Writing about Writing is an Infinite Loop
And even this just contributes to the loop.
If you, right now, search for how to make money on Medium, Medium articles advertising how to make money are more than likely what you’ll find.
And while it isn’t necessarily bad, this type of behaviour on Medium from experienced (usually!) writers to new writers is somewhat troubling as the latter. On my first day on Medium, I had already left the site with my first article, and more important for the point of this article, a deep worry about how exactly the culture of writing on this website is.
I almost wrote about that culture immediately after, in fact, however, I saved the idea for later, and I think I have a slightly better grasp on how this website’s pyramid-scheme-like structure when it comes to writing on writing works — and I’ve hopefully saved myself the embarrassment of being the person with no expertise on anything proclaiming their expertise.
I’ll Show You How to Get Rich Quick With 8 Payments of 99.89
When I was 8, I ran across an advertisement on some person’s ancient blog for miracle medicine, which claimed that it would be able to extend the life of people who took it for decades at a time.
The only, slight issue was that this medicine could only be paid for in several payments of several hundred dollars, and you then had to go through a 5-day-class which cost about 100 dollars in order to be able to understand the use of the medicine (why?!) and only then could you send them your address to deliver the medicine to.
Now, I was smart enough to understand the medicine wasn’t actually real, although, I still, for reasons unbeknownst to me to this day, decided that it would be fun to watch approximately 5 hours worth of these advertisements in total — more than paying my share of money to these scam artists.
Today, looking back, I can see somewhat why I went ahead and watched these videos — they presented pseudoscientific nothing with a dangerous flavor of speech, one that made them sound authoritative and profound — despite, in reality, having almost nothing to back them up in their claims and their attempts to swing people to their side.
What made me so concerned when I first saw these videos was that these articles that purportedly teach people how to make money were written in almost the exact same tone that those advertisements were written in: a tone that begged someone to submit to a supposed expert’s advice.
These articles, in my opinion, only serve to further the author’s own goals, since the authors of these pieces are usually aware of what people’s first impression of Medium is: a quick and easy way to make money, with almost no effort on the part of the author, as Medium plays a game of divinely inspired matchmaker to instantly match your content to engaged readers.
Obviously, this view is not the case, though is also similar to the views other people have at first glance at other community-run sites like Youtube and Instagram.
The main thing that causes this is the lack of information people usually have about the specific platform they want to publish on before publishing to it. While someone might be good at writing, it’s easy to suffer from the idea that your writing in specific deserves to be read, and thus the platform will recognize that and serve your content to more people.
Not only this but it’s become somewhat of an expectation for online content creators to make ridiculous amounts of money from their content and simple psychological rules that thus, most trying to make money this way will assume that within 6 months, they’ll be able to live off of their money. This, I needn’t say, is almost never the case.
In the end, writing about writing is only an infinite loop of people trying to market themselves for success, and people trying hopelessly to write to success.
And so, I’ve written in a meta way about it, though I can promise the reader this: I won’t write about the writing of writing about writing again.
