Robin Good
@robingood
The *curation guy* - indie author, speaker, advisor - focus on empowering subject-matter experts, artists, creators.
robingood.substack.comRobin Good
everyone has taste and not everyone’s taste is for everyone. Different taste attracts different people. The job is not to have the right taste. The job is to know yours, be decisive about it, and trust that the work made from a decisive position will reach the people whose taste it is for. The rest is performance.
Zoë Yasemin • The End of Taste as Currency
Everyone has taste. Everyone always has had taste. Taste is personal. The question that matters is not whether yours is sophisticated enough or current enough or rare enough. It is whether you know what it is and whether you are decisive about it. Knowing what you like and why you like it.
Zoë Yasemin • The End of Taste as Currency
None of them would survive on the reference alone. What separates them is the argument each is making about who they are for, what their audience needs, what they believe about how the work should function in someone’s life.
This is the thing that does not yet circulate as a downloadable skill. You cannot scrape a position off a Pinterest board. You... See more
This is the thing that does not yet circulate as a downloadable skill. You cannot scrape a position off a Pinterest board. You... See more
Zoë Yasemin • The End of Taste as Currency
There is an observation that has stayed with me. People no longer want the thing. They want the signalling mechanism around the thing. This applies to a Raf Simons archive piece, to natural-wine bars, to particular books, to particular cafe orders. The reference has become the thing, and the work that was supposed to come from engaging with the... See more
The End of Taste as Currency
Music is infinitely accessible and practically free. What we've actually lost is the curator. Someone we can trust to show us the beautiful imperfections again.
Because Rolling Stone Told Me To
branding feels a lot like world-building to me, creating a visual language people can emotionally recognize themselves in
Substack • Search "curation" on Substack
Influencers (by definition and per contract) are paid to recommend; curators earn trust by choosing. Different economic incentives yield different results. Influence is a media buy. Curation is a reputation. Not having everything for everyone is a feature, not a bug.
The Future of Search is Taste.
only once you can be a curator can you become a creator
Substack • Search "curation" on Substack
The article argues that LLM-powered wikis solve Vannevar Bush's 1945 maintenance problem but fail to address his more fundamental vision: the "trail"—a personally-voiced, sequenced path through knowledge built by committing to ideas, discovering they're wrong, and revising them.
The distinction matters because synthesis (what wikis do) prevents the frame-revision thinking that produces original writing, while trails require the cognitive pressure that comes from irreversible commitment.
Synthesis itself is the problem: by resolving tension before a writer commits to a position, the system removes the pressure that forces thinking. The distinction matters because it redefines what "better" knowledge systems should actually do—protect unresolved problems rather than solve them.