Although they weren't mentioned, social media and streaming video are the most striking cases. There's one flavor of social media website and it sucks. It's the same infinite scrolling page of 30s attention grabbing headline/video/images posted by the same people on the same 5 or 6 websites made by the same set of engineers. There are minor variations, but they're better described as "positioning" than truly differentiated experiences. What makes instagram "better" (or worse) than tiktok or twitter? It's the same soup filling the contours of the same, slightly differently shaped bowl.
Streaming video is even less differentiated. Every player looks more or less the same now and the content is largely fungible between platforms. It used to be that Netflix had superior selection and had the best player, but content has been balkanized and every platform looks and works roughly the same way. Almost every platform is now targeting the same type of content: low cost, easy to mass produce, and mass consumable. I will give youtube and twitch credit for being quite different -- at one time. Now, for whatever reasons, these services seem like they're on a steady march towards homogeneity too.
There are signs of the phenomenon the article describes everywhere and it seems to have happened across most artistic and business disciplines around the same time period. I would be very curious to know the ages of some of the posters in this thread since there are some interesting differences in opinion/experience. If you see it, you see it and feel it everywhere, but if you never saw what life was like before there's no way to make any kind of comparison. There were places and services and things objects that did not even attempt to cater to average expectations. That difference was real, in ways both tangible and abstract. This article won't resonate with posters in their 20's like it does for those in their 40's.
Streaming video is even less differentiated. Every player looks more or less the same now and the content is largely fungible between platforms. It used to be that Netflix had superior selection and had the best player, but content has been balkanized and every platform looks and works roughly the same way. Almost every platform is now targeting the same type of content: low cost, easy to mass produce, and mass consumable. I will give youtube and twitch credit for being quite different -- at one time. Now, for whatever reasons, these services seem like they're on a steady march towards homogeneity too.
There are signs of the phenomenon the article describes everywhere and it seems to have happened across most artistic and business disciplines around the same time period. I would be very curious to know the ages of some of the posters in this thread since there are some interesting differences in opinion/experience. If you see it, you see it and feel it everywhere, but if you never saw what life was like before there's no way to make any kind of comparison. There were places and services and things objects that did not even attempt to cater to average expectations. That difference was real, in ways both tangible and abstract. This article won't resonate with posters in their 20's like it does for those in their 40's.