"it’s no longer enough to organize the world’s information. It becomes important to organize the world’s trustworthy information."

"the websites at the top of Google are not necessarily the highest-quality ones, but rather the ones that put the most effort into SEO."

"The problem, now so drastically different from a decade ago, is not what to read/buy/eat/watch/etc., but figuring out the best thing to read/buy/eat/watch/etc. with my limited time and attention."

"protection of privacy is not a compelling enough reason to leave Google. For the vast majority of people, allowing them to “control their own data” is not a selling point, especially if it requires paying for something they’re used to getting for free."

"the opportunity in search is not to attack Google head-on with a massive, one-size-fits-all horizontal aggregator, but instead to build boutique search engines that index, curate, and organize things in new ways."

"These entertainment giants offer curation that demands our attention, but they don’t offer curation on demand. The opportunity is in moving curated content feeds away from their never-ending-now orientation and toward more goal-oriented interfaces."

"All curation grows until it requires search, and all search grows until it requires curation. —Ben Evans"

"boutique search engines feel less like the Yellow Pages and more like texting your friends to ask for a recommendation."

"The line between curator, compiler, and cataloguer is thin and there is a natural invisible asymptote — diminishing returns on more data over time."

"With today’s subscription models, customers have no real incentive to help the platform grow. Nascent token-based business models show early signs of promise. By giving ownership to stakeholders and allowing subscribers to benefit from future upside, startups can overcome the cold start problem."

"We need more interfaces with a point of view on what information is missing, how it needs to be organized, and at what point of the value chain the curation has to happen."

"As information becomes more abundant, the connections drawn between disparate pieces are becoming increasingly important."

"A combination of irrelevant filters, ad-based business models, and unconstrained supply has overwhelmed consumers and made it hard to find signal in these platforms."

"protection of privacy is not a compelling enough reason to leave Google. For the vast majority of people, allowing them to “control their data” is not a selling point, especially if it requires paying for something they’re used to getting for free."

"in a world of infinite information, it’s no longer enough to organize the world’s information. It becomes important to organize the world’s trustworthy information."

"What started as a well-intentioned way to organize the world’s information has turned into a business focusing most of its resources on monetizing clicks to support advertisers rather than focusing on the search experience for people."

"As signals evolve, new ways of indexing and surface areas for innovation emerge."

"When you monetize via ads, curation takes a backseat to featuring advertisers - there is just less digital real estate available to curate your own recommendations - so these platforms end up making ethically dubious design choices that generate massive trust gaps."

"Vertical search aggregators work when you know exactly what you want. But knowing what you want isn’t usually the starting point - which creates an opportunity to help the overwhelmed consumer with better discovery and curation along the funnel."

"thus far, the conversation around “curation” has been too focused on the content and not enough on the structure."

"The opportunity is in moving curated content feeds away from their never-ending-now orientation and towards more goal-oriented interfaces. People should be able to find whatever content they want on their terms and not be beholden to when the curator decides to publish."

"All curation grows until it requires search, and all search grows until it requires curation. - Ben Evans"

"We have a firehose of information being created, and few people devoted to filtering, organizing, curating and indexing that information."

"Over and over again, curation sites fall into an existential trap. They start with high-quality, curated recommendations. As they grow, they scale with crowdsourcing, often filling the gap with scraping. Over time, the content goes from great to good. At that point, vertical search aggregators like Yelp offer more utility."

"he downside to this ad-driven model is that advertisers and content producers are competing for the same attention, which is why these sites end up feeling like marketing blogs."

"subscription itself is not a panacea, especially when the use cases are not frequent enough."

"Nascent token-based business models show early signs of promise. By giving ownership to its stakeholders and allowing subscribers to benefit from future upside, startups can overcome the cold start problem."

"In a world of infinite information, it’s no longer enough to organize the world’s information. It becomes important to organize the world’s trustworthy information."

"When you monetize via ads, curation takes a backseat to featuring advertisers and platforms end up making ethically dubious design choices that generate massive trust gaps."

"The need for signal gives way to curators. But thus far, the conversation around “curation” has been too focused on the content and not enough on the structure."

"Searchable, human-curated interfaces will help us move away from ephemeral, time-bound feeds, into contextual, high signal, trustworthy knowledge spaces."

"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."

"Audacious teams, like DuckDuckGo and Neeva, are trying to compete with Google head-on by building massive horizontal search engines."

"For the vast majority of people, allowing them to “control their own data” is not a selling point, especially if it requires paying for something they’re used to getting for free."

"I believe the opportunity in search is not to attack Google head-on with a massive, one-size-fits-all horizontal aggregator, but instead to build boutique search engines that index, curate, and organize things in new ways."

"But, increasingly, we’re seeing that this scale is at odds with a fundamental human need: relevance."

"There is no search architecture that will work universally across all categories. It’s hard to imagine wanting to use the same UX to search for recipes as to search for freelancers."

"With strong opinions on how to organize information, reflected in their choice of filters, vertical search aggregators have distinct advantages that horizontal software can never achieve."

"For example, on Behance, the online creative community, school and location are featured prominently as filters — implying that where you live and where you went to school is an important indicator of the quality of your design portfolio."

