Virality is Toxic: What Medium Lost for Clicks
A manager at a furniture store received a very strange voicemail from the New York Post: a request for comment from one of the mustached employees about his dating life.
In just a week, a normal 25 year old’s life turned upside down. Caleb’s activity on popular dating apps like Tinder had been exposed by several women on Tik Tok with similar stories: he gushes, then he ghosts. It’s not a unique story, especially for people entering the dating pool in New York City. In a matter of days, all of his personal social media was gone. Now known as “West Elm Caleb”, he became synonymous with every girl’s worst nightmare when dating. It wasn’t long before major news feeds like GQ, Wired, Insider, and Rolling Stone all wrote about their take on West Elm Caleb-utilizing this ‘clickbait’ title. This transition from everyday dude to now viral meme showcases the best and worst parts of internet culture. Good because people can connect with similar stories; bad because of the dehumanizing and villainizing effects it has of people’s singular actions.
When I was younger, I held a common assumption that virality leads to justice. Because something is widely shared and viewed, the piece of media must be truthful, good, or special. After my multiple affairs with Buzzfeed, Twitter, and those like it, I felt empty inside. And this makes sense considering most media outlets nowadays have a competing interest to imprison its reader in a financial ecosystem riddled with subscription fees and products. In the case of West Elm Caleb, no one’s life is going to be made better. His personal and professional life are being made public without consent. There will still be people who continue to ghost and people who will rant about it, now with the possibility of exploiting their poor dating stories for views and clicks. Essentially, nothing changes except for the profit margins of popular media companies.
This clickbait culture has penetrated and spread across Medium and other platforms like it.
Medium, just like other platforms for sharing content, have taken similar notes with more incentive to maintain this toxic culture of sensationalism. Medium is a web news publication with a special center on tech-related content. Rather than focus on the depth and quality of writing, value is measured by a user’s time on the page and scrolling speed. Content itself relies on the consumer’s instinct to click their mouse fast and continuously. No one does this quite better than Medium. But readers and writers are starting to notice.
In this essay, I will lay out exactly what changed in Medium. Popular articles from today will help explore the reasons behind this shift. Lastly, I would like to try and suggest ways to improve writing if it means sacrificing business interests for the sake of the consumer. After all, the consumer is king and the king should be well informed not baited, right?
So, what changed in Medium? Before answering this question, it needs to be established there was any kind of shift at all. According to Casey Newton’s The Mess at Medium article, the relationship between journalist and freelance writers has been a tenuous relationship. In the beginning, the idea was journalists would provide the site with high quality content that would provide freelance writers a halo effect for their stories as well. This assumption was fueled by the idea that journalists would bring in views, thus advertisement dollars and freelancers would convert readers to paid subscribers, in general fulfilling the goal Medium had of connecting writers to their readers. However, this assumption was disrupted by profits in the millions, not billions. One factor included journalists’ stories not bringing in the attention expected. In fact, the most popular stories on Medium came from freelance writers who uploaded their work for free, not on a paid salary like the journalists. With this in mind, CEO Ev Williams at the time layed off employee journalists at Medium and the emphasis on freelance writing thus continued.
Everything from UI/UX design, algorithms, and business model shifted to support towards a focus to gain views. Titles on Medium sound like something from BuzzFeed now, top 10 this and 7 ways that. It’s not work that informs the mind, it’s a constant reminder of trying to get you to shell out 5 dollars each month. The more you click the more they win. Stories aren’t stories, they falsely promise ‘life-changing’ advice. For example, one of the most popular stories of all time on medium is How a Password Changed My Life by Momo Estrella. While I agree the topic of passwords is important and there’s no doubt helpful tips for the reader, the over exaggeration shows a commonality among today’s media. The story one has to share, whether helpful to the reader or not (in fact, possibly toxic), is a story because of its outrageousness and ability to capture attention. It succeeds because it triggers a compulsive almost involuntary action from the reader, thus triggering the Medium algorithm to spread it to other readers like a California wildfire.
Medium lost quality readers and writers because it chooses to promote stories that are click driven, not quality driven. So as a writer, get in, do your clickbait, then get out before you ruin yourself. Once these quality writers, also with their own capitalistic tendencies, leave to grow themselves, Medium has already lost too much. For the self respecting reader, this cycle becomes all too obvious and they eventually leave finding a more quality enriching ecosystem with depth. Articles are just bullet points and bold font.
There is however hope. I think going back to Medium’s original mission of journalists and freelancers alike is the route to go. At the time, it boasted 35 million in revenue with this relationship, but the greed of turning Medium into a billion dollar profit machine, similar to Twitter and Google, was just not going to occur.
35 million is a lot.
If adding an extra zero to the end of your paycheck not trickling down anywhere else is worth more than good writing and a loyal reader sticking around, then one can expect a rival platform to battle this greediness.
