Nearly three-quarters of Black people want to watch more content that portrays their lives and experiences (Target Market News, 2018), but they can't find enough of it, and when they do find it, it usually hasn't gotten the budget or development resources that more mainstream content does.
When I grew up in the 90s, it seemed like black people had a relatively high number of TV shows to choose from like "Martin", "Living Single," and "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air". It felt good. I felt represented. Unfortunately, it turns out the 90s were an aberration, and over the next 2 decades, black content would become widely underrepresented in Hollywood. Having watched too much TV as a kid, I foolishly decided to get into media as an adult. I worked as a journalist, producer, media strategist and executive, loving to make content, but always being reminded that my culture wasn’t getting the representation it deserved, and always hoping to do something about that someday.
When I started at YouTube and Google, I thought I would finally be able to help change that; I thought the internet and the world's biggest video source would bring black people the same awesome experience they were creating for other viewers and creators. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. Black millennial users of YouTube, despite using it more than any other millennial group, often expressed that the comments on YouTube could make it an uncomfortable place. And black creators often did not get the same chance at success that their mainstream counterparts did, leading to some black creators filing lawsuits against YouTube. Despite YouTube's good intentions, systemic biases in how non-black users treated black creators, as well as the economic realities of Black people only representing 10% of the U.S. audience, have led to YouTube never doing quite enough to address this.
So I left YouTube, and Iyanu and I decided to address this on our own. The creator economy is booming, with black influencers among the most creative, and black consumers often among the most energetic and prolific users. I knew that energy could be harvested into a platform that gave black viewers the content they want, and creators the chance to make it. So we started BlackOakTV with the goal of delivering the most, and the best, Black content possible.
We license content from indie creators and make it available in one place, so Black viewers have a one-stop shop for the content they want to see. We're also creating/commissioning original content, to raise the bar on quality. We're different from Netflix in that our focus on black content means we can identify new black voices earlier, make it easier to find black content on our platform (hint: it’s everywhere!), and better serve the diversity of black viewers rather than just treating Black people as one single niche. As for the other streaming services targeting black users, our main differentiator from them will eventually be our product. Iyanu is an amazing engineer, and with his prowess, our product will provide a unique viewing experience, full of the features black viewers want.
But Netflix’s business model is where we aim to be a lot like them. Because Netflix changed media not just because of how they made their content available, but because for the first time in TV history, the aggregator of the content owned a direct relationship with the end user--and that’s why streaming is so valuable. And it’s why we want to have a product that makes users want to view our content exclusively through our properties. Today, users can go to blackoak.tv or download one of our apps, and after subscribing to our 7-day free trial, they can watch all of our content, on-demand, simply by scrolling through our catalog of shows and films. And because we appreciate the HN community taking time to hear our story, for a short period of time, we’re making some of our original black TV shows available for free on our site and in our apps on iOS, Android, Roku and Amazon Firestick. You don’t even have to sign up, just find the "free section" on our homepage or click the following link: https://beta.blackoak.tv/categories/free-episodes.
With that, I welcome any feedback, ideas, or experiences similar to ours. It’s been very challenging trying to enter a quickly maturing business with a lot of competition from public companies, and while we think we have some of the answers, your suggestions, thoughts and advice would be greatly appreciated!
Try to negotiate your contracts with global streaming rights. It shouldn't cost too much more but will make your life a lot easier as you try to expand globally. That was one thing that slowed Netflix's global expansion -- a lot of the content was not globally licensed.
You will have to develop a very robust system for identifying a user's location based on IP address as well as advanced proxy detection. Maybe not at first, but as you move up into more "Hollywood" productions they will require you to show that you are protecting their content from theft. You will also have to show that you are encrypting everything with DRM, or they won't license content to you.
Don't try to stream your video from AWS. Netflix uses AWS as the control plane but built their own CDN, and some of how they build it is publicly available: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/. Before they built their own CDN, they used Akamai and Level 3.
Try to build your system for future white label resale. If you're successful, maybe some Asian or Hispanic filmmakers will be interested in a platform focused on their needs. If you build it for white labeling you could potentially resell it for them (this is how HBO started streaming, by buying what MLB had built).
Here are the Netflix black content categories that I know about, but there could be more:
https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/81299227
https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/81305957
Good luck! It's a hard space to compete in, and if Netflix starts to notice you I can see them trying to copy you, but hopefully you'll be big enough by then to fend them off!
Congrats on the launch!!
I think you might be referring to Disney/Disney+ and BAMTech → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Streaming_Services
(Super helpful answer by the way!!)
These guys have identified a market opportunity and are going for it. There are a lot of interesting aspects to discuss. If you don't want to do that, there are other threads to read—you don't need to muck this one up.
As for "how is X for black people a thing" - come on you guys, BET was founded in 1980. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BET
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As a brand, I see you trying to become a trusted provider of content for an underserved black-identifying audience with diverse tastes. To build brand first, I wonder if you don't want to put BlackOak-curated content out on existing media platforms. That could be #BlackOakRecommends on twitter.
As a studio, and one competing with other producers, how will you differentiate yourselves to content creators? I guess that starts with the ability to get one's content in front of subscribers, but is there something beyond audience (which you are building), and money (which you are growing), that you can offer creators? Maybe that is access to and information about audience.
As a platform, you are starting with UScreen.tv, and categorically the questions I have are how does your consumption experience road map and analytics & recommendations road map line up with theirs? How will you be able to deploy your own tech relative to theirs? Analytics might differentiate you. Netflix reportedly does not share much. How might you be able (through analytics) to inform creators about audience response through your platform? Can you use analytics uniquely to reinforce and maintain the trust of your audience - e.g., when the platform recommends a video or creator to a user, be able to answer the user's question "Why am I seeing this?"
As a market place, you are an intermediary between content consumers and content creators. How do they to find each other and be rewarded from that - how users browse and how you recommend would be central. Maybe you license curator channels on your site. Perhaps that is in part potentially how you are able to connect creators directly to audiences, i.e. like hosted artist's pages. Perhaps the "BlackOak artist's page" is the place that consolidates an artist's identity, catalog and channels - twitter, instagram, twitch, etc - vs the artist's own page, youtube channel, weebly, etc. So, that's MySpace, of yore, on BlackOak.
If there's a theme to all this, I would say it is how to make consumers, curators, and creators more visible in relation to a consumption experience. Ideas are cheap! good luck with everything.
To your point, we are trying to be all of things... and I would add community to that list.
In terms of where we're starting, I'd say we've headed down the dual path of curator and studio. Five years ago, I think we could've been just a curator and come out earlier with a differentiated product. But today, with so many curated options out there, content differentiation was something we felt was key (and a part of our go to market).
With those paths, we offer creators at a certain point in their journeys they don't get elsewhere: investment. And at the same time, our viewers get to be among the first to discover new talent.
But like you said, we have lots to do to prove ourselves to many entities... so we know we have our work cut out for us!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jeremy-cai-manufacture...
It talks about how they could act like a software company by letting their suppliers take inventory risk. I feel like there could be a parallel here in BlackOakTV - perhaps by enabling independent studios to self-finance and have upside in the success of their content.
And that doesn't even include anything on BET, or shows with black executive producers or showrunners but which were based on existing IP or were from non-black creators, like LA's Finest, All Rise, The Neighborhood, or the Shondaland shows.
And really, the big elephant in the room is BET. Which does everything you want to do, but it already has the connections to the black creators, and the black audience, and the black investors.
So it kind of seems like this is another SV startup that was created without a critical examination of what the market actually is beyond hoping to be potential acquisition target for an actual player (in this case, presumably BET).
So yes, BET, and others, are going after this market. We looked at the landscape and decided there was something different we could do that wasn't just unique, but likely execute in a manner that the incumbents could not realistically pull off.
BET--to use your own example--is owned by Viacom, whose two biggest strategic revenue plays are growing Paramount+ and licensing their content/channels to other distributors. Thus, BET can never be all the way in on serving the black audience, as Viacom will always look to maximize a piece of content through the channel that makes it the most money--usually one of the two I just mentioned.
There's also the product side, where none of the incumbents have invested in, and the large players, have actually disintermediated themselves by selling through other products like Amazon and Roku channels. Now we haven't built out a differentiated product yet either, but it's on the roadmap and you can be assured that disintermediation is not a strategy we're interested in.
Yet I understand your criticism...this idea is not new, has lots of competition, and is late to a game that has already started. But no one said this would be easy, and we have a differentiated approach that we believe gives us a strong shot at success.
BET can never be all the way in on serving the black audience, as Viacom will always look to maximize a piece of content through the channel that makes it the most money
Yes, BET is owned by Viacom, but unlike CBS, BET runs, and has run, largely as an independent unit, has its own financials, has control over its own studios and IP, and has its own streaming service, BET+. I really hope you haven't staked your entire business plan on a fundamental misunderstanding of how BET operates.
There's also the product side, where none of the incumbents have invested in
This is simply wrong. Every year, BET spends several multiples of what you've raised to date on developing new talent. Not only that but recent indie darlings I May Destroy You and Dear White People were both the product of conventional studios...
But if by product you mean the delivery mechanism aka website, then your website simply isn't anything special, and it's definitely an inferior product compared to any your competitors right now. (It's irrelevant what you might have on your roadmap; customers will judge you based on what you have right now.)
and the large players, have actually disintermediated themselves by selling through other products like Amazon and Roku channels. Now we haven't built out a differentiated product yet either, but it's on the roadmap and you can be assured that disintermediation is not a strategy we're interested in.
??? Are you actually dismissing your competitors being available on Amazon and Roku? The point of being on Amazon and Roku is to expand the potential audience, not to "disintermediate" themselves. If your goal is to be web-only, you're relegating yourself to never-was status. Note that HBO Max's interfaces online, on my LG TV, and on my Roku are virtually identical (the same is true of Disney+, and Netflix's respective interfaces).
But no one said this would be easy, and we have a differentiated approach that we believe gives us a strong shot at success.
As far as I can tell, your "differentiated approach" is to try and cheap your way into the market with a library of low-budget indie productions. This is a viable strategy to make money...if your plan is to resell those rights on to bigger studios/streamers, or use the rights to redevelop the IP. (See e.g., Saban of Power Rangers fame and his sizable library of old Japanese shows, or Blumhouse and horror). I had a number of other clients who also made good money reselling IP they bought on the cheap, but the key to this business strategy is knowing who wants to buy and how much they're willing to pay.
But let's be serious: do you honestly believe that there is a $10 billion market for low-budget indie tv crap targeting black viewers? Because that's bigger than the non-targeted market for indie television in the U.S. (and note that Disney pulled in just over $11 billion in 2019 with mass market fare), so I'd have to seriously question both the inputs and the financial model that could have led to such a ridiculous number.
Your interesting points are worth reading, but the meanness is destructive and not cool here. We're trying for conversation in which people treat each other well, in addition to making interesting points, because without that, the forum crumbles into internet default nastiness.
I'm sure you can make your substantive comments thoughtfully, so please do that instead. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Within the LA startup and entertainment communities, we are less politic in our critiques; LA's funding system is quite different from SV's, and harsh truths are more valued here than polite nothings. A thick skin is required to survive in the film industry. (It is an aphorism here that a true friend is someone who will tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear.)
My intention was not to be mean but to be straightforward, but I currently work in-house in entertainment so my abrasiveness filter is much less refined than it used to be. The comments I made were the sanitized versions of the critiques from people in the Black film industry who were initially interested in possibly working with BlackOakTV.
Unfortunately, there are now concerns about the role of non-Black investors in what is ostensibly a Black platform. Due to the politicized nature of the ongoing discussion, I will not go into further details on HN as that is likely to trigger a flame war over non-technical issues.
From my perspective this isn't an LA or SV issue or anything to do with "funding systems", it's a (rather shallow) internet issue that has simply to do with the tendency of internet discussion to degenerate rapidly, which is what we're trying to avoid here. Comments that would make sense in a smaller, private context become completely different beasts on the public internet; the medium is the message, etc.
I appreciate that you meant to be helpful and there was interesting information in your comments, which I imagine everyone, including the founders, appreciated.
My key question is how are you going to bulk out the offering - I think there is value in a smaller set of curated content but to keep my subscription I'll need to be able to get several months of content?
Could you not just focus on originals and licence some old classics as well?
Second, I 100% understand how BET is owned. I don't think anyone on Wall St. cares when a public company says we operate this subsidiary like an independent unit--it's pretty much never been true in the history of public companies, but it certainly isn't true in the case of BET. BET's biggest show of the year (the BET Awards) is aired on multiple Viacom channels. BET+'s subscriber numbers are folded into Viacom's overall numbers and separately disclosed. BET's cable carriage fees are negotiated in conjunction with Viacom's other cable channels. And at least (I haven't actually done a full count) 3 of BET's original shows are available separately on other Viacom SVOD services--something the "leader" of BET+ wouldn't do if they were 100% focused on growing their own subscriber base. Also, I'm pretty sure the head of BET (Scott Mills) reports to David Nevins and not the CEO of Viacom, which is the only way you could even begin to think it's an independent unit. So for you to say BET is run as an independent unit--well, I'd hate to see what it would look like if it wasn't run independently.
Third, when it comes to product, yes, BET spends more than us. We're a start-up. Our product is not what theirs is...yet. All I'm saying is that they aren't implementing the types of features we plan to add, and aren't investing in product development at a commiserate level with that of a tech company. And that's okay--I don't think they want to be a tech company--they want to be a media company (which I'll touch on later). In terms of our website being "inferior", you are right. We're not there yet. But to say it doesn't matter what's on our roadmap--well, I take it you don't really invest in seed companies. Because if all you can do is see what we're doing today and write us off, then you wouldn't invest in any company at the seed stage. You wouldn't even invest in Netflix before SVOD with that criteria. But I'll give it to you: we're not as good as the incumbents today.
Fourth, yes, I look at our competitors' decision to use Amazon Channels and Roku Channel as an opportunity for us. I think you don't quite understand the nuance there though. I'm not criticizing them for making their apps downloadable to Amazon or Roku--our apps are there as well. I'm saying that they disintermediate themselves by being apart of those platforms "Channels" offerings, which means Amazon and Roku actually own the customer relationship and can take a huge percentage of the revenue from each customer. By doing that, our competitors are simply replicating the old cable business model in digital form. But what Netflix should have taught us is that digital finally gives TV companies the chance to know and "own" their customers--and there's immense value in that. You bring up HBOMax, but they just went through a protracted negotiation with the platforms because they wanted to get HBO off of Amazon/Roku channels. In fact, just this week, HBOMax is no longer on Amazon Channels. This is good business. It's risky, but it's best for the long term. BET is not taking that route. They prefer to grow their audience at the sacrifice of ARPU and data, probably because they want to be a media/content company--or at least that's what's easiest for them to do given their strengths. And that's okay. That is one way to play it--and it's also probably the route you go if you don't want to invest a "ton" in tech and part of your parent company's mandate is to be a content "arms dealer".
Fifth, I think you've distilled our differentiated approach into something it very much isn't. I've written a few times about the few things we're trying to do. If you think our plan to get venture scale returns is to make "indie tv crap targeting black viewers", then you're not really here for the conversation but just to malign what we're doing. And I guess that's fine. I responded in hopes that others might be interested in an educated response to the misleading conclusions you reached.
But I stand by the substance of my comments about your startup, and please be aware that a number of them are simply me echoing the sanitized versions of comments I got from my Black friends in Hollywood after I sent them a link to your website. There comments were significantly harsher than what I passed along.
If you would like to talk to one of my friends in the Black Hollywood community, I can try to connect you with them. But please be advised that they will hold nothing back.
That said the attacks on the existing options read a bit weak - will be fun to see what they come up with!
Please read this reddit thread, it highlights so many opportunities:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/aag6aj/...
My summary of weak spots mentioned:
- Not black-owned
- Very heavy on commercials
- Missing lots of quality content
- Generally inauthentic
- Not creating opportunities for HBCU students
- Could have more focus on news and original reporting
All that is to say that the BET brand isn't super strong in the black community, and a rethought, streaming-native service could definitely have an opportunity to outshine a BET+ type offering.
I have to admit, I would have more sympathy with their cause if they weren't so openly racist.
I am in favour of freedom of opinion, though, so if they want "black owned" producers, they are certainly entitled to it.
