Do You Follow People or Publications?
Because the Powers That Be think you care more about publications
I was looking for people I follow under my “Following” tab — you know, the place where I should be able to find the people I follow. What I found mostly were stories from people I don’t know — but they were from publications that I follow. Specifically, the first twenty stories were from ILLUMINATION. While ILLUMINATION is my go-to big pub, and while it has some very fine stories, it also has a lot of stories that I don’t care about. That’s going to be true of any publication that publishes a wide variety of topics.
This is why, when I’m reading on Medium, I rarely go to particular publications to find something to read, unless that publication is Catness. But the pubs that publish on various topics most likely have a lot of stories I don’t care about, stories about politics or business or technology. Stories about how much the writer earned from writing last month.
I don’t come here for the pubs. I come for the people — individual writers who consistently write stories I enjoy reading.
It seems the Powers that Be don’t realize that. They have put the publications at the top of my “following” tab. Which would be more logical if this platform weren’t primarily a social network. As an experiment, I went through and unfollowed a bunch of publications — at that point, after much scrolling, some familiar names began to appear. If you are willing to scroll and scroll and scroll, you can find the people you follow.
Perhaps the Powers that Be have a different vision for this platform. Maybe they don’t want us to be friends? Maybe they want us to choose stories to read on this platform the same way we would at a newsstand. We’d pick our favorite publications without even considering whether we knew any of the writers contained within. But that is not how Medium works.
Besides, at a newsstand, the publications all specialize in a particular topic. If I want to read about cats, I would pick up a copy of Catster. Here, I might go to Catness to read about cats, but even on Catness, I’m likely to read something by Deborah Camp or Dakota Duncan before I read something by someone I don’t know.
I guess all of this explains why I’ve had trouble finding stuff to read on Medium lately. When I pick up the app and scroll through the “for you” or “following” tab, I see a bunch of stories that do not interest me. Honestly, I used to scroll through the heads at the top to find something to read. I’d see Pam Winter’s face and click on it. Then I’d scroll over to Bev Potter. Fortunately, I subscribe to both of these women. Otherwise, I would have to use the search function to find them.
