Last Tuesday, I needed to find a new note-taking app with some unique features. I didn’t open Google. I didn’t ask ChatGPT. I went straight to Jeremy Caplan’s Wonder Tools, searched and found what I was looking for.
This is not a rare happening. When I want to stay updated with new AI tools, startups, business models and communities, I go to Greg Isenberg Youtube channel and I always come out with a positive outlook and new stuff I didn’t know before.
When I need to understand P2P commons-based new governance experiments, I check Michel Bauwens’ latest. When I’m hunting for beauty in everyday moments, I scroll through Sami Youkilis’ Instagram.
These people have become something more valuable than any other standard content creator in my life.
They’ve become personal human filters, the trusted humans whose taste and judgment I’ve loaded into my permanent discovery stack.
I don’t follow them. I don’t just read them. I basically filter the infinity of content, news and tools through them.
That’s why I am entertaining the idea that we are likely moving from platform algorithms to personal human filters.
Table of Contents
Why Personal Human Filters Have the Highest Trust
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What I Would Do To Become Part of Other People’s Permanent Discovery Stack
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Notes: Positive Consequences of Becoming a Trusted Human Filter
Personal Human Filters: What Are They?
Personal human filters are the mix of experts / curators / trusted guides, as well as their custom search queries, the prompted frameworks, the search engine plugins, lenses, and datasets that you can rely on to manage and extract relevant high-value content from the digital content firehose and to decide what to watch, read, learn, or buy.
In a world of opaque machine feeds, serving almost exclusively commercial and for-profit interests, the only “algorithms” worth trusting are human ones, because they - unlike AI - show the principles and values, transparently expose their sources and influences, share their processes and proofs, behind their strategies and choices.
Thus, if I want to compete and become an alternative option to what social media, search and algo-based feeds recommend, my main job should be one of becoming a human curator that people use as their trusted filtering and recommendation system.
Tomorrow, following an expert will not just mean “getting their newsletter”. It will mean being able to plug one or more of their personal filters into your own search queries or social tools, so that your results and feed start to resemble what they would keep and what they would leave out.
Experts who matter will become integral parts of other people’s personal feed filters, searches and queries, often directly inside the platforms themselves.
Why Personal Human Filters Have the Highest Trust
When you let someone’s experience, taste and filtering systems decide what reaches your screen, the level of trust you’re attributing to that source is much higher than when you subscribe to their newsletter or “follow” their social posts.
When you use personal human filters as your major approach to search and decide, then being included in some expert filtering stack means that you’re trusted more than any platform, search engine or individual algorithm.
You are no longer just a voice they read now and then. You become a part of the system they use to choose what to learn, who to follow and what to buy. You are quietly becoming their always-on lighthouse system - maybe only for a very specific topic or interest - but still, that is the strongest trust position you can have in a world run by non-transparent machine feeds.
This is why I believe that:
Whoever Owns the Filters, Owns the Relationship
In other words: If I let you become part of my personal human filters, I am choosing you over the algorithm and the platform.
I no longer “go to Google”, or to my preferred platform social feed. I go to your search plug-in, custom prompt, archive, to your directories or maps, or to your recommendations.
The more I use your criteria and filters to decide what to pay attention to, the more I build relationship with you, not with the platform that hosts your content.
You, as a human filter, become the owner of the relationship.
You do not actually own their data or their wallet, but you own their habit of coming back to you first to make sense of things.
What I Think Is Going To Happen
I have been thinking about this for a long time. I may be wrong but from the signals, trends and platform evolution I see around me, I sense that the big platforms will not keep full control of their feeds forever.
Several technical signs and announcements in recent times seem to be suggesting that little by little, several social and search platforms will expose more knobs and sliders, allowing experts to create dedicated filters, automations and systems that slice and dice the content in uniquely useful ways.
Thus, what I envision is a situation where we will be able to treat search and social platforms algorithms as raw infrastructure over which experts will build their own custom filters on top.
What I imagine are search packs that use specific datasets, filters or selection criteria and which surface content and authors I would have never bumped into.
What I dream, is for this human-engineered filtering assets, devices and stack to become easily shareable, rentable, stackable and remixable as to give to everyone the ability to see and discover through these custom lenses built on the experience and taste of unique people they admire.