Sorry I think it is racist, no matter how you turn it. I think it is a way backwards, not forward. But again, if that is what they want, OK.
Would it be beneficial for the black community if other communities started doing the same? So white people would prefer to do business with "white owned" businesses?
I posted your link in one of our group chats. If any of them reach out to you it means they're interested. However, I wouldn't get my hopes up, critiques from the chat thread so far:
-"so it's quibi for black people"
-trying to be BET "for indies" but without backing it up with the funding, marketing, audience, mentorship opportunities, or industry connections
-based on out NY, but the hearts of the black TV industry are Atlanta and LA (BET is hq'd in NY, so I think this one was about where the talent/crew are located rather than the execs)
-featured shows on front page: "First Dates" has promise if marketed properly. "Trifecta" tested poorly with all the women in the chat ("hell no"). Nobody could figure out what "The Retreat" was about and based on the trailer they weren't interested in finding out.
- the website is amateurish, the copy is basic and doesn't inspire interest, and "looks like a fly-by-night operation"
- "they need to hire a marketing team ASAP"
- "it's all stuff BET rejected" (this was from someone who works at BET)
There's nothing wrong with that --- perhaps the networks involved should have rejected those shows! You pick one, you gotta turn down another one. But having more venues specialized in a specific type of show means that, for instance, when BET passes on your thing, it can still find a home somewhere else.
I don't know anything about these particular shows. But look at the first couple episodes of Broad City --- not the extremely successful TV show, but the low budget web series that started it all. I'm inclined not to dismiss things based solely on production quality relative to what's on FX.
The rest of these points are probably well taken!
And while I agree that it is possible for a low budget web series to become a bigger show on cable/streaming...Broad City succeeded because it was available for free on the biggest video streaming platform in the world (aka Youtube) and had the benefit of the recommendation algorithms and all the visibility that Youtube leads to. A niche website with a monthly fee will not give the world the next Broad City.
For comparison: Quibi also had a monthly fee, higher production values, dozens of Emmy nominations...and those shows still went nowhere until they were picked up and made available for free on Roku this year. Contrast to Dust, a similarly niche (sci-fi) distribution house that has seen multiple projects get picked up for feature-length development, and numerous talent get offered studio gigs, because it made all of its content available for free (even before it started using Youtube to host its videos).
Be honest. It's less capital intensive, with much higher valuations.
"Be honest" is the same as "you're a liar"
Just for clarity, when YC funds a company, the goal is not to have it get acquired. It's to have it go public. Acquisition interrupts that, so it's a suboptimal outcome. That said, YC supports what founders want to do.
I assume you are just as critical of things like Crunchyroll?
I'm turning off of this site for a while.
And the best part is these shows are good! They are really fucking good!
Nothing is stopping you from consuming that content and incorporating into that homogeneous base upon which you build your interactions.
Perhaps the niche-ification of streamed content has resulted in Black shows that don't feel relevant to non-black people. And since the majority don't feel it's applicable to them, they lose the algorithm game.
Just a guess, I don't have any real evidence to back this up. But if that's the problem, it seems like it would be solved by this startup.
1. Fox/WB/UPN. These fledgling networks broadcast a lot of black-oriented content trying to grab a foothold in the market. This in turn spurred ABC/NBC/CBS to do the same to avoid losing market share.
2. Bill Cosby. The success of the Cosby show in the 80s/early 90s instigated a lot of attempts to grab a piece of that market. Cosby had further success with the spin-off show A Different World (which was notable also as being the only TV show at its time to focus on Gen X characters).
I my opinion the problem isn't that there is no demand for black-focused media, its that its just become another subcategory of Netflix. And because it may not be as popular on Netflix it doesn't get as much production. Look at what Netflix is producing these days - its mostly lowest common denominator algorithm driven garbage.
This, the best content on Netflix in the last two or three years for my taste are largely foreign productions
Twitter on the other hand seems to do everything possible to push you away from your niches and selected content, even though the whole idea is to follow people.
1. What is your cost per episode? Can your subscription fee sustain realistically sustain that?
2. Your design needs improvement, at least on desktop. Haven't looked at the apps yet. If you expect "product" do be your differentiator, there's a LOT of work. Also, I'm not sure this is a sufficient competitive advantage. (a) its replicable (b) I've never seen this as a reason for people to pick one content provider over another: content is king.
3. Do you plan to incorporate content from existing content providers or remain purely indie?
4. A lot of the shows are short and production quality varies. Do you have any concern that people might consume all the "good" content of interest and now have anything else to watch?
5. You all have some filters that aren't meaningful like "Author". These authors are so niche, I have never heard of them, making the filter useless. There's also a draft filter showing up!
6. You need to make it easier for people to sample content before going through the friction of installing an app or registering. Maybe a trailer plus the first 5 minutes of an episode? Right now I don't feel compelled to watch anything else or sign up because the page is a little janky and I can't really tell what some of the shows are about from the trailers.
7. Netflix had the initial advantage of not focusing on content creation, and instead leveraged existing content. Why not solely focus on distribution instead of cutting checks to creators for original content?
1. Content cost: Generally speaking, and assuming capital raises, we will only buy content that our subscription revenues can sustain. And over time, we do intend to raise our price as the service gets better.
2. Product: Yes, the product is far from perfect. We wanted to get in market with content, and iterate on product as we learn. We're largely leveraging third-parties to hold this thing up, but we will make improvements just as any product does. In terms of it being a differentiator, it's just that different, not necessarily defensible. But the way the market sits, we're the only ones interested in doing that. But I get your point, it's not like Netflix has a game-changing technology advantage over all the companies chasing them.
3. Content diversification: We hope to have the most, and best, black content on the planet.
4. Lack of content: Yes, we're very early, and I'm worried about not having enough content. But we will continue to add to it as we grow. We definitely do not plan to stay where we're at, but where we're at does work for our super-niche demo w/in the greater black community at this point.
5. UX/filtering/etc.: Thank you for calling those site issues out. We aim to fix those this weekend!
6. Content sampling: Agreed. We should, and will, make it easier to do that. However, the 7-day free trial mitigates that to some degree. Additionally, people generally don't just land on our site/homepage randomly. They usually have seen a trailer or come through a landing page that features (and describes) a specific show.
7. Just be a curator: Netflix also had the advantage of doing this 10+ years ago, so we can't change that. The truth is that with today's number of options, you have to have content that people can't get elsewhere. Plus, as I've alluded to in the comments, working directly with creators has been a big part of acquiring subscribers for us, and will likely continue to be so.
You're kidding right? They have huge technological advantages in the areas of content production. Comments like this are why people are doubting this pitches ability to deliver. It doesn't really sound like you know your competitions strengths.
There is a reason it's the N in FAANG. They are a technology company first.
I fully agree with you that a good "product" and design is a reason for people to pick one content provider over another. It's almost exclusively about what content a provider has access to.
One particular example that I would call out is funimation. They offer a streaming service that has a very large library of english dubbed anime. Their platform sucks - missing features, constantly receive errors about needing a subscription (even when you're a pro member), sometimes specific episodes just won't player. Yet, they are still a huge player in the market because they offer content that people want.
I wonder to what extent that was also true with BET, which is an obviously extremely successful outcome. (Maybe I’m just chicken.)
Again, best of luck; this seems like a really smart idea and has a team that’s got very relevant experience on at least the tech side of the house.
One, Netflix has to worry about competing with a lot of other major players, while also being profitable going forward, so they really can't over-spend on an audience that is likely underrepresented among their customer base relative to the global population.
And two, we think focus is big. Serving just one audience means we can do more things with content and product that Netflix couldn't do because black people are a small percentage of their base (not to mention the possible alienation as evidenced by this thread). Media is probably the industry where serving "niches" has proven the most worthwhile. We hope to follow in that trend!
Really would love a modern day family show that is relatable and shows a successful family. Not too far fetched, but real like the set of Cosby show with the kitchen room and living room was relatable to me. Before moving to America my family with 5+ people lives in two rooms that were like 12x12. I’ve tried watching shows like Modern Family and they just don’t really carry the same weight IMO. Too rich or fake seeming.
Good luck
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZchP89w2pJo
> Deshawn Brown 1 year ago If you think about.. Huey is actually right. Im black. And i think bet only breeds arrogance and ignorance.
In streaming content is king and over priced this day due to the ongoing war between Netflix / Disney / Amazon / Hulu ... and if you read through Afrostream postmortem, the main issue is that new subscribers consume all the content relevant to them in three month (so you always have to acquire more content). I read that you plan to commission indie content, but how do you plan you be able to keep up? Will you focus more on content that is fast / cheap to product : live shows / reality TV, or do you have an other idea in mind?
An unsolicited advice : If I was in your shoes, I would look at how to use deepfake to transform some content to fit your platform. For example, by trying to change some old cartoons, where licensing cost can be reduce, to match your niche taste. This will put you in a good position for the future of content war, if it ever go the way of fully generated content.
As a subscriber it's easier and more fun to tell people about the site because you can get your friends watching the same fun show with you without the barrier of them having to subscribe up front.
I guess it would be hard to stop people from using a feature like this to watch whatever they want without having to subscribe - but maybe a subscriber would only get a limited number of 'shares' that refresh when the sharee converts. That way someone who's sharing multiple shows with the same friend would have a limit but someone whose shares are bringing in new subscribers would be equipped to invite more and more people.
That applies to almost every startup ever. I expect that every founder can report hearing similar feedback.
I did omit one factor that differentiates this startup, but every startup has extra risks particular to it.
This sort of startup has three problems: a constant stream of content wrapped and delivered in a pretty multi-platform product, middlemaning the production of content by building networks of producers and talent or buying existing IP and also paying them upfront or hoping they take a gamble on your platform and get a piece visitor counts, and then also finding users for the site.
Each of those require some specialization.
You just have to look for it.
They're focusing on a particular cultural group to aggregate content and sponsor more... none of which excludes anyone else. Marketing niches are a core concept across the entire business world.
What makes this one niche less effective?
Can they build a good business doing that? If they can discover and secure great content, then I think so.
For marketing, it might help to color grade the stills on the page similarly. The natural balance of the first still makes the green and magenta casts in others more obvious.
Good luck.
The extent to which these things appear to people outside their audience as "low budget" might not matter, and if it doesn't, that seems like a big new thing, an idea you can play around with.
The page aggregates visuals. Its design amplifies the visual effects of low budget.
Even straight to video movies get boxcover art.
But your comment prompted me to look at my Youtube app. There's a lot of effort in the home page river to create visual coherence to solve the same problem.
Some of it appears to be color grading. Some appears to be sequencing similar palettes adjacent. Some is breaking up palette transitions with ads using colors that help.
A big part of it is using a title screen with text over the image...after looking at the desktop browser page.
An avant garde art project can seek to create a new form of visual literacy. That's not what this is. There are visual conventions paving the happy paths.
People might watch a drama with purple lighting without caring. But if you ask them if they want to watch a drama with purple lighting, they will think it a strange question.
A suggestion: have some description of your content somewhere. At least logged out, I can barely see more than the episode title, I have no idea what any of the shows are about.
In any way, I (white) think this sounds like a great idea, congrats on the launch and good luck.
And yes, our site needs a lot of work in terms of the meta data. We're working on getting that filled in across the site as much as possible. Hopefully, the free episodes we made available have their descriptions in place!
I'd also be worried anything big with wide appeal would be snapped up by Netflix et al. Here in Australia Cosby, Family Matters, Fresh Prince etc were all very popular. But this was in a mainstream way, African-American issues and experiences were largely irrelevant to us as viewers.
And the alternative is?
> African American
It’s such a weird term, but as far as I know it’s the term people over there use?
Personally, I see it as a misnomer and a way to create an other. Note how you rarely if ever hear white Americans referred to as European American.
I also feel you missed my point. I'm not saying "Black" is rude, I'm saying the term "blacks" is rude.
It also creates the confusing situation of having white Americans from Africa ;)
> I also feel you missed my point. I'm not saying "Black" is rude, I'm saying the term "blacks" is rude.
Thanks, though at least Wikipedia uses the term very liberally, and there are several sources cited that use the term as well, including modern ones.
My apple News+ has had a black experience and racial justice spotlight - you can't turn some of these off actually.
edit: I should add that having watched a few shows like Jack & Jill (which I had never heard of until now)...I am reminded that when you have white people choose the Black actors/actresses of a show (even if they have Black employees' advice) limits the range of beauty. I forget how many gorgeous people are overlooked because they don't fit the mainstream idea of what "we" are supposed to look like in order to be seen as attractive. It's a subtle thing that permeates our children and culture and really makes a difference in perspective.
Also, the portrayal of middle and upper class Blacks is soooooo limited. I am so tired of hearing about up-and-coming poor Blacks. What about privileged assholes like me who always had a great life with plenty of opportunities? We are out here and we have stories.
I am telling everyone I know about it as well. Getting the word out and early support is key!
The fact so many people are capitalizing black and lower casing White is such a deliberate act of divisiveness.
Stop doing this. You're turning moderate people into enemies.
Everything is being turned into race and division to the point it's making my Asian partner and a lot of her friends in the Asian community mad at the black community.
Can't we all just get over the tiny number of genes that separate us?
I mean this in love and honesty. And I'm sorry I didn't capitalize Black. Let's capitalize it all.
Nobody anywhere on this thread is freaking out when people fail to capitalize "black". The people who do capitalize it are simply making it unambiguous that they are referring to American Black culture.
Definitely capitalize Black people for the same you capitalize White people: It's a distinctive ethnicity and culture in America; it isn't simply a broad description of people sharing a skin color.
White Americans and Black Americans are both distinct and unique ethnicities and cultures.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Americans
Netflix and Apple gets to turn on, off, buy, sell, and change this content on a whim. They get to select what is important about black culture. Today the black experience might matter to the audience, tomorrow who knows?
Ownership is the only thing that matters in America and for black creators to get there content out there they will need to own the means of production.
WorldStar / BET etc - have been some channels / platforms focused more heavily on the black experience?
Here is Netflix's Black Stories page: https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/81305957
In my opinion, we need to recognize the voices and stories of black communities and provide access to platforms where creators and actors can express themselves genuinely. As you recognize, there's a disparity between the 90s where this was more successful to where we are at today. You could argue the black film industry has evolved and adapted from the 60s and 70s to where it's at today, not getting worse or quieter but more niche.
Is the goal to create and perpetuate insular communities of color? Is it to equally provide opportunities of mixed cultures and ethnicities? Can black creators easily showcase stories of non-black stories? Each of us lives in very different worlds of integration and has different stories we want to share. A community and platform that can address everything with transparency and sustainability is going to win because imo that's the bigger opportunity.
I think it's a bit too late to worry about that.
I think some recognizable shows will be needed for this to take off though. "Original Content" is a hard sell; that's why Netflix started with a AAA show like "House of Cards" to establish credibility. It's only after that they started diluting the Netflix Originals brand by buying up every half baked show out there.
Here are some I thought of:
- Roc (rare sitcom where laugh track comedy is mixed with heavy drama)
- Everybody Hates Chris
- Martin
- Girlfriends (CW)
- My Wife & Kids
I really hope you are genuinely curious cuz whenever someone starts the thing with "to be honest but" or "honest question" or "I'm genuinely curious" I often feel kind of scared that they're just trying to troll and trap you in their own belief system where they've already decided the. As in like if someone really has a genuine question they shouldn't have to say they do to prove that it should be obvious when they say it kind of seems like compensating for some sort of deception. Not saying you're doing that just saying that's how I feel when I see that kind of stuff sometimes.
The good thing business wise I guess is that the market possibilities are infinite, but I am not sure what world you want to create.
A society based on this is running in an inefficient way, people duplicating work, not because they are competing to be better, but just because. That's got to be bad.
A society segmenting what content is available you based on your demographic (even via self selection) seems bad. We should be encouraging cross-over between different groups, not erecting barriers, such as artificially grouping content into classes targeted at a niche and making you pay for an entire class at a time.
Pay per individual item, and pay for everything, both seem like models much more likely to create a healthy society.
I guess the problem with the former model is that people don't like it, and the latter model is that it creates a few gatekeepers who decide what gets funding. Charitably this sort of niche based company can be seen as a workaround to that gatekeeper problem, but I'm really not sold in this instance (of course I happen not to be the target market either, neither being much into TV nor black, edit: nor american, so I guess I don't need to be sold).
