companies curate, but ultimately we're talking about user generated content, whose popularity at some point in life came from the fact that a lot of people chose to engage with it. The only difference now is that you dont need to be some a-list celebrity to get this engagement. A camera, an idea, and a bit of video editing can make you go viral.

even if we stripped down all the engagement algorithms and made it some "pure" HN-style "votes determine curation" (which is a trap in and of itself, but I diagress), you'd be surprised how similar the site layout would look. Arguably even worse because bigger creators get more views and likes by nature of being big.