Contrarian opinion ahead: when everyone is skating in one direction, I try to look the other way to see what they might be missing. With the rush to ML and AI

Contrarian opinion ahead: when everyone is skating in one direction, I try to look the other way to see what they might be missing. With the rush to ML and AI in search and recommendation systems, I think there are huge opportunities in curation. Curation is the opposite of where tech has been heading. Why? “Curation doesn’t scale!” People cry, but this ignores two important points: (1) it can scale via the crowd, and (2) it doesn’t necessarily need to scale to be valuable. Regarding (1), others in this thread have suggested website up/down votes. Just one example of a scalable system. There are so many sites I’d tag as spam for my friends to avoid if I could. It’d be great if we could work together to eliminate the code spam sites, for example. Regarding (2), I would happily take book recommendations from someone like PG even though he’s only read a tiny tiny tiny fraction of all books written. Critics don’t read everything, but they use their experience and social graph to find great culture. I’d value a domain expert’s opinion on great books over any number of Google queries. I feel like there’s a massive opportunity here to “take a step backwards” towards curation and the high quality content it has traditionally provided. There are dozens of huge curation startup opportunities waiting for those willing to go against the wind.