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Lots of opinions about Cosmos's public domain search, most of them not very nice

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Spill the tea what am I missing here

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As someone who does a LOT of public domain research, a big issue for me is that the site hides / shortens most of the important metadata and info about each piece. The "vibey" search approach is cool in theory, but impractical for anything focused—and, I think, de-incentivizes people from learning more about the context or origin of these pieces by just linking them via AI powered aesthetic matching. I also just find it sort of antithetical to the mission and ethos of public domain to have such a superficial acknowledgement of the source location of all of the pieces on there. Most of the public domain imagery we have access to is a result of hours and hours of labor on the part of archivists and librarians (often poorly compensated) who have scanned and tagged these pieces. Organizations like these—The Internet Archive, the Public Domain Review, etc.—are literally being sued into oblivion and begging for money to keep doing the work they do. I understand they don't have the funds that a company like Cosmos does to make a tool like this, but I would love to see these VC backed products working *with* these long standing orgs to make tools rather than scraping their sites and barely acknowledging the labor and expertise that allowed these collections to exist in the first place.

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Jake <3 thank you!! Happy you're eating good 🫡

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Sep 6Liked by Jake Bell

❤️ollie

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It really hits

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