Paradise Lost
I read Charles O'Meara’s piece, Why I’m Leaving Medium. My immediate reaction was, “Them’s fighting words.” Can’t argue with the thrust of them.
O’Meara’s a passionate writer with strong feelings about his work. I’ll miss his insights and sardonic humor. I know I can find his crows on his website, but the ideal is to have great content in one place.
Medium ain’t as pristine as it used to be even as recently as a year ago. Snake oil salesmen keep gaming the platform. In fairness to Medium, it’s happening on other platforms as well. My Twitter feed is getting harder to curate. Instead of tweets that sparkle with wit and the immediacy of the moment, I now get offers to buy followers. Why would I want to do that?
We have a flawed content delivery model. I’d rather skip the tags and have searchable content organized the way newspapers do it. That is, politics, art, music, cinema, theater and so on.
Others may choose to receive a barrage of self-help pablum so they can get rich quick. I might pity them for the poverty of their ambitions, but who am I to tell them what they should or shouldn’t read?
The little green hearts are cute, but they threaten to turn writers into panhandlers. People can’t read your stuff if they can’t see it. As I understand, your writing only gets seen when people recommend it. So you’re obliged to beg your family and friends to recommend what you just wrote. That’s a line some writers are not quite ready to cross.
Medium has created a chicken-and-egg situation. Reminds me of a line in The Panda’s Thumb. Stephen Jay Gould quotes Samuel Butler as saying that a hen is an egg’s way of making another egg. That’s an evolutionary strategy that works for both chickens and eggs. I’m not sure Medium’s current publishing model works as well for readers and writers.
A customizable homepage would let people choose the kind of content they want to see. It’ll work better for everyone.
