This is the response to How to Get Read on Medium.
Check out these quotes:
- “Write a title that gets them in the door. Use “how” or “why.” This can veer dangerously close to the black magic of the internet — tricks that help bad content go viral — but, used in moderation, it can also be helpful.”
- “Ask people to like you. … Email your buddy from college whose Tumblr about hipsters somehow blew up, or nudge a work friend who writes a cool blog about penguins. And ask your mom. She’s totally obligated.”
- “If the free market dictated, every news story, book jacket, and white paper on fluid dynamics would feature a picture of a kitten.”
And, drum rolls:
“The lesson: Exceptional ideas always find an audience. Eventually.”
Medium, if you teach us that exceptional ideas always find an audience, why don’t you make finding the audience for your writers your number one goal?
Why do you choose to outsource this painful task to the writers? Just because the most popular writers are relatively comfortable leveraging their social media channels to promote their content doesn’t mean all writers are. How is Medium different from a weighted average between Facebook and Huffington Post then?
A while ago I read this piece: How to build an audience using Medium. It was terrible. Horrible. Devastating.
I wrote to Medium asking to fix this. I asked Medium whether the spree of “Please recommend my post” could be ended.
Medium said they are on it.
Now asking readers to recommend one’s post is on the official recommendations list for the writers.
Sigh.
Back then I thought for a while and wrote The 21st Century Platform for Readers and Writers: What Medium can do to stop being stuck between the past and the future.
Every single product and marketing person I talked to agreed that would be a great direction to go. Every single data engineer and data scientist agreed it is possible.
It still is.
Apparently, Medium just does not think it is anyhow important.
