Please Help my Publication About Absolutely Nothing Thrive
Let’s flood the Internet with meaningless frivolity.
Recently Tony Stubblebine wrote that Medium wants to elevate publications, which made me happy and sad at the same time. Happy, because I have a very cool publication, called Sybarite. Sad, because I let Sybarite slowly die after one or two confusing formatting debacles. Rather than push through and try to figure it out, I threw up my hands and walked off in a huff, letting it dangle there like a billboard in space. Very cool, very adult.
But I’m gonna to revive it because I believe in it. I created Sybarite (you can read about its the origin story here), as the antidote to content zombies, who mostly spew so-called self-help stuff, which does a disservice to worthwhile self-help writing. Listicles, how “crush” this or that, information on what rich people do, how to lose weight — all of this is the blight of the Internet, a locust swarm that destroys the good crops.
Worse, content for content’s sake — which is mostly self-helpy stuff — leads to bad writing because it’s too easy. No need for craft or to create a sentence that punches you in the gut, because your reader is hooked by the promise of the latest life-hack. This is a disservice to both the writer (because the writing never gets better) and the…
