why curation...

Relying on creatives or niche experts (e.g., wine or book editors) is not a novel concept, though I do think we’re leaning on them more heavily as an antidote to algorithmic recommendations, and I know they’re working harder to produce differentiated suggestions.

You can use algorithms to surface new things. But algorithms are not nearly as good as human curators yet. Whatever pattern matching is going on inside the mind of Werner Herzog when he recommends books and films is yet superior to YouTube’s recommendation engine. Going from Herzog to Kapuściński and from Kapuściński to Mandelstam and Mandelstam to... See more