Medium — Now I’m Sure, Sort Of
These days I’ve been reviewing things
Redoing early posts or else deleting them
But I have copied this without a change
on the off chance it serves some purpose
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These days Medium has somewhat changed
It seems erecting firewalls is it’s business plan
I remain marginal I linger on
Mainly ’cause I know of nothing else
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The following from Sep. 8, 2014 got some reads but subsequent experience has been less encouraging in the reader realm. There are secrets but I do not know them. Or else they relate to the business plan of which I do not approve.
I would change the part below regarding Twitter. Responses there are affected by Twitter in ways too numerous to mention. The result is that it is more skewed toward popularity (and fakery) than Medium.
We need alternatives.
Medium Has Ways But I Am Not Sure What They Are
I have been testing Medium. Wondering what operates in the minds of whoever operates it.
My first test was just joining and posting something that was/is my passion. I did not expect response. It was not among the daily digests I receive … daily.
Then I did a little research to the point of determining that this has a Twitter provenance. That interests me as I made Twitter my main effort a few years ago. By main effort I mean the center of operations. The index. Where everything I care about gets parked.
Twitter is incidentally the greatest free research laboratory in the world. Responses on Twitter will tell you volumes about what communicates and what goes by without notice.
Back to Medium.
My second post was timely and definitely a candidate to be featured in one of those daily emails. It was a somewhat iconoclastic look at the efforts of Democrats to get me to vote for their candidates this fall, something I will doubtless do with no prompting. I have been involved in this stuff for an age and fancy myself able to say what sort of communication would work for the Democrats and what risks to loss. In any case, my second piece about Democratic spam got no response on Medium for enough days to be out of date and has only now gotten enough notice to suggest that there is a trace of breath left in it.
Water over the dam.
This is my third test. Two is never enough to arrive at even a tentative conclusion. I purposely chose a title that might tweak curiosity. Everyone is interested in their own “thing”.
What are the ways of Medium? Is it popularity based and if so how does one become popular? How does one establish oneself? Does succeeding on Medium lead to any wider success? Is there any zeitgeist operating? Whuzzup?
If you have been on the Web as long as I have, you have seen great things come and go. Does anyone remember Themestream? I might be called a citizen beta tester. Always on the lookout for the next big thing. I am sure that’s what Medium wants to be. I just want to learn what makes it tick.
