I love the interface on Medium. So we begin on positive note. I see claps as a positive step forward.
It should not come as a surprise. It is always the underdogs that answer the call for change.
For someone who is only beginning to blog, this will be a welcome change. It means you don’t have to build an immense readership to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Medium hegemons. And there are hegemons on Medium, whose every article, the good ones as well as the trashy ones, seem to launch off from the Everest into the starry december sky, while the ragtag army of smaller and newer writers are unable to muster enough readership to make a dent on the stat screen, no matter how well they write.
My problem is a little peculiar. I don’t mean to sound too harsh, since the good will of the Medium CEO is visible in all the changes that are being brought. I haven’t converted yet, but that adds absolutely zero to the conversation at hand.
What if you bring zero readership to your page?
That is a possibility. There will be people who bring zero readers with them when they sign up on Medium. They will be expecting that if they put in the effort, their work should stand on its own feet. Most of them are here so they can build a community around their writing. Taking this hypothetical, what are the chances of this writer making it big on Medium? Abysmal. There will be one or two stray views and maybe an proportional number of claps, depending on who it is that is reading this work. Even if I attach relevant tags, my work will hide behind the obscure wall of LATEST. In other words, doesn’t the Medium algorithm assume I am a bad writer until proven otherwise. Is there no way to circumnavigate this?