In such a world the platform only owns the firehose. The real trust and the real relationships live with the humans whose filters you decide to run your online life through.
In summary:
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Right now:
Platforms and search engines own the algorithmic filters which determine who sees what
To be visible and “appease the god” one must be posting more and more content, using SEO, hooks, frameworks, formats, and whatever else fits the algorithm’s secret taste and preferences.
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In the near future:
Platforms and search engines keep owning the content stack and the plumbing
Expert curators become key trusted human filters
Expert curators create, build, code unique filtering systems, apps and algos on top of the major platforms
To be visible one must then be discovered and appreciated by human curators first, or become a useful filter hirself (himself+herself).
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What this entails:
We will be searching and finding stuff across search and social by either following our trusted references or by using their custom filtering algos, apps and systems.
Differentiation and loyalty will sit both in expert human curators as well as in the custom filters that users will be able to pick, save, remix and share.
Being included in someone’s filter becomes a trust event.
Owning and publishing your own filters becomes a new way to become relevant and visible.
For people with lots of experience (this with great ability to judge and evaluate) this filtering ability will become their unique moat. Not in inventing new stuff, but in being highly skilled in being able to evaluate, assess, analyze and choose. And that is what a filter does.
My filtering ability will become a very valuable, unpromptable, uncopyable, rare asset.
Duration: 6’:36” by Jakob Nielsen
Must-watch video for experts, would-be curators, trusted guides, especially if over 50. It explains why crystallized intelligence is a unique high-value asset that people with a lot of experience - in whichever sector - naturally have, but also how to speed up its development in younger people through an intelligent use of AI.
What I Would Do In Practice To Become Part of Other People’s Permanent Discovery Stack
So, what do I do, if this newly painted scenario makes sense to me and outside signs confirm that this is indeed the direction we are going?
How do I become a source for others or the filtering systems they build?
How do I become part of other people’s permanent discovery stack?
I would optimize for being worth saving and repeatedly useful over time. This becomes priority one.
I don’t want to become part of someone’s permanent discovery stack just for being original, unique, entertaining, useful or inspiring. That’s fine. But I am aiming higher. I want to be providing something so useful and lasting that someone will want to save it, put it aside and come back to it every time they will want to.
Here some practical ideas:
1. From Content to Infrastructure
Stop creating disposable content. Start building reusable resources.
Essays get read once. Infrastructure gets bookmarked, returned to, and recommended.
What you could do:
Look at your best archive content and ask: “How could I turn this into something people can use repeatedly?”
Could it become:
A comprehensive index?
A decision framework or checklist?
A curated directory with criteria?
A comparison matrix?
Templates or process maps?
A mini-app or calculator?
Build one. Publish it as infrastructure, not content.
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Real-world example:
Content Finder Toolkit. This is a perfect example of pure infrastructure and human filtering at work. I built this multi-directory of content sources at the beginning of 2024 and I have been updating it ever since. Its purpose is to rationalize and organize in one location all of the online resources, I need to tap into when I produce new content (images, video clips, music, icons, illustrations, etc.). It now contains over 500 personally selected sources organized in 60+ categories.
N.B.: Over the years, I have built several of these and each time I did, I benefited for a long time from the direct and indirect advantages that creating such useful and re-usable infrastructures like these generate.
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2. From Generic AI Visuals to Human Fingerprints
Stop using stock AI art that looks like everyone else’s. Start showing your actual process and presence.
In a world where everyone can generate perfect generic visuals, the rare thing is seeing the human behind the work.
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What you could do:
Replace the visuals in your next piece with:
Personal photos from your workspace or process
Well captioned photos from your personal life
Personal doodles
Hand-drawn sketches or diagrams (even rough ones)
Screenshots showing your actual tools and systems
Behind-the-scenes clips of how you research or create.
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Real-world example:
Sami Yukilis is my human filter for “humanness” in the visual realm. Through his Instagram channel he showcases an uncanny eye matched with a unique ability to catch moments of human life without asking anyone to strike a pose. Sami is a human filter reminding me always of the beauty of life, hidden behind your ability to just stop and look. He brings back a calmness and purity I can’t find anywhere else.
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3. From Guru to Cartographer and Recommender
Stop positioning yourself as the guy who has the answer. Seriously consider positioning yourself as the map.
