MK

Vigorously participatory curatorial subcultures certainly exist, but in practice, they require too much time and energy to have a broad appeal. People enjoy sharing their discoveries with friends, and they may at least occasionally rate and review items. But most people, most of the time, leave the hard work of curation to others — or to algorithm

Community moderation works . This was the overwhelming lesson of the early internet. It works because it mirrors the social interaction of real life, where social groups exclude people who don’t fit in. And it works because it distributes the task of policing the internet to a vast number of volunteers, who provide the free labor of keeping forums

For one, social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks.

Truly democratizing cultural creativity, one might argue, would promote the development of skills and capacities rather than minimize the need for them.

It’s that these reactions are so normalized online that they’re almost boring.