Thanks, Bonnie. There is a facility on other blog platforms that allows the reader to share something they read somewhere else, by simply reblogging it. In other words it appears on your blog site, identical to the site it came from with full accreditation etc.
Medium doesn’t allow people to reblog their stuff even if it was published at a time when you were stumbling around trying to build an audience. Now editors tell me they only want to publish new stuff but forget that many of the successful writers publishing regularly on their sites have written stuff in their past of equal merit.
It has also occurred to me, because of the currying favour element of growing an audience, ie commenting, visiting and generally waving a flag in certain people’s direction, will get you noticed and, by extension, more favourable treatment.
Editors benefit from this. They read a lot of stuff so a lot of people read their stuff. They get more claps because (and I do caution this is my theory of what happens and if it does, it’s only a small measure of why people clap) if you clap for their work then there’s a better chance they’ll “notice’ your work and applaud accordingly, even make sure you’re stuff gets published.
I know I’m attracting howls of foul and anguish from editors in literary publications who are genuinely hard working, volunteering and thankless, but these are aspects of Medium that should be looked at.
I posted Old Stories to try to draw this debate out and to give my stories an audience so thank you for responding, Bonnie and fuck Medium, anyway. I paid my money but they haven’t done anything for me. On the contrary, I’ve done things for them.