I am an Airbnb host and once rented to a black couple for a month.
After that I had a lot of "black" content (people) suggested on my youtube.
It's a difficult(AI), but especially solved problem that only big companies have and they are obviously doing (approaching - as a small startup) it wrong...
... which is kind of a surprise, because YC is such a renowned VC/incubator.
Looking at the other startups they support lately it is sad to see what they have become: Supporting minoritie's interests for the sake of it (statistics).
They're investing for the most part in startups that have opportunities for significant growth, besides a small number of charitable ventures. Here, streaming is a big deal and starting in the US but pushing into Africa is a potential opportunity. Other recent startups have been financial plays in India or South America or similar - proven plans in new, broadly populated areas. Are they supposed to wait on PayPal or whoever to tailor their service to suit a particular country?
Do you personally read your local newspaper waiting for them to add tech commentary or do you visit and post on Hacker News?
If YC are wrong and there's little interest, they've thrown away a tiny amount of money. On the whole, they've been right, however. It doesn't cost you or I anything.
I'd rather see them try this than all of us support a streaming monoculture.
Is the licensing you do for content that's already been made? I guess I was curious how the "original" stuff works for you, like if you produce it more directly or if it's more about buying the distribution rights.
Also super curious how you feel you fit into the existing ecosystems – festivals, production companies, etc. Do you have/want connections in specific parts of the film and content world that would help?
Could you tell more about it? Not American here.
e.g. I don't watch a lot of content with women on Youtube. Not because I have anything against women. It because the subjects I am interested in, isn't covered typically by women.
Bluntly, yes. A lot of people in the U.S. are implicitly or explicitly racist. You can see this in statistics, such as 'black-sounding' resumes consistently getting less callbacks than 'white-sounding' resumes [1].
[1]: http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%...
Also the whole "whitening" (Whatever that means) of a CV/Resume sounds like something that is completely subjective.
Sorry but the different in applications could be again explained by something else e.g. simply being able to remember the name.
Racism is claimed for every disparity now between racial groups. While I doubt that it can a factor, I doubt it is the singular cause.
Also this says nothing about Youtube views.
I’m white non-american and most of the content I watch is created by white creators. This is though because of most of the quality content is created by white creators which is because most high income countries with opportunities are ”white”. This leads to majority of quality content being ”white”.
Perhaps an uncomfortable truth? That said, it would have been useful, if you provided a few (of the numerous) citations supporting your statement.
I don’t get why black people would be interested in black on content. Would asians? Would women sign up to a platform that had only females? I’m not black but it feels insulting to black people. On the other hand, I’m aware that maybe I just don’t get it.
If it's just a question of likes/subscriptions/shares, then the statement that they are the most energetic and prolific users seems incorrect.
If it's something else, can we identify what the problem is with some other algorithm that is not likes/subscribes/shares?
I hope your plans for blackoak is successful, but I'm not sure it solves the problem you're describing. The biggest issue is places like netflix and youtube have a huge market share, and if you are just hosting/moving content off those platforms, you risk your content creators having less recognition unless you can gain enough traction. On top of that, if you're competing in the paid streaming market, like netflix/hulu/prime/disney/etc., now you're telling your market to pay for another service on top of the things they already subscribe to.
So again, best of luck, hopefully you have plans to solve or mitigate what I just described.
They attribute it also to the comments. Nobody wants to deal with racists attacks every time they post something.
It's not like BET, where there is a clear advantage to having a channel with black oriented content. It feels more like a different cable provider.
If you were trying to make a YouTube competitor, I would understand that. User-generated content doesn't seem as solved as top-down development.
Do you have data supporting the assertion that black content languished after the 90s? I feel like I anecdotally agree with your experience but I’m also curious if the data reflects as much.
Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine to be sold to Blackstone-backed media company for $900 million: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/02/reese-witherspoons-hello-sun...
From what resources you are likely to have available to you in childhood; how you are treated by the justice system; what jobs are available to you; your ability to get a mortgage despite having good credit.
Or to put it another way, with an example: I'm sure there are plenty of non-religiously-observant American Jews who would be happy to treat race as a non-entity, but that's not much of an option for them when anti-Jewish slander and violence is an ongoing part of society.
I fail to see the "segregated" and "only" parts. Marketing to a particular demographic and reflecting the life experiences of that demographic doesn't mean that other demographics aren't allowed, nor does it mean that nobody else is going to be interested.
> BlackOakTV - A streaming service promoting content by black creators focused on black culture
instead of:
> BlackOakTV - Netflix for Black people
OP asked for feedback. They can do what they want with it (including ignore it).
“Race” is, in origin, a mythology drawn around culture; it is either an actual ethnicity that is an in-group or an imaginary one ascribed on the basis of external appearance as an out-group. And the mere act of creating that distinction by an in-power group can create a shared experience reifying the ascribed ethnicity into a real one over time.
But, no, race is not apart from culture, but a product and aspect of it.
Someone perceives an unmet need, and seeks to meet it.
> Why can't e.g. the existing Netflix simply air culturally black content if people are craving more of it?
They could. Someone with sufficient motivation and resources to launch a business thinks they aren't. That's...kind of true of most startups—an incumbent could meet the need they are marketing too, but they think the incumbents aren't.
> Why does the service itself need to be exclusive and segregated?
The proposed offering is neither exclusive nor segregated; no one is excluding people from subscribing or segregating them.
Well, no, because Netflix is the example that defines the segment; that dominant incumbents tend to be focussed on the preferences of the dominant socioeconomic cultural segment, which is predominantly White in the United States, is...not a novel observation.
For many people, IOW, the “for White people” is implied.
> My initial comment that stared this sub-thread is that I see a social utility to having content "for women" since it's motivated by biology
Content “for women” is often not “motivated by biology”, but, more to the point...
> but I don't see a social utility to having content "for black people"
Who cares? It’s not seeking government subsidy, or proposing the existence of a social (externalized) good, its proposing meeting an unmet private need.
Well, sure, because that's not their target market, but also because there isn't really a single predominant 'White culture' in the U.S., distinct from mainstream culture in general, in the same way that 'Black culture' was united by centuries of slavery and cultural destruction.
But you can certainly find media out there specifically targeted at people of Irish descent, Spanish descent, British descent, etc. It's just less of a mass-market thing because those groups don't have as much in the way of a distinct culture from the 'mainstream'.
We don't even get all the English-language culture there is around the world. Easy example: most of us are totally unfamiliar with popular Christian media.
Really, the appeal being made by people objecting to this site is that Black people shouldn't have sites that nurture that kind of content, because it somehow squicks white people out. That is a weird argument to make, and not one these founders should take seriously.
At least some people are arguing that it should exist, but should not be marketed to the demographic it is designed to appeal to, because it squicks white people out not that black content exists, but that people marketing it acknowledge that it is designed to appeal to the unmet needs of black consumers, because white people want to buy it but not if the marketing says it was designed to meet black interests.
Edit: Want to also point out that in practice we don't seem to attenuate messaging in black pop culture. It's some of the most explicit sexual and sometimes violent content in existence and it appears all over radio, TV, and the internet. I'm not saying it's exclusively that, but it doesn't seem to suffer from expectation that it be attenuated "for white people". If that were happening I'd immediately be on the side of any effort to stop censoring it because I believe in freedom of expression.
I don’t see a messaging problem. I see you positing a different unmet need than the one that firm here has identified and is addressing. Which is fine, but “Netflix for people who want Black-created content but get icky feeling about products marketed to Black audiences” is, I suspect, a much narrower niche, and certainly a different niche, than BlackOakTV seems interested in serving, whose existence (to the extent it exists) does nothing to invalidate the niche BlackOakTV is trying to address or their efforts to do so.
Why do you think that this messaging is what you associate most with black pop culture? Attenuated messaging does not have to be universal. Imagine if white pop culture was almost exclusively promoted as Britney Spears et al., Dumb and Dumber, and slasher flicks. Is that an accurate portrayal, or a curated subset that projects a certain image?
The fact that what he/she associates with "black" culture is so negative - and doesn't seem to stop to critically analyse that - but accepts it as "normal".
At the same time, he/she doesn't understand why people from that community might want to create something for themselves - where (for once), they are the gate keepers of their own content (aka "writing their own narratives").
Yes, I am. I’m not asking for content that caters to me. You don’t have to white wash your content in order to be inclusive. You don’t have to burn any narrative fuel on fragile whites. That would be awful.
I’m asking to be invited to participate. Not on my terms.. on theirs. For me it’s a subtle but significant and important difference.
Take a look at https://allblk.tv/. Inclusively, yet unapologetically, black. It’s not that hard and really we’re not just talking about appeasing message board nerds here. If that was the case they really shouldn't listen to anybody on this forum, now should they?
It is easy to overlook this unpleasant fact though.
You might want to reevaluate what you wrote. The last 500 years or so (of American especially, but also most Western European - Spain, France, UK etc.) history wouldn't exist if your statement was remotely true.
If you study the history of the world, "tribalism" in some sense is a common theme throughout all cultures, many wars and many injustices. It might have been "Protestant vs Catholic" or "Sunni vs Shiite" or "Serb vs Croat" or whichever tribal, ethnic, religious or language grouping was relevant to the area.
In every single case, if the groups remained separated and saw one another as "othered" the problems spanned years and generations and the societies remained fractured and insecure. Only in the societies where people dropped the labels that separated them and merged into one identity did they thrive and improve conditions for all people. In short- the best way to help Black people in America isn't to perpetuate our separate identity, but to remove the power and significance of racial identifiers entirely.
While I don't appreciate your condescending tone. I agree with you that "tribalism" is generally problematic. However, you'll also find that "tribalism" has also been essential throughout history for the persistence of marginalized people and their cultures. There is an inherent tension in many places and times throughout history between identity and assimilation.
> but to remove the power and significance of racial identifiers entirely.
The issue is not the power of the identifier, but the difference in societal treatment, amassed wealth and political power that flows along racial and socioeconomic lines.
Which brings me back to my original point, why do we not see the same ire when talking about resources directly aimed at specific underserved needs of women?
“X for Women” is seen as contentious. In fact, “X for Women" articles on HN often have all the same arguments, with gender in place of race, as this thread, with very slight changes, with focus on serving the unmet needs of women with regard to X painted as sexist and equivalent to external regulation based on gender role stereotypes just as this is compared to state-mandated segregated services.
However, while tribalism is definitely a thing, women are generally seen as being included in the tribe. Perhaps that's why you see it as being less contentious.
I'll also point out that this "the difference in societal treatment, amassed wealth and political power that flows along racial and socioeconomic lines" is exactly what results from the power of the identifier.
And you think the source of this power and significance is...media streaming companies?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZchP89w2pJo
Did any of your investors ask you why Netflix can't just add a section like what you're doing? How do you respond to that from a business standpoint?
"Tyler Perry's Madea's Gillian's Island".
Basically, Madea wins some sort of lottery and wins a free vacation all expenses paid to a resort in Mexico with her and the gang (and tyler + his daughter, and her new boyfriend) but the plane goes down over the bermuda triangle and they end up shored up on an unknown island.
Throughout the film tyler's daughters boyfriend (who tyler thinks is a loser, gangster) has to work along with tyler to help the family survive. Madea does her usual thing, and mostly tans on the beach, complains and yells at people.
The heartwarming message of uniting in the face of disaster, combined the usual Madea hijinks are sure to make this a non-stop blast of a film.
plot twist: madea had a cell phone that works the whole time, but refused to use it in order to make the family bond.
Please get this to the higher ups as I really want to see this film made.
Tyler Perry has already played into film tropes with Boo! and Boo! 2, where Madea gets into some ghoulish hijinks - so Madea's Gilligan's Island would be along those lines.
I love tropes, or playing with tropes more like. it's an inversion of science fiction - where sci-fi relies on changing the parameters of the world (What if we had robots? what if we had telepathy? Predict t he future? How would human life change? What would happen?), a play on tropes allows you to explore how a character you already know might deal with a situation that has been played out manifold times.
Yes, Madea is made for black people, but I'm not black, and I absolutely adore Madea films. I wish more films were made like this - it's an underrepresented category in film. It's been tried by some christian film makers, but they usually come of hard on the nose and aren't enjoyable. Or you have just straight comedies, okay fine. How about we mingle the two and use the story to convey a clear message everyone can grasp? I love it - through all of Madea's characters personal faults, and through the other characters faults, trials and tribulations, there's redemption.
Tyler perry, please make this movie.
What I want is Tyler Perry & Co to write this movie.
Tyler, I don't want any money, I don't want anything more than having this film made! (you could give me a little cameo though, I'll be a busboy or something)
I'd be worried about Netflix if they saw you're growing fast, but until then I doubt they'd be a threat. If they were courageous enough to do this they would have already, so most likely they're waiting for a player like you to prove that there is a large enough market for this before they pull the trigger. And I think by that time you should be large enough that it'd be just easier for them to acquire you instead.
Second, if you build out your platform in a way that can be generalized it could be worth even more. The platform should be content agnostic so that it can be used for other underserved populations down the road.
Sweet idea and good luck!
There is so much curation of content before it shows up on somewhere like Amazon, Netflix (probably even BET?) that any minority-driven content you end up with is a polarized caricature of the actual experience.
I see you guys as providing agency to different communities of black creators, to actually share their UNFILTERED perspectives.
Even platforms like TikTok do not offer this agency - evidenced by the number of videos by black creators that start off, "If you're black, keep scrolling."
I hope that creators recognize this agency and rally around BlackOakTV. Good luck to you, my friends.
This is a streaming service set up to elevate content by black creators, to make up for the fact that the mainstream media under-represents those people. I'm struggling to see the outrage on a cultural level and on a startup level I can absolutely imagine there is a market for this.
I'm going to guess that "Netflix for black people" is not going to be the tagline the business will advertise itself on, it was chosen by an early-stage startup to catch your eye and make you think about the ways in which Netflix does not serve black people.
Remember the first law of the 48 laws of power - you are still a minnow playing in the huge pool, and you have to appeal to ALL (if not MOST) of the current gatekeepers - who would not be as passionate about this as you are.
If you have any "fangs", this is not the time to "bare" them.
My advice is to be less explicit in the beginning, and use careful "dog whistles" in your messaging to target your audience - have you not learnt anything from history?
What's good for the goose, is surely good for the gander too.
BTW, I support what you're doing, and wish you all the success, you've just got to be more subtle with your messaging - as all the bleating in here suggests.
I've seen people suggest that censorship is only censorship if the government does it, but suggesting that racism is only racism when the government does it too is a first.
I think you've misunderstood this post. This is less like a "white's only" restaurant, and more like an Italian food restaurant. It's supporting a cultural niche, not excluding another.
People can have more than one cultural background, and American "black culture" is the common cultural heritage around the experience of being black in America, which has a lot of broad commonalities regardless of where in the country you are, and also locale-specific subcultures (e.g. west coast vs east coast vs deep south).
Like the whole point of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was that Will Smith and his uncle's family had very different subcultural contexts (although their divide was less "Nigeria vs Jamaica" and more a class divide), but also shared the broader experience of being black in America.
They don't necessarily. Not speaking for the BlackOakTV folks here but I don't think this is trying to target all black people. The US is somewhat unique in having a large population that was ripped from their respective home countries and forced to create their own shared culture under the thumb of slavery. Someone that immigrated from Nigeria in the last decade doesn't have that same experience.
Unique?
"Between 1502 and 1866, of the 11.2 million Africans taken, only 388,000 arrived in North America, while the rest went to Brazil, the European colonies in the Caribbean and Spanish territories in Central and South America, in that order"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Latin_America
"The melatonin in their skin" explicitly shaped many aspects of law, society, and culture in the US up until the 60s, which is still in living memory, so I don't think it's that surprising that there would still be measurable differences in culture and media interests.
Think about how much your parents' lives and the stories they told you are reflected in your present-day values and interests.
I see it regularly today, as African-Americans and many other people commonly say. We can recall that overt racism is practiced in certain political groups which have expanded in popularity. Research shows that racist attacks have greatly increased over the last few years. Regarding the law, many of the laws that existed before the Voting Rights Act have been recently reinstated since the Supreme Court invalidated key parts of the Act and banned federal courts from addressing many state voting issues.
