A non-curated agency would not be able to claim they have quality images, unless the contributors would self-curate ... which would only be possible by enforcing limits  (limited upload per week/month, or even limited number of images per contributor).

it would probably mean folks paying to have their images there something like faa

I've heard different things from different people and someone asked me to post this to everyone. Can a non-curated agency exist? Why or why not? Framed a different way, is the pain that photographers get not having their work accepted, worse than the pain that buyers may face searching for content?

Well, you run a non-curated agency, right?  How's it working out?

If I want to buy image, I won't go to uncurated site. It's a waste of time to comb through all mediocre photos or snapshots.
The experience is similar to looking for photos in Flickr or Google images, at least Flickr does offer most interesting, which somehow filter the craps out a little.

IMHO we don't need another FAA, flooded with repetitious junk.  But for most of us, Crated didn't work out either, because they were way too narrow-minded and accepted only their idea of photographic 'art'.   Maybe there's a middle ground?

The complaints you see here are about flaws in the review system - and each agency has different weak spots, foibles and inconsistencies.

A formal appeals process (iStock used to have a good one - Scout) both helps improve reviews and fix the inevitable eff ups that will occur. The problem is that a good process, with training, supervision and quality control is expensive, and all the agencies are looking to cut costs.

At various times contributors have suggested an option to allow content that meets the legal requirements (model/property releases) but fails on some other issue - primarily a perception of composition or commercial value - a trial run where it gets to stay if it makes sales and gets booted if it doesn't. No agency has ever implemented anything like this.

The issue with no editorial control (Alamy just inspects for technical flaws) is that you get masses of garbage and unless your search is amazing and/or you have a rating system that the non-curating reviewers impose behind the scenes, buyers won't stick around because it isn't a good experience.

I wouldn't assume that masses of complaints about wayward review processes means people don't want reviews. We want our work to (a) sell (b) for decent royalties (c) in good volume at sites that (d) work reliably, quickly and are appealing to buyers and (e) have good quality and variety.

It might work if you had a really kick-ass search engine/ algorithm.  Over time if the algorithm took into account views, sales history of the image, sales history of the submitter, number of times images is shown as thumb vs number of times viewed, vs number of times sold....

Basically turn your buyers into your curators.

I guess iStock had an idea of this with their public lightboxes, though I admit I didn't curate mine so much as make sure what was in it was what it actually said, i.e. avoiding spam/misidentifications. Then far too many people just added two random files to dozens of their own to fulfil the 'public' requirement. Still, I'm surprised how many people seem to have visited some of my public lightboxes (13 are showing as having had over 5000 views), but I have no idea how many sales derived directly from them.