Increasingly I see the most important role online to be that of the editor. I already have far too much information to deal with. The one service I'm willing to pay real money for at this point is the one that finds only the very most interesting bits for me. So far this role has really only been served for me by a handful of genuine friends.
The other day I walked past a female colleague's desk. She had a bunch of powdered donut holes sitting there and I had a ridiculous urge to say "balls" like she was a college roommate or something.
Now, I obviously didn't say that. I wouldn't say that to a male colleague either. I wouldn't even say something like that to my college roommates. I don't know what I was thinking. It just came into my head and I had to put a stop to acting on it.
But whenever I think about frictionless sharing, I'm going to think about people saying "balls" whenever they have the urge.
Loukides is right. There's no societal value to frictionless sharing, is there?
But to your point about the editor. In my stupid scenario, I was, thankfully, my own editor. Presumably Facebook doesn't share everything with everyone, only what it thinks should be shared. They've usurped the role of editor. So maybe that's their value ad? I can go around saying "balls" all day long, but Facebook will be kind enough to not relay the message to my grandmother.
But you still have to make an explicit action (eg hit play on spotify). It's not like Facebook is pulling things out of your head, you still have control over what you're sharing with people.
That's precisely why while everyone is predicting the death of traditional publishing houses, I predict that they'll continue to flourish (though in a slightly transformed state) even with ebooks supposedly leveling the playing field. In an era where everyone and their grandma can sell their ebook on Amazon, you need a respected publisher (or "editor" as you put it) to sort through the coal and present you only with the gems.
This is a role that traditional publishers actively do today!
In contrast, I have predicted the relative demise of traditional publishing houses precisely because most of them are now so poor at performing the non-writing tasks that used to be their natural contribution that one has to question their continuing relevance. We're living in an era when self-publishing is cheap and easy, and when word-of-mouth advertising and sites like Amazon sell far more books than knowing the manager of the local bricks 'n' mortar bookstore. Publishers have a future as a one-stop support network for authors who only know how to write but also need design work, editorial guidance, etc. Publishers have no future as a pure middleman in the distribution chain, whose services reduce the author's percentage cut to single digits but who don't generate an order of magnitude more sales than a dedicated author self-promoting on-line.
I agree, nothing beats content that have been deliberately selected just for you and friends, who know you personally, are best positioned to do just that.
How have you been getting content from your friends? I'd love to hear about that from you.
On a related note, I thought I'd just share that I built this app called Handpick, which helps you be selective about what you share with whom you share:
I still rely on good old-fashioned email. I try to exercise enough restraint in what I send out that I don't saturate my friends' attention. I used to run a private email list of about 20 people but haven't had the time to curate it lately. I'll try your beta if you have room.
But yes. I agree with you. And not just the most interesting bits: the ones most out of my usual loops. We have this vast online space and find ourselves locked into a few echo chambers.
The problem with those links is that they don't cover what I need to know to be better at my job.
Roughly I need something (and my guess is that this is the same for everybody) which covers these areas:
* General news which actually matter. This includes stuff like SOPA (but only once and not on every tech site) as well as important elections and a few high profil criminal cases (but only the general overview I don't need to know the details) so that I can converse with others. This shouldn't be more than 20% and less than 10% most of the time.
News from friends and relatives -- a combination of Facebook and google plus sorta covers this, but it isn't very good since some people share so much that it gets irrelevant and others share almost nothing at all so I still miss important stuff. This should also be about 10%-15%
Professional development -- essentially something like what they were trying to turn Code Quarterly into -- high quality, upto-date, high quality, long (but not padded for length) articles delivered about every two weeks. This magazine (which would properly be sent as an email) would be adfree (for the same reason consumer reports don't have ads) and fairly expensive. This should take up the rest of the time.
