Human Curation Is Back | Hacker News Reader

Human Curation Is Back

mondaynote.com

Curation is my entire business and this article only casually mentions what I think is the most important point about why human curation works so well: trust. And, in particular, trust when things get weird.

When there's a clearly identified brand or person standing behind curation, it has a major effect on the audience and their response, versus a "blameless" automated job. Humans explicitly trust or distrust other humans, whereas trust in software or algorithms is either implicit or of dubious nature.

If I subscribe to a magazine, listen to a radio station, or attend a festival curated by a known figurehead, group of people, or a brand like "The New York Times", that I trust, I know things that I experience that are out of my comfort zone were likely designed to be there. If a news recommendation algorithm throws up something weird (and they always do, alas), I have no idea if it was being smart or just making a mistake.

I have no idea if it was being smart or just making a mistake.

When does a bold recommendation become a mistake? Can human recommendations be mistakes? (Both algorithmic and human recommendations are based on models, assumptions, and partial information.)

Oh absolutely. I certainly have. And boy do you hear about it! Due to the trust people have in manual curation, mistakes are quite painful. This is one of the reasons I think people subconciously like manual curation. If you can blame and chastise the curator, that makes it more appealing.

If The New York Times runs some vile headline on their front page, it would do incredible damage to the brand. If Google News automatically ran a similar thing, fingers would get pointed at some blameless algorithm (like with the black people/"gorilla" auto tagging debacle last week) and we'd all shrug at how funny technology can be while remembering just how uninteresting Google News usually is at the same time.

I would think, by strict definition, a bold recommendation would be one you doubt you'll like but that turns out well, and a mistaken recommendation would be one that turns out poorly. In other words, the value of a recommendation is not something you can evaluate at the time, before following the recommendation; instead, it's a measure of regret. (And by that vein, yes, human recommendations can totally be mistakes, too.)

On the other hand, people do tend to try to filter on the recommendations themselves before knowing their regret-value. People will subconsciously multiply the likelihood that something was a "bold recommendation made by design" by the relative status of the recommender.

Celebrities, leaders in your industry, people you're attracted to, etc. can get away with recommending all sorts of crazy things. Just because of their source, these things seem much less crazy. And this doesn't seem to correlate at all with how well they would know you or your tastes as an individual. Kind of a mysterious behavior, though it reeks of evo-psych tribal status dynamics stuff.

Not just trust, but also social proof. Humans are hard-wired to find interesting what other humans seem to be interested in, regardless of whether it's a positive or negative interest.

I don't think human curation is "back" per se. There's just a difference in expectations.

When I listen to a radio show or a new playlist from a friend, I have a general understanding of their tastes and the taste of the audience that has elected to receive these recommendations. Arguably, the biggest thing here is that decision - you've subscribed to this person's taste and you are predisposed towards justifying that decision.

With a recommendation algorithm, it is reaching much higher, trying to give you personal recommendations. The relationship is more confrontational. I'm much more inclined to think "why this" when given an algorithmic recommendation, trying to reverse engineer it, instead of trusting a person's taste in curating a selection based on much broader criteria.

> If it’s a good idea to use human curators to navigate 30 million “songs”, how about applying human curation to help the customer find his or her way through the 1.5M apps in the Apple App Store?

Isn't the App Store already heavily curated? First there's the human curation step of reviewing apps for acceptance into the store, which weeds out the total junk.

Then there are dozens of hand-picked lists of apps such as "Summer Road Trip" or "Stargazing."

In fact, finding favor with the App Store Editors is one of the few well-known paths to indie app development success.

Algorithmic curation is in fact very good at analyzing things you like or habitually listen to, watch, read, or buy, and present you with other things you may like.

In the case of Apple Music, the curation is there primarily to take advantage of the trust factor to push product for business partners. It's not about exposing exemplary art, or presenting you music to your particular taste.

Everyone's experience will vary, but what has been suggested to me so far from Apple Music has been very relevant to my tastes. I definitely don't feel like I'm being pushed content to satisfy their business partners -- to the extent that every label and artist on the service is a "business partner."

Of course, Beats One is going to be more mainstream -- it aims to be a radio station in very much the traditional model, complete with top twenty segments -- but I've even found that station interesting at times, discovering some Nigerian music, for instance.

Yesterday I was suggested a mix of Autechre and Squarepusher to help me get through my afternoon's work -- which it actually did. The other day I was suggested the Beach Boys Smile sessions and over a hundred Smashing Pumpkins B-sides -- so, there's a lot of variety and it all feels relevant to me. I'm not getting Taylor Swift thrust on me, and so far I don't get the sense that corporate partners have some quota that I'm there to fill.

1) app search is so broken that I would pay[1] money to access a decently curated list. I'd love for something like GNKSA to exist but for apps that have demo / lite versions; are sold for a price; have limited sensible iaps; etc. or maybe there exists a subreddit for this?

2) I buy many books for my child. Amazon is pretty hopeless at recommending books to me, even though I've seeded it with knowledge of the books I've bought. So I turn to human curation: the Kate Greenaway medal focuses on excellent illustration in books for children. That list is an excellent source for books. Then one or two degrees of separation (eg, other books the illustrator has worked on, or other books the author of the winning book has written) get you hundreds of excellent books. Someone scraping this list and using affiliate links could probably make a bit of passive income.

I find amazon excellent. Either by just looking at books I like and seeing what other people have purchased, or creating a wishlist and it suggesting new books.

