Back in the golden age of the internet, around 2006, social platforms, or what was known as web 2.0 then, used to reward content creators and content curators equally.
I remember a blogger who used to call herself a news jockey, a la disc jockey in music.
In twitter, people were accustomed to the manual RT, instead of the tweet button. These RT’s allowed others to share the name of the retweeter along with the name of the creator. Blogs were full of quotes from other bloggers. I remember a blogger who used to call herself a news jockey, a la disc jockey in music. Even platforms like Global Voices, their raison d’être was content curation, not creation.
Then, the big tech for one reason or another, decided to reward creators and not curators anymore. There is no way in YouTube where you can re-post other YouTubers videos on your page. Manual RT’s are frowned upon now. When someone shares an article on Facebook, if you share it from their timeline, their name will mostly be gone by the second re-share if not right away.
It started when listicles became a thing and content creation became much more valuable financially and traffic-wise than curation — Embee
Obviously, I can see why this is happening. Big tech companies need creators way more the the curators now. They can automate the curation process via their algorithms and their recommendation systems, but they cannot automate the content creation process. Thus, they have this incentive to kill the curators and focus on the creators. And the only curators left now are the meme thieves, who copy a meme, slightly change it, and put their name on it. Those are the worst kind of curators, as they do not respect concepts such as attribution.
