Who is doing the choosing for Medium promoted crap?
I took a cue from Medium and put a Paypal donation widget on my posts. — Mike Essig
I have often wondered who does the choosing for Medium promoted crap, whoever they are, they are clueless.
I was one of those invited as a popular writer of high quality writing.
I declined.
I declined because it went against what had been created at Medium, a de facto collaborative commons, readers and writers, often one and the same, the commoners.
To be charged for accessing content, was to enclose the commons.
What was the point of being paid, if resided behind digital razor wire?
And who was to choose the writing, what was the criteria, how much to be paid, to be paid per article, per word, per number of visits, the dwell time?
Was there to be the creation of what David Graeber calls bullshit jobs, to select who would be paid, who not?
Has anyone been paid?
If you like content, tell your friends, recommend, tweet, share, help to increase the signal to noise ratio of articles worth reading, otherwise they are drowned out by the crap.
I edit several publications, if you like, please feel free to share, follow.
Were people naive enough to think the money they were paying was going to writers?
The money would be used to inflate the value of Medium, then sell out, the only beneficiaries Vulture Capitalists.
And no, I have not paid.
Postcapitalism we have what Paul Mason at a meeting on Postcapitalism called silly money chasing silly projects. Artificially inflate the value of a company, then sell out before the company is discovered to be worthless.
DHH:
It’s a crying shame, really. I love Medium. It’s the best writing environment on the web, and they sweat the details like nobody else. The community too is just peach. This could have been a love story for the ages.
But I don’t think we’ll grow old together, Medium and I. I suspect it’ll end quite tragic, actually. $132,000,000 is a lot of money after all, and that’s how much venture capital Medium has been dipped in. Before having a prayer or a song about how to turn into that multi-billion-dollar business it must to satisfy the required rate of return.
As DHH points out in his enlightening essay RECONSIDER, on entrepreneurship:
Part of the problem seems to be that nobody these days is content to merely put their dent in the universe. No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them.
In fact, it’s hard to carry on a conversation with most startup people these days without getting inundated with odes to network effects and the valiance of deferring “monetization” until you find something everyone in the whole damn world wants to fixate their eyeballs on.
In this atmosphere, the term startup has been narrowed to describe the pursuit of total business domination. It’s turned into an obsession with unicorns and the properties of their “success”. A whole generation of people working with and for the internet enthralled by the prospect of being transformed into a mythical creature.
As Charles Eisenstein has pointed out in Sacred Economics, few make money on the internet, and the economic value of the activity is a fraction of that it displaces.
Without the commoners, Medium is worthless.
Those who foolishly paid, are not happy. All they got was a lousy header.
Many have taken the view what is good enough for Medium, is good enough for me, and added a PayPal widget to lob them some money.
It would appear Ev Williams and a bunch of greedy Vulture Capitalists have done an excellent job of alienating the Medium commoners.
