Depends really heavily on how much this person I otherwise have no relationship with can learn my taste. Most recs from friends help to build our relationship in mutual interest areas, but it’s often v different from what I choose to read on my own
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What do you think are the main differences between reading you might share with friends, versus what you read on your own?
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Most friends don’t share my interests in the same depth. The most enjoyable/valuable stuff I read on my own can be pretty niche and isn’t really useful unless you have some context. Of course my friends have their own deeply nerdy interests as well, but overlap is fairly shallow
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I hope that doesn’t sound egotistical. Just that people can get pretty specialized in what they like, and it could be challenging for curators to appreciate multiple areas in the same depth as readers would
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I’ve always thought about how this applies to music recs as well. Easy for algorithms to pick “tropical pop” songs, and for human curators to pick “sad songs”. But much harder to grok someone’s actual musical taste without a real relationship and a lot of conversation about music
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I wonder if it would be better if you had access to stuff they followed, and then just whittled it down for them? Like a dump of their Twitter follows, subreddits, RSS feeds, favourite blogs etc, and pulled from that rather than the wider interverse?
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Yeah, that would cut a lot of feedbrowsing time. Kind of like what aggregator/influencers like Kottke do, if you have a big overlap in interests. Pulling only from my current feeds makes it hard to bring in new stuff from left field though - which is what I’d want from a curator
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Woah, I read what I just wrote, and realised I think I meant the opposite of the way it reads. I mean, would a curator's job be easier if they had access to feeds of stuff you already like, and pulled from them to do their job.
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This very much depends on recommendation quality - if it were high enough, I'd happy pay $50 for 30 minutes reading a month, but I can't imagine that being economical for the person paid to find the things to recommend, who'd presumably have to do more than three hours of work.
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I'm proposing $50/month for 30 days of 30 mins reading - so 15 hours worth of content. Yeah, obviously the 'how economical is human curation?' part is still unsolved.
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Yeah, I was saying I'd happily pay this rate and have someone throw away the least-good 29 days of content.
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But I don't know how useful that feedback is, because I think that's a really hard level/quality of curation to reach - it'd need to be substantially higher than "reading old tweets by people I consider really smart and funny"
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Hmm. I like 'better than old tweets by people you admire' as a heuristic...
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I subscribe to The Browser, which is similar but $5 a month
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Ooh, thanks for the heads up on this! Sounds awesome.
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But I would probably pay for deep expertise in a specific subject I would like to learn. See the difference?
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Would you pay someone to find the expertise for you?
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Unlikely.
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i don't even have 30 minutes to read the free stuff on top of all the reading i have to do for work
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Do you know how much time you spend on FB/Twitter? Checking Moment, I spend 45 mins - 2 hrs (ugh) on the combination of FB and Twitter on average. Would it displace some social media time at all?
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fb almost zero; twitter varies pretty wildly, depending on how much stuff i have to do
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