Your argument makes a lot of sense. It’s probably true. I just wrote that Story because it has a controversial title so more people will click on it.
Then, I also knew many people will Recommend it not because they liked what they read, but because they don’t get enough exposure on the network (not proportional to the good writing they’ve been churning out several times per week).
Finally, I knew people would Respond to it because many people would disagree.
Do you see? That is the problem with Medium: You can optimise for Stories that people will like, rather than Stories they would want their name beside, and others to read too.
The way the users of Medium perceive the Recommend button, in majority, determines the kind of Stories that end up on everybody’s home stream/feed, and I know I’ve been getting only one type of Story for a long time.
And the part that prompted me to write that Story was that I don’t know how to fix it. I thought that if the above Story got really popular, someone from Medium might reply to clear things up.
Lately, they’ve been using Medium very rarely to communicate with users on a personal level. This either signals that something big is in store — a big Medium update, or something else (I don’t know what).
Maybe they have been communicating with their users, but somehow those Stories never end up on my home feed/stream, and I don’t know how to fix it.
I want to know how to fix my home feed/stream.
My current strategy has been to follow everybody I don’t already follow. The more diversity the better, right? But I found that it messes up my home feed/stream, because Stories are ordered by <most recent Recommend from someone you follow>.
If I follow less people, then I don’t get all the diverse stuff. I’ll keep getting the kinds of Stories a hundred people like.
The dynamics of how a Story is propagated through the network, and the emergent behaviour within the system of users who both follow and are followed by users, is something that needs to be investigated.
Why?
First, for fun (I ❤ data and that sort of stuff).
Second, I don’t know how to fix my home feed/stream. Should I just unfollow everybody and follow whomever Ev Williams follows? Would that, over time, give me an identical home stream as the CEO of Medium?
Recommends and likes are different because liking something is easy. Sharing what you like is also okay.
I guess the problem is that people are not discriminate enough with their Recommends.
Maybe I should follow only those users who have few Recommends, because that either means they don’t use Medium much, or that they’re very selective with their Recommends (good curators).
After reading the Story, the thought ‘Will my followers want to read this?’ and the thought ‘Do I like this and has the author done a good job?’ have different answers.
Tumblr got it right. Likes and Reblogs are different. Reblogging required more thought than just a Like.
People know their name is going to be next to a Reblogged post. A Like is just a thumbs up to the author, “Hey! This was good. I liked it. Thanks for making it.”