"If Behance were designed today, I’d argue neither “location” nor “school” would be filters."

"On Yelp, a search for “electricians in Miami” begins with a page titled “The Best 10 Electricians in Miami, FL” with text underneath that indicates the majority of these are sponsored results."

"Vertical search aggregators work when you know exactly what you want."

"Inevitably, you’ll want a way to search through a curator’s archives."

"Curation, when thought of in the context of sharing bite-sized, isolated bits in feed-like architectures, is predominantly about entertainment, not utility."

"The opportunity is in moving curated content feeds away from their never-ending-now orientation and toward more goal-oriented interfaces."

"The solution is better search and better curation, all wrapped in a better business model — a combination I call boutique search engines."

"With such a tight relationship between curation and search, the real question is not whether you need curation or search but at what point it comes in, and how:"

"it takes the entire universe of music and finds endless ways to discover and search across its library, including a mix of manual curation (via playlists curated by its in-house team of curators and its users) and algorithms (like Discover Weekly)."

"They have constrained supply, which is the foundation for their biggest moat: trust."

"Getting the right mix of curation, search, algorithms, and business model will likely prove massively difficult and massively valuable."

"Yahoo, for example, became too big to be browsed, lost its signaling power, and reached the point where Google was better."

"The downside to this ad-driven model is that advertisers and content producers are competing for the same attention, which is why these sites end up feeling like marketing blogs."

"Subscription simplifies the network effects to two sides: content as supply, a paying audience as demand."

"I believe that until you can build habitual recall into your product, Google will be an important part of how your engine gets discovered in the first place."

"It’s pretty bad at answering questions that require judgment and context like “What do NFT collectors think about NFTs?”."

"These days, I find myself suppressing the garbage Internet by searching on Google for “Substack + future of learning” to find the best takes on education."

"When I’m researching a new product, I type ""X item reddit"" into Google. I find enormous value in small, niche, often forgotten sites like Spaghetti Directory."

"There’s an emergence of tools like Notion, Airtable, and Readwise where people are aggregating content and resources, reviving the curated web."

"But at the moment these are mostly solo affairs, hidden in private or semi-private corners of the Internet, fragmented, poorly indexed, and unavailable for public use."

"It’s hard to believe, but one of Google’s main problems, once they got going, was that there just wasn’t much to see online."

"Today, Google’s index includes more than 100 trillion pages. AdWords was the catalyst for the explosion of content garbage manufactured for SEO purposes we see today."

"Audacious teams, like DuckDuckGo and Neeva, are trying to compete with Google head-on by building massive horizontal search engines. Rather than crawling and indexing things their own way, they sit on top of existing data sources and position themselves as privacy focused alternatives to Google."

"But protection of privacy is not a compelling enough reason to leave Google. For the vast majority of people, allowing them to “control their data” is not a selling point, especially if it requires paying for something they’re used to getting for free."

"Google is a great example of how the internet enabled scale and speed: every page on the web returned in an instant. But increasingly, we’re seeing this scale is at odds with a fundamental human need: relevance."

"Whereas Google’s product begins and ends with a search bar, trading off functionality for simplicity, vertical search players like Yelp, Expedia, Zillow, and Behance emerged to fill functionality and relevancy gaps using structured data specific to their industries. With strong opinions on how to organize information, reflected in their choice of filters, vertical search aggregators have distinct advantages that horizontal software can never achieve."

"But here too, relevance depends on the sociology of the current moment."

"But thus far, the conversation around “curation” has been too focused on the content and not enough on the structure."

"Curation, when thought of in the context of sharing bite-sized, isolated bits in feed-like architectures, is predominantly about entertainment, not utility. It’s not wrong to say there is a market for this kind of curation."

"These entertainment giants offer curation that demands our attention, but they don’t offer curation on-demand."

"All curation grows until it requires search, and all search grows until it requires curation."

"The solution is better search and better curation, all wrapped in a better business model - a combination I call boutique search engines."

"Searchable, curated interfaces will help us move away from ephemeral, time-bound feeds, into contextual, high signal, trustworthy knowledge spaces. Because searchable interfaces are densely linked, an explorer can follow multiple trails through the content, rather than being dumped into a ""most recent"" feed."

"With such a tight relationship between curation and search, the real question is not whether you need curation or search but at what point it comes in, and how?"

"On top of the signals, these businesses have built strong search engines. OnDeck, for instance, has built an opinionated graph that allows you to discover talent in ways that are not possible on Linkedin. For example, you can filter by people with “Software Engineering” skills whose current status is “Open to new ideas’."

"Unlike vertical search aggregators, boutique search engines feel less like yellow pages, and more like texting your friends to ask for a recommendation. They have constrained supply, which is the foundation for their biggest moat - trust. Importantly, boutique search engines introduce new business models that don’t rely on advertising."

"At Startupy we’re building a boutique search engine for startup insights and the people and companies that have them. You can think of us as a digital playground where thinkers and creators curate, organize, map, and interconnect the world's most valuable insights and ideas."

"They start with high-quality, curated recommendations. As they grow, they scale with crowdsourcing, often filling the gap with scraping. Over time, the content goes from great to good. At that point, vertical search aggregators like Yelp offer more utility."

