The next wave of online platforms will be focused on learning and growth

The volume of content being pumped out each day online is mind-boggling: over 2.5 quintillion bytes, which is equivalent to what was published in a whole year in the early 2000s.

Gaby Goldberg (venture capitalist at Bessemer Ventures) reckons that this will lead to “curators being the new creators”. Curators are people with good taste or greater knowledge who can bundle information for those with less knowledge or time. 

But Sari Azout (venture capitalist at Level) says that curation and the question of “What to read?” misses the real challenge: how to better process and contextualize information that we’ve already consumed.

Because the burden of retaining and organizing information is left to the individual, most of us don’t bother. We either try to assimilate new info into suboptimal personal systems, or more likely just move onto the next thing on the feed.

Online feeds are obsessed with what’s new, rather than what’s most valuable. On Twitter, there is zero emphasis on remembering, applying or reflecting on content. It’s “an environment that promotes distracted thinking and superficial learning” (Azout).

The favoring of the ephemeral over the evergreen or valuable stops us achieving our goals. But there’s scope for new online architectures that can solve this problem. Instead of content losing its value over time, it increases if it becomes placed within a web of connected ideas.

The impact of this change can be huge: instead of preying on our psychological vulnerabilities, platforms can serve us in creating an ever-deepening personal resource that gives us mental freedom and the power to achieve our goals.

Many curation, knowledge management, and community tools exist - from MyMind and ReadWise for personal use, to Notion and Airtable for groups. They work well, but the revolution in genuinely crowdsourced knowledge has a long way to go. 

Knowledge management is a hot topic again, with renewed interest in libraries, archives, intelligent search, and serendipitous discovery - as opposed to passively accepting whatever appears on your feed. 

Bottom line: A new business category will emerge that is yet to even be named: online communities that help users learn and curate information to serve their own interests and goals - not the commercial goals of the platform.