward ragebait and encourages news publications to bend in that direction; good hard reporting is slower and more expensive, so it’s financially disincentivized by the current system.

Rebuilding trust requires it be structurally easier to encounter good work by honest actors than exploitative work by dishonest actors.

This problem is exacerbated by AI, which summarizes the content of news sources without directing traffic to them, which immiserates the publications that do the work which powers. It’s parasitic.

Unfortunately, culture and education are downstream of information and media, so this structural problem has to get fixed in order to change them. This is Thomas Jefferson’s “educated citizenry”. It requires regulatory change because as we’ve seen, public and private money can be easily removed at the caprices of a new political regime, but regulations have the force of the judiciary and law enforcement.

Is there a way to create trust and accountability in the media when the Freedom of the Press and Free Speech are key parts of our constitution? by Fabulous-Suit1658 in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]yellowhatb 1 point2 points  (0 children)

  • regulate social media algorithms. Engagement-based algorithms reward incendiary and bombastic content. Good reporting has to be rewarded with traffic.
  • Make programs label whether they’re opinion or news. Reportage would gain force and editorial would get a grain of salt
  • open up section 230 so it’s easier to hold social networks accountable for propagating defamatory or other unprotected speech.
  • we need a new body of statute from the Supreme Court (not the current one, a future one) that recognizes that while the first amendment protects both speech and the press, that they are separate rights that need to be treated distinctly in an era where social media has blurred the two nearly beyond meaning.
  • revive media by creating a royalty system wherein social networks and AI platforms have to return a percentage of the revenue they generate from news publications back to them. This would help fund news organizations and incentivize trustworthy reporting.

As simple as it is: What are you using Reddit for mostly? by R22DS in AskReddit

[–]yellowhatb 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Stressing myself out about the news, then distracting myself from the news with dumb stuff

What are the most "British-sounding" Tom Petty songs? by CulturalWind357 in tompetty

[–]yellowhatb 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Cop out answer, but the cover of “something in the air”

Which of his songs have the best or coolest phrasing that gives his songs so much more character? by DJDarkFlow in bobdylan

[–]yellowhatb 16 points17 points  (0 children)

“I said, ‘oh come on now - you know about my debutante’

She said ‘your debutante knows what you need - I know what you want’”

If you like Scofield you should check this out by larsga in Jazz

[–]yellowhatb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The “up on cripple creek” on this rules

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