Is Medium Breadcrumbing You?
The more engagement you get, the more you give
Breadcrumbing is a popular Buzzword right now in the dating world in which one person strings another person along without any intention of giving that person what they want. They tease commitment and security with no real intention of making it happen. They’re present and affirming just often enough to let you know that they’re capable of being a good life partner, but they’re absent so often that you’re left miserable and constantly trying to brainstorm ways to get back into their good graces.
Sound familiar?
Not to be too on the nose, but it sort of sounds like my relationship with Medium. To better understand the power of breadcrumbing, you have to understand intermittent reinforcement.
What is intermittent reinforcement?
The term comes from an experiment done in the 1950s by behavioral research scientists who experimented on how lab rats respond to rewards. The rats were given a lever, and when they pulled the lever, they got a food pellet. Simple. That’s continuous reinforcement though, and we are talking about intermittent reinforcement. With continuous reinforcement, the rats behaved normally.
But what if the rats only got a pellet sometimes when they pressed the lever? What if when they got a treat, it was random and unpredictable? Would they learn to ignore the lever or become bored? No, they became obsessed with it, and that’s intermittent reinforcement. Since they had no idea when a treat was going to come, they couldn’t stop thinking about pressing the lever. They stopped grooming and doing other regular rat things and focused only on the lever.
Of course, this is how casinos work!
The excitement of gambling is based on intermittent reinforcement. What makes gambling addictive is the fact that you don’t win every time but you do win sometimes and the thrill of that uncertainty is what makes it exciting. The reinforcement is intermittent and causes a positive and euphoric response in the brain that in some circumstances can lead to gambling addiction.
Addiction to something through intermittent reinforcement is a common phenomenon in 2022. Only sometimes when I check my phone do I have a notification or a text that sends me a little jolt of oxytocin, but that sometimes has had me checking my phone every few minutes for years. And recently? I’ve been checking the Medium app more than any other.
I have no call to action
We can’t really do anything about this. You and I write are on Medium for one reason, we love to write. And at some point, somebody told us we might be able to make a living at writing. You were probably a blogger before Medium and my guess is that there’s a manuscript that you’re stuck on somewhere on your hard drive. But you know, the publishing industry. Famous actors and TikTok stars can get a book deal with great publishers in no time simply because they know the name will sell the book, and that’s what publishers care about. What do they have to lose when they’ve got a TikToker with an audience of millions who will absolutely do free advertisements for them?
I’m guessing that you’re not a famous TikToker. If you were, you probably wouldn’t be writing on Medium.
I don’t have a solution to the problem, but I do think that being aware of the game will help you in taking back your power.
Use Medium to help you practice your writing, but don’t let Medium use you.
