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I think people tend to underestimate the effort involved in curating content. Reading and assessing all of that stuff is time consuming. And there are a lot of
by DamnInteresting 5y ago
I think people tend to underestimate the effort involved in curating content. Reading and assessing all of that stuff is time consuming. And there are a lot of complainers and axe-grinders out there who harass you when your curation does not exactly match their interests and values. People assume you linked to a thing because you 100% agree with it. People respond flippantly to the titles without reading the articles. People get mad because they hit a "you've read X articles" paywall. It can be a lot to deflect.
The other pain point in curation is the relentless poaching. If you find any success doing it right--by keeping tabs on creators directly--soon other lazy (often more popular) "curators" will be using your hard work as a major source of their own links, without giving any credit.
- dang 5y agoThanks for the great articles, and I hope no poaching of them ends up here. We do switch URLs and ban sites when we see that kind of thing, but we don't always catch it.
- DamnInteresting 5y agoThanks for the kind words! I wouldn't consider it poaching for content I curate to appear here; to the contrary, I sometimes share relevant links on HN myself. I am mostly put off by sites that claim to be hand curated by a few people, and then a significant fraction of their links are clearly based on my efforts. I don't want to name names, but there was a very popular curated site/newsletter that was leaning heavily on my work for a few years. Fortunately someone there seems to have realized it was uncool, and they backed off. Edit: To be clear, here I am discussing my site's curation of third-party links. We also create our own content, but I don't share those articles on HN myself, I would consider that gross.