I guess MY “words (don’t) matter”
It’s been a progressive (for lack of a better double-entendre) process that I have been subject to.
I got shadow-banned a few months back and brought it to management’s attention that I’d had zero traffic by way of responses or even reads for several days, and some boilerplate-generating bot replied back to me that one or two comments I’d made had fallen short of “moving conversation forward”, which I found comical given some of the bombast I have seen out of no end of politically-acceptable posters hereabouts, usually in the last thing of theirs I read before adding them to my four-figure block list.
So, not apologizing for anything and not making any promises to behave myself any more leftwardly, I did tell the algorithm that I had indeed re-read the rules as it had asked me to do, and my good graces (after a fashion) were restored. Meaning, my traffic went back up to the averages of four reads and one-to-zero comments on just about everything I post…
This was around the time I also noticed that only original posts of mine would ever be seen by any larger group from among my contacts, that responses would only show up buried within what passes, apparently, as a comment-thread format on this site, and that nothing I ever write ever shows up on my own home page any more.
I think, in sum, this is what is called “no-platforming”?
Medium doesn’t bother with any tedious little spankings like sternly worded messages or emails to me, but it has made more than clear that I and what I write have been ruled as unforwarding of the sort of conversations it approves of hosting.
Add all the above to this five-dollar-a-month paywall that too many folks have sadly capitulated to, and within a few weeks Medium has gone from being a fairly open and accessible venue going both ways for me, to a virtual desert island in cyber-terms, where if anyone ever reads my stuff it is a coincidence or a software glitch that delivered it to them, and the only people who ever respond any more are those out on the extreme margins like myself who, like me it seems, remain too stubborn and maybe a tad defiant to just up and quit the thing in the face of such systematic snubbing.
(Oh, and for the last week or so whenever I try and click on the Medium logo to look at what I guess is the other home page, I get this annoying “server error” message, which does include a “site status” button, which when I click that I get this screen saying “all systems operational.” Apparently, such juvenile manipulativeness is the strategy of choice for our hosts, using duplicity and rank falsehood rather than any sincere and direct approach straight to me, sort of the way fourteen-year-olds police their little cliques.)
