🔵 How Spotify's editorial stranglehold is coming unstuck

If platforms like Vine and TikTok aim to make us all content creators, subscription platforms like Spotify aim to make us all content curators, picking our favorite tracks and sharing them with friends and the internet at large. While curating our music choices might give us a brief flash of empowerment, like we’ve somehow escaped the clutches of c... See more

Part of me wonders though if TikTok is helpful in understanding recommendation algorithms and curation, because it’s so blatant. I notice that, especially with younger users, there’s a total understanding that what they’re seeing is not occurring naturally, but is the result of computational choices being made for them.

-AI may be the solution to serendipity. AI-driven feeds untether the social graph from our offline connections: instead of hanging out online with the people you went to college with, you can forge new friendships and uncover new content creators. Bytedance’s suite of AI products—including TikTok outside of China—are the most successful AI-powered ... See more