In the Information Age, Curators are King

It is interesting what things are, and are not, successfully "curated" on the net. For example, way back in the mid-90's when Compuserve was king I ran (for about a year) a paid online magazine for Science Fiction ("Radius" in case you ever ran across it). Because it was online (Win HLP files and in later issues this new fangled HTML stuff), folks heard about it fairly quickly. Because it actually paid a professional rate (3 cents a word, good luck getting even THAT now), I was quickly innundated. So much so that after a year I gave it up just as it was starting to break even. Why? Because I had gone through so much DRECK that I couldn't even read the good stuff anymore without noticing the problems I got from even writers who had been in Asimov's and Analog. It would take almost three years before I could convince myself to read a page of SF again.

Bringing this back around to my "point", I find it interesting that you don't have a "Quora" or "Earbits" of online fiction, let alone Science Fiction anywhere. I wonder if that's because there are more people who listen to music than who read... or some other problem? Or maybe it's just that my experience still is the average one, and because you need talent to pick up a guitar and get out even a chord, and not so much to write, perhaps there's just so MUCH noise versus signal in writing that you can't curate it successfully (short of being a traditional publisher, and we all know how well they are doing these days).

This article only talks about crowd curation, yet curation by an individual is even more effective and important nowadays (despite being under the radar compared to "social" sites).