Censorship Kills Innovation

Slippery slope

Photo by Matt Ridley on Unsplash

Here’s a thought —

Online writing platforms shouldn’t tell writers what to write or what not to write.

Put differently, online writing platforms shouldn’t suggest what their readers want to read or don’t want to read, as Scott Lamb did in Medium’s February Newsletter when announcing the ban on Meta stories from being able to be paywalled.

Screenshot from February’s Medium Newsletter that was distributed to all of our email boxes.

Notice how Scott put words into our mouths about what kind of stories members value and don’t value.

He makes it sound like there was a poll that went out. I never saw the poll. Many other writers I have spoken with never saw the poll. Who was polled?

I’m going to make a bold statement: If some of the great writers of old that we celebrate were alive today (Joyce, Voltaire, Woolf, Kafka), they would be writing more than one novel or short story about the world of online writing, which includes platforms like Medium and Substack.

All of these writers were…