What's Hype?

Nov 07, 2006

What's Hype? · by Rafi Kam

Don’t Believe the Hypebeast is the best site to come along satirizing urban lifestyle shit since Gossiping Bitches (R.I.P.) and Oh Word before we fell off. The blog’s name is a riff on the trendy streetwear site Hypebeast, which also happens to be the blogging home of idiot savant Lupe Fiasco.

The latest Don’t Believe the Hypebeast post is on the stupidity of the marketing label “skurban” which has now spawned the unbelievably bad business idea of “skurniture”. This shows you the type of thing DBTHb does well and what they don’t do well (link to what they’re talking about!).

Once these guys master linking to their topics, they’ll be unstoppable.

Since no idea’s original, some fella tried to make a satire of DBTHb’s satire with a site called Don’t Believe The Don’t Believe the Hypebeast Site. How meta can you get-a? It should come as no surprise that two weeks later the humorless copycat site seems to have disappeared.

Speaking of streetwear, Hypediss is a site with a strong focus on streetwear. This is a site where people can vote on items by either hyping them or dissing them. It borrows the big idea behind Digg but instead of voting on news stories, the site’s users are voting on quick random items usually fashion items or some potentially cool new thingamajig.

This is a much better way to build off Digg’s model than using the open-source software pligg to make a super-niche-specific version of Digg. Which is what hiphoppick.com (via Grand Good) does.

Just because open source software now makes it super-easy to roll out your own social network, social news site or blog site doesn’t mean doing so will yield a hit. The fact that it’s super-easy means it will be that much harder to stand out. And the same is true for the new fad of niche specific customized search engines.

Back to Hypediss, I like the style of the site but I think they should incorporate a short list that shows in real time what’s been recently “hyped” by a reader to let people have the thrill of discovering some hidden gem from the archive.

Also I think this yay/nay concept should be used for an mp3 site. People are looking to discover new music and this would be a great way to facilitate that. Let me know if you know of any sites slickly using the Digg formula for mp3’s.

One popular “Hype” site does have to do with mp3’s and it predates both Hypediss and Don’t Believe the Hypebeast. That site is Hype Machine which aggregates selections from many mp3 blogs and is all about the thrill of discovery.

They kind of lose me with the interface though. And you can’t thumbs up or thumbs down on MP3’s there. It’s election day and I haven’t registered since moving back to New York months back. Can’t I at least have some mp3’s to vote on?

Comments for "What's Hype?"

Now that would be kind of an interesting tweak to OHHLA, a “hype” vote on lyrics. Of course adding that might blow the roof off what’s already gonna be a large budget, but it’s fun to imagine millions of hype votes battling it out to REALLY determine who’s the greatest of all time. The more I think about it though it would probably be depressing because KRS and Rakim’s lyrics would grow mold while Jim Jones and Young Jeezy got more hype than Pookie at the Carter.

— DJ Flash Nov 8, 06:07 AM
Rafi!
I’ve shouted out Dbthb a couple times of Flawless Hustle. They’re really hit or miss; sometimes they have me laughing out loud at work, more often lately they’re not quite as clever as they used to be, but they’re usually good for a chuckle.

Check out the ‘Streetwear Culture x Run Amok’ post about the Bape X Disney ‘Winnie the Pooh’ at FH for my best impression of the hype slander post.

Also www.elbo.ws is a decent mp3 aggregator too, but I don’t think they let you yay/nay songs either.

— Gaberockka Nov 8, 10:09 AM