how you can get on the short list of Medium writers to whom I subscribe
a how-to poem
Published in
2 min readAug 7, 2021
From: Joe Váradi
To: Your Friends at Medium, My Friends at Mediumthis email subscription thing
even by Medium standards
raises more eyebrows and
questions than it answerswe already have options
a plethora of vices
newsletters and digests
to flood our inboxesand now, one more …
a personal subscription
to feed your instant
feedback loop addiction(don't even get me started
on the latest pyramid scheme
the referral program ——
it makes me want to scream!)would you like a glimpse
into the criteria
of how I rank writers
from awesome to inferior?a clue or three, perhaps
to why I might strike on
this latest featurette,
that envelope icon?first and foremost
you had to have stolen
my heart, with a sweet
story or po'emsecond, you must not
be a serial blogger
pumping out pabulum
by day or by the hourlast but not least
it helps if you’ve shown
me some love, too ——
yes, I'm reciprocation-prone!
dedicated to Bev Potter, who is freaked out by this feature, and to K.C., Tanya, J.L. and Sarah, who, having satisfied the above criteria, are the first writers I subscribed to
