Medium-Level Bullshit

The Stupidity of the Crowd or “Top Stories in Bullshit”

Please note this was written in one rant-filled sitting without the benefit of a copy editor.

You see it all here on Medium:

[Insert noun here] prevents [body part] cancer, helps rejuvenate [bodily function] and is proven by science. (Disclaimer: No evidence included.)

How To Get [positive adjective] (Disclaimer: By someone who hasn’t done it and wishes they had.)

How To Stop [negative adjective] (Disclaimer: see above.)

Medium, like every crowd-curated content site I’ve encountered, is degrading ungracefully. Devolving. It is reaching for that old cliche, “90% of everything is crap.” It has become a boutique Facebook.

I get a daily digest. In the first few months it was filled with jewels. I discovered great writers and deep insights into my interests (health, creativity, tech). I shared and commented and “hearted” and felt like going though that digest had been a good use of my time.

Lately I’ve become jaded. Click-bait headlines like those “promoted content” items on gossip sites are more common that thoughtful articles.

This isn’t Medium’s fault. This isn’t any single person’s fault. This is the fault of “the crowd.”

Those in tech and trends will remember when “The Wisdom of the Crowd” was a bestseller. Back then “trendsetters” were sought by every slimy product-pushing marketer, “The Tipping Point” and “Blink” were on every executive (and bloggers) reading list.

And it was all bullshit.

The crowd has no wisdom. It is a mob. It admires the emperor’s new clothes and thinks the housing market could never crash. It has bumper stickers and shirts with all the nuance and intellectual consideration that will fit in a slogan.

“Top Stories in Bullshit” is the only crowd curated list that is accurate.

Self publishers love to talk about the rare success stories, the fan-fiction that becomes a major franchise or the tireless author who finally hits an audience that appreciates a fine piece of work that would had been rejected by publishers. Self publishers don’t love to talk about the grammatically-challenged plot-free stories of true love gained or mighty orcs slaughtered.

I’m not ready to leave yet. But I’m trimming my “interests.” Creativity will be gone in 30 seconds. Health is a gaunt patient with the plugged pulled.

Curation by the gatekeepers of large publishing houses and television networks is too strict. Curation by up-votes or “hearts” encourages promiscuity. Between the two are reputation-based curation. StackExchange, where you have to prove your chops and where people who already have correct the ignorant and encourage the willing, has proven that there is a middle ground.

As a technologist, I’m considering how to incorporate this into my own sites coming down the pike. It isn’t the right answer for every content site (there is a place for reddits, networks, and Medium), but it is a better way to spend time than to read an article about how some spice or “these three steps” will keep you young and healty, bring prosperity and happiness, and cure world hunger.

Because we all get old, prosperity is relative and earned, and hunger will always haunt us.