I think this is a vast over simplification of people’s complaints about Medium. I would write a longer article on this but my pc exploded (seriously) and I’m limited to fighting autocorrect on a phone.

Forgive the stream of thought style writing; it is difficult to edit and read back on this phone. It also seems to hate commas.

Whether intentional or possibly accidental, the way things get shoved to the top of medium is through a quick browsing type mentality. So what you get is more of a Cosmopolitan magazine style set of quick stupid articles instead of an actual set of literary articles that seems to me to have been the originally stated purpose of medium.

In this day and age of quick internet browsing, especially on smartphones, those mindless list articles, self-help articles, and sentimental garbage articles are the only ones that really get read much by people who aren’t intimately familiar with the difficult to find literary writing on medium.

When I originally signed on to medium several years ago I wrote a few articles and then realized there was really no way those were going to get seen by anyone without me trying to market myself. I didn’t sign on to medium to market myself I signed on to write.

A few years later I decided to give it another try and while I’m still not any good at marketing myself, and I hate Marketing myself, I’ve tried to play the game and don’t much care for it. As it is now the only people reading my writing on medium are other writers on medium. Those writers seem to think I write pretty well but as long as crap articles are shoved to the top, only medium writers are going to read my writing, not readers in general, which is the purpose of me writing on medium in the first place.

That might sound a bit egotistical, however I believe any writer who wants or expects people to read their writing must be a bit egotistical. It was my original understanding that medium was just the place for those kind of writers. If it weren’t for a few publications on medium I’d have no reason to ever read anything suggested to me. Without those publications I see nothing but list articles, self-help articles for simpletons, and a gigantic barrage of small business startup articles which I personally could not possibly care less about. Seriously what is the connection between writers and start up businesses? I don’t get it. However until I started to exert more control over what got shoved in my face on medium that’s pretty much all I was seeing.

Thank goodness I delved deeper, which the majority of non-writing readers are not going to do. It’s just not in the internet nature.

Think of it this way. If you were a member of a writers group that met in person do you really think anybody would care about people coming to that group with a list articles? I don’t think so.

I cannot argue with the popularity of quick stupid mindless clickbait style articles. It generates millions of dollars in ad revenue on the Internet and sells magazines at the grocery store but it’s not real writing and it’s not art. And for those of us who aspire to real writing and/or art ( successful or not) it’s insulting to be relegated to the bottom of the barrel while those articles are pushed to the top.

I think it’s a shame that the likes of Kafka, Steinbeck, Hemingway, etc would be completely ignored on medium except by other writers. That’s the problem with medium.