Apps are indeed terrible. The algorithms are shit because people buy shit, so they suggest shit. Curated apps stores have been tried (on Android) and there are blogs about apps. The problem is that most money is made from these terrible freemium games that are no better than slot machines. So the curators get paid off, or end up promoting the stuff people want (slot machine-like shit)

On the same note, jinni.com before it closed was excellent at recommending movies.

This makes me think about the YC company Dating Ring, which just participated in a podcast season about their business. The denouement turned out to be that their curated dating did not scale, so they pivoted to being a lifestyle business. It makes me wonder whether curation is best when many canonical "good enough" solutions exist, but not when people try to seek the "best" from a set.

http://gimletmedia.com/show/startup/

Note that one of the authors (Jean-Louis Gassée) was in charge of Macintosh development at Apple in the 1980s, then left to head up Be Inc., the developers of the BeOS operating system.

Also note what Steve Jobs thought of Gassée

“Jean-Louis Gassée is evil,” [Steve Jobs] snapped. “I don’t say that about many people, but he is evil.”

Brent Schlender. “Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader.”

Why would you accept this statement without any context, even if it comes from Steve Jobs? What makes this person evil?

Lol. Do I look like I'm Steve Jobs? So what makes you think that I personally think Gassée is evil. I have no opinion on Gassée, thought it was interesting to report the Jobs' quote since the original comment talked about Gassée's role at Apple.

I stated my point badly. I never assumed you that you were Steve Jobs but I shouldn't have assumed belief. The original commenter I felt gave people context on Gassée's background while your comment, in my opinion, contained a negative assertion with no context.

What makes you think being called evil by Steve Jobs is a bad thing?

Here comes the context...

In 1985, after learning of Steve Jobs's plan to oust CEO John Sculley over Memorial Day weekend while Sculley was in China, Gassée preemptively informed the board of directors, which eventually led to Jobs's resignation from Apple. (wiki)

I can get behind the corporate curation of apps, which are essentially just tools. However, the idea that a corporation can curate something like music seems very arrogant to me. Music is art. Even if you cut out the crappy 90% as per Sturgeon's law, the remaining 10% has so much variation that you couldn't possibly pick out "the best" to any measurable degree — especially when you consider the fact that, historically speaking, most of the best (read: most influential) art pushed the boundary of the medium in some way. Maybe it's possible to find the slice of music that most people would enjoy listening to, but that's so music business-y it makes me sick.

Isn't an art museum a business curating art?

Sure, but you have your choice of museums. Apple aiming to curate the world's supply of music is a different issue.

>Apple aiming to curate the world's supply of music is a different issue

Well it's pretty much a non-existent issue since there's no possible way they become the gatekeeper to all music. I think you're raging against a scenario that exists only in your mind.

Well, my understanding is that one of the primary goals of Apple Music is to provide human-curated playlists in contrast to the algorithmic playlists offered by servies like Pandora and Spotify (in addition to the Beats 1 stuff). These playlists aren't listed under the names of the individual curators, nor is there a way for new curators to become part of the system. It's all by Apple. So no, not "gatekeeper", but maybe "tastemaker".

Corporations have been arrogantly curating music for a century now. Didn't stop jazz, hip-hop, punk, or electronica developing, thriving, being sucked into the corporate curation machine, and then spawning a dozen rebellious reactions outside it.

Curation doesn't mean 'have someone pick out the top ten best'. Curation means things like 'have someone knowledgeable pick out fifty underappreciated forgotten masterpieces'.

Also, 'apps' includes 'games', not just tools, and you could replace the word 'music' in your rant with 'videogame' pretty easily.

> Curation means things like 'have someone knowledgeable pick out fifty underappreciated forgotten masterpieces'

Ideally, this is how it should be, and can be. Tastemakers have been effective for a long time and will continue to be, it's a fuzzy thing they do.

I recently started listening to an internet radio service curated by humans (after spending years exclusively on one with selections done by algorithm)-- it could be my imagination, but so far the overall quality seems better.

I've been listening to streaming radio for over 15 years now and to this day, none of the algorithm-based services can compare to my list of Shoutcast bookmarks.

I always wonder how things would've played out if anyone did a better job of promoting such things (although I guess there's not much money to be made in promoting tens of thousands of small-time DJs and music enthusiasts who are doing the streaming).

The whole Apple music streaming thing made me do a double take because they're basically offering a much smaller set of the kinds of stations that have been freely streaming for years.

Streaming mp3 like shoutcast/icecast streams will play in just about any mobile or desktop media player. They can be bookmarked, creating your own custom "radio dial" of stations you personally like. And the variety of music is astounding. I've got maybe 15 or 20 stations that are programmed by people that consistently expose me to new and interesting music along with stuff I already like. I get to enjoy those simple pleasures like realizing the common thread between the last 3 or 4 songs played since there's a real human DJ behind the playlist. And I can access them anywhere I could access Pandora or Spotify.

When someone says they are changing the algorithm of a news feed or search engine page it's never to benefit the reader, it's always to benefit the advertiser. It's a lazy way of fitting the advertiser to the feed rather than letting the user decide what they want, and then fitting the advertiser to the users' preferences.

I spend a lot of time curating news (see bio). It's not enough to go out and just aggregate information on a topic. I see so many products that scan the web for news and then present them in a list. Even Google does this, presenting a list of blue links with no context. There's a news article, then a tweet, then a YouTube video. but what does it mean? The reader is required to make some mental sense of it all. The reader is required to build the story. The challenge IMHO is to build an intermediate stage of human curators who can compile data that can then be built up into a story that is meaningful to humans.

Completely agree. Algos have limits and in almost every practical application that they touch my life, require a human to make sense of with understanding.

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