It's also not rare anymore in my personal experience, as it was before 2016. In the last month a white person told me that people with black skin were 'biologically different', which accounted for economic inequality. Over the weekend another told me, highly ironically, that 'minorities' were more prone to disinformation than white people, and that was the cause of problem of disinformation on the Internet. (For the record, I disagreed with both as effectively as I could - you can't tacitly approve.)
A significant cause of discrimination is that its impact and presence is overlooked by people who aren't affected by it. Racism doesn't affect me (directly), so it's not hard to say it's minimal.
I intentionally avoided discussing modern politics in order to make a stronger (albeit more limited) argument, by emphasizing explicit legal discrimination. Even if someone doesn't believe in systemic racism, it's not a point of debate that black people alive today were explicitly persecuted under the law based on the color of their skin.
I understand what you are doing now and that used to be my approach. Now, I feel that it just allows the denialist rhetoric to perpetuate. I'm not even going to call it a myth because it's such obvious nonsense, I believe even to the people that say it - it's just push-back, a tactic.
There's the further concept that due to systemic racism, Jamaican and Nigerian culture will blend into the larger black culture than the larger US culture. And the Nigerian and the Jamaican will experience a similar American experience, very different from what an Irish or German white person would.
It's really self-centered when we use "black" to mean "African American". It's strange when it goes the other way. You'll hear some Americans call Idris Elba an African-American.
I'm all for dropping the term African American, unless it's referring to a recent immigrant. It's a misnomer from the past, that for some reason people consider PC.
Based on their skin color, they are treated the same way by much of society. They are often compelled, for safety and for just day-to-day peace from racism, to live in the same neighborhoods, go to the same schools, eat at the same restaurants, visit the same websites (where they don't have to read racist comments), play the same online games (ditto), etc. - heck, you can't even watch porn without encountering endless racist portrayals based on skin color. So people with 'black' skin have many common experiences.
Also, market segments don't have to be perfectly defined. We can always find flaws - no two people are alike; no one person is exactly alike from one day to the next.
Both are referred to as "black" (or worse), anywhere they go in the world, and both suffer the effects, prejudice and discrimination of racism - anywhere they go in the world.
Another fan fact - your hypothetical Jamaican and Nigerian, are the most likely to type "How does country X treat black people" before deciding whether to visit a country on holiday - something very few other people (if any) do - so there is a lot that binds the Jamaican and Nigerian together - the nonsensical (but very problematic) notion of "race".
HTH
Edit: For clarity, the Supreme Court actually ruled in favor of the homophobic cake shop in Colorado strictly on freedom of religion grounds, however religion is clearly not the factor here. And for your argument to be effective, you'd have to agree that a homophobic cake shop can't get away with discrimination simpliciter.
>“[T]he Commission’s treatment of Phillips’ case violated the State’s duty under the First Amendment not to base laws or regulations on hostility to a religion or religious viewpoint.”[0]
Not only is that utterly unclear, it doesn't even make a distinction between "they said something that offended Phillips' religion" and "you can't make/apply laws that are hostile to Phillips' religious viewpoint". I don't think there's a queer person in America that would perceive "vastly different outcomes" from a ruling like that.
[0]https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...
I get that this tag line is more for marketing purposes, and in fact they might not refuse to take white ppl's money that want to sign up... but they are in fact discriminating in the type of content they will produce and stream-- but since its against whites it is okay.
Wow. Pets, okay.
> I get that this tag line is more for marketing purposes, and in fact they might not refuse to take white ppl's money that want to sign up... but they are in fact discriminating in the type of content they will produce and stream-- but since its against whites it is okay.
Lemme ask you a question: are the American arms of Univision/Telemundo/Korean Broadcasting System also discriminatory since they also will likely not put up content by ethnicities other than their own, which would also be "against whites"? Cause they actually have FCC approval.
You can target a niche, thats fine, but doing this type of headlines, you just end up segregating yourself.
Remind me again which side won Masterpiece Cakeshop at the Supreme Court.
Also, there is a huge difference between denying service on a particular basis and designing a service to appeal to a particular community while leaving it open to all.
It was actually "cakes for anyone except gay people."
It's the exclusion that gets you in hot water, not the targeting.
I am all for discrimination, but you have to let everyone discriminate and currently whites can't.
> When I grew up in the 90s, it seemed like black people had a relatively high number of TV shows to choose from like "Martin", "Living Single," and "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air". It felt good. I felt represented. Unfortunately, it turns out the 90s were an aberration
I also grew up watching shows like these, and being a white person watching a black family didn't feel strange or incongruous at all.
Something I've already wondered is, what if that aspect of the 90s wasn't an aberration, but a feature from a time when there were fewer channels and diversity was concentrated in the fewer places everyone watched, due to how content was structured?
And is it unfortunate that relegating "black" content to its own service gives it a "niche" status that it doesn't deserve? Am I missing out on good content because signing up for any new streaming service is a high bar and something I don't do?
Will the bigger streaming services drop the content offered by this one, so that the largest audiences lose the opportunity to see this content?
Was having fewer channels actually in a way anti-monoculture?
What was weird for me was as I got older, all of these shows became just samey Horsein Around type crap on top of that I do remember at a certain point noticing a stark difference between shows that were on UPN, WB, BET ect and ones that were on say like FX, Fox, ABC NBC I'd say starting around the early 00s.
This difference became so stark, but when I was younger there seemed to be far less of a difference. Almost like we started off with the here are ethnic families, they are similar to you but slightly different. Then ended up with, here is this completely different culture that you don't understand so it no longer is going to appeal to you. You being me and me being clearly at the end not the target demographic.
In retrospect maybe the beginning was a fantasy that was never really true. My point is overall, I think I'm pretty burnt out on content that is meant to be hyper focused on identity. I hope more people get burnt out on it and realize that centering your life around aspects that you have no agency over is a waste of time.
I remember this fork in the road quite clearly. First noticed it when I saw ads for "The Parkers" on UPN during ad breaks for "Star Trek: Voyager." Prior to that point I'd watch hours upon hours of Cosby Show, Fresh Prince, Sanford and Son, etc. without the slightest feeling of otherness. I am also white.
1. And let's not fool ourselves thinking that because I've used the word "history" that it's not still very much the case.
Importantly, even if you're right in a lot of the instances, it doesn't actually move the discussion forward in a useful way because it paints with too broad a brush and encourages others to do the same.
This is most comments on HN.
Or also just get you to talk about it, because controversial.
If you find any niche that makes sense, go for it. There's a reason for MotorTrend to shift into cable and on-demand, Disney, etc. The market can get slice 'n diced in a million ways from the Left Handed Channel to TrannyTV (for transmission specialists naturally).
>make you think about the ways in which Netflix does not serve black people.
Heck, it (Netflix) doesn't serve me, and I ain't black. It's a pity that they can't run out and buy rights to a jillion older movies, but I guess everyone is still loathe to license them (or too expensive).
Even if it meant objectifying people into a market segment just to make money, under the branding of empathy and identity?
Just because it is branded “black” doesn’t mean it won’t perpetuate harmful racial stereotypes, such as “being black is the most important thing about you as a person”. In fact, it would have every reason to amplify that message to keep and grow their “segment”, regardless of its psycho-social consequences.
Not to be rude, but what do you think a 'market segment' is? What is there besides market segments? For that matter, what is there besides money? at least in terms of the entertainment biz.
On the contrary, you’re making my point.
The objectification already exists. This won't change that. It will, however, hopefully result in more content existing for a market that's hungry for it.
OP also identifies as black, so I trust that they understand that branding their product as "for blacks only" will only hurt them, even within their market segment.
/r/BlackPeopleTwitter mods are douchebags.
The problem isn't the idea, is being sold and marketed as something it's not. This isn't like BET. This is... I don't know what it is. But it's not a Netflix competitor with classic black talent sitcoms.
If you read the OP, it's a blatant bait and switch.
Africa is both one of the largest and one of the most populated continent on earth. There is no Black African subculture in France. There are African immigrants from many different places in Africa each with their own cultures and many descendants of immigrants with a mix of sensibilities towards the culture of their parents places of origin.
As a French, the idea that you could have a "Netflix for black people" in France slightly insulting but our culture is extremely different from the American one. We used to have a channel dedicated to the cultures of French oversea territories but it was stopped as it wasn't doing very well.
But, of course, there are TV stations for all sorts of ethnicities all over the world, so the answer to your question is just "nobody would care except message board trolls".
That certainly isn't unique.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Blacks of different origin also have different cultures.
I mean, if one tried to start up a netflix for blacks in an european context, with the same leiv motiv as this one (political) it would be very difficult as different blacks come from different backgrounds.
They surely share stuff, to a same degree one would say white europeans share stuff too.
Also, I haven't discussed this issue with black people, but my gut feel given their reaction to other stuff is that the suggestion that they have a "different culture" to the country they live in may even be offensive to them.
Since the american worldview is always trying to get influence through media and the internet, this may be changing with newer generations.
In most other countries, including other countries that practiced slavery, either more of the original cultural of Black residents remains intact, or there's been more time post-slavery for a united-by-slavery monoculture to more visibly break up into smaller subcultures, or both.
Yet there's no one making claims based on that, and I'm not aware that such claims existed in the past neither. People just accepted as a fact of life and moved on.
If you look at how all the relations played out between southern europe, the Ottoman empire and northen africa in general, you'll see this isn't from so distant past.
Besides, not all forms of slavery are equal; what made American slavery fairly unique is that you were born in to it, was for life, based on skin colour, and was an important part of society/the economy.
While the general concept of slavery goes back to before history, this particular combination is actually fairly rare as far as I know. In modern Europe slavery was never part of society in the same way (i.e. you didn't have a slaves in England or Belgium, just the colonies), and in more ancient times slavery was a lot more "flexible" (detail differ greatly) compared to US slavery, in some cases being a temporary thing as punishment or crimes etc.
The descendants of people who bear the same skin hue of the formerly enslaved still have to live with the stigma caused by slavery.
This (and in many other ways as pointed out by the last commenter), is what makes the effects of the Translantic slavery still reverberate today - because people are still judged by skin colour because of that precedent that was set back then.
I don't know why this has to be continually explained to supposedly intelligent people - wilful ignorance?
Not everyone is from the United States; reasonably sure the person I was replying to isn't (I'm not either).
https://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/14/africans.in.america/index....
>Ezeamuzie recalled finding himself more confused by his experience with some African-Americans: Why were they so cliquish? Why did they mock students for being intelligent? Why were they homophobic and bent on using the n-word? Why did every conversation seem to involve drugs, girls or materialism?
There is also a significant divide between Brazillians that immigrate to the United States. If you are five generations removed from Germany, but born in Brazil (essentially 100% Caucasian / white), there is a huge social gap with mixed and Black African origin Brazillians. I was also surprised by that in New York City.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9903503 ("Afrostream (YC S15) Is Netflix for African and African-American Movies")
I read a good comment here from a netflix employee about the technical challenges. DRM seems like its going to be a bitch. Would be a cool startup to work for though
How do they fail to meet the standards you've set for yourself?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BET
Have you considered integrating meta data?
I'm always switching back to imdb.com while watching shows. Keeping that inquisitive traffic on your own site might help with engagement, building communities, etc.
PS- imdb.com sucks. You can do better.
Right now it feels very amateurish. The landing page is not that bad, but only once the video actually starts playing. Before that when your logo is just frozen. It looks very bad. The copy can also be better.
The Initial Dashboard UI looks really bad. I'm very confused why you guys have such a thick menu bar at the top with a cyan like background color...
On top of that you guys have very few shows, and all the shows seem like web series I'd watch on youtube for free...
Also please fix your categories, right now it's showing the shows name...
I think you guys should really consider just making your platform free for a while until you get some traction.
Seems like an interesting idea but executed very poorly so far... Hopefully that changes in the future :D
With the accompanying explanation by Uzo0312, how is this racist?
"For black people" does not mean "Not for any other people". I want to watch great content and if Blackoak produces it, I'll watch it like I would with any other provider.
The fact that they'll encourage and fund more black creators seems like a great thing. I'm sure there are funds out there for women directors, are those sexist?
Netflix for Women focusing on stories with female leads or with female directors doesn't sound offensive to me either.
Good luck with Blackoak, it seems like there is a great market for it and it will elevate black creators.
But, be honest: would you be offended by a "The White Network - A Network for White People", with a mission/focus on white, traditional European culture? Would you similarly interpret this statement to "not mean 'Not for any other people'"?
For many, the divisiveness isn't from the existence of such channels and networks -- it's from the double standard.
Celebrating a culture is not racist.
would a religious or political headline carry the same explosive implications? http://beta.christiancrusader.tv http://beta.jew.tv
#1
Content saturation is a slow moving train and higher quality content just has a slower race to "free" than other content. To combat free, you need to control the content. Netflix had to aggressively reinvest into its own exclusive high quality content to avoid someone outcompeting them on the same content at a lower price (which the owners of the licensed content could do). The more effective they are at growth, the better control they have over maintaining the licensing advantage which allows them to stay relevant as a cultural hub.
There is so much high quality culturally important content now that almost nobody can afford to pay for it all, which makes cost a concerning gatekeeper for culture. Additionally, television's linear nature and technological inferiority meant it was doing a poor job of providing the kind of access to content that people were becoming used to.
Now there are several services providing access to large collections of free movies and TV shows, but there are still plenty of classics missing in their libraries which feels like leaving history behind. You aren't the only one that noticed the TV of yesteryear has become harder to find and it's far from being only black content.
Unfortunately for premium content the situation may be even worse, as the competition is causing fragmentation and I think this fragmentation has an outsized negative impact on already under-represented niches that become even more thinned out as a result. In this case the fragmentation is more problematic, because black households have lower average incomes, yet the higher fragmentation increases monetary pressures involved in accessing the content across paid services. Look up people's favorite old shows, then see which streaming services have them and there are splits between Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Sling, etc.
There's already a lot of black content, but user friendly discovery and access are very real problems. The licensing of some existing content below a threshold might also be less valuable for the smaller audiences when you're facing stiff competition. The upside of this is that companies can compete by funding new projects (which they are doing), but of course those new projects are then exclusive which doesn't help unless they're exclusive to the service that everyone's already subscribed to.
_____________
#2
So with those things said, where does BlackOak fit in this picture? It doesn't have control over its underlying technical infrastructure since it's based on a middleware service. The free originals I've seen on the site so far are relatively low budget and while some of it is interesting, there is clearly inexperience around the areas of production, acting, scriptwriting, editing and so on.
There's more effort put into them than typical YouTube videos, but the entertainment value is not that dense yet and I'd put the perception of it as very inconsistent even drooping to awkward improv sketch quality. Simply being original content doesn't feel like enough when YouTube has so much original content that has less than 1000 views and BlackOak still exists as part of the internet which keeps it in competition with other content on the internet. There are definitely some actors in there that I'd be interested in watching more of if the whole thing was snapped together well, though.
I think if that quality trajectory is maintained, it would be difficult to keep viewers around through advertisement interruptions if you transition to free. The subscription cost is low, but my guess is if you hide the content behind a sizzle reel then people might pay for a month just to check it out and then not return.
If you can't invest more funding into those types of projects, perhaps you would be better off funding projects that already have lower budgets so you can increase the quality. When the content comes across as inauthentic in scenarios where the actors can't pull it off, then reality TV type approaches, interviews and other formats might have better success where people can play more loose. Unfortunately, unless you get really lucky, you're going to need some decent funding to hit a critical mass with whatever content you make or license and if you can't build that kind of confidence in investors then you may be better off pivoting to something you can create demand for.
_____________
#3
Not a fan of the name, logo, domain, messaging, confrontational activist vibe or site design, but those aren't a big deal until you have content that draws in viewers unless potential future investors are also seeing it as their first impression of you.
_____________
#4
Personally suspect blackness alone isn't enough for black audiences to dive into an upstart platform as the market isn't completely devoid of black content, I think it's just that there's a feeling of there not being enough of it in the public places that are deemed most visible which make some feel less culturally relevant. This same issue can apply to anyone, regardless of the characteristics they're measured by. YouTube's algorithmic sleight of hand can make people feel culturally relevant by drawing people to content that's relevant to their interests and letting you see a lot of other people engaged in it. Race is clearly not irrelevant and stronger racial culture can make it more relevant, but the relevance of it is probably greater in some contexts than others.
Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Pluto, Sling, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, advertising companies and so on are in a better position to address that I think. If you can maintain the funding to be relentless and create a critical mass of content then you might eventually be able to flip that prediction to become an observable public place. My guess is that African descent purchasing power will continue to increase over time around the globe and companies will find a way to capture those dollars as they always do. If you can navigate the insights to be one of those companies, then give it a go! There are a lot of classic shows with black actors that aren't on any streaming service anywhere, so opportunity does exist.
But, hey, it is famous YC, so they might be successful anyway.
Wait until they find out about Nollywood movies or TV shows which is also available on Netflix.
I find that the Nollywood producers seem to be having a good time exporting their culture and making themselves relevant as far as possible with the success of several Nollywood actors that have become memes themselves with a huge following.
That's what the viewers want to see, not more stories of some recent fraudulent political movements.
HN makes me realize why so many black people find the tech world hostile and stay away.
Does the existence of ESPN encourage a divide between those who like sports and those that don't? Do Spanish-language channels encourage a divide between people who speak Spanish and those that don't?
It seems to me that, unless this new service will be in the business of directly funding or creating their own content, it would be morally wrong for them to engage in exclusive content agreements.
This is a great way to encourage representation and sponsor more content within the culture, for everyone to enjoy as they see fit.
If not, what's the difference? Each is a cultural group - one just has a history of being violently attacked and suppressed...
Edit: This feels a bit like the idea that showing children stories about gay people would somehow "turn them gay".
I just have some skepticism about juggling so many different pieces in order to get this to work.
In my country, in europe, it would seem that being black is not an identity but merely a physical characteristic like being blonde. I have never raised the issue explicitly, but I guess my black colleagues at work would not appreciate being classified as a different identity just for their skin color.
You shouldn’t say “Netflix for black people” because Netflix is for black people already. Moreover if I start selling boxed water called “water for black people” with black stories on the carton, I’m unnecessarily limiting my audience (even alienating some) just via my poor choice of name.
Ironically, some of those alienated are going to be black people themselves - such naming will certainly stir memories of the segregation era, don’t you think?
by, not for
Maybe trying to call to associations with BET is enough, and something like Black Streaming Entertainment (BSE, to avoid possible problems with BES) would be enough? Although if it's free, to my eyes BlackStream seems like it would be ideal.
Restaurant for Italians. Suggests that non-Italians don’t belong here.
Restaurant by Italians. Suggests that Italians make the food here and that it’s not for a particular group.
I'm not disagreeing with that specific point. Just making a corollary that by doesn't necessarily identify what it is in all contexts, as it's more ambiguous depending on where it's used. For a restaurant, it's fairly obvious because we have prior assumptions about the service. It it was laundry, the assumption might just be it was advertising itself as a black owned business. For a streaming service? Probably more on the side of how a restaurant is seen, but why even court that confusion? Most restaurants would avoid it as well, and call themselves Soul Food or some other moniker that clearly communicates what it serves as opposed to who runs it.
"Restaurant by Black People" might communicate something about the restaurant enough to most people, but it's also just a poor choice of description all around. Netflix by Black People is similarly a poor description, IMO.
Judging from the Netflix recommended videos and casting for Netflix originated shows, I'd say that goal has been achieved at this point.
You do have to wonder how overlooked Spanish speakers must feel. That's probably where the real money is in 'Netflix for xxx people'.
There's definitely been more movement in the space, but it's still really lacking. I can't imagine it would cost a ton to license most foreign content for the US, which they currently have 0 percent market share of.
I (as a middle age white male) WANT people to be thinking about because it's still happening 24/7, and people who aren't bigoted should be aware and pushing back every minute, in every way they can.
Saying "X for black people" is a cultural focus, on the same level as "Finnish music" or "Flamenco dance" or "Swahili language".
Nah man, I think just being not-bigoted and intolerant of directly witnessed bigotry is good enough.
If we want something to change, we'll have to act. African-Americans are only ~1/7th of the US population - not enough to make changes themselves.
- wolverine876
I'm saying it is enough. It's always enough.
Also, you're problematically lumping all sorts of people who happen to have dark skin into a single category. The African immigrants I know want nothing to do with "american black culture" and resent being associated with it.
Finally, in order to be able to discuss these issues clearly, it's important to have distinct terms. If someone wants to criticize "american black culture", they cannot do so without being labelled as racist, despite that fact that criticism of cultural practices is generally accepted.
Basically we have two concepts:
1) Being "black" - being of african descent and/or being above a certain threshold of darkness in skin pigment. We should not tolerate discrimination for being black. It's also worth noting that this sort of categorization of people into black/white is not very scientific.
2) Belonging to American slave-descended culture. You can belong to this cultural group regardless of your skin color. We should be tolerant of criticism of this culture's ideology and practices.
These two concepts need different names. I'm aware "slave-descended" isn't an ideal (if accurate) name, so open to suggestions here.
It can also imply a simple physical descriptor of traits belonging to African-descended people. Is an ethnic Nigerian born and raised there black? Do they belong to "American black culture"? So are they black and not-black at the same time? Do you see the problem(s) here?
I literally wrote "Majority of Black Americans...who come in many different pigments"
> It can also imply a simple physical descriptor of traits belonging to African-descended people. Is an ethnic Nigerian born and raised there black? Do they belong to "American black culture"? So are they black and not-black at the same time? Do you see the problem(s) here?
This is why I wrote "Majority" but you should also consult a Nigerian-American
"A lot of hispanic countries have problems with drug cartels, crime and corruption"
vs.
"A lot of black communities have problems with drugs, violence and poor educational outcomes"
It's pretty easy to accuse the latter statement of being racist isn't it? Not so much the former though huh? Why do you think that is?
I'm not sure that it's easy; it depends on the context. As we know well, many racists use conceivably non-racist criticism to find ways to denigrate African-Americans, so it's important to be careful and sensitive to that.
But the big difference is the vulnerability of the groups. If I post on HN 'software developers are morons' or 'SV billionaires are morons', it really doesn't matter. Devs and billionaires aren't in danger of losing their jobs, being subject to hatred, etc. But if I post that '(vulnerable minority) are morons', that's a very different matter - they are in danger.
This, of course, deeply depends on your definition of racist/racism. If I criticize some behavior that happens to be more prevalent among black americans than other americans, to some people that simple fact makes that critique, and thus me, a racist. That's the problem with the modern definition of racism. It's an ex-post-facto evaluation and it's way too easy to slap that on to pretty much whatever you want.
> But if I post that '(vulnerable minority) are morons', that's a very different matter - they are in danger.
No, they're not. I don't know a single reasonable human that would read that comment and go immediately fire '(vulnerable minority)'. Come on..
You'll have to talk to those people, whoever they are. What I'm saying is that actual racist behavior often uses arguably non-racist arguments to attack African-Americans. It's an obvious and well-used tactic.
> No, they're not.
Hate speech spreads and promotes hate, of course, and that is dangerous to vulnerable minorities. And yes, people lose their jobs because they are minorities.
Also if you are under the impression I'm writing to score some "points" I can assure you you're mistaken.
United States society has been problematically lumping people together based on skin tone for over 400 years; the GP didn't invent it today on HN. It's already been done and well-ingrained. If your skin is black, many people will treat you differently, to the extent that you may be subject to violence, many won't hire you, loans are more difficult to obtain, you'll experience stereotypes and racism regularly. In the end, rather than deal with danger and abuse every day, you end up living in the same neighborhoods, socializing with the same people, going to the same schools and restaurants, visiting the same websites ... to make your daily life peaceful and safe. As I mentioned in another thread, you can't even watch porn without encountering endless racist stereotypes.
As a result, while you may not think so and there are always exceptions, Americans with black skin share a lot with each other.
> slave-descended culture
What evidence do you have that this defines a cultural group (whatever that is)?
> We should be tolerant of criticism of this culture's ideology and practices.
Few people share your distinctions, so it's impractical. More importantly, it's impossible to distinguish criticism that is racist from that which is not. It's obviously easy, and often done, to say things that are arguably non-racist but critical in order to encourage and spread racism.
Also, criticizing groups seems inherently stereotypical. An at-will club, such as the Libertarian Party or local Linux User Group, is different. But being born in a neighborhood to a culture doesn't make you responsible or at fault for some stereotype which may have nothing to do with you (and usually are false and often racist anyway). Let's look at people as individuals, responsible for their own actions.
Finally, there's a lot of effort to create space for criticizing black people. Why is that important? How about we focus on the overwhelming problem, racism?
Wouldn't the best solution to this problem represent a rejection of such categorization? Wouldn't that necessarily exclude "X for Black People" in the same way it excludes "X for White People"? I'd like to live in a society where skin tone is no more important than hair color. Surely the best way to get there is to de-emphasize skin tone and therefore "blackness" and "whiteness"?
> What evidence do you have that this defines a cultural group (whatever that is)?
From tptacek in another post:
"Black culture ... was created artificially by kidnapping millions of people from the African content and stripping them of their cultures, family ties, and names, prompting those people to construct a new culture (while uniting them for another 100 years in the experience of apartheid and the civil rights movement). It's its own powerful, interesting thing."
I have a hard time disagreeing - it seems to be a distinct cultural group.
> Few people share your distinctions, so it's impractical
I disagree. I would say many people are able to make the distinction, and the lack of appropriate terminology to discuss it is universally frustrating.
> More importantly, it's impossible to distinguish criticism that is racist from that which is not.
It's quite easy. If you criticize a practice of cannibalizing visitors then it's reasonably clear the culture/practices are at issue, not the inherent traits of the people, unless of course we can prove some genetic predisposition to cannibalism.
> arguably non-racist but critical in order to encourage and spread racism
Yes doublespeak is a thing, but that doesn't mean frank discussion should be off the table.
> But being born in a neighborhood to a culture doesn't make you responsible
I would say that it exactly does. Who else can be responsible for a culture's practices than the people who maintain and perpetuate that culture?
> space for criticizing black people. Why is that important? How about we focus on the overwhelming problem, racism?
Because these are intrinsically related. As long as we can't disentangle the criticism and solutionizing of very real problems with black culture and ideology from racist bigotry against black people we'll never solve the problem. As long as black people are in a special class that's protected from serious criticism they can never be equal to the rest of us.
> Wouldn't the best solution to this problem represent a rejection of such categorization? Wouldn't that necessarily exclude "X for Black People" in the same way it excludes "X for White People"? I'd like to live in a society where skin tone is no more important than hair color. Surely the best way to get there is to de-emphasize skin tone and therefore "blackness" and "whiteness"?
That would be ideal and I want to live in that world too. I also want to live in a world without war, but for now I support having a military because war is still a thing. Today, tomorrow, and likely for years to come, African-Americans do and will suffer from racism and are stereotyped into a class by much of society. Also, they should do whatever they want; who are you and I to tell them what to do? Why do they need your approval?
> As long as black people are in a special class that's protected from serious criticism they can never be equal to the rest of us.
That's not at all what puts African-Americans into a different class and makes them be seen as unequal by racists. The racists and systematic racism are the overwhelming cause; the discrimination and classes is already there; the question is, how do we provide 'liberty and justice for all' to the people in that class, as best we can, while it persists?
>> More importantly, it's impossible to distinguish criticism that is racist from that which is not.
> It's quite easy. If you criticize a practice of cannibalizing visitors then it's reasonably clear the culture/practices are at issue
Again, it's not; you call it double-speak.
>> But being born in a neighborhood to a culture doesn't make you responsible
> I would say that it exactly does. Who else can be responsible for a culture's practices than the people who maintain and perpetuate that culture?
How do you know if that individual 'maintains and perpetuates' the culture - culture being an undefinable, changing thing, defined by you? And if they do, what about you and I therefore maintaining and perpetuating widespread racism, which is common among white people, and which is probably the worst evil of American history?
Why is it so important to you to criticize other people's business? How about we focus on our own 'culture', conduct and its consequences?
They clearly don't. I'm just pointing out that "X for Black People" seems to perpetuate and deepen racial tension and division, rather than helping alleviate them. It's moving the needle in the wrong direction, much like a nuclear arms race would.
> The racists and systematic racism are the overwhelming cause
This is not at all clear, and is hideously complicated (see below). To what degree are cultural practices prevalent in (some) black neighborhoods responsible for outcomes?
[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_anal...
[2] https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv19.pdf
[3] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/32/15877.full.pdf
> Again, it's not; you call it double-speak.
Yes but as I said, its existence shouldn't take frank discussion of the table.
> How do you know if that individual 'maintains and perpetuates' the culture
I'm no cultural anthropologist, but if an individual engages in a cultural practice that they learned from the cultural group they are a member of, then they can be seen to be perpetuating that practice.
> And if they do, what about you and I therefore maintaining and perpetuating widespread racism, which is common among white people
It's quite simple: I don't engage in the practice of racial discrimination or bigotry, in spite of the fact that it was a common practice among my family and community. I have therefore identified a cultural practice which I consider wrong (or just plain dumb), and consciously chosen not to engage in the practice and not perpetuate it. I am thus an active participant in the evolution and stewardship of my culture. I expect the same from everyone else.
> Why is it so important to you to criticize other people's business? How about we focus on our own conduct and its consequences?
These are not mutually exclusive. I'm not aware of any issues with my conduct. However given this topic's overall popularity, polarization and the aforementioned problematically overloaded terminology, I find it extremely beneficial that these conversations be had in whatever forums can support them. To me, this is what depolarization looks like.
> This is not at all clear
This crosses the line into absurdity. Have a great day!
I think the muddying consists of the fact that conflating physical traits with cultural identity means that any criticism of the given culture can be and is frequently labeled as racism.
Not that there can't be more than one.
For non-blacks, what would be recommended shows to watch to get a feel for black culture (or your vision of black culture, I guess)?
Edit: it seem Afrostream shut down in 2017 https://techpoint.africa/2017/09/22/afrostream-shut-down/
But all that does not matter: Nobody thinks "we are 13% of the population" so to see 26% representation in TV and movies is great.
No. Everyone is interested to 100% in what they are interested in (e.g. black cultural content TV-series, certain restaurants, certain fruits, certain meat and certain women), independent of the (bigger or smaller) share they have.
Being in the minority in a country really sucks. You are just kind of like the foreigner and other people run the place. Those people silently and to 100% safely conspire. The majority runs the place, they own the place. I was recently in Switzerland and "swiss-german" speaking people there will makes sure, that they stay in the majority and in control.
Otherwise I don’t really get the solution. Don’t try to integrate different cultures, thereby continuing to exclude them?
Instead we seem to be going backwards. 2050 New York City might look more like 1900 than 2000.
Your "melting pot" interpretation concretely just means "they should not be different or receive different things than me".
No, it doesn’t, and that makes no sense. The melting pot idea means that everyone works toward a cohesive national identity and recognizes contributions from everyone. It doesn’t mean that every group should be separate and excluded from each other.
Lemme ask you another question since we're asking silly questions: should Telemundo and Univision be illegal to broadcast in the US because its not in English (cohesive national identity, right?)? Cause that's what you sound like.
You are being sarcastic and not engaging in good faith.
Sure, lets deescalate: are their broadcasting in America and commensurate content choices discriminatory or working against a cohesive national identity?
> You are being sarcastic and not engaging in good faith.
But I find the last bit ironic
In response to your question, yes I would hope that as Latinos continue to become a larger portion of the population, they join the overall “American” culture and influence it. Not remain as a separate group with a separate language and separate media.
If you look at the statistics, this already happens. Second and third generation Latinos identify more as American than as Latino.
If one wants to solve the injustices of the past, its important to actually acknowledge the reality of those injustices and how they feed into modern day. The "melting pot" theory I suspect was always a form of injustice in of itself, because it expected people to simply forget what happened to them and accept that they'll never get an apology have amends made for them.
My point is that this identity was expanded to be inclusive in order to build social cohesion. That was a good thing, but now let’s rename it to just “American” and include all ethnic groups, instead of going backwards.
Social cohesion largely as a means of sharpening anti-Blackness and of labor control, particularly during and after the defeat of Reconstruction and due to growing relevance of the industrial organized labor movement. Du Bois did an immense amount of work critiquing pretty much exactly this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924
Of course they didn’t have it as bad as black Americans, but that isn’t the topic of this discussion.
