I miss human curation

My latest column at The New Yorker is about the revenge of homepages: Why we're turning toward individual websites as the platform era of the internet continues to disintegrate.

I started working on this piece because I've found myself going to homepages more often. It's a way to get a controlled, curated look at what a publication offers, and a ch... See more

The messages I receive from Micro.blog and Mastodon and my RSS feeds are that everyone is retreating back to their own sites and/or their own domains. Everyone is remembering fondly that twenty-years-ago life. Everyone wants to get away from the algorithm and read the weekly musings of the everyday people. Everyone wants to recapture that feeling o... See more

I’m glad that I’m not the only one who misses old school human curation. For me, it’s more about wanting a connection moreso than valuing the actual thing being shared. I think this trend is accelerating. With generative AI and the ever-present algorithm that has sucked itself into every facet of our life, a part of the response to it will result i... See more

The pleasant parts of the internet seemed to be curated by human beings, not algorithms.