Curation
The art of creating value by providing context and meaning to apparently disconnected information bits
Robin Good and
Curation
Then there’s curation theater.
Posting endless ‘favorite reads’ lists composed entirely of current bestsellers. Ticks the boxes, but doesn’t quite reveal taste. Reposting LinkedIn hot takes, adding cute hashtags but not really contributing much commentary
Posting endless ‘favorite reads’ lists composed entirely of current bestsellers. Ticks the boxes, but doesn’t quite reveal taste. Reposting LinkedIn hot takes, adding cute hashtags but not really contributing much commentary
Sangeet Paul Choudary • Humans as 'luxury goods' in the age of AI
The more our world becomes measurable and quantifiable, the more we need spaces that preserve what can't be measured—the hunches we can't explain, the patterns we feel but can't prove.
Sari Azout • What Matters in the Age of AI Is Taste
Today, buying products online has never been easier. Convenience is at an all-time high, and consumers have more options than ever before. It seems, once again, that there is nowhere else we need to go. And yet, this is precisely the problem.
In today’s oversaturated world, we need curators to help us separate signal from noise. Gladwell told us... See more
In today’s oversaturated world, we need curators to help us separate signal from noise. Gladwell told us... See more
Jesse Lee • Curators All the Way Down
If creators were once the internet’s golden children , producing original content to feed our insatiable scroll, this next phase belongs to someone else: the curator. Not necessarily the loudest voice or the most prolific, but the most discerning.
Curators are the new digital tastemakers, and their currency isn’t volume - it’s taste. Instead of... See more
Curators are the new digital tastemakers, and their currency isn’t volume - it’s taste. Instead of... See more
The Creator-Curator Hybrid
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.
Where have all the websites gone?
AI drives the cost of words to zero. The market floods. Consequently, the premium on Authenticity—on blood and bone—skyrockets. The web fills with synthetic noise. Curation becomes the only moat.
We are not just fighting bad content. We are entering a new age where being human is no longer the default—it is a luxury product. The future belongs to... See more
We are not just fighting bad content. We are entering a new age where being human is no longer the default—it is a luxury product. The future belongs to... See more
AI slop
Don’t get fooled. Although curation can save very significant time to those who benefit from it, it positively does not save any time at all to the curators who exercise it.
helping readers discover work they’ll actually subscribe to.
I Just Learned How Substack’s Notes Algorithm Really Works (And Now Everything Makes Sense)
Read that again.
The Substack Notes algorithm is optimized for one thing: helping readers discover work they’ll actually subscribe to.
Not time spent. Not endless scrolling. Not ad clicks.
Subscriptions. Paid conversions. Real connections between readers and writers.
The curator relationship operates at a fundamentally different psychological level than advertising. An algorithm might know you like blue Oxford shirts, but a tastemaker knows why a particular blue Oxford matters in a lineage of blue Oxfords. This contextual knowing, placing objects in historical and cultural frameworks rather than recommendation... See more