Why Real Humans Make Better Mentors Than Algorithms

Alexander Hipp
3 min readMay 15, 2021

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We’ve all been in the situation. Just after finishing university, when changing a job or path in your career, or also just by learning about a new topic out of curiosity. Day one.

It’s the first day and the new topic seems to be impossible to grasp. All the words and ideas are flying over our heads. We’re lost.

What do we do when we’re lost? We look for stuff online and consult the usual suspects like Google or Youtube. We get a trillion results and advertisement that doesn’t really help.

The amount of resources out there makes it almost impossible to know where to start. Is this article already too advanced for me? Do I need any prerequisites to understand it?

To overcome this challenge, we often pay others to prepare the content for us. And with the Creator Economy thriving, everyone who is knowledgeable in a specific topic can make a living by showing others “how to do XYZ”.

Learning new things by leveraging the experience and knowledge of an expert is an excellent way to understand a new field, but it also brings some downsides.

In most cases, this knowledge comes in very expensive courses, workshops or training, and the quality of the contents depends heavily on the person creating them.

On the other side, there is a vast amount of content out there, accessible for everyone and free to consume. You can, for example, get different opinions from other beginners who are tackling the same problem. But also from the smartest and most experienced in the field.

Yet, their content is only helpful if you can find it amongst the vast amount of resources. There are a lot of great pieces of content out there that would perfectly fit your current situation, but you will never discover them just because they’re not built for search algorithms.

We believe that the future of content consumption should be human-to-human and not dependent on an algorithmic that is optimised for clicks. People are collecting and sharing content with others. (Read more about it here https://gobeyond.so/blog/the-future-of-content-is-human-to-human)

Imagine a mentor or an expert curating only the very best content they can find, especially for a beginner like you. They provide you with a clear path on how to tackle the resources, and they are reflecting on their learning on each item.

The more people recommending the best content for your specific challenge on Beyond the easier it gets for you to end up consuming only the very best things to break into the new field in no time.

This is precisely our vision of Beyond. We will enable everyone in the tech and startup industry to recommend their best pieces to others while leveraging the community to help you learn fast and better.

Originally published at https://beyond.so.

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