Commodifying taste
APRIL 29TH, 2016 — POST 116
The Hollywood Reporter yesterday ran an exclusive article about a new social network. Called Rex, the social network was founded by American documentary director Chris Smith. Rex is being pitched as a social network for discovery and curation, not only of movie, TV, and music products but also for dining and travel. With high-profile investers like Sean Bailey, president of production at Walt Disney Pictures, Rex is seemingly hoping to corner a well-documented and intrinsic side effect of the social media mammoths of Twitter and Facebook: the sharing of things to watch, listen to, eat, and experience. But with this already so inextricable from most people’s experience of social media, to the point of being heavily capitalised on by content creators, I’m left wondering what Rex thinks it can add.
A lot of smart people are putting a lot of work towards solving a distinctly modern problem: there is too much stuff. The glut of high-budget scripted television that is “must watch” is oft-touted as exemplary of this but it runs deeper than TV. The music industry has become so focussed on the products of about 10 artists that the better stuff increasingly sits on deeper and darker corners of the internet. Movie distributors too have essentially resigned themselves to carry tentpole franchises and prestige movies through to any kind of significant theatre release and smaller, more festival-oriented movies like The Babadook or Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl are quietly left to be discovered (and adored).
The grander discussion regarding curation, specifically as it applies to the services in the business of serving it up, is one between algorithms or humans. Netflix has taken up the former, based on its perception of your taste from what you’ve watched to help point you to other items in its catalog. Apple Music swings the other way: Jimmy Iovine, one of the service’s leaders, is adamant in his belief that people will do a better job, especially when it comes to a playlist of music, than computers could ever do. But whilst Iovine leads teams of people who are tasked with making playlists, so the story goes, Rex’s bet is being made, at least initially, on the organic curation that comes from the social action of sharing. Not only that, Rex is banking on your friends having good taste, or at least as bad taste as you.
The pages of recent internet history are littered with dead, or at least severely crippled, social media. Most platforms to arise post-Facebook, from Apple’s poorly conceived Ping to recent jokes (?) like Ello, have fallen victim to the fact the social space has been saturated. Those that have seen some success like Product Hunt or This.cm have done so through laser focus on purpose, limited number of actions, and weaponised exclusivity. Product Hunt’s “inner circle” of curators is notoriously difficult to penetrate, requiring explicit invitation from the platforms employees. This.cm employs one of the more ingenius limitations on social media: each user, from the biggest company to the smallest individual, can only share one link per day. These both enrich the value of curator’s recommendation: they’re either “authorised” to speak, or they care about their recommendation enough for it to be the only one they make. Rex, at least as it has been reported so far, is not doing anything like this. It seems to be pitching itself as the “Facebook for recommending content” but the obvious problem with this is that Facebook, and if not Facebook certainly Twitter, is kind of already that.
Whether the product is underdeveloped or the company’s narrative could use work, both are understandable. Given the list of investors, which includes a lot in the movie business, Rex seems geared for an obvious monetisation route through promoted curators and “massaged” recommendations. Rex strikes me as more interested in providing an “organic” platform for the distribution of movie marketing than it is in thinking about how social media operates in 2016. If you want to lure users from Facebook and Twitter, you can’t just hope to have a better Facebook or Twitter, because you won’t.
Rex seems to be movie guys wanting to play in the world of tech.