How many answers-people are already out there, providing instant solutions an guidance to those in need of it?
How many maps are there of the key answers available? How many guides are there helping you understand the pros and cons of each?
The guru says “Here’s my framework.” The cartographer says “Here are the 5 people I trust for different aspects of this, when to use each one, and why I personally chose this path.”
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What you could do:
Pick one topic where people ask your advice and create a “recommendation map”:
The 3-4 main approaches
The best person(s) representing each approach
Where they overlap and diverge
Your personal choice and why
When someone should pick differently
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Real-world example:
Mapu is the youngest person in my permanent discovery stack and one of the clearest signs that “human filters” are the future. In Instead of Doomscrolling she doesn’t just drop links. She weaves media roundups that explain why each essay, video or podcast matters right now, especially if you feel fried by endless feeds. I always find great recommendations for authors and sources I didn’t know.
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4. From Writer to Curator-Explorer
Stop writing about things. Start finding, testing, and organizing things.
Writing is abundant. What’s scarce: someone who does the actual work of exploring and comparing so others don’t have to.
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What you could do:
Test 5-10 options in a category. Create a comparison with your criteria, process, and recommendations for different use cases
Build a mini-tool (calculator, decision tree, scorecard template)
Package a starter kit (templates, checklists, scripts people can copy)
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Real-world example:
When I am looking for new digital tools, apps and software, I always check Jeremy Caplan reviews and explorations inside Wonder Tools. He has lots of experience in doing this, goes straight to the point, explains clearly and has a particularly well-developed sensitivity to what is good and usable and what is not when it comes to tools for indie entrepreneurs, journalists and writers.
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Notes: Positive Consequences of Becoming a Trusted Human Filter
Short summary of some of my own notes on becomign a trusted human filter:
I become a default starting point
Before searching in the open web, they check my directory, my framework, my “recommended tools”, my map.
The advantage in this case, is that this situation gives me first access to their attention and questions.
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I become indispensable
The more they use my filter, the more they shape their world with my help.
Their projects, tools, and people they follow start to carry my values and principles, my fingerprints.
That makes me harder to replace than “a good writer” or “a smart newsletter”.
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I control the context of discovery
When they discover a new idea, tool, book or person through me, they also get my framing, my perspective, my warnings, my comparisons.
These elements show who I am and consequently build further my authority and credibility.
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I become the person they credit and recommend
When something works for them, they say “I found this through Robin” or “This was in Robin’s map”.
I stop being just one more voice in their information diet and become part of their internal permanent discovery and decision stack.
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I can make a business out of this
I can build, share and market custom filters, for free or at a price
I can create and grow topic-specific collections of sources that can be queried
I can ingest AI with curated content collections and make them queryable
I can create custom prompts or skills that search and filter according to my specific criteria, not Google’s
Ad libidum
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Cover image: Faithful reader and supporter Dario Ganz showing me the beauty of his town and view. Belluno, Italy. October 2018.
☞ Tools I Use and Recommend
Generate infinite Substack Notes from your articles, auto-schedule them, discover the best times when to post, and track all of your key performance indicators (likes, comments, subscriptions, etc.) in a simple to use web app.
WriteStack
.An interactive, intelligent repository for the most interesting stuff you find online. Articles, inspiring book passages, images, videos, podcasts. Search through your collections and everyone’s else public ones, find invisible connections, create visual maps.
Sublime
.The easiest and best designed screen recorder I have ever used. Feature-rich: auto-editing, transcriptions and auto-captions, alternative layouts, green screen and a lot more. Free version available to test it right now.
Supercut
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The tools above are ones I actually use, pay for and value. If you try them through the links above, I may receive a small commission. It helps me keep TRUST-able independent and free, and it doesn’t change anything for you.
N.B.: I only recommend tools that I personally use, have paid for and that genuinely make my work easier or better. I pick small, well crafted tools made by people who care about what they build, who stand behind their work with their own names and who can be actually contacted and talked to.
Follow a path with a heart.
From Koh Samui (TH)
Robin Good
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The shift from "content creator" to "human filter" makes so much sense. I've started curating a small list of people whose judgment I trust more than any algorithm—and realizing that's the moat worth building.