The "curation is an great addition to value" argument is certainly a powerful one.
I agree with the position that it makes sense to pay for a selection of writing (or other content) that someone, who truly deeply understands their demographic, puts together.
This site ( HN ) is certainly proof of that. It is effectively a magazine curated by its readers (upvotes/downvotes) for 'my deomographic' which is the demographic of everyone on here I guess.
In the novel "Fall", Neal Stephenson developed a theme I found profoundly insightful - the internet becomes a morass of trash so to get anything out of it, you gotta be selective about what you read or consume.
Selectivity, for characters in the book, was effected by subscribing to 'edit streams' - content pushed to them by editors who figured out what they should see for news and what they should see elsewhere from the arts, science, anything.
The super wealthy have personal editors - bespoke curated balanced content that was super expensive since one essentially is paying for person to "pre-read" and "grade" everything.
The 'middle class’ subscribes to one or more cheaper good shared 'edit streams' that had balanced and nuanced selection made possible by amortizing the cost over a ton of subscribers - a magazine.
Everyone else consumes what FAANG equivalents and bottom of the barrel anybodies pushes out for free on the "Your Feed" streams. Since they are free, you are the product.
Anything on those is largely driven by agenda - think "the right vs the left", propaganda, 'just because I have a mic", anarchy, pick your poison.
Two thoughts pop to mind out of all this
- just occurred to me that Facebook's / TikTok's /YouTube's etc "For You" streams are just really bad, (very addictive) very poorly edited magazines. Can't really make money from them because they are the equivalent of a old-timey pulp magazine.
- (this is the biggie) these FAANGs should set up some way for folks to make money through curation of their content (patented, TM, etc). Just send me a cash "Thank You" to cover college bills and the mortgage for this idea.
> these FAANGs should set up some way for folks to make money through curation of their content (patented, TM, etc)
Not sure what you mean by "patented, TM, etc". Other than that, I think this should already be possible from the outside e.g. by setting up a Patreon whose sole point is to provide a curated list of content from other platforms such as YouTube or Facebook, and already has a payment mechanism.
This hinges on the fact that content can be linked from the outside, but any approach will be subject to the mercy of the big platforms that host the actual content.
The "patented, TM, etc" was just a joke claiming credit for the whole thing to support the "pay me" joke in the next line. It is a completely content-free line.
The idea of doing a Patreon is interesting.
The real problem is that from a technology support perspective, this is not a real tech business, it is just a feature on any of the platforms. The moment they implement some type of "Magazines" on YouTube / Facebook / Tiktok, you gotta move from Patreon to their platform because of discovery.
The product is not the tech, it is the skill in curation.
As a curator, i could care less what the platform is as long as someone pays me as much as I can get out of the system. Happy to run it on multiple platforms, on email .. whatever mix pays me the most. But I realize right up front that I will have to be paid on the platform the content is on because that is where it will be easiest to get new sign ups.
On second thoughts, @moring, you are definitely on to something here!
It may be a product if one can find a way to effectively integrate content from across different platforms. Which means it has to be off any of the platforms.
Like, maybe, curated paid for lists of selected content via RSS, for my beloved, now dead but not forgotten, Google Reader
About user input, where the users can moderate contents by tools (like upvote/downvote).
I think that the user feedback is sometimes very dangerous. Corporation XY releases trailer, users do not like it. Trailer is review bombed. People running corporation are angry, they do not want downvotes.
There are several things that can be done to solve that "problem". For one: you can remove transparency. If things are not transparent it is easier to "fool" users, boost some things that should not be, or limit reach of things that are correct, true, but undesirable by the big tech.
I think that is the main reason why social media feels muddied, user input does not seem to matter that much.
It is hard to push content on mainstream media, if it is transparent that the quality of the thing you are pushing is mediocre.
I want search engines to operate similar to this. Instead of using googles monolithic index, you can subscribe to different trusted sources for lists of sites that are curated and maintained. Then your personal search engines queries them all at once.
I think if you could balance the incentives right it would put the onus on the curators to make sure that their indexes were full of high quality sites. And if one starts giving you rubbish, just remove their index from your search engine.
This is an interesting idea. The way I see it, there is a lot of really high quality content that does rise to the top of YouTube. But also the feed has a lot of recency bias. So a great creator who puts out things once every many months, ends up having their stuff at the top of the pile for just a week or two.
So as time passes, high quality quickly gets buried by the mediocre barrage of content.
So an interesting feed would have some dimension of time-indepedence.
I agree with the position that it makes sense to pay for a selection of writing (or other content) that someone, who truly deeply understands their demographic, puts together.
This site ( HN ) is certainly proof of that. It is effectively a magazine curated by its readers (upvotes/downvotes) for 'my deomographic' which is the demographic of everyone on here I guess.
In the novel "Fall", Neal Stephenson developed a theme I found profoundly insightful - the internet becomes a morass of trash so to get anything out of it, you gotta be selective about what you read or consume.
Selectivity, for characters in the book, was effected by subscribing to 'edit streams' - content pushed to them by editors who figured out what they should see for news and what they should see elsewhere from the arts, science, anything.
The super wealthy have personal editors - bespoke curated balanced content that was super expensive since one essentially is paying for person to "pre-read" and "grade" everything.
The 'middle class’ subscribes to one or more cheaper good shared 'edit streams' that had balanced and nuanced selection made possible by amortizing the cost over a ton of subscribers - a magazine.
Everyone else consumes what FAANG equivalents and bottom of the barrel anybodies pushes out for free on the "Your Feed" streams. Since they are free, you are the product.
Anything on those is largely driven by agenda - think "the right vs the left", propaganda, 'just because I have a mic", anarchy, pick your poison.
Two thoughts pop to mind out of all this
- just occurred to me that Facebook's / TikTok's /YouTube's etc "For You" streams are just really bad, (very addictive) very poorly edited magazines. Can't really make money from them because they are the equivalent of a old-timey pulp magazine.
- (this is the biggie) these FAANGs should set up some way for folks to make money through curation of their content (patented, TM, etc). Just send me a cash "Thank You" to cover college bills and the mortgage for this idea.