Apparently the Digg "algorithm", back when it worked, was one human being?

I've seen a few lists of "do things that don't scale" success stories, because VCs and founders love to write up survivorship bias success porn, but I'd be much more interested in a collection that included both successes and failures so that you could at least attempt to figure out what differentiated the successes and the failures.

@danluu Absolutely believable. Every good forum or good era of a now terrible forum was basically built on human curation. "Catchers in the Rye" in the sense Holden Caulfield imagined - terminally online folks standing at the edge of an abyss to keep people from falling into it, and just as critically, to keep any thing nasty from crawling up out of it.