This is in part my motivation for http://hubski.com, which is a sharing-based aggregator. I think that news that comes with crowd-sourced analysis is infinitely more valuable than the MSM formula, and that's where aggregators shine. However, curation is something that doesn't crowd-source as well. IMHO curation gets stale if it's completely crowd-sourced, but it also gets stale if it's left up to the individual. The solution I'm trying is to allow users to put their curation in the hands of a group of select people. It's easy to see who is contributing what, and if someone isn't providing value, you swap them for someone else. -You basically build a curation group.
I guess I don't agree with you after all. HN is close enough to what Code Quarterly was trying to do that it's hard to believe an expensive product could get off the ground. The real problem is that too few people are able and willing to actually write quality long-form pieces.
I've thought for a long time that "Web 3.0" will probably be based on some form of curated user-generated content for immediate satisfaction, combined with deeper original content produced by specialists.
One big problem we have today is that many on-line social sites become closed and introverted, which leads to the Internet echo chamber phenomenon. Heck, you're reading one of the best examples right now. Such places can still be interesting, informative, and insightful (as posters on another good example might put it) but they also tend not to introduce dramatically different ideas very often, which means that while you can learn a lot in the first few months of following the discussions and perhaps the early days of contributing, the useful-signal/noise ratio drops rapidly once you've seen 90% of the groupthink before.
Another big problem is that it's not just the sharing of citations (in whatever form) that is becoming a flood, it's also the content itself. The Internet is full of blogs where most of the ideas are not really new and original, most of the analysis is fairly superficial or based on second-hand thinking, but every now and then the author writes a gem and attracts attention. Perhaps this is human nature, but I think it's often a case of a blogger who has potentially interesting thoughts to share but who simply lacks the time or inclination to do detailed research and editing of their posts, making the hit-or-miss-but-mostly-miss result almost inevitable. Thus not only the aggregators/social news sites but also many of the sites they link to become a flood of same-old-story material.
I think people are going to tire of this before very long, as we start to realise quite how much time we waste maintaining superficial on-line relationships and consuming superficial content. However, it is difficult for anyone with life's many other commitments to do a good job of producing good content or of filtering what's out there. Sooner or later, we're going to have to admit that there is value in good content (including proper research, careful presentation, etc.) and either people who want to produce it as a hobby will have to spend more time writing fewer (but better) things or people who want to consume more good content are going to have to pay smart people to create it as a real job. Likewise, there is value in good curation, but having someone who can pick out a manageable level of good content to present to a community without becoming repetitve and while actively seeking relevant new ideas from new sources is often not a job you can do in an hour a night, either through your own work or through focussing a user-generated stream that accepts submissions in real time.
I'm not sure we're ever going to get an idealised situation because every individual has different interests and, just as importantly, might be interested in different new ideas if they found out about them. But I'm pretty sure we can make a decent first approximation, at least as good as any of the big name on-line social discussion sites today. We're just going to have to pay for it, one way or another, sufficient to attract the relatively few people who are both willing and able to produce and curate really good content if they have the chance.
Good, but dated and preachy (TL;DR humans make life too controlled and easy, and then they pay for it, how dare they, serves them right, harrumph, etc.).
I am more interested by the continued bleating of friends for new ideas and the continued rejection of ideas throughout it than by the predictions of a worldwide communication network. 'News' aggregators and commenting systems, a hundred years ago.
Makes me wonder if mining old sci-fi stories for things to build would be worthwhile.
> I am more interested by the continued bleating of friends for new ideas and the continued rejection of ideas throughout it
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. For most people, who have (or would have) interest in a lot of different areas, there are probably already several lifetimes' worth of new ideas out there if they can only find and enjoy them. Such is the power of connecting billions of people in a global network.
On the other hand, while that solves the breadth problem for those who want to develop themselves as rounded individuals, it doesn't attack the depth problem for those who want to advance a particular field of art or science that they really care about. I think we might do best at that by adopting something like academic practices of ongoing sharing and collaboration, but done on a global scale by anyone who cares, and with something way better than journals as the means of peer review and promoting the best new ideas to the top so others can expand and build on them. Of course, it needn't necessarily be an academic subject either, it could be anything from sports coaching to cookery.
