WRONG AND WRONGER
Boost Is Broken, and Yes, I Have a Better Idea
My apologies to whoever conceived this, but it’s harmful
A few weeks ago I learned something that really astonished me. Did you know that if an Anointed Booster suggests a candidate to Medium and they agree, the Anointed One gets paid? Yes, paid as in moolah, money, cash.
Nobody realized the potential for incest? Oh, my!
But there are more reasons this program is flawed. Imagine you run a pub and are a Blessed Booster. Umm, I’m just throwing out a wild guess here, but I expect you would read most or even all submissions to your pub.
So whose stories might you find Boost-worthy?
Duh.
I’m not saying the stories might not be worthy, I’m just saying that you can only boost what you have read, so your pub is very likely to be a frequent source of nominations.
And, of course, the authors and pubs you follow and subscribe to. You read those, they are another good source. But you are also told to look afield, and you are an honest person, so you do. Maybe you click into a Tag and start looking for headlines you like.
Good for you. But this can be boring, even painful. You will find a lot of stories you don’t like or that aren’t very good. Maybe you do get lucky and find something you can suggest. Yay! You did a good thing!
Or maybe you couldn’t find one. So, frustrated, you just pick one that is at least half-ass good and send it up the elevator. Maybe it gets approved because the guys up there are bored too?
I think something like that happened to two stories of mine that got Boosted. Those two are not very good — I’ll show them to you down below so you can judge for yourself.
This poorly conceived Boosting costs those of us writing for the wrong pubs money. And can we get into the pubs where we might get noticed?
Quite a few of them are closed to new writers and others I’ve looked at have stringent requirements and picky, picky editors. Just saying, it’s their pub, their rules, but they get to start the Boost process. Seems wrong to me.
Medium wants to keep both readers and writers happy, There is a lot of vapid writing on Medium that ideally they’d like not to have. Boosting is designed to wean money away from those writers.
There is a more democratic and far less corruptible way.
A better idea
This is so simple, you might spit out your coffee. Put a little button at the bottom of the story:
“Recommend this story to my followers”
I imagine you understand what happens if I click it when reading your story. Yup, it gets a little mini-boost but only to my followers.
You wouldn’t know who the recommend is from. It would work simply that the story has greater visibility to you for some period of time — just as the stories of everyone you follow now are. It wouldn’t be emailed to you, you’d get no notice of it. The unfollowing followers would never see it, just as they don’t now. It is simply “further distribution”, more exposure to readers.
It would be no different from my recommending one of your stories in this post except that no one would know who recommended it and only the typical 1% of your followers will see it (1% according to Medium, someone said).
Put another way, it would only tell Medium to treat that story exactly as it treats a new one of yours, except not emailing to subscribers.
No, not forwarding. That could be incredibly annoying.
Treat them as though my followers were following (not subscribing, just following) the author of the story I soft-boost. In other words, increase the likelihood my followers see it.
But — but — but: people who do notice it and read it see the little button too. They can recommend it to their followers and those people can click it and on it goes and wow, congratulations, you have genuine viral story and you earned it honestly!
Edit: So many people have misunderstood this. I’ll say it again:
The problem with Boosting is the same problem that existed with Curation: a small group of people are deciding what should be distributed more widely.
All we need is a button that would tell Medium to distribute someone’s story that we read more widely but only to *our followers*.
Not a notification, not an email, just the same wider distribution as curation or Boosting, but only to our followers. IF they see the story, IF they read it, they see the same button; if they want to pass it on to their followers and so on and so on, you get organic vitality. Fair, democratic Boosting.
Some in the comments still don’t understand. They worry that people with tens of thousands of follwers would benefit the most. They wouldn’t.
Yes, people have thousands of followers. What percentage actually READ for most of us? I’d guess 90% of my “followers” have never read anything I ever wrote.
Some people really do have thousands of readers BECAUSE THEY WRITE THINGS WORTH READING. They wouldn’t gain much, if anything, because so many of their followers followers are already reading them! In other words, most of the people on Medium who’d want to read them already are!
But the newer writer, relatively unknown, will get an organic boost in readers if their writing deserves it.
I doubt that I would benefit. My type of writing will get a small number of fans and growth will be slow. Probably that would be true for anyone who has been here a few years. Isn’t that how it should be? Shouldn’t really good new writers get more exposure?
Notice Medium doesn’t have to pay any staff for this. It’s automagical. And they could implement this while keeping Boost if they wanted to.
As I started writing this, I got a Notification about a post by Matthew Clapham you should read:
Also see this:
And here are my not so worthy Boosted stories:
And please, please, please: if you agree, for the love of your stories and mine, please share this!
It seems from the comments that some smart people — people I think are pretty smart — like this idea.
It might not help everyone, but you’d know that it’s fair.
