Everyone is a curator now. It's in LinkedIn bios. It's in Instagram profiles. It's the go-to word for anyone who shares links, makes playlists, or puts together a mood board. "Curated" has become the adjective of choice for anything that isn't completely random. A curated newsletter. A curated wardrobe. A curated selection of artisan cheeses at your local Waitrose.

The word has been stretched so thin it barely means anything. And that's a problem, because real curation -- the act of selecting, editing, and presenting with intention -- is one of the most valuable skills anyone can have. We've just buried it under a mountain of lists.

Lists are not curation

Let me make a distinction that matters. A list is a collection. Curation is an argument.

A list says: here are things that exist. Curation says: here is why these things matter, and why these other things don't. A list is additive -- you keep putting things in. Curation is subtractive -- the craft is in what you leave out. A list requires effort. Curation requires taste.

Think about the difference between a Spotify algorithm generating a playlist of songs you might like based on your listening history, and a friend making you a mixtape. The algorithm is comprehensive. The friend is considered. The algorithm knows your patterns. The friend knows your soul. One is a list. The other is curation.

Real curation isn't about gathering everything. It's about the conviction to leave things out. The courage to say: this matters, and that doesn't. That's not aggregation. That's editing. And editing is a point of view.

I think about this a lot because curation is basically my operating system. I've always been the person people come to when they want to know what's worth paying attention to. Not because I know everything, but because I consume voraciously and filter aggressively. For every ten things I find interesting, I share one. That ratio is the work. The nine things I didn't share are the curation.

Where the good curators are hiding

The best curators I follow aren't the ones with the biggest audiences. They're the ones with the most specific taste.

Jason Kottke has been curating the internet since 1998. His blog isn't about a topic. It's about his attention -- what he notices, what connects, what resonates. You read Kottke not for comprehensiveness but for a particular way of seeing. Emily Sundberg's newsletter takes the chaos of internet culture and finds the thread. Noah Brier connects ideas across domains in ways that make you see both domains differently.

What these people have in common isn't subject matter expertise. It's a consistent lens. You know what a Kottke link will feel like before you click it. You know an Emily Sundberg take will be sharp and slightly unexpected. Their curation has a signature. That's the difference between a curator and someone with a lot of bookmarks.

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The curator's test: Can someone identify your recommendations without seeing your name attached? If your curation has a recognisable sensibility -- a through-line that connects the diverse things you share -- that's taste. If it could be anyone's list, it's just a list.

But here's the question that keeps nagging me: where do the curators find their sources? If curation is filtering the noise, what do the best filters use as input?

The source problem

Every curator I admire has the same dirty secret: they spend an obscene amount of time consuming. Not scrolling. Consuming. Reading entire articles, not just headlines. Watching entire films, not just trailers. Going deep into rabbit holes that most people would abandon after the first turn.

The problem is that the internet's discovery layer has been systematically dismantled. The blogroll is dead. StumbleUpon is dead. Delicious is dead. Google Reader is dead. Nuzzel -- which surfaced what your Twitter network was sharing -- is dead. The tools that used to help curious people find interesting things have been replaced by algorithmic feeds that show you more of what you already like.

So the curators go elsewhere. They go to physical bookshops and pick up things they'd never search for. They go to independent cinemas. They follow people in completely different fields. They read academic papers and trade publications and local newsletters. They talk to people at dinner parties. They cultivate what the writer Robin Sloan calls a "stock and flow" -- a combination of deep, slow sources and fast, surface-level ones.

The best curators are essentially hunter-gatherers in an age of farming. Everyone else is tending their algorithmic garden, harvesting the same predictable crop. The curators are out in the wilderness, finding things that don't fit the pattern.

Curation as identity

I've been building products for a while now, and the ones I keep coming back to are curation tools. Trove is a taste engine. CultureTerminal is a culture aggregator. Even the pub guide and the restaurant directory are, at their core, curated collections with a point of view. I didn't plan it that way. I just kept building the tools I wished existed.

And I think that's because curation isn't something I do. It's something I am. The impulse to collect, filter, and share -- to say "you should pay attention to this" -- isn't a hobby. It's a worldview. It's the belief that in a world of infinite content, the most valuable thing you can do is help someone find the right thing at the right time.

The paradox of curation in 2026: the more content that exists, the more we need good curators. But the more everyone calls themselves a curator, the harder it is to find the good ones. We need curation of the curators themselves.

This is why I've been thinking about meta-curation -- the curation of curators. Not a list of people to follow, but a genuine editorial layer that says: these people see clearly. Their filters are worth trusting. Their taste is earned, not performed.

The taste behind the taste

What separates real curation from list-making is ultimately the same thing that separates a great restaurant from a good one. It's not the ingredients. It's the chef's palate. The thousands of meals they've eaten, the flavours they've catalogued, the instinct they've developed for what goes together and what doesn't.

A curator's taste is the same. It's accumulated, not declared. You can't decide to have good taste. You develop it by consuming widely, thinking critically, and having the confidence to trust your own reactions over popular opinion. The person who recommends the book nobody's heard of over the one everyone's talking about -- that's a curator. The person who shares the same book everyone else is sharing -- that's a relay station.

So who curates the curators? Honestly, I think it's time. The curators who last -- who are still interesting and still trusted after years of doing it -- are the ones who were never performing curation in the first place. They were just paying attention. Consistently, obsessively, and with a point of view that couldn't be replicated by anyone else.

The rest will drift back to list-making. And that's fine. The world needs lists too. But let's not confuse them with the real thing.