Why You Should Curate the Web Like a Museum

I used to think collecting links was a vice.

Then, in early 2023, I clicked into a stranger’s public profile on stashed.in and felt the same electric hush I get walking into the Tate Modern on a quiet Tuesday morning.

Forty links. No more.
Each one given a custom cover image that looked hand-picked.
Titles left exactly as the author wrote them.
One-sentence plaques underneath a handful of them, never more than twelve words.
White space everywhere.

I stayed for forty-three minutes.
I opened twenty-two tabs.
I followed the creator before I even realized what I was doing.
By the time I closed the browser, something in me had shifted permanently.

That day I understood: the internet is not short on beauty. It is catastrophically short on curators.

Hoarder vs Curator: The Table That Changed How I Use the Internet

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I lived in the left column for fifteen years. I now live happily in the right. The move took one weekend and changed every subsequent day.

Why Curation Is the Ultimate Life Cheat Code

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1. Taste compounds faster than raw knowledge

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Reading 500 mediocre articles teaches you the median.
Curating 50 exceptional ones teaches you the 99th percentile.
That instinct bleeds into your writing, your design, your cooking, your friendships, your life.

2. Reputation is just repeated public curation

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The fastest way I’ve seen anyone go from “who?” to “the person who always finds the best stuff” is to consistently show ten great links before asking for anything in return.

3. Human memory was built for galleries, not lists

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Your brain can forget 4,000 text lines in a week but will remember exactly where on the wall you saw that red painting in room 7 for decades. Museums have exploited this for centuries. We finally have the tools to do the same with the web.

4. Identity is revealed through selection

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You learn who you are by noticing what you refuse to let die. After two years of ruthless museum-style curation I can now answer “What kind of person are you?” by handing someone a single URL.

The Museum Test (One Question That Deletes 90 % of My Saves)

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Every single time I’m about to save a link I ask:

“If this were printed as a 2×3-foot poster in a public gallery with my name on the plaque, would I still want it there tomorrow?”

The answer is almost always no.
Those tabs get closed forever.
The rare yeses become permanent exhibits.

That filter alone dropped my total saved links from ~19,000 to under 400 in a year ago. Recall went up. Anxiety went down. Magic.

What I Stole From Actual Museum Curators

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I spent a long weekend reading memoirs by curators at MoMA, the Met, V&A, and the Getty. The principles are embarrassingly transferable.

• Rejection is the primary skill (MoMA rejects 99.8 % of submitted works)
• Negative space is content
• Sequence creates narrative (the piece next to another piece becomes a different piece)
• Lighting = attention hierarchy
• Temporary exhibitions keep permanent collections alive
• Provenance matters (who made this, when, why)
• Wall text should never outshine the art

Translated to links:

• Delete aggressively and often
• Leave empty rows in your grid
• Put your single favorite card top-left
• Choose cover images that punch
• Archive old stashes instead of letting them decay
• One-line provenance notes are enough
• Never explain the obvious

Do these seven things and your collection stops feeling like storage. It starts feeling like argument.

From Landfill to Legacy: My Personal Museum Blueprint

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When I launched stashed.in publicly in 2023, the marketing line was “Pinterest for links.”
The private line was greedier: I wanted a living museum that costs nothing, updates itself, and carries my name into the future.

Today my profile is literally a museum with wings:

• North Wing – “Typography That Physically Hurts” (87 links)
• East Wing – “Indie Revenue Teardowns I Study Like Scripture” (41 links)
• South Wing – “Recipes I Actually Cook More Than Once” (63 links)
• Basement – “Things That Made Me Cry in Public” (29 links, password-protected)
• Attic – “2009–2018 Graveyard” (archived, visible only to me)

Visitors can walk the halls in any order. Most leave knowing more about me than if they had read a 50-page About page.

The 30-Day Museum Challenge (Zero to Gallery in Public)

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I’ve run this challenge informally with about 400 people. Completion rate: 100 %. Dropout rate on every other productivity challenge I’ve tried: ~90 %. There’s something about making art in public that keeps people hooked.

Week 1 – The Great Purge

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Export every bookmark, Pocket list, Raindrop collection, Notion database, Apple Notes link dump.
Run everything through the Museum Test.
Expected survival rate: 3–12 %.
Delete the rest without ceremony. Feel the oxygen return.

Week 2 – Opening Night

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Create one public stash titled “[Your Name]’s Internet Museum – Opening 2025”
Add exactly 21 pieces (7×3 grid looks perfect).
Spend real time on cover images. Crop, color-grade, sometimes screenshot a specific frame.
Write a one-sentence plaque for at least half.
Pin it to your profile.
Send the link to three friends whose taste you trust. Ask for brutal feedback.

Week 3 – Rotation Sunday

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Every Sunday evening:

• Add 1–4 new acquisitions
• Remove 1–4 older pieces (relegate to an archived “Storage” stash if you’re scared)
  Museums never let the collection calcify. Neither should you.

Week 4 – The Guest Wing

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Create a new stash called “Gifted by Visitors” or “On Loan from Friends.”
Only add links that someone sent you directly and that pass the Museum Test.
Credit them on the card.
Watch your taste diversify overnight as people start bringing you treasures.

By day 30 you will have:

• A public gallery you’re stupidly proud of
• A sharpened sense of your own standards
• At least a dozen new internet friends who found you through your walls
• Zero digital clutter

Unexpected Side Effects I Never Saw Coming

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1. People started paying me to curate for them
   Corporate innovation teams, VC associates, even one celebrity chef have hired me to build private stashes for their teams. Payment range: $800–$4,000 per gallery.

2. My reading speed doubled
   When every saved link has to earn wall space, I stopped tolerating mediocre intros. I became savage with the back button.

3. Offline life improved
   Choosing restaurants, books, furniture, even friends started feeling like curation problems. Standards rose everywhere.

4. Strangers send me their best finds weekly
   The museum became a magnet. People want their work hung in a room that clearly has taste.

Counterintuitive Truths After Curating ~4,800 Links Down to ~420

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• Smaller collections carry more authority than large ones
• An empty row in a 5×5 grid is more powerful than a crammed 10×10
• Changing a cover image is often more important than the link itself
• Deleting a masterpiece to make room for a new one feels like growth
• Private “junk drawer” stashes are still necessary—every museum has storage vaults
• The algorithm starts working for you once you become a tastemaker

The Mortality Angle Nobody Talks About

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Ten years from now most social platforms will be ghost towns or paywalled beyond recognition.
Your tweets will 404.
Your Notion pages will be locked behind a login nobody remembers.
Your Obsidian vault will be an unreadable folder of .md files.

But a public stash of 200 timeless links with hand-picked covers and short provenance notes? That has a fighting chance of surviving migrations, platform deaths, and even your own death.

I still visit the archived Pinboard pages of people who passed away years ago because their links were just that good. I never met them, but I know them.

Curate like someone will study your walls in 2075.

Your First Exhibition Starts Now

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You don’t need permission, a niche, or even a finished idea.

Do this tonight:

1. Go to stashed.in → New Stash → make it public
2. Title it literally anything that makes you smile (“Internet I Refuse to Lose”, “Opening Night”, “My Taste in 12 Links”)
3. Add seven links you would frame if the web were paper
4. Spend five real minutes choosing cover images that feel like art
5. Drop the link in one group chat, one Discord, one email

Then sit back and watch what happens when you stop treating the internet like a hard drive and start treating it like a gallery.

I’ll be in the gift shop with Stasha, saving a seat for your opening.

The walls are blank.
The lights are warm.
The internet is waiting.

→ stashed.in