Curation is dying.
In order to read the news, you used to have to actively choose which magazine or newspaper in which to subscribe.
Building your music library used to involve going to a music store, looking around, and actively choosing an album to purchase. Even in the iPod days, you would search through iTunes and actively choose which album or song to purchase, slowly building up your collection. Your iPod became something that was somewhat of a reflection of your personality, or at least of your music tastes.
Looking at today, our music is, more often than not, decided by algorithms. We don’t even attempt to build our music library anymore. Through Spotify, Apple Music, and the like you just “own” (without ownership) nearly all music that exists. Then we lean on generated playlists to be our DJ, guiding us through the infinite set of options. This can be appealing. Sometimes, it can be a great thing! It is also, unfortunately, just one example of how, when we don’t have to curate our tastes, we start to lose our understanding of what our own tastes actually are.
This same general pattern can be found in how we consume other forms of media. We no longer build a library of our favorite films, we simply have access to almost everything at any moment through Netflix, Disney+, and the other streaming services. We no longer have a pile of magazines on our coffee table which mimic our passions and hobbies, we simply allow Google or Apple to “learn” about what we like, and then let it feed us what it thinks we want to consume. Even in social media, we used to curate the set of people we followed, but that has been largely taken over by “Trending” timelines that have nothing to do with who or what you followed, and everything to do with what will garner more engagement.
It would be unreasonable to attempt to just turn back the clock, and it is disingenuous to say the “new ways” don’t add something. With that in mind, the best path is to bring back a sense of curation, without losing the ease of use we have today.
Scoopy is trying to tackle a piece of this problem. It encourages you to curate your list of news sources (among other things) so that you can feel more agency over what you are scrolling through. We give you the ability to boost or reduce your sources so that you are in control, not some secret algorithm under the hood. We want to build a world where your sense of self, your tastes, and the differences that make everyone unique can be reflected in the way your Scoop looks.
If this seems like a cool idea to you, we would appreciate if you subscribed to one of our paid plans so that we can continue to make Scoopy everything it should become, and if you aren’t sure, we offer our Cake Cone plan where you can try out the interface and see if it is a good fit for the way you want to consume news and more.
Happy scooping!
