The inevitable decline of fully open platforms

curation platforms are also able to achieve unique relationships with their end consumers. They win trust by limiting supply and creating opportunities for consumers who were traditionally more passive users of the internet to participate more actively by lowering the barrier to entry for “curation as creation.”

When you monetize via ads, curation takes a backseat to featuring advertisers - there is just less digital real estate available to curate your own recommendations - so these platforms end up making ethically dubious design choices that generate massive trust gaps.

One way to rethink these platforms is to think about all the users across the 90-0-1 ratio; to figure out how to share a platform's overall value with all its contributors, big and small. In the creator economy, this means rewarding readers and curators alongside creators.

Our digital systems generate noise and there's little the algorithms can do a... See more