It's extremely important to acknowledge that the barriers to social cohesion for certain races are significantly higher than others. We are in living memory where black children had to be accompanied by the military for their protection because they dared attend the same school as white people.
I’m struggling to see how your comment relates to what I’m saying.
Then I don't understand why your response to someone trying to create a platform to express their culture strikes you as "Fracturing."
Looking at top musicians, artists, and other cultural figures, it seems to me like this is already largely the case. Hip hop sales come in large part from white people. I want more of this cultural sharing, not isolationism.
> because we appreciate the HN community taking time to hear our story, for a short period of time, we’re making some of our original black TV shows available for free on our site
Like thousands of business before them they're marketing to an audience but it seems like they're more than happy to build a broader audience.
As I said, this is easy to observe from abroad, where there is no space to differentiate between black Americans and white Americans. They’re all just Americans and they mostly act the same way.
Just because someone is loud and inflammatory does not mean their views are widely held.
American multiculturalism up until WW2 was English, Scottish, Irish, French, Italian, Jewish and Greek. Strictly European, yet still featured plenty of discrimination within those tiers. The discrimination didn't end because people magically became more enlightened, it ended (or at least was greatly reduced) when the marginalized groups assimilated into a more homogenous "American" identity, which defaults to 'white'.
It's not clear where non-Europeans fall into this melting pot concept, because most are not racially ambiguous and cannot claim to be white. Most scripts will not have a protagonist of a specific race. But in casting, it will simply be assumed that the character in question is white. Because melting pot or not, that's what everybody's default is.
And yes, groups of white Americans that were hostile to each other a century ago are now so integrated that it’s not even thought about. An Italian Catholic marrying a German Protestant was a huge deal in 1900. Today it is nothing.
I remember that song from Schoolhouse Rock too. But if as an adult you sincerely believe the US has actually been a "melting pot" at any point in history, you are deeply misinformed. What about Native American genocide, slavery, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow, internment of Japanese-Americans, redlining, or mass incarceration sounds like a "melting pot" to you?
Neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, literature, theaters, and religious institutions are segregated. Black people are still being harassed or worse for being in the "wrong place" at the wrong time. I assure you whatever racist events you hear in the media is just the tip of the iceberg.
I grew up in one of the most racially and culturally diverse places in the US "a true melting pot" and the neighborhoods were still segregated by race and ethnicity.
The cultural contributions you are talking about are mostly selections made by white tastemakers who vet who and what is fashionable for the time. Sometimes to improve marketability they will replace minorities to make the material palatable.
The only thing that matters in America is equity (ownership not fairness). In order for black people to have equity they need to own it.
The fact of the matter is that in American media, most of the actors, writers, and producers are from one group in terms of looks. How is it "mind boggling" to think about how it feels to rarely see someone who looks like you in popular media (and almost never for leads in films)? Or when someone like you is depicted, it's usually a tired trope or racial stereotype?
America is extremely diverse and yet our media disproportionately represents one type of person, and only very recently has begun to correct itself. It's easy to say "hey, we're all Americans", when most people in media look like us. Would you say the same thing if most tv shows and nearly all lead roles in films were solely of Asian-Americans? The answer is clearly no.
Big productions are in a huge % american media, national media for some ~40million population country, limits itself to talkshows, entertainment world, sports and so.. not movies, series or sitcoms
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
To each their own. Good luck!
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And even if I started it, it was up to dozens of others to not comment on my comment. Could have just downvoted it to oblivion.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Where I work (US-company, but I work outside of US) it is similarly weird to me.
We appear to have gone backwards in the past 5-10 years in my view - no longer can you just be "you", but now it feels like we have to be labelled, categorised, and segregated into different groups. We now have to make a big deal and a big song-and-dance to highlight our differences and define what our ethnic backgrounds are (apparently to "celebrate" it or whatever), despite there being various laws (at least in the UK) about this sort of thing being a protected characteristic that you simply cannot talk about during interviews - its weird.
What if I don't fit into some neat pigeon hole on some spreadsheet? What if I don't want to explain in detail my family tree and pointing out which ethnicity my ancestors were? This idea that people are 100% Ethnic-Category-A/Ethnic-Category-B/Ethnic-Category-C and fit neatly in those slots without any kind of overlap seems willfully ignorant at best, and subversive at worst.
Now I concede there is grossly unequal enforcement of laws. But the words on the page are just the words on the page. It's the people who enforce those laws in an inequitable fashion.
Likewise here in BC.
I believe it is illegal to discuss race, gender, pregnancy, family planning, and so on and so forth during the interview.
No, we haven't. “Don’t label me, I’m not a soup can” was a reaction by certain people against what they saw the current dominant culture to be at the time in exactly the same way that pointing to that as an ideal today is. Except that the latter adds in the construction of an idealized view of the recent past on top of it.
EDIT: But, it is true that the 90s—basically the last period of sustained, strong, broad economic expansion (subsequent expansions have been much worse distributionally)—was also a local high point in subjective perceived quality of race conditions, though not particularly in objective measures. People are a lot more prone to be concerned with fairness issues when their experience falls short of expectations than when they don't.
See Michael Harriot's "blackfamous" thread:
https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/120569584639172198...
I will admit, I did not know who Stacy Adams is. I wonder about the size of the portion of people who know who Stacy Adams is, or who Louis Vuitton is, that also know who Corrinne Yu is.
My perspective as a white man is that when black people create something for themselves like this, it's reclaiming the power. Like how they use the N word with each other, or how Gay people use that word, it's a reclaiming. Taking the hurtful racist division and turning it into something empowering is the point.
I have no idea if that works in the long term or not, but I always think about Morgan Freeman who said something like the only way we can solve racism is if we stop talking about it
Separate but equal was a dismal failure in the US. I don't understand why it deserves a second attempt.
It was not a failure, it was an lie that succeeded quite well at exactly what it was supposed to do, and was struck down for exactly that reason.
But there is a difference between de jure segregation of public services to assure that one community is underserved and crafting of commercial services to the serve a distinct set of preferences associated with a particular demographic.
https://www.epi.org/publication/schools-are-still-segregated...
That seems less like segregation and more of just statistics. If black students are a minority, then by definition they won't be a majority in a random subsample.
> As shown in Figure B, black students are also in economically segregated schools. Less than one in three white students (31.3%) attend a high-poverty school, compared with more than seven in 10 black students (72.4%).
That's probably the stronger argument in your link. That outcome isn't surprising given that most school funds come via property taxes - if most economically depressed areas are minority occupied due to lower costs, then those same schools would also be economically depressed.
The residents in their area are mostly black.
> Why is school funding tied to property taxes?
That's how most of your city is funded.
> Why isn't there a level of mobility that would allow students to go to a more well funded school?
There is? Like, you can move to a different school district but it's going to be more expensive. Nobody is preventing you.
> Who made these policies and why?
It's not clear what policies you are referring to. That we fund things via property taxes?
I disagree with your implicit assumption that all bubbles are inherently negative.
Regardless, who decides which category a site/app falls into? There are legal remedies that can fix literal "war between 2 camps", everything else is freedom of expression.
This implies that there is a "white experience" and a "black experience" which is simply false and subtly racist. This is kind of the point of the parent's post--we've gone from understanding that variance within a race far exceeds variance between races to a mistaken belief that different races have such different experiences that we basically can't understand each other, that we're practically different species. Consider the white translator who was forbidden to translate the work of a black poet, the eminently qualified white school board volunteer who was forbidden from working with students because he wouldn't "understand the experiences of nonwhite students", or the anti-standardized-testing folks who argue that blacks are innately unable to compete in standardized tests.
On that latter point, there's a popular analogy[0] circulating over the last decade that implies that different races are like different species of animal--chimps, goldfish, elephants, penguins, etc--and standardized testing is like a tree-climbing test. To put a fine point on it, these folks are implying that blacks are innately inferior at standardized testing while whites (and presumably Asians) naturally excel.
[0]: https://twitter.com/JamaalBowmanNY/status/137652006277390336...
Simply too much mutually exclusive duality, such as "We are all equal. But my group specifically-- we're different and we need special things and special treatment!"
I am white and was nearly killed by a black officer in South Florida. He piled drived me head first onto a concrete floor on video tape. Prior to that, he choked me and threatened to kill me.
I was in Miami to attend the VMAs with a billionaire, yet they claimed I tried to fight them. Eventually all charges were dropped. The cop was actually working private security when this happened.
It’s just men, testosterone, and power emboldened by a badge. The cop — Mr. Ritchie — later won Detective of the Year, while his Sheriff went to federal prison. Reality is different than what you read in the papers.
That is nonsense.
I love cops in general. I am a cop supporter. I have known excellent cops.
But cops enjoy a great license in the performance of their duties. Because of that it’s very important that we 1) hire cops of outstanding character, not just bullies who want a civil service pension, and 2) hold them to very high standards, a standard of behavior higher than you would an average citizen.
If dealing with aggressive criminals turns you into one you simply don’t have the strength of character to be a cop. And good cops who tolerate bad behavior in their peers are not good cops.
As someone that grew up extremely poor. I am not aware of the two education system other than the “historically black university”.
What do you call the “white education system”?
You seem to not be informed that black people were expressly banned from many American universities as recently as the 1960s. Even after racial bans were made illegal racial discrimination was heavy, things don't change instantly just because a law is passed.
The only reason black universities exist is because black people didn't have other options. Creating black univerisites couldn't possibly make the problem worse.
The media is dominated by white writers and actors and as a result the large majority of content is based on white culture with storylines that appeal to white people. Black actors audition and black stories are pitched, but most don't get hired or funded. BlackOakTV is making a space for those who are rejected and can't get funding for stories appealing more to a black audience.
It's really more about how much money you have in your pocket, what neighborhood you're in - but please continue driving a racial wedge to further divide the nation and distract from our broken system's root causes.
And the most important that you don't mention, the mobility. If there is no mobility and black people will be forever on the poor side, the elephant is still in the room.
Ask yourself this, what makes Blacks in America different than Jews or Asians? Heck, the Jews are probably the minority who has suffered the most historically (and still does, btw!), and they managed to integrate quite well.
What has the gov't done to help Jews or Asians advance that it hasn't done for Blacks? Nothing.
I think it's time to look for other solutions, rather than keep blaming the amorphous "white man" for all problems.
I’ve been alive for almost half a century, and I notice no such change.
I have noticed lots of people feeling like there is a recent change when they realize the identities that arr important to many people outside their immediate bubble (or even inside, though those are often just silently assumed within in-group dialogue or by dominant groups), often in the late teens or 20s.
> We now have to make a big deal and a big song-and-dance to highlight our differences and define what our ethnic backgrounds ar
No, we don’t. Some aspects of identity are important to some people. Why some people who notice that then suddenly also feel the fact that certain dimensions of identity are important to other people implies a general obligation, I don't know.
People for whom Black is an important aspect of their identity don’t, as a rule, think it is important for being White to be central to White people's identity. (And the same is true, mutatis mutandis, with other dimensions of identity.)
> What if I don't fit into some neat pigeon hole on some spreadsheet?
Then...you are just like everyone else, in that regard.
> This idea that people are 100% Ethnic-Category-A/Ethnic-Category-B/Ethnic-Category-C and fit neatly in those slots without any kind of overlap seems willfully ignorant at best, and subversive at worst.
Sure. But many of the people to whom minority identities are most critically important and worthy of attention would be the first people to tell you that; in fact, they have a whole analytical framework around it (intersectionality.)
See story on that from Les Earnest: https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/earth/mongrel.html
Personally, I don't really understand all this need for individual representation, but then neither do I really have to.
Very harmful.
But I don't think the divide is anywhere near as insane as you're imagining. People don't just belong to one culture and ignore any external infulence. Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, etc. people all watch the NBA, NFL, watch Marvel superhero movies, so on and so forth. It's just that everyone also has additional niches.
What constitutes under-repressented? Is proportionally represented ok?
I mean, I'm one of those "subcultures" and honestly I don't feel the need to be represented in media. I'm ok with it, but I don't see what does it bring to me or to my "subculture". We need investment in infraestructure and political-institutional changes.
I understand it's your country, so your own to decide but I agree with the other user, I really can't understand why so much focus with media representation in the US.
It feels weird, and honestly the logic behind it comes as very superficial and light-minded.
Reminds me of an article a while back complaining that Muslim characters were underrepresented in film despite being 2X proportion, meanwhile Christian characters in film are rarely represented (and secular characters wildly over-represented). When identifiably Muslim and Christian characters are portrayed in film, they are frequently villains (Muslims being terrorists and Christians being bigots, typically) and when they aren't villains they are fundamentally secular but maybe they wear a cross necklace or feature prominently in a corny Christmas special (e.g., Turk from Scrubs). Anyway, this is all a tangent, sorry for the digression, etc.
But here’s the thing you’re missing - if your race is a dominant part of your identity, like it is for many black people in America, it’s certainly normal to look for stories that feature black people and black stories. Stories where the characters experience problems and issues similar to the ones they might face in their lives.
Yeah, maybe, I can perhaps agree with that, but I still fail to see the political proposition.
Maybe I should live in the US to understand it, but honestly when I read about black-americans It seems many of their pressing issues are material ones, and the ones that aren't are probably very related to material ones and I fail to see how a netflix for black people is going to change any of that, except reinforce an ingroup-outgroup dynamic.
There most certainly is an ingroup-outgroup dynamic, but I don't think a Black Netflix intensifies it, it merely caters to that audience, just like Netflix is doing with #blackAF or DisneyPlus is doing with blackish.
If I was in a more predominant subculture, maybe I'd be interested in accurate representation, but expecting a lot of that from entertainment doesn't seem wise.
Accepting entertainment for what it is, and not necessarily representation, feels like a more manageable remove.
Don't hire people who are white, if you can help it. That's inclusion.
Create institutions, like TV channels, only for specific races. That's diversity.
Pass lots of "stimulus" bills to trigger inflation through printing money, causing everyone from the middle to the bottom to get poorer, but the same amount of poor by the end of it. That's equity.
"Bobo's in Paradise" and "Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy are good books to explain what's really going on.
Then someone pointed out to me that my favourite super-hero was Spider-Man because Peter Parker is a 20-something loser, just like me.
But there's something authentic about Miles when other characters feel like pandering.
----
Nick Fury Junior is technically a newer character. (The original Nick Fury Senior is white). They just handwaved the difference by sticking a junior in the name without elaboration though.
------
Black Panther from the 70s is definitely pandering lol. But the writers were good at it. (Blatant pandering isn't necessarily a bad thing in the right context)
Now as a parent with a tween and younger kids, my understanding of the current state of the science is that there still is no overwhelming consensus on increased violence related to media, however it seems to be agreed that aggression is linked. 30 years later Mortal Kombat is the number one fighting game franchise of all time, and murder rates are lower and violent crime are relatively unchanged.
Smash Bros and Street Fighter are probably more popular actually.
Mortal Kombat really, really sucked between 3 and 7. MK started to get good again around 8, but really it was "Injustice" (which used Mortal Kombat's engine) that made people start taking MK seriously again.
MK9 is a modern, competitive fighter. But its not as well respected as other games: Street Fighter, Tekken, Smash Bros even. Japan has a real arcade scene (or at least, it did before COVID19 struck), so the games that have proven themselves in the public arcades are more fundamentally competitive than American games like MK9 or Killer Instinct.
I dunno how Smash Bros became so popular though.
----------
Honestly, the extreme violence of Mortal Kombat is a big turnoff to the competitive crowd IMO (much like the extreme "sexiness" of Dead or Alive is also a turnoff). Its good for carving out a niche, but... I don't think people actually like seeing the characters they attach themselves to die.
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There was a study I saw: its not that violent video games cause violence. Its that violent individuals choose violent video games.
In a mainstream setting, you'll just gross people out with a lot of the Mortal Kombat stuff. I think kids like it (because they like seeing their parents get grossed out). Otherwise, when adults get together to play fighting games... "Injustice" seems to be more popular than Mortal Kombat, despite Mortal Kombat being the mainline game and Injustice the DC-superhero "skin".
