Algorithms predict what we like. Curators show us what we’re missing.
Written by Maxx Burman | Art by Erik Guarisco
This summer, I took a break from the endless sea of digital content I spend most of my life swimming through and traveled around Europe for a month. Somewhere between the museums, boutiques, restaurants, and old buildings, I noticed how often I was being introduced to things I never would have found on my own. It made me realize how rarely that happens to me online.
We’ve spent years building increasingly sophisticated algorithms to navigate a world with more content, products, games, brands, and experiences than we could possibly consume. We call this curation, but most of what we’ve built are recommendation engines. They learn what we like, then show us things slightly to the left and right of what we’ve already demonstrated an interest in.
Real curation is different. It requires someone to develop a point of view, demonstrate their taste, and put their reputation behind their choices. Over time, that judgment builds trust, giving a curator permission to take us somewhere we wouldn’t have gone ourselves. As our choices become increasingly infinite, we need curators who can change our perspective, introduce us to something unexpected, and help us develop our taste, not just recommend more of what we already like.
Buried in a Sea of Slop
I love the idea behind Fortnite Creative. Give millions of people access to the tools behind one of the biggest games in the world, let them publish whatever they can imagine, and you should have one of the most interesting playgrounds for interactive experiences ever created.
Instead, every time I open it, I’m confronted with hundreds of variations of Red vs. Blue, Bedroom Wars, and whatever niche mechanic performed well enough to inspire a thousand copycats. I know there must be incredible experiences buried in there, but they’re surrounded by so much repetition, imitation, and disposable content that finding them feels like work.
The Xbox and PlayStation stores have a similar problem. Remarkable indie games, ambitious AA titles, and massive AAA releases are mixed alongside endless $3.99 shovelware chasing the latest trend. The more everything is presented together without distinction, the harder it becomes to tell what deserves our attention.
More than More of the Same
One afternoon in Zagreb, my wife and I walked into a furniture store because she recognized a lamp in the window. Once inside, we found dinnerware from a company we’d never heard of, chairs from another designer, books, ceramics, and objects we never would have thought to search for ourselves.
The store wasn’t recommending fifty other lamps that people who liked our lamp also liked. Someone had decided that this lamp belonged with that chair, those plates, and the strange vase in the corner. The connection between them wasn’t category, popularity, or purchase history. It was taste.
Recommendation engines are remarkably good at learning our preferences. Pinterest can build a feed that feels uniquely mine, Spotify can reliably serve me music I’ll probably like, and Amazon can often predict what I’m likely to buy next. But personalization begins with signals we’ve already given.
We listen to something, click on something, buy something, and the system gives us more things like it. Those things perform, creators make more of them, and platforms distribute more of what performs. Over time, preference becomes a feedback loop.
I sometimes wonder how much that loop contributes to the sameness we see around us. Millennial gray, beige interiors, coffee shops with concrete floors and wooden stools. Sans serif logos with wide kerning, glass buildings stripped of ornament, cities that increasingly borrow the same visual language.
Great curation works in the opposite direction. It doesn’t just help us find something adjacent to what we already like. It connects things we would never have connected ourselves, and the distance between those things is often where the value lives.
Vermillion Red
I saw the most powerful version of this at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. One exhibition was built around vermilion red, bringing together work from different centuries, movements, and styles. In some paintings, the color dominated the frame. In others, it appeared as a tiny accent.
I had seen some of the work before, but I had never seen it this way. Placed together, the paintings became a story about how a single color had traveled across centuries, how differently artists had used it, and how much emotion could be carried by something as simple as red. The curator had found a connection between works that, on the surface, had almost nothing in common.
That is curation at its highest level. It doesn’t simply organize what already exists. It offers a perspective, creates a throughline, and helps us see something we could not see on our own.
To do that, a curator has to put something at risk. Every object a boutique owner puts on the shelf, every film a critic recommends, every painting a museum curator places on a wall is a declaration that this deserves our attention. Make enough good choices, and those individual judgments begin to compound into something more valuable than any single recommendation: trust.
Once we trust someone’s taste, we give them permission to lead us somewhere unfamiliar. They can introduce us to the strange chair, the challenging painting, or the color combination we never would have chosen ourselves. At its best, curation doesn’t just help us discover new things. It helps us develop new tastes, see new possibilities, and become curious about things we never knew to look for.
Closing Thoughts
I don’t want an internet that gets increasingly better at reflecting me back at myself. I want it to introduce me to things I don’t know how to look for, perspectives I haven’t considered, and ideas that might change what I want next.
I want big velvet armchairs in coffee shops instead of another wooden stool, buildings with sculptural details instead of another wall of lifeless glass, and brands willing to use strange colors, surprising fonts, and unfamiliar references. I want more people with enough conviction in their own taste to show us something we might initially overlook.
That means treating curation as a creative act, not a sorting problem.
If you run a platform, build a store, publish a newsletter, design a marketplace, or shape any experience where people have too much to choose from, don’t just make everything easier to find. Develop a point of view, make deliberate choices, and earn enough trust to lead people somewhere they wouldn’t have gone on their own.
We don’t need fewer things to be created, and we don’t need the old gatekeepers back. We need better taste, stronger conviction, and more people willing to put their reputation behind what they believe deserves our attention.
We don’t need more recommendations. We need better curators.