Read on Twitter
The Age of Curation
a thread
a thread
The Internet put thousands of years of human thought at our fingertips, and enables billions of people to create content every day.
The result is more data than we know what to do with. And the majority of it is trash.
The result is more data than we know what to do with. And the majority of it is trash.
In a world overloaded with data, curation has become more important than supply.
The largest companies in the world have built their businesses on aggregating & curating supply:
Google search for information, Amazon for physical goods, Netflix for premium video, etc. https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/
Google search for information, Amazon for physical goods, Netflix for premium video, etc. https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/
But no matter how good an algorithm is, when the supply is saturated with noise, it drowns out the signal.
The solution: trusted, human curation. https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1258909468030427136
Humans do what algorithms can't. And the Internet loves to reward quality curators. First with attention and followers, then with $$$.
Curation comes in a few shapes:
Filtration: Separating the good from the bad
Distillation: Summarizing & simplifying
Synthesis: Connecting the dots
Filtration: Separating the good from the badDistillation: Summarizing & simplifyingSynthesis: Connecting the dots
For information curation, the keys are simplicity and brevity. https://twitter.com/visualizevalue/status/1271093860148658177
Twitter bots and summary threads are prime examples.
@george__mack created @navalbot & @nntalebbot to surface @naval and @nntaleb's best ideas. And in the process, he's built a substantial following of his own.
@jmikolay has branded himself as the master distiller, taking thousands of tweets from the best thinkers and summarizing them in a single thread. https://twitter.com/jmikolay/status/1265273577563205633
But maybe the best example of information curation is @ryanholiday. He's built a career out of curating the best of Stoicism.
From filtering out the best quotes ( @dailystoic) to synthesizing the greatest ideas of Stoic philosophy in his books, Holiday has become synonymous with the space.
And with billions of people on the Internet with a long tail of interests, there's no shortage of opportunities for curation.
Who knows, maybe there's even an opportunity to create a course on curation. 
