THE RECOMMEND BUTTON IS RUBBISH RUBBISH RUBBISH
The Recommend Button is lazy, ubiquitous, and beneath contempt. WHY are you recommending something is more relevant, and informative. If I want to say something has value, I HIGHLIGHT as to why I separate the garbage from the garbage. There are many things I like about the Medium. Like the ability to incorporate video, art, and photography on a single page as part of the context of a work that is of value. But the recommend button as a paradigm simply fixed as architecturural content designed to be interpreted as both worthy and popular (hence the term pop culture) gives pop culture a bad name, a negative rep it so richly does not deserve.
Stop recommending. Render the tool itself irrelevant. Replace with HIGHLIGHTING an example of WHY something has worth to you. Stop being so fucking lazy. The recommend button turns the work into trash and the writer into a jerk. If you think of writing as a popularity contest, you are essentially reinforcing a system of feedback that is based on a knee-jerk and then you leave. That is the very synthesis of Manhattan Mainstream publishing’s assessment that it and it alone assigns worth as a marketing gimmick dressed up to look like something that resembles the truth, when, in fact, it’s usually the opinion of an intern from Brown who wants to be an editor so now she’s a fucking volunteer.
How do you think it works.
“I only look at writers who are RECOMENDED by certain agents.” A direct quote from my editor at Houghton Mifflin. Ed Murrow once asked Carl Sandburg what he thought the most evil word in the language was.
“Exclusivity.”
It is amazing to me the extent to which writers themselves buy into a system that excludes them. Ebooks are down. Print books are down. Everyone weeping into their vodka tonics. I’m telling you, the system doesn’t work for us. We reduce ourselves into terms they create. It’s their game, and they do not tolerate the monkey wrench.”
Why do we tolerate a paradigm that reduces the inherent value of our work.
Because we are so wretchedly poor, we just want an admission ticket into the ball park. Everyone gets thrown under the bus. But everyone cannot fit under the bus.
Do you really think they don’t know that. They think writers are a stupid annoyance, and I have heard them say exactly that.
So now an Internet Publishing House, which is what the Medium is, it is more than simply a platform because the writers themselves are the consumers assigning worth where some get paid and others do not and never will.
That is what NYC Publishing Houses do. Most of the people who hit me are either writers or they want to be writers. Or they’re around writing a lot. Limiting what gets assigned worth renders much content that has worth, unworthy.
It isn’t fair, and it is beyond ironic that writers themselves perpetuate their own marginality. I can’t even know writers. It’s just too painful to look at.
Highlighting folds out more information as to exactly what is of worth here. The recommend button does not measure anything whatsoever. It is a cheap trick designed to represent analysis. It analyzes nothing. It is herd behavior.
HIGHLIGHT text you see as relevant. Stop wasting my time. I don’t give a flying fuck how well Desdemoana designed an app that made her a billionaire who knows Kevin Rose and lost twenty pounds. I. Do. Not. Care.
I care about content that deserves to be seen. HIGHLIGHT. Take the fucking time. SHOW me. Don’t tell me. Whose side are you on anyway.
