Social Media Content Curation

NEW YORK, United States — The history of the internet is a story of two counter-balancing forces: the explosive growth of information and the rise of new systems that help us sift and make sense of this information. Back in the early 1990s, human editors at companies like Yahoo! compiled curated lists and directories of useful information. As the rising volume of information overwhelmed these human filters, hand-curation gave way to algorithmic search à la Google. But today, as consumers become their own media outlets, producing staggering amounts of user-generated content every day, and savvy marketers reverse-engineer Google’s algorithm to game the search results, separating signal from noise is once again becoming difficult.

“Search results in many categories are now honey pots embedded in ruined landscapes — traps for the unwary,” wrote investor, writer and entrepreneur Paul Kedroksy. As a result, we’re seeing a shift back towards human filtering and hand-curation. But this time around, instead of professional editors — who could never hope to sift through the quantities of content the world currently creates — it’s consumers themselves who are doing the curating.