Medium’s secret trend-setting initiatives
I received the following email from Digital Culturist recently:
What caught my eye was the following clause
Digital Culturist was asked by Medium to participate in it’s #PostsFromTheNearFuture campaign.
The following image is seen on many Medium posts:
If you remember, there was a recent series called Future of Food that was running on Medium. The image for that looked like this:
Every month, Medium contacts top publications and starts a trend. It does this using an unlisted Medium post from Ev Williams, the CEO of Medium, shared by email with those publications.
Those publications then publish Stories on the topic one after the each, using the appropriate tag and often image (two examples above).
The larger Medium community feels that someone came up with Future of Food, and everybody else caught on to it and therefore Medium feels like a really vibrant community — more than it is really.
In fact, ZapChain has more insightful comments than Medium because you can pay people money to write (using Bitcoin). It doesn’t need to be much, even 10 cents are enough.
Also, on an unrelated note, Kimbal Musk is the brother of the more well known Elon Musk. While the latter is trying to colonise Mars, the former is trying to feed the world. The following Story was written by the former, Kimbal Musk.
#RealFood is food we trust to nourish ourselves, our community, and our planet.medium.com
Again, on an unrelated note, Tim Boucher runs invironment, a publication about food, farming and environmentalism. He is a farmer, and his posts are different from the rest of the tech-filled posts that have overpopulated Medium.
This is one of his most recent posts that I did not find in my home stream/feed, but would’ve loved to read. This is yet another example of how Medium’s “Top 3 Stories for You” doesn’t work properly. It recommends more of the same kinds of Stories… again and again and again.
I don’t want to be stuck in this filter bubble.
Entrepreneur’s Guide to “Minimum Viable Farming”medium.com
The above Story about “Minimum Viable Farming”, as mentioned previously, was written by Tim Boucher, who now goes by ☮ t♭on Medium.
I also noticed the emergence of emoticons (some people call them emoji) in usernames and Stories on Medium. Perhaps this is because many people use Medium on mobile nowadays instead of in a real computer.
Why isn’t there a Mac, Windows or Linux program for Medium? Why does Medium have to be a website. Can’t it be a program? It would be much more efficient and resource-friendly.