This situation was posited very early on in the age of the Internet. When everyone can publish, the noise floor rises above everything else. Back in the late 90

This situation was posited very early on in the age of the Internet. When everyone can publish, the noise floor rises above everything else. Back in the late 90's early naughts I believed that a new "job/career" would arise which was simply "curator of good stuff related to <x>". There was a lot of discussion about that, and for a long time Google's page rank was a kind of side effect. People would bookmark pages that they found reasonable and then Google would harvest that curation signal and rank that content more highly. In 2010 the book "Building Web Reputation Systems" was published by O'Reilly and a consensus built around "algorithmic curation" based on social cues (like "reputation"). This web site is sort of the epitome of that way of thinking. It's diverse members "vote" on topics and bring them to the front page (or keep them on the front page if they are put there for reasons). And it suffices for a lot of things, but it doesn't really do the job that an editorial staff could do. There is no way to distinguish between votes up or down because the reader agrees or disagrees with the politics of a piece, or the merits. Everyone has their own internal metric for what deserves "up" votes and what deserves "down" votes. The aggregate of those metrics may rarely converge on a consistent notion of "good" or "not good." At the same time, there is no straight forward way to monetize curation in order to pay the curator(s). Historically that has been via subscriptions to publications, but the resistance to paywalls and intrusive advertising (both mechanisms in use on today's network) have reduced the effectiveness of those techniques tremendously. Worse, the term "blog spam" is a pejorative for a reason, the blog owner, wrapping something they felt was worth reading in some prose and advertisements, do not compensate the author, and for many provide insufficient value to justify their attempts at monetization. Getting back to the article's main point however, for specialized topics, finding that curation is difficult, getting paid to facilitate it more so. And that means that quality information (wisdom) is drowned in the sea of noise (hot takes). My guess is that the Overton Window for paying for the work someone has done to distill the wisdom out of the signal has to move from the "radical" to the "acceptable" before we'll see much progress here.