I miss human curation

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

Somewhere between the late 2000’s aggregator sites and the contemporary For You Page, we lost our ability to curate the web. Worse still, we’ve outsourced our discovery to corporate algorithms. Most of us did it in exchange for an endless content feed.

Human curation might reemerge...

The internet is overflowing with content, making the search for specific topics (especially niche or less popular ones) a daunting task.

This challenge isn't new—it dates back decades. Initially, we turned to trusted human curators for guidance, with platforms like fark.com serving as go-to sources for discovering wo... See more

as much as the feeds brought me things I never would have seen or heard otherwise, my overdependence on them was also cutting me off from a different realm of experiences that I had forgotten about over the course of the decade: the encounter with scarcity rather than infinity, the process of judging and choosing for myself what I wanted to see in

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if I wanted to use the web in a personal way, it seemed better to do so through social media. But this felt like a job too! Everything in social media is explicitly quantified with likes and shares and retweets. All the platforms have a notification bar to show you which random utterance of yours was gaining in popularity, implying that you could r... See more

I think that at this point in life—after ten or so years of a proliferative mode in the online idiom—there is a craving to return to an earlier, slower internet. Before real chronology and temporal relationships were replaced with sped-up simulations of real-time.

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