We live in the age of scale. Everything has to be scalable. Everything has to accelerate. It seems that if your business, division or team isn't achieving rapid growth, it's not successful.

Scale, though, isn't always creating more opportunities. It induces an effect called aggregation. The more prominent a business is, the more people flock to it. The more information it gets, the better it gets. The further it improves, the larger it gets. And so on.

For businesses to compete with aggregators, they need scale. Without scale, it's hard to make enough money to sustain operations. But scale depends upon two things, automation and data. Automation requires both automated artificial intelligence systems and crowdsourced ones. Data is also a combination of automated and user-generated content.

The question is, who controls the generated content? What happens when the amount of information exceeds human oversight? Can we trust an algorithm to vet what content exists and what doesn't?

Scale and content

Most companies are investing heavily in scalability. They're increasing their capacity, their infrastructure and their quality of service. But hidden among this growing frenzy, content