There was a period - roughly 2008 to 2014 - when the internet had taste. Not the whole internet, obviously. But enough of it. Enough that you could open your laptop in the morning and stumble into something genuinely surprising. A Tumblr reblog chain that led you from architecture photography to an obscure Japanese jazz album. A tweet from someone you had never heard of that reframed how you thought about an entire industry. A blog post on Kottke that connected three unrelated things in a way that made you sit up straighter.
That era had a word for the people who made it work. Curators.
What we actually lost
I'm not being nostalgic for nostalgia's sake. Something structurally changed. The early social web was built around people with good taste sharing things they found interesting. The value was in the filter. You followed someone not because they were famous or because an algorithm surfaced them, but because they consistently showed you things you wouldn't have found on your own.
Google Reader was the infrastructure. Tumblr was the gallery. Twitter was the conversation. Nuzzel - and I still miss Nuzzel - was the signal. It showed you what the people you trusted were actually reading. Not what got the most clicks. Not what generated the most outrage. What the smart, interesting people in your network thought was worth sharing.
Then, one by one, the platforms killed it all.
Google shut down Reader in 2013. Tumblr sold to Yahoo and slowly collapsed under the weight of corporate mismanagement. Twitter replaced the chronological timeline with an algorithmic one, then Elon Musk turned it into something else entirely. Nuzzel was acquired by Twitter in 2021 and promptly shut down. The tools that enabled human curation were systematically dismantled and replaced with engagement optimisation.
The result is an internet that feels paradoxically both overwhelming and empty. There's more content than ever and less worth finding. Every platform serves you a version of what you've already seen, optimised to keep you scrolling, not to expand your world. Discovery is dead. Serendipity is engineered out. The feed is a mirror, not a window.
The sameness problem
Here's what nobody talks about enough: algorithmic feeds don't just affect what you see. They affect what gets made.
When distribution is controlled by an algorithm that rewards engagement, creators optimise for engagement. The thumbnails get louder. The headlines get more provocative. The actual substance gets thinner because substance is harder to measure than a click. Everything starts to look and sound the same because everyone is optimising for the same signals.
This isn't a conspiracy. It's an incentive structure. And it has made the internet genuinely boring in a way that would have seemed impossible in 2010.
Think about the blogs you used to read. Not the content farms or the SEO plays - the actual blogs. The ones written by people with a point of view. Jason Kottke has been writing kottke.org since 1998 and it's still one of the best things on the internet because it's one person's taste, consistently applied, for decades. That's the model the internet abandoned. Not because it stopped working, but because platforms couldn't monetise it efficiently enough.
The pendulum is swinging
But here's the thing about pendulums. They swing back.
Look at what is actually happening. Substack built a billion-pound company by giving writers back their audiences. Newsletters are booming because people want a human voice in their inbox, not an algorithmic slurry. Letterboxd became the film platform by being, essentially, a curation tool - people sharing their taste in movies. Are.na is thriving as a visual bookmarking tool for people who think in connections. Even Spotify's most-shared feature is Wrapped - a curation of your own taste, packaged to share.
People are hungry for curation. Not the corporate, committee-approved kind. The personal kind. The kind that comes from someone who has spent years developing a point of view and isn't afraid to share it.
What I'm building (and why)
I didn't plan to build a suite of curation tools. It happened the way most honest things happen - I built what I needed, and then I noticed the pattern.
Trove started because I was drowning in bookmarks. Hundreds of saved links across a dozen apps with no way to find anything or see connections between them. So I built a bookmarking tool that learns your taste over time. It summarises what you save, maps the themes, and surfaces a profile of your intellectual interests that you might not have articulated yourself. It's a curation engine for your own curiosity.
CultureTerminal came from a different frustration. I work at the intersection of advertising, design, media, and brand culture. There was no single place to read across all of those worlds. So I built one. It aggregates stories from sources I trust - Dezeen, Business of Fashion, Fast Company, Kottke, Hypebeast - and scores them for cultural relevance. It's human curation encoded into a system. My taste, scaled.
Curio is the most personal of the three. It's my attempt to rebuild what Nuzzel did - surface the links that matter by tracking what people are actually sharing across their networks. Not what is trending. Not what is going viral. What the interesting people are reading. Social signal aggregation. The curation layer that Twitter used to provide for free before it decided engagement metrics were more important than usefulness.
Three different products. One common thread: they're all curation tools. They all exist because the internet stopped doing this job well, and I got tired of waiting for someone else to fix it.
Curation as a creative act
There's a persistent myth that curation is passive. That it's just collecting things. Pointing at other people's work and saying "this is good." That misunderstands what curation actually is.
Curation is editorial. It's the act of deciding what matters and what doesn't, what belongs together and what doesn't, what deserves attention and what is noise. It requires taste, judgement, and a point of view. The Tumblr users who built incredible blogs weren't just reblogging randomly. They were building worlds. Each one was an argument about aesthetics, about what mattered, about how things connected.
That is creative work. And it's becoming the most important creative work there is.
The curator's advantage
We're entering a period where AI can generate virtually anything. Text, images, code, music, video - all of it's becoming trivially easy to produce. The supply of content is about to become effectively infinite.
When supply is infinite, the scarce resource isn't creation. It is selection. Knowing what's worth making, what's worth sharing, what's worth paying attention to. That is curation. And it can't be automated, because taste isn't an algorithm. It's a lived perspective. It's shaped by everything you have read, watched, experienced, and thought about. It is irreducibly human.
This is why I think curation is the next unfair advantage. Not just on the internet, but in business, in brand building, in product development. The companies and individuals who can cut through the noise - who can say "this, not that" with conviction and consistency - are going to win. Not because they make the most. Because they choose the best.
When everyone can make things, the curator becomes the most valuable person in the room.
