I’m no expert, but feel free to reach out with any questions, and feel free to look me up there as well (same username) if you wanna see what I listen to ✌

I personally am a big fan of Rate Your Music. By cataloging and rating my music opinions there I’m able to get interesting recommendations, but moreso I’m able to actively navigate and explore music by genre, year, year-range, influence, even descriptor tag (breakup or migration, for example).

Better is engaging with it as a pseudo-community; finding others with similar tastes and seeing what else they like, or finding review authors whose writing resonates with you and following them.

As for how this pertains to AI, well you have sort of some protection in the crowd effect; obvious AI is likely to get either called out as such or buried in low review scoring. Users of RYM aren’t infallible of course, but in much the same way that the average lemmy user is already a comparative poweruser when compared to the average reddit user just due to the narrowing of field and additional barrier to entry serving as a filter for those less invested in decentralized internet spaces, the average RYM user is more music savvy and discerning as a listener than the average Spotify listener*️⃣, most of whom just want something on in the background while they do their errands. It’s not going to be a foolproof solution, but at least RYM feels more to me like navigating music through the lens of listeners rather than marketers and algorithms.

(*️⃣This is not a value assessment, I’m not saying RYM users are better listeners or inherently have better taste than anyone, just that they’re on average more invested in active music listening as a hobby.)

Gotcha, just read it. Thanks for the explanation. Suck that there are some decent-ish “normal” communities there, but it’s not like there’s a shortage of alternate options, so I guess it all sort of pans out in the end. Cheers.

Weird. All of my interactions with hexbear have been in novelty communities like !music, so I hadn’t seen any of that. I’m aware of the lemmy.ml - tankie connection, just hadn’t heard that about hexbear. Interesting.