Well, I thought that I’d talk about one of the problems with curation today. Often, in this information-filled age, curation is seen as a good thing – a quality filter. Still, part of this fascinating BBC Future article about the millions upon millions of Youtube videos which get little to no views made me think about the downsides of curation.
The BBC Future article points out that “[The] majority of these unseen YouTube videos range from neutral to overwhelmingly positive. The same can’t be said for what rises to the top. Research suggests YouTube’s algorithm amplifies negativity, reinforces stereotypes and gives users little control over the content they don’t want to see.” Just let that sink in for a second. Most of Youtube could be the sort of joyous, fun thing that most people associate with the “good old days” of the internet, but the site’s algorithm might only be showing you the tiny fraction of the site filled with misery, anger, arguments etc…
Of course, the hilariously ironic elephant in the room here is that the BBC is pointing this out. Like any other part of the press, a quick glance at the BBC’s news site will show you pretty much nothing but woe and misery and conflict and fear on most days. 99% of the world could be at peace. 99% of people could be relatively happy. But the press will focus heavily on the 1% that isn’t. There are a mountain of reasons for this – everything ranging from high-minded ideas about “Exposing problems” to an attention-grabbing “If it bleeds, it leads” mindset. Most of all, it’s because it’s technically unusual. Noteworthy.
But, because the audience for these news sites is shown nothing but “unusual” things, it seems normal. It seems like the entire world is a crime-ridden, war-ravaged hellscape. Even though most of it clearly isn’t. If you’re sitting here reading this rambling article, then you’re probably at least relatively safe right now (if you weren’t, you’d probably be doing important survival stuff instead).
And this is one of the problems with curation. You don’t know what the curators are curating for. For a newspaper, it might be “Selling more newspapers” – in which case, they’ll report the most attention-grabbing and melodramatic true events that they can find on any given day. It might be “Building support for a political idea” – in which case, the curators might go for whatever evokes the strongest emotions in the audience in a way that gets them to support the idea more – usually these emotions are some variation on anger, misery and/or fear.
(And, yes, I’d originally planned to title this article something scary-sounding, like “Beware The Curators!”, before noticing that I was doing exactly the thing I was moaning about….)
Case in point, after some random research for a recent article – that I sensibly ended up ditching/replacing after realising that the videos which initially inspired it had much more of a right-wing political bias than I had first thought, that even discussing the topic in detail would be playing into a “culture war” argument from the other side to the one I’m on at the moment (and, yes, everything in 2025 has made me a bit more left-wing. I miss the days when my opinions were more of a nuanced mixture of left and right, but the modern right is utterly awful!) – the algorithm on Youtube kept feeding me bitter and miserable podcast-style videos from US conservatives moaning about the publishing industry.
Anyway, as well as proving the point mentioned in the BBC Future article I linked to earlier, these grumpy videos were – at their core – also about curation. In particular, the podcasters’ arguments that the publishing industry was curating their publications for everyone but them.
But I’m getting side-tracked. The point here is to be aware of the problems with curation on the internet. Yes, it can be a “quality filter” but that’s only the case when the curation is actually done on the basis of quality – and whose standards is it judged by? – but it can also often distort or alter your perceptions of the world, culture etc… as well if it is done in certain ways.
Of course, in this information-filled age, some degree of curation is usually needed because no-one can look at everything. Even so, it’s probably worth at least trying to curate things yourself. To actively search for what interests you, to get to know your own sensibilities, to look at a variety of opinions etc.. Because, whilst curation can sometimes be a good thing in some ways, it also gives whoever is doing the curation a lot of control. Some curators use this power for good, some use it neutrally and some use it for nefarious purposes.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
