Facebook will kill Craigslist.
I used to have trouble understanding who bought
$60 healing wearable stickers. Or really anything from Gwyneth Paltrow's website
goop. But then I caught myself trying to buy a small $30 Japanese linen kitchen towel
[1] from
Need Supply Co.
Stores like goop and Need Supply Co. seem to satisfy what I'll call the
curation economy. The editorial and product discovery teams at these stores seek out brands or products that cater to a niche community that subscribe to a certain lifestyle or quality in certain products.
For me: I love cooking and am willing to invest into quality products that will last a long time. I also just wasn't willing to waste time and try out five different towels on Amazon (not that I can even trust
[2] reviews anymore...). I trusted that the rikumo brand that I ultimately ended up buying from has been somewhat vetted by the Need Supply team. Goop likely caters to ultra-wealthy folks who are sick of whatever Net-A-Porter, Saks is offering up as the "cool gift"s. In return for these curation services, I'm willing to pay a hefty premium
[3] for a towel that likely costs less than $2 in material costs.
This sort of paying for curation is not a new "internet thing." But it is a skill and feature that becomes valuable over time with content over-proliferation, which is exactly what's happening to the Web today.
To make things worse, tech companies have become too dependent on machine learning and other content recommendation algorithms, and the whole system of content discovery is beginning to suffer as a result. It's becoming harder to sift through echo-chamber'ed content or clickbaity articles to find insightful articles. Companies like Outbrain and Taboola certainly did not help either here.
Why does this matter? Original, non-populistic content production will decline if there are few viewers just because the content was not recommended by machines. The extreme pessimistic world we will live in that novel content is limited to 10 second Tik-Tok clips, 50 character tweets, and SEO spammed content that's already filled up page 1 on Google searches
[4].
Launches like
HBO Max's human curated content make me optimistic. I'm also working on an online tool to help people tap into their personal networks to unearth recommendations.
Some examples to apply this thought framework in the
curation economy moving forward:
Youtube.
- I've been a Youtube addict for the past few years, and one thing that's always confused me is why Youtube does not award playlist curators. Without content curation, Youtube slowly becomes a simple video hosting site. Google's search algorithms only go so far in terms of curating and finding the right content tailored to someone with very specific needs. What does Google's ML algorithms do if the perfect dance tutorial video you're looking for is titled "MOV102111_finalver.mov" and only has 1,200 views? Or if there are 15,000+ videos on how to memorize the multiplication table for your child? Perhaps one day their algos will auto-generate these things, but they should stop pretending that they can do this for non-music and non-viral content:
"Learning at Home" (with Google's terrible curation algorithms).
Currently, Youtube outsources all this curation and link sharing on other social networks (WhatsApp: "Check out my friend's new music video") or blogs (Medium: "5 Best Youtube Videos to Start Learning Python").
Youtube needs to step up its game for curation and sharing of curated content if it doesn't want to become just another CDN. Note: Vimeo has gone this route and has garnered a niche userbase of graphic and film professionals who are willing to pay for high fidelity and hosting...
Reddit
- On the other hand, Reddit has a sort by
/new sorting capability. Worthless internet points/"karma" has proved super effective in crowdsourcing quality content that the broader "Reddit community" would generally approve of. Subreddits exist to cater to smaller communities that have their own culture yet still share the same currency ("karma") in the broader website. Reddit still seems to be figuring out the monetization model, but it is no doubt in a valuable position to capture the curating service it offers.
UPDATE: Reddit just launched
a cryptocurrency based on Ethereum. This seems to be one step towards solidfying their currency's worth and perhaps encouraging more quality engagement and curation.
Next up: "On recommendations: Hey, what do you put in your smoothie?"
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