I believe will become an important part of our digital lives: online communities at the intersection of content curation and knowledge management.

At least 2.5 quintillion bytes of information are produced every day, which is approximately what was produced during all of 2002. While this presents enormous opportunities, our brains are not  equipped to deal with this abundance.

We seem to have forgotten that the goal is not to consume more information. The goal is to think better, so we can achieve our goals.

Our feed-based information architecture is obsessed with the present.

We consume information recreationally, not as a way to achieve our goals.

Curation has been too focused on the information and not enough on architecture; how we collect, store, augment, and utilize what’s already in our minds. 

These days, we turn to places like Twitter and Substack to find things that people we trust find useful. But Twitter, which was originally conceived as a platform to post personal status updates under the prompt “what are you doing?”, was never designed for the purpose of curating the world’s information stream. Their use-case was always one of obsolescence.

In short, the architecture of digital platforms has made us obsessive documenters and consumers of the present, yet largely indifferent to the archives we create.

The human brain is incredible at uncovering meaning, but is deficient at long-term memory storage. If we forget what we read, we can’t apply the knowledge to the problem at hand.

While technology successfully disrupted content production, the experience of consuming content remains unchanged – the words have merely moved from a printed page to a screen.

The intersection of curation and knowledge management is inhabited by utility tools like CB Insights – destinations for both reading content and organizing information. Their biggest miss is that they still function as hierarchies and have not tapped into the power of networked information and crowdsourced knowledge.

I’m of the belief that “Come for the Content, Stay for the Community” will be one of the dominating themes for media this decade. As more creators break away from companies to go subscription indie, they’ll find it to be an effective and rewarding strategy to think of ways to build ‘whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ experiences.

The potential to build community-curated knowledge networks remains largely untapped.