An Open Letter To The Medium Feed
Dear Medium Feed…
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How are you feeling lately? Is everything okay? How are you handling all the “Open Letters” lately that are passing through you? Do you read them all or just kind of skim over looking for the good stuff?
It must be weird: always being the messenger — always delivering someone else’s words to someone else’s ears or eyes, as it were. Even having people talk about you like you’re not there, like you’re not listening…
Wait, are you listening? Ahem, is this thing on — ?
We wanted to give you the spotlight today, Medium Feed, because really you’re the unsung hero here. You deliver the goods, day in and day out. Even after everyone else has gone home for the night. In fact, you might just be the hardest-working part of Medium — not to mention probably one of the least understood. I mean understood on a deeper level…
By now, probably most users realize you bring new stories into our feeds, literally feeding us with (hopefully) enriching stories recommended by the people we’re following.
Or published by authors and publications we follow ourselves:
Or based on tags, which can bring in new content from outside the network of people we’re following:
We totally get all that, Medium Feed. And that your goal, as ever, is to consistently and correctly deliver the stories that matter to us. Because Medium Engineering made you that way.
But you have to know that how you do all that is opaque to the rest of us. You with your “bots” and your “algorithms” and assorted electronic elves… I guess what we’re saying is: Little help, please?
Let us get to know the real you, Medium Feed. That’s all anyone has ever wanted.
UPDATE:
After posting the above Open Letter to the Medium Feed, we received a mysterious response from a pseudonymous Medium account which our servers insist never existed. The response too was deleted within a few minutes after being posted by whomever — or whatever — originally penned it.
Luckily, one of our crack User Happiness agents had the presence of mind to quickly screen-capture the story before it was deleted, and so we’re including it tentatively here as possible evidence of… contact?
We’ll leave that for you to decide!
