The Lowest Common Denominator Problem
When websites get too good at sorting content
After being on Medium for a while, the biggest problem with the site is pretty obvious. The navigation kinda sucks.
Surely there is new and interesting content rolling in, I just don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to find it on my own. So I read the Top Picks, which is a smidge undemocratic, a little cookie-cutter at times, and an awfully boring way to find content.
This problem is well-noted. It wouldn’t be worth my time to write much more about it. I feel confident that it will be addressed and the site will evolve into a beautiful butterfly or a lizard or something. Instead, I’d like to look ahead for future pitfalls. Let’s talk about what we can learn from Reddit.
For being “the front page of the internet”, Reddit’s front page is crap. There’s a simple explanation for why this is the case. Thorough, quality content takes time to appreciate, and it generates varying opinions. An informative article may take several minutes to read, and people are going to disagree about the validity of its arguments. Thus, the material that makes it to the top is going to be simple to digest and have widespread appeal. At the moment the top post on Reddit is a picture of a sleeping cat, and the second post is a meme about not having anything to eat in your kitchen. They generate immediate positive reactions that almost anyone can relate to. And they’re super dumb. This is the Lowest Common Denominator Problem.
As the scale gets larger, so does the problem. Smaller subreddits dedicated to particular topics suffer far less than colossal pages like r/funny and r/gaming. A community of 10,000 can still have meaningful, personal conversations. A community of 100,000 will be far more likely to post stuff like “Does anybody else breathe air?”
It’s not just Reddit either. Many types of content operate on this principle. Call Me Maybe topped the charts, action flick clones draw crowds at the box office, and Two and a Half Men was lucrative enough to seem worth salvaging even after the main character was written out. (There’s nothing wrong with enjoying these things, but you can’t pretend they complex or artful.)
Medium isn’t Reddit. It doesn’t use upvotes, it doesn’t sort everything into a ranked list, and it doesn’t allow you to link cute cat pictures. None of this makes it immune to the Lowest Common Denominator Problem.
Even on a site dedicated to the written word, we can fall prey to digestible crap. Two-minute reads containing truisms about how to be happy will have people breaking fingers in their rush to hit the recommend button. That fifteen-minute beast about the complex political identity of people on the island nation of Mauritius? Not so much.
I still don’t really understand how Collections should be utilized, but they seem sort of like primitive subreddits. Does that mean they should become more topic specialized? Should communities form around them? If so, they’re bound to fall into the LCDP. If not, they’re bound to remain awfully nebulous, and thus not terribly useful as a navigation tool (plus I get the sinking feeling that you can abuse its mechanics by starting your collection’s name with the letter A or over-crossposting).
Curation won’t always be a workable answer (and based on the current status of the navigation problem, it isn’t even a workable answer now). There’s just too much content to have a small team sorting through to find gems. It’s also far from both democracy and meritocracy (you can debate which is the true ideal).
If the content on Medium is to remain diverse, in-depth, and high quality, future design changes must allow for better exploration and user management of content, but also vigilantly guard against the dangers of LCDP.