"The line between curator, compiler, and cataloguer is thin and there is a natural invisible asymptote – diminishing returns on more data over time. Mitigating this will require making highly nuanced product choices that trade off signal for scale."

"The downside to this ad-driven model is that advertisers and content producers are competing for the same attention, which is why these sites end up feeling like marketing blogs."

"This is why subscriptions present an opportunity - it simplifies the network effects to two sides: content as supply, a paying audience as demand."

"Moreover, as my friend Joey points out in this article, any product where you’re spending a lot of time using it in incognito has a pretty big UX problem."

"With today’s subscription models, I have no real incentive to help the platform grow. Nascent token-based business models show early signs of promise."

"I suspect scaling the number of curators without compromising signal is one of the hardest questions we’ll grapple with. Ideally, we move away from the wisdom of the crowds and towards the wisdom of communities."

"How can we incentivize curators? People are driven to contribute for a complex web of reasons, including a desire to create something from which the larger community will benefit as well as the sheer joy of practicing a craft."

"Though intrinsic incentives should continue to be the primary reason people contribute, I’m excited to see what layering extrinsic incentives will unlock."

"It will be a long journey, but I am invigorated by the process of manifesting the answers into a tool that can help us use the explosion of information to harness our potential as a species, not to keep us scrolling."

"Despite the internet giving everyone the same access, the best performers - even if marginally more ‘talented’ than the rest - can also now reach an internet-scale audience and serve a much bigger market, reaping an even greater share of wealth."

"From the internet’s beginnings, we were promised that it would be the great equalizer"

"Today's digital spaces, rather than democratizing wealth and access, amplify the inequities of the physical world."

"A Renaissance of Individualism on the Internet that Changes the Definition of Talent"

"A renaissance of individualism on the Internet that changes the definition of talent"

"A shift away from ad-funded models towards creator empowerment"

"Web3 technologies that unlock infinite remixability and more granular distributions of value"

"The assumption underlying the winner-takes-all market dynamic relies on creators being judged simply by a talent or excellence standard."

"However, we ignore that taste and talent are co-determined. Talent is the name we give to people who best deliver what we prefer."

"This requires the development of a “discriminative faculty to judge and express taste according to the aesthetic principles of a consumption domain”."

"But what do people end up preferring? Holbrook theorizes that people, as a whole, are much more dispersed in what they prefer than is the ‘expert consensus’."

"Winner-take-all outcomes happen in cultural markets under the influence of received expert opinion."

"Holbrook’s work draws from Bordieu’s, who famously discussed that those with the highest volume of “cultural capital” dictate what’s deemed “good taste” - and therefore “what’s best”."

"“the working-class ‘aesthetic’ is a dominated aesthetic...obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics”."

"But that’s at odds with the internet’s promise to “democratize everything” and to allow us to express our individuality - a culture that flourishes when we can each define what “talent” means to us and that is antagonistic to forced standards and received opinion."

"we introduce “Jad’s Theory” (of talent & taste on the Internet). We’re witnessing a renaissance of individualism on the internet - a breakup with institutions and the rise of the individual and, with that, an unbundling of internet communities."

"For the creator middle class to rise, we need to see higher resolutions of taste preference and a breakup with singular, discriminatory platform algorithms and the opinion of the ‘few’ that arbitrate taste and force today’s dominant aesthetic."

"Ad-funded models require content to be managed at scale, and as advertisers are the main customer, they start to fill the role of the “expert” that defines what is valuable."

"New, creator-centric business models enable monetization based on intensity of fandom, not size"

"Web3 technologies unlock infinite remixability and more granular distributions of value"

"An underexplored undercurrent of Web 2.0 monetization tools is that creators have been incentivized to publish good enough content frequently vs. great content sporadically."

"The true power of Web3 technologies is the potential to reshape how value is created, shared, and distributed on the Internet, making distributing value as easy as sending and receiving an email. That’s a fundamental technology unlock that makes it possible for creators on the internet to earn more of the value they create."

"The problem is this heavily skews towards pumping out bland and mediocre half-baked thoughts you’ve had a day to work on, not evergreen content that will still be valuable in five years."

"We’re particularly excited about a web that can route economic value to sources of inspiration, one that can lead to a revival of the back-catalog resulting in a renewed focus on quality over quantity,and one where win and help win is the guiding philosophy."

"Be a proud owner of an experiment that honors the original ideals of the Internet - users and creators, unconstrained by intermediaries, sharing ideas and economic upside"

"A powerful signal to the world that you support the “win and help win” worldview, and are, unabashedly, an Internet optimist."

"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"

"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."

"But thus far, the conversation around “curation” has been too focused on the content – “what should I read?” – and not enough on the structure – “how do we collect, store, and contextualize the information we consume?”"

"The goal is to think better, so we can achieve our goals."

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

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

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

"Knowledge management is becoming a hot topic again with the rise of tools designed to bring structure and order to our information stream"

"Most of these communities exist inside Slack, Discord, Telegram, or some other tool. But given the chat-based nature of these platforms, it’s easy to miss the best content"