I truly enjoy most of your writing on Medium. That’s why I follow you. This post, however, illustrates in stark fashion everything I dislike about Medium. Medium loves articles about how to be popular on Medium. Medium encourages self-absorption and writing about writing, rather than writing about something more complicated and meaningful. Medium, at its worst, appears to breed shallowness and insincerity. And that’s the side of Medium I hate.

Medium is becoming the McDonald’s of writing. Or maybe it’s the Walmart. Either way, posts are targeted directly at people’s brain stems from the beginning, starting with the title, and then going on to beg for approval at the end, complete with instructions showing us what a heart means, in case we’ve recently undergone successful lobotomies.

We’ve had social media for decades, and we get it. If your stuff is good, you won’t have to ask. Since you DO write things worth reading on a regular basis, you must know that already.

I don’t have any answers other than to point out that some portion of the human race finds Donald Trump appealing and thinks isolationism will work well in 2016 for whatever country they happen to live in. So I’m not real confident that humans like to do the right thing, only the thing that fools other humans into acting in a particular manner. Medium is successfully positioning itself to eagerly partake in this anti-intellectualism and exaggerated sense of self-importance.

Maybe it is what people really want, but we’re still just encouraging them to be mediocre.