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Now that I'm an adult, here's my viewpoint on the whole thing. Children like breaking taboos. Adults don't like it when Children break taboos (children should listen to Adults). I feel like Adults sometimes make up stories for why children should listen to them, but this only encourages more taboo-breaking behavior from kids. That's why Mortal Kombat is such a draw for me when I was younger (I knew my parents didn't like it, but that was part of the charm).
Similarly, I see my sister freak out about her daughter playing Mortal Kombat (despite me and my sister playing MK back when we were her age) and turn off the game. My sister claims that the improved graphics make it different... but my eyes see the same thing. Her daughter likes breaking taboos and sometimes not listening to her mom, and playing MK is an avenue to do so.
Edit: Mortal Kombat’s major advantage over Smash is that it’s available on every platform. I think Street Fighter’s problem is that Capcom doesn’t bump the version, so it’s non obvious how Super Street Fighter V Arcade Edition is different from Street Fighter V (which also had a bungled release).
Of the three SF would be my preferred franchise, but sales suggest WB is doing something right.
Not that I doubt your stats. But Street Fighter, Marvel vs Capcom, Tekken and so forth were largely arcade games.
MK2 was an arcade game for sure, but later MK games dropped out of the arcade scene.
Smash never was an arcade game.
I have to imagine that a lot of players paid one quarter at a time to get their Street Fighter skills. But MK players (especially recent ones) are console games. So I'm not sure if copies sold is the best metric.
It's accessible (no crazy button combos), fun (at a party or whatever), and not really "violent" in the same way that Mortal Kombat is bloody as hell. Cartoon violence, not realistic simulated violence. I think that's a major driver.
> It's accessible (no crazy button combos)
Melee is not. You need to consistently wavedash into double-shine combos while foxtrotting to remain competitive. Every landing must be L-canceled (especially during combos). Its a horribly inaccessible game, and was all we had for many years.
Following Melee was Brawl: where "tripping" was invented to randomize the game and piss off competitive players. The most popular "Brawl" was the version people __hacked__ to rebalance the game (taking advantage of the Epona glitch from Twilight Princess to install the Homebrew channel: you can remove tripping and arbitrarily rebalance the Brawl game entirely). It wasn't until Smash4 (WiiU, 2014) that players got an actually competitive game.
Smash Ultimate is finally a very, very good game. But it makes no sense to me why the Smash community stuck with it through the Melee and Brawl years.
> Cartoon violence, not realistic simulated violence. I think that's a major driver.
I think that's a good point. The Smash series (and Marvel vs Capcom series) was timid on violence and sexiness... focusing mostly at the "cartoon" level that was mainstream and acceptable.
The other fighting games leaned into violence (Mortal Kombat) and/or sexiness (Soul Calibur's Ivy, Street Fighter's Cammy, KOF Mai) to try to get some appeal, but I think that lowered the chances of the wide mainstream acceptance.
Smash was always a "Kids" game, and therefore safe for kids to play. No reasonable adult would turn off the game or otherwise be worried that their kids were playing that game. Marvel vs Capcom was at a similar level.
To the broader point, I think what Uzo is talking about is "representation."
Which doesn't just mean "some type of person on the screen." It means the full diversity of experiences and aspirations of that type of person... on the screen.
Living Single isn't Friends with African Americans.
It's African Americans put in the situation of Friends, and then living their own similar-but-unique story in that situation, informed by cultural differences. (IMHO, it's also a helluva lot better of a show)
The 90s had a lot of shows about middle class, successful African American families.
That kind of... stopped. Once TV got homogenized and distributors realized that African American viewers would watch shows about white people, but white people weren't as happy watching shows about African Americans.
And the lack of aspirational and affirmational media that speaks to every person is absolutely a problem.
Living Single was a good show because, unlike Friends, it was actually funny.
> That kind of... stopped. Once TV got homogenized and distributors realized that African American viewers would watch shows about white people, but white people weren't as happy watching shows about African Americans.
But let's be nuanced about this - I don't think that skin color is the real case. Everyone watched Cosby (and for the sake of discussion let's ignore the current situation with him). My (white) heavily bigoted/borderline racist grandmother watched Cosby. He was America's dad and loved by everyone. I think the real problem was that black characters weren't put into shows that represented widely popular, aspirational American ideals or lifestyles, which Cosby had (nuclear family with professional parents and kids dealing with kid stuff). If you want to say that really doesn't represent the majority of the black American experience you wouldn't be wrong, but it also doesn't represent the majority of the white/Hispanic/Asian American experience either. It was something to aspire to.
Those sorts of mass-appeal western values-type shows, IMHO, will be some of the best bridges to build in regards to race relations.
I'll watch a movie set in Scotland just because I think Scottish culture is super interesting, regardless of whether that movie aims to make Scotland seem charming or "well integrated" with my own culture.
But the thing is, nobody (at least in America) expects a show about Scottish people to shoulder the burden of holding up a bridge between Scotland and the world. But there is a sense (at least in America) that the cultural success of Black stories is to be benchmarked against the Cosby Show. Which is weird, when you think about it.
Implies that America thinks this way. Again, nuance is needed.
> the mission of making Black people seem cheerful and unthreatening to America
_seem cheerful and unthreatening_ is in particular what I take umbrage with. That implies that America finds black folks threatening which is why there better be some deep clarification in that statement. But on it's face who really thinks this way? Only ignorant people and true racists have this perception. As far as I can tell that percentage is low.
As far as the business goes I think there's more opportunity in casting that wider net like Cosby or more recently The Neighborhood and creating more appeal for a larger audience. The model of "Netflix for black people" immediately excludes about 86% of the population. Some non-black folks will subscribe, and giving a very liberal 16% of that share they are still excluding 70% of the potential population. This doesn't mean that they won't be successful though - Tyler Perry basically does the same thing (though not overtly so) and he does pretty well for himself. If I were an investor I'd have to examine this under a microscope before jumping into any investments. But who knows? Hopefully they will do well.
You are certainly welcome to subscribe no matter who you are, and you might well do that if you're interested in stories told in a Black context --- for the same reason you might have been super interested in watching Babylon Berlin even if you don't even speak German. Or you might not. That's one of the cool things about pluralism.
EDIT: short of a Tyler Perry or Oprah Winfrey jumping on board (someone that has significant momentum), the only other way this survives is with an acquisition. Netflix would be primed to pick this up as the start of a black-interest channel within Netflix itself. If this is a real market Netflix will either buy them or start their own.
And just a note here - I care nothing about the racial aspects of it but do like it when companies and people win and thrive. I want to see that here too but I think they're lopping off too many potential customers.
Implies that Living Single came after Friends, but it debuted the year before.
https://www.theodysseyonline.com/white-ripoff
Eth bro dot co at gmail
Where do you draw the line in your definition of "subcultures"? Is it Black/White/Brown? I always feel weird that I'm pigeon-holed into "white", as if I have anything in common with those of Italian or Jewish ancestry.
>The country has a deep history of racism and black people being literal slaves
The USA is astoundingly multi-cultural. Why do you think so many people from around the globe try to get there?
Agree. I could imagine Netflix-for-Turks streaming in Europe for overseas Turks!
Most well educated gypsies are being frowned down by their own relatives as if they became "non-Gypsy traitors" and they often run away from their own ghettos to never, ever come back.
That never happened in the US with Black people, even in the worst racist laws in the 50's. They even tried to live with the same rights as the White people.
Gypsy people in Europe, at least the tribalistic ones want to secede from the society, as a reverse MLK and live by their own rules, having those priority over state laws.
I think it terrible what the US is heading too (equalizing culture with skin-color)
Oh man that's some small minded simpleton-vibes here :)
There are of course those who immigrated later.
Serving targeted programming to an identifiable minority audience seems like a perfectly reasonable business (and social) proposition.
I don’t know that “Netflix for Black People” will test well, but it seems perfectly fine to me. [white middle-aged male if context matters].
Edit to add: It seems like Fubu* is another extraordinarily successful story that used a similar Black solidarity message and targeting to positive effect.
* "For Us, By Us"
Maybe some black people like to see shows with diversity, too.
In some other post someone was commenting how their wife, who is a director of advertising, got complaints for using a white female hand for an advertisement. I proposed using profile information to show people advertisements of people that matched themselves, but that was met with disdain in HN. It was argued that we need more diversity, not pigeonholes for people to be isolated in their subcultures.
Honestly when I read the title, I immediately thought, "Drinking fountains for black people."
This isn't the same as "drinking fountains for black people" because it's targeted programming but it's not exclusionary.
"Drikning fountains for black people" existed because "Black people using white drinking fountains" was prohibited. It wasn't a preference.
Presumably black people who like to see shows with [non-black] diversity are already having their needs met. Addressing a market whose needs are not being met has business (and social) value.
Wow, that is egregious. We ban accounts that stoop to vile tropes like that. I doubt that you intended it that way but you did it anyhow—seriously not cool. If you want to keep commenting on HN, please don't do anything like that again.
The gratifying thing is that the commenters who replied to you were so entirely decent. That's the sort of thoughtfulness that you ought to be practicing, even when you encounter something that rubs you the wrong way on the internet. Or rather, especially then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"X for white people" makes more sense in a population where caucasians are the minority, for instance in China.
Totally hypothetical example... "NBA for white people" - basically majority-white professional basketball teams playing each other. I'm sure that would ignite a firestorm if someone tried to do that.
Is this really true, today? I can definitely see that even 10 years ago, but just glancing through Netflix recommendations, I see characters from all over the place. I wonder if anyone has been able to quantify this progress.
>know that that means you have some issues to work out on your own.
Wait, what?
Asking seriously, I'm European.
To echo what others have said, though, if you are not a member of a minority, it can be difficult to understand how affirming and wonderful it can feel to experience, just for a brief moment and even if by fantasy, to exist as if you were the majority. For example, I am gay, and here are some common thought processes that go through my head that are basically completely foreign to straight people:
1. When I walk down the street with my partner of 20 years, deciding to hold hands is not something I can just do spontaneously. It is essentially a political act when I do it, and so my first thoughts always go to (a) am I safe and (b) do I feel like making a political statement right now.
2. When I travel, the first thing I think about is whether I am going to a place that is accepting of gays. I'm just too old to want to deal with anti-gay attitudes when I'm supposed to be enjoying myself on vacation.
3. When I introduce myself to new people, I do a mental calculation as to whether I feel like mentioning my partner and thus outing myself in that situation. Again, it's always a conscious calculation, where it almost never is for straight people.
So the first time I visited the Castro (a well-known gay neighborhood in San Francisco), it was kind of magical to me, to just walk down the street and have people assume I was gay before assuming I was straight, and it was really the first time I could completely relax and feel like what it was like to be a member of the majority.
So that's what things like BET, LogoTV, Telemundo, etc. are really about, it's about actually feeling like you are the focus of attention for a short time.
In the sense that shows and movies seem like the result of endless series of meetings, where anything that anyone might object to is censored and removed.
that means, this channel intends to highlight stories from or about black people, but it doesn't suggest who should watch it.
saying "it's for black people" is patronizing because it is claiming that it is not for me, whereas, if it is "about black people" then i feel welcome to watch it, because i happen to be interested in that.
No problem with e.g. "X for German-Americans" or the like, if the niche is there.
Also, it’s not like this blackoakTV doesn’t allow white people to sign up. But I bet you won’t, because you have no interest in black stories. Which in turn kind of proves why it should exist.
Whereas in the case of Black products culture and location are not the distinct.
Edit : what I am writing is really confusing and I should have stopped 2 seconds before commenting.
I think most of the world is just completely weirded out by how US culture tackles this issue.
Long story short: The average lifespan of the dollar is approximately 28 days in Asian communities, 19 days in Jewish communities, 17 days in white communities — and just six hours in Black communities. Meaning after that time, that dollar has to go into another community for a product or service.
These are entrepreneurs. Their job is not to teach everyone melting pot kumbayah culture. Their job is to make money for themselves and their investors. After about 35 years of travel and living I'm intimately familiar with Africa and Asia. There are changes in Africa right now. Changes that feel much different than any changes I've lived through previously, and this product strikes a brilliantly resonant chord with those changes. People, particularly the 18-35 demographic in Africa, will eat this up. They get some black american and african celebrities along with someone like Wode Maya on this thing, and having blackoak would become a status symbol in Africa. At least among the young.
Sure, not great for global society, but awesome for business. Only people who don't realize how quickly Africa is growing would think otherwise.
However, X for white people is often the default case and is left unsaid. As an American you should be well versed in this. No one is saying that non-black people cannot watch the content, the implication is that the content it is tailored for black people.
Indian Americans regularly consume music and foods that most other Americans don't.
Hispanic Americans mostly are bilingual with Spanish/English. There are more spanish only speaking hispanics than there are english only speaking.
America has a history of racists laws (goverment) and bylaws (corporations, institutions, universities) created directly to disenfranchise non-whites that shaped present day distribution of races in different states, neighborhoods, socioeconomic status, cultural values and more.
As recently as the 60s, blacks were expressly banned from many colleges so in order to fill the gap, HBCU (Historically Black Colleges & Universities) were created because black people had no good options.
Most media in America is created by whites and the stories are based largely on white American culture. The Indian and Chinese Americans are another group that have a very hard time finding tv shows and movies that resonate with their culture. BlackOakTV looks like an attempt to offer more content representing the real differences in black American culture written from the perspective of those who actually understand it.
Is more or less what I thought, (with the difference that I thought "Y for Z people").
So I can't judge if it's necessary or makes sense, but from the point of the author it seems to be the case.
Which is sad as black people are not a small minority in the US and so I would expect more representation of them.
I mean Netflix (or any thing similar) should be "for everyone" featuring a diverse mix at least similar to reality (or maybe slightly more diverse (1) ).
(1): For <small> minorities in a country representation with a mix "like reality" would mean they would not get much representation as just a <small> number of content thingies would represent them. So increasing the degree of diversity above it is I think a good idea.
That said, this is a great idea and I wish this company the best. I'd love to see something similar for the Hispanic community, as well.
We tried "rap music for white people" and we decided we preferred the rap music for black people :D
24/7 Caso Cerrado, let's goooo
In another timeline this has already happened. We merely have Governors Abbott and DeSantis and Delta Covid.
I could certainly be mistaken, but I'd bet my net worth that this is about making a product that will resonate with global black youth. From Canada to eswatini. From Addis to Trinidad and Tobago.
And that market is enormous.
It is weird how we just tend to generalize over all of this because of the color of one's skin.
Wouldn't BET+ be BET for the internet?
Black people are certainly entitled to watch whatever content they choose, but they are not unique in their "different lived experiences". "White people" are not some amorphous, homogeneous group.
Then again, we live in a society where discrimination against white people is 100% legal and promoted, so I won't have much hope for this being inclusive for all.
That's entirely your own interpretation and you might want to consider why you think this way.
There is nothing stopping a white person from subscribing to "Netflix for black people" if they think the content may be of interest to them.
You are in America:
Vending machine for Americans sells Gatorade
You are in Mexico
Vending machine for Mexicans sells Agua Fresca
Vending machine for Americans sells Gatorade
This is no different then X for X people.
They aren't saying you aren't welcome, it's more so that you likely don't know if you'll even like Agua Fresca. Mexicans know they love Agua Fresca.
Maybe Mexicans don't really like Gatorade, but they know that the Americans in Mexico would like to have some Gatorade - boom it's a niche, it's a business, profit can be made.
This is NOT discrimination, it's catering to a market. Discrimination is treating unjustly. It has nothing to do with providing X for X. Y could totally have X, no one cares, it's just that Y just may not enjoy it, relate to it or even want it.
“Black” in America is, confusingly to lots of people, the name of an ethnic/cultural group formed by centuries shared experience of kidnapping, deliberate eradication of prior cultural identities, deliberate ongoing disruption of the family unit, slavery (and after slavery de jure discrimination, and after that substantial ongoing public and private discrimination in fact) to which the racial group also labelled “black” was subjected in America.
A. We're all equal! B. We need something special, because we're different!
What's next? Here are a few ideas:
The NBA channel for white people and please only white basketball players on the teams Track and Field channel for asian people with only asian athletes on the teams Chess for dogs channel with only dogs playing chess, poor cats they are not allowed to play chess on this channel Landscaping for black people with only black landscapers on the shows
What i like about the porn industry is there are many sub-genres within it, so one could argue that this BlackOakTV is an attempt at a subgenre. However at a time like this in the US... You know, Edward Bernay's was right in his book Propaganda, create a suggestive environment and people will buy what ever the environment suggests and they will think it was their own idea for wanting to buy it. But who knows, maybe the equality and diversity crowd really is screaming inside for more segregation and preventing all sorts of freudian slips from surfacing.
