Something obvious that I don't think I'd fully considered or written down: quality curation becomes more valuable as our collective output increases. This is sort of the role that influencers can play. I think I'm generally skeptical of middleware, but this seems like the sort of thing that is actually important.

How can we ensure higher quality curation? The incentives don't seem that good. If someone is known for picking out things that are high quality, and they have lots of eyeballs on them, this is ripe for advertisers to step in. This isn't a problem if someone else is able to take on the curation role, but it does seem to make the job short-lived.

Another thing is to aggregate recommendations from multiple people who trust one another. But this might still require more work to figure out how to do the aggregation.

Automation seems good here. Product recommendations are often pretty good. I could imagine filters that are shared amongst people and remixed, so everyone has their own quality filter. Explainability might be important to see why things are recommended, versus just a black box.

(But then how can we demand explanations from our machines, when we can't even demand explanations from ourselves???)