Dunbar goods are composite assemblages of information whose value is legible only to a small, difficult-to-define group. In a previous post, we explored their properties and their fundamental incompatibility with contemporary communication practices and search paradigms. What we did not explore, however, was the marginalised class of web citizen responsible for their production. This post is about that class of citizen.
To understand these overlooked citizens, we need to examine a rule that describes online participation patterns: the 90-9-1 rule. It suggests the following distribution of production and consumption labour in online communities and across social media:
90% of users are "consumers"
9% of users are "curators"
1% of users are "creators"
The rule states that a small minority create the bulk of the material that the majority consume, with a middle class influencing what passes between the two. Characterising the three user types further:
Consumers browse and observe; they exhibit minimal agency, operating in a paradigm of exchange and with a passive orientation
Curators triage and contextualise; they exhibit medium agency, operating in a gift paradigm and with an inquisitive orientation
Creators synthesise and generate; they exhibit maximal agency, operating in a paradigm of exchange and with an active orientation.
In the current landscape, consumers and creators are first-class citizens. Socio-technical systems tailored to their needs are abundant. Friction and cognitive load is minimised for consumers; being the majority, vast civilisational infrastructure exists to serve them with acceptable information via nearly invisible means. Creators too have an extensive array of means at their disposal, except these means are designed to amplify and leverage generative activity. Consumers can easily consume; creators can easily create.
Curators, in contrast, cannot so easily curate. They must expend unnecessarily high effort to configure and sustain curation activities, flip-flopping between a creator-orientated tool stack and consumer-optimised channels, chaining together unwieldy inputs and outputs from not-fit-for-purpose tools.
Systems for consumers are abundant because they allow for value capture via exploitation, whereas systems for creators are abundant because they allow for value capture via syphoning. Systems for curators, however, are hard to conceive of the in the first place, face boundaries to scale because of their end user's uniqueness, and are difficult to capture value from because curation is gift-like activity with no direct causal relation to profit.
Worse, the emergence of value for practicing curators from the resulting assets, relationships and changes in disposition takes time to emerge and be realised. Much of the power of curation comes from the compounding effect of the process and the outcome, however most of the value from a compounding effect is yielded at the tail of the compounding period.
All this leaves curators with a choice. They're more engaged than consumers, and while they have creator-like tendencies and attentional profiles they are averse to the high outlays of effort associated with sustained creator-hood. Thus, they're forced to choose:
Become a consumer and stifle the innate desire to be more engaged online
Become a creator and compel oneself to be over-active and eventually burnout
Pay the tax required to curate in a landscape that marginalises the activity
That was before Subset came along, however. Curators now have another option. Use the tool designed for them, for the 9%. Use Subset to save, share and search, to curate.
