Sublime

The Banality of Online Recommendation Culture

A recent surge of human-curated guidance is both a reaction against and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations.

By Kyle Chayka

October 30, 2024

Illustration by Ariel Davis

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In the 2010s, affiliate marketing became a dominant strain of online business models. The Wirecutte... See more

Running a newsletter like DD is, at its core, an expression of taste. It’s me saying, ‘Here’s what I think deserves your attention this week.’ A process that Stepfanie Tyler describes beautifully in her piece on taste as the new intelligence:

“Curation is care. It says: I thought about this. I chose it. I didn’t just repost it. I didn’t just regurgi... See more

And at the same time, I think that the group of people who, by luck or by temperament, proved very, very good at using the internet, to some degree, distracts from the many, many, many people for whom the internet is fundamentally a distraction machine, or for whom the internet is creating, because of what we built on it. You know, shorter attentio... See more