Actually i have a better idea for the chess dogs, let's only have dalmatian dogs playing chess and keep golden retrievers from enjoying any media attention while playing chess on this channel. This will lead to great narratives in the minds of the niche consumers and dalmatian ownership will skyrocket along with chess board sales.
Anyone want to give me funding?
Good luck with it regardless. More friction in the market means someone is making money. Let it rip.
We in the US have a long history of subjugating and violently suppressing the rights of black slaves (and every black person after outlawing slavery). The last few years have shown that the number of people who still believe that should happen is much larger than we suspected.
It's not a fetish - it's a straight up fight to end discrimination against a group of people.
If it wasn't for the rightwingers (American and otherwise) who want blacks to sit in the corner and shut up, or get attacked and discriminated on, there wouldn't be a problem.
All this ”we have long history is america black slavery blaablablah” is not any kind of a counter argument. By segregating people you are doing exactly the same thing what slave owners, south africans and those hillbilly right wing extremists do.
You should see the diversity threads on this board. It's the same dog whistling every time, but here its about some made-up 'we're reverting back to segregation' argument but no one had a problem with Minari winning awards about the Korean-American experience. It's the same idea, simply expanded to an entire platform of such content.
And imagine the outrage if someone had made “X for white people”. There’d be riots in streets.
The bizarreness and racist double standard behind this is just astounding seen from the outside.
White has been the default in America for a long time. Seems like that's slowly starting to change but until it does, there's going to be a need for things specifically targeted at minority groups.
I saw this interview recently: <<<David Bowie Criticizes MTV for Not Playing Videos by Black Artists | MTV News>>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZGiVzIr8Qg
It blew me away. He is so on point!
Not saying there were no Black artists: just saying that Black culture wrapped in what white people accept, like is not enough for the Black community.
Edit: you guys downvoting me are likely too young to remember day one on MTV when stuff Blacks actually listened to was not featured on MTV until hiphop culture forced the issue.
Black influence on mainstream music came at a huge cost to Black music stars. They were copied but mostly not included unless they paid homage. Horrible place for them truly.
You have minimal idea about what Black people are really about without another white person’s filter because that’s how it has always been even on BET.
If it would merely be a redundancy, why would it provoke outrage? "Conservative Talk Radio" seems pretty redundant to me, but doesn't provoke any emotion.
If it's "focuses on content for <minority group>", that's great. Minorities tend to underrepresented and trying to address that balance by creating more for them is all bonus.
If it's "excludes all but <minority group>", I am not a fan; I thin it causes resentment. The ability to have a group that allows <minority> but not <majority>, but not have a group that allows <majority> but not <minority>, is _wrong_ in my mind. Admittedly, having a group that allows both but focuses on <minority> so that <majority> is unlikely to be interested in joining is reasonable.
I guess the act of specifically excluding/disallowing a group, unless it's acceptable for _all_ groups to do the same, inherently conveys "you are the worse of the two groups". It's insulting and an attack.
My apologies; I must not have been clear. Nothing here is an example of something I have an issue with. I was merely pointing out that having "X for <minority>" can go two ways; promote the minority, or exclude the majority. The former is great, the later is not.
I wasn't, in any way, trying to indicate the post is doing the wrong thing. As others have noted, it sounds like a Netflix-ey version of BET which, as far as I know, hasbeen nothing but positive.
It's rude to troll on someone's Launch thread.
Personally, I'm divided on how I feel about this launch, but if there is a market for it anywhere, it's the US, with its deep-rooted racial divisions and disparities.
The comparisons you are making seem very different, as they are based on language and global geography, rather than skin colour.
Remember the Democrats little kneeling to BLM while wearing Kente scarves publicity stunt? The irony (or symbolism?) of the Democrats dressing up as Africa's most prolific slave traders was apparently lost on most people.
The idea of permission structures for white Americans being somehow erected because some ethnic groups and communities sold people from other ethnic groups and communities (because, and I apologize if this is obvious to some readers, the compaction of people of African descent into "African-American" is, for obvious reasons, something here and not there) is one of a set of apologetics in common use in the United States designed to erase the complicity of our forebears.
Good luck to BlackOakTV. I look forward to seeing what happens next for you all.
The idea is that "X" is de facto "X for white people" in America. I don't necessarily agree with it, but that's the argument.
I still thinks it sounds like nonsense, but at least it explains the massive downvotes Im getting :D
It must be hard to live in a country where everyone is so obsessed with race, yet supposedly also how it “is not important”. To me that seems like a massive contradiction.
Bigotry, hatred, and violence, whether explicit or less obvious (voting rights, bias in many services etc) is the problem that some us unfortunately continue and the rest of us want to end.
In america there are black people alive who weren't allowed to vote because of their race.
Given the history of race in america it makes total sense that america is still grappling with race while also there is significant pushback against that grappling.
Perhaps you should put some effort into self-education and understand the context of race and racism in America before making qualitative statements about things you seem to not even grasp the basics of.
The difference between majority and minority is surely not that difficult to comprehend from outside the US?
IMO the solution to that problem is definitely not to reinforce that division.
Well, yes, and this was codified into US law until the last bits were finally suppressed in the 1960s, but that doesn't mean the underlying racism has been eliminated as well.
Will it be racist to continue using this terminology then, once the US reaches 50-50?
So close, and yet so far.
personally, i think it's great that the founders have chosen to sell this as "X for black people." it is much more honest and cuts right to the point. if they had not, if they had instead chosen words like "diversity," then inevitable drill-downs would be criticizing them for trying to hide their true intentions.
It's really tiresome.
Many institutions in the Western sphere either don't match the demographic/ethnic composition of the target market any more or never have. Parliaments, cabinets, newsdesks, movies, highest level management in big companies, even access to voting - all of this has been dominated by white, straight and often old men, with women, non-White people and LGBT not being represented at all.
Over time, many of the discriminatory policies fell - but the reality was, until maybe a decade ago, representation still lacked - and now, change is coming in ever faster and faster. You now have female-centered superhero movies, Black superhero movies, transgender people in parliaments, a Black US President... and the speed of that change was for many conservatives simply too high, so they framed the quest for equal representation across all parts of society as a "culture war" instead.
> Wonder which certain long-nosed tribal "people" funded this one...
But I couldn't reply to it since it was flagged. The answer is Techstars Music, owned by Techstars which is founded by David Cohen
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/black-oak-tv/company...
But I think that MLK was fighting against this "X for black people" thing. (X == buses, schools, shops, etc). Isn't it racism and segregation?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is not remotely true of this site.
Racism is the belief that different races are distinctly inferior or superior to one another. [1] I don't see anything in the author's post or the product that indicates they believe Black people are racially superior.
Segregation, specifically in context of what King was fighting for, means spatial or institutional separation of the races. [2] Clearly not the case here, they are pushing for more representation of Black people in media, not less.
(There are other civil rights leaders you can invoke besides MLK when you're feigning outrage btw)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation
Correct.
> But I think that MLK was fighting against this "X for black people" thing.
No, Dr. King was not fighting against Black-founded commercial services attempting to serve the particular interests of Black consumer. But, that's a pretty good illustration that your first sentence is correct (though its also a pretty good mimicry of American White conservatives coopting Dr. King, so, maybe you do understand a bit about race-based political propaganda in America.)
The Atlantic empire enslaved people different by color, language, religion and used them as a tool for centuries. Now, they are attempting to fix it.
The Rus' enslaved people of it's own creed, skin color and religion. Made them property as well. But, when serfdom cracked, everyone was like `okay moving on to the next chapter of our glorious history`.
Why would you reckon you'd ever grasp foreign problems, when at your own house you were scammed like a sucker?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution
Condescending to others about their own country's history is not a good look.
I elaborated my view by pointing out their version of slavery was shushed and never addressed with. The descendants never draw conclusions from their own history, failing to understand what's the deal with USA at their current timeline.
Looks like you're unaware of the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_Revolution which steamrolled the foothold for hacks taking over (the October Revolution).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Without snark also.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But they in no way market to Japanese, or Asians in general. I think that is the key.
You should be marketing "black content for everybody", not "content for black people". Sure, the segment that responds will be heavily slanted to certain demographics, but at least you aren't putting up artificial barriers, and you'll stir up a lot less upfront negative reactions.
Unless controversy is part of the marketing strategy, which is risky, but sometimes works.
Black hair products can be a thriving business, just as this potentially can be as well.
Again, realistically, how many white people would pay for a platform like this? If you think the number is substantial you are delusional. For starters, its being marketed "for black people", its all black content, and other platforms e.g Netflix already have content from black creators (albeit not as focused)
Having said that, they do not need white people to sub to build a viable business. I think it could work - the real secret sauce will be in securing great content naturally. But positioning your business as "$X for black people" does pigeon hole their potential market quite a bit.
Umm, no? Like I tried to convey in my original comment, "for <group>" means a focus on that group, as opposed to just general content. Nothing I've ever come across that was marketed as "for <>" has ever been intended to exclude me as a non-member, nor have I ever interpreted it that way.
I suspect you have a bias to hear it as exclusionary more than is typical.
Anecdotally, I watch BET fairly regularly, if not often. I'm aware that it's business model is generally content by black creators, for black consumers, but again, I don't remember any hints anywhere of implications of "if you're not black, you can go". If anything, wider viewing would be more informative and promote sharing across groups.
Feels like some kind of "Outrage marketing" strategy, I mean, look how this thread has blown up over the last hour. I'm sure the OP is smart and knew what they were doing when wording this post.
I don’t understand how this would lead towards a better society at all. I don’t understand how YC gave you funding. I am starting to really lose respect for YC. Seems like a toxic idea and honestly I hope you fail.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
By the way, how did I break the guidelines exactly? I understand that you guys simply are protecting your investments but come on.
Your comment broke at least these site guidelines:
"Be kind."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You also broke 3 of the 4 comment guidelines for Show HNs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
You also have a history of using HN for flamewar and for political battle. We've had to ask you more than once in the past to stop. We ban accounts that keep this up, so if you would please take the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd appreciate it.
But for my curiosity, does the rules not apply for the posters as well? Is it ok to post stuff that is inherently racist or promotes segregation?
For example, if someone would have made a dating site for nazis would that be ok on HN as a post and when the obvious comments are coming, I guess those would get warned and removed?
BoomerFlix.
What better market to target if you want to make a few coins?
Who's in?
I'm not actually a "boomer" (I'm too young), but my kids call me one anyway. But I'm a little surprised that there's no streaming service that includes nothing but old 60's/70's/80's movies whose rights could almost certainly be obtained cheap, and not even bother with more recent movies.
It's easy to imagine. Movies from (especially) the 1960s/1970s. Lost In Space. Unscoped airchecks (with fees paid of course).
When will hacker news fork into racially segregated communities?
Please remember to ignore this HN thread. I can already see it's becoming absolutely atrocious and is not even remotely representative of society at large.
'White culture' creates all of the countries that people from every other country are fleeing to, or trying to immigrate to.
White people created Democracy, Checks and Balances, overwhelming amount of the technology that makes our lives great, much of the major medical breakthroughs...and so much more.
White culture, of science and planning and Democracy, is GREAT.
Let's remember to celebrate it as well.
Remember kids -- jws AREN'T white!
Granted it’s been predominantly made of white people but there was never any explicit awareness of race like there is in black culture, as far as I can tell…
Western culture (a term which would be more familiar to me at least) is in fact heavily predicated on judeo-christian values hailing from the Middle East, where people were not really white… Similarly in the Classical World there was a lot of mingling between races.
I’m European and I despise identity politics but the whole idea of “white culture” is just weird to me. I think of it as a race-agnostic “western culture”, and I don’t think it’s at odds with “black culture”, or that the existence of “black culture” logically means there exists a “white culture” - other than maybe at the fringes.
As a purely business concern, it seems like you're going to struggle against an already crowded marketplace. Netflix is already "Netflix for black people" (as are Hulu, Prime Video, etc). They've been focused on creating and promoting that content for years and already have multiple categories based on race, gender, sexuality, ethnic background, etc. Do you expect users to switch away from those services or add another service on top of the existing ones?
Any black American has less in common with any black person in Africa or Europe than they have with a white American.
Honestly so sick of US issues always being portrayed as a simplistic black/white issue.
In most of mainland Europe this woukd be against the law
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we've had to ask you many times to stop breaking the HN guidelines. If you keep this up we're going to have to ban you, so please fix this.
You couldn’t have picked a worse example lmao
I am fine if you want to downvote me but this kind of things I don't want to exist.
There are other ways to do this but building a streaming service for people based on their race is too much extreme.
I think people should try to bring people together instead of further separating based on their Race.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28089696.
But I love it. One thought that comes to me: If you’re successful at this, you probably get to repeat the story of the big record labels poaching black creators in the 1920s. That’d be good history to dive into and weave into the marketing narrative you pitch to your creators. A solid outreach and education piece for indie makers could have lasting societal impact all on its own.
Happy to discuss if you’re interested in discussion.
Many of us are from countries where segregationary nonsense like this is rightly found to be disgusting.
But hey, it's HN, let's drive fractures deeper as there's a buck to be made.
I'm confused. Hint: it's the word "black" everywhere
Don’t think that’s okay?
Netflix and HBO Max is filled with LGBTQ of all races already. To the point it breaks from immersion. What are you talking about being “under represented in Hollywood?” 13% of the us population are black Americans, it’s at least that in shows (likely much higher).
I’m sick of this racism. If I started a “Netflix for white people” I’d be banned everywhere.
Stop racism at the roots. You do not deserve to be popular. I'm ashamed this even got to main HN page.
crazy you have to do this in order to give some people a chance
youtube biase is a fact. good luck on the project!
Many persons are not going to understand the need or motivation for this, but that's fine, it is not for them.
I wish someone with deep pockets will get the message, buy it, and add it to their (bigger) service offering.
Imagine the scary pushback if replacing "black" with other color.
Netflix for Africans Netflix for Asians Netflix for Indians ... sounds normal.
But
Netflix for Black People Netflix for Women Netflix for LGBT
Will definitely cause an outrage
An other example on how we are tribal, even if the tribes are just activists vs non-activists.
I mean if you need e.g. "Restrooms for Indians" implies that "other" Restrooms are somewhat not suited for Indians which normally hints to some major problem with discrimination.
Just to be clear I explicitly mean "<GenericService>" not "<SpcificProduct>", e.g. black people often have a kind of hair which non-black people have rarely, as such a "Shampoo for Black People" (which is actually a "Shampoo for any kind of people with that kind of hair common with Black People") isn't that unreasonable. Similar a movie focused on living circumstances especially common with black people staring mostly black people is also likely mainly targeting black people as an audience.
But Netflix (HBO, Disney) are not specific products but very generic services.
Since content is often relevant to a particular culture, and streaming platforms collect content together, focusing on content from one culture can make sense.
Neflix is like the news, and Neflix for Black People/Culture would be like HN.
What's wrong with Nollywood? or Bollywood?
They seem to be doing well and are already on Netflix.
Maybe you're just trying to target a niche, but I think you're limiting your potential market, and, frankly, helping to further divide our society on racial lines.
Simply creating a space that caters to culture specific creativity is a good thing, and as others have pointed out its been done before with BET.
One effort that has been happening is providing incentives to have diverse top of the line staff on productions so that they share their stories and angle on things.
We at wrapbook (https://www.wrapbook.com) at making it easy for productions to measure their diverse staff so that we can incentivize diversity down the line.
Question for the founders- At least since Feb 2021, Amazon and Netflix have created and promoted black voices by creating a separate category. Is the problem you attempt to solve more visibility and is what Amazon doing insufficient?
The problem is, that as long as you do not live "in your country" you will always feel "off" when turning on the TV and watching any other culture you can't connect with, not matter the percentage.
This is the "#1 reason why we will never get rid of racism?!" Not, say, racists? Or race supremacists?
Is there something racist about this platform or its creators? I didn't see where they said they think one race is superior to another.
Few people could actually believe that, even fewer have the courage to say it.