THERE MAY BE HOPE FOR MANKIND

The Medium Help Desk Disappoints, Then Redeems Itself

Maybe there’s light at the end of this latest tunnel

IDK how the NHS got in there. There’s no hope for them. But maybe there’s hope for our stats and for Medium’s Help Desk. Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

It’s worth repeating:

… maybe there’s hope for our stats and for Medium’s Help Desk.

I’ll explain.

Yesterday, I noticed this alarming pattern.

From left to right the data points are for December 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th. The far right, at zero, is for today, December 7th. Image from https://medium.com/me/stats?publishedAt=DESC

There’s no scale on the image above but shown are 1.1K views and 147 reads for December 6th.

As you can easily see, the read ratio of 13% is way out of range. My usual read ratio is in the range of 60 to 70%.

I was concerned for a couple of reasons:

• I thought that perhaps my account had been compromised
• I was concerned that if my read ratio remained low the algorithm that directs my stories to potential readers would de-prioritize my stories as “not worthy” and distribute them accordingly, that is, to fewer potential readers than before

So, I did what many might do under similar circumstances. I wrote about it. And, I…