Explaining The Medium Paradox

The more left wing it seems, the more right-wing it is.

There’s been a shift in Medium and it happened when I wasn’t looking. I’ve been writing scripts for the last few months and took my eye off the blogging ball. I’ve got a bit more free time now and I’m back, but something has changed at Medium and it doesn’t seem to be for the better. There’s something missing, now that I’ve sat down and thought about it, I’ve worked out what it is.

Opportunity and equality.

My Journey

My Medium journey began with absolute cluelessness. I did the obligatory things that a writer does on arrival. I looked around. I read a lot. I found articles about how to write articles. I began to ‘find my voice’.

My voice, it turned out, was writing about writing. Until it wasn’t. Then my voice turned out to be writing about history, then psychology. Finally,when I found my voice, it turned out I was a contrarian. I wrote about things that bugged me. What bugs me now is the phrase ‘finding my voice’

I graduated in the class of ’18, surrounded by writers I enjoyed reading. A disparate group of teachers, stay-at-home parents, academics and bored office staff. A heady mixture of average people, supplementing average incomes with a side hustle.

On occasion one of us would be ‘elevated’ to the home page. Our work plucked from obscurity and marketed to everyone. I had two such e-mails in the early days. Someone I’d never heard of asking if I’d like to move my story onto the home page. Of course I did. For a short amount of time, I was Medium famous. The class of ’18 rejoiced in my success as much as I rejoiced in theirs.

And then another e-mail came through. Like the previous emails, it was a request to move my story onto the homepage to find a wider audience. Chuffed doesn’t even cover it. The editorial team had a few amendments to make, small changes, tiny changes really…

You see… they thought that my article might offend people from the #MeToo movement. I agreed that it might, but I refused to make the changes. I refused to change it because the article is equally offensive to both sides of the political spectrum. In truth, the article isn’t offensive at all. And I firmly believe that being offended is a choice that the reader makes.

After a bit of back and forth, the editorial team dropped the article. It didn’t make the home page. It made no difference. The article is still my best performing piece according to all the stats. It did better than anything that went onto the home page anyway.

I moved on with my life, got engrossed in scripts and I forgot all about it. Until about a week ago when I came back to Medium.

What have I found?

Over the last week, I’ve been reading, catching up on what I’ve missed. Medium has changed. As I write this, my featured page only consists of five stories. All are from newly minted Medium publications.

Three of them are from GEN. Two of those stories are by the same author. One is by an author whose work I also saw yesterday. The fourth is by a well known professional columnist whose work I enjoy. The fifth story is the only one that feels like it has been ‘elevated’. Judging by the stats it’s a relatively new writer. Her work is still in ‘Human Parts’ though, a Medium publication that requires submission

So what’s the problem here?

The problem is that most of the work in these publications seems to be the work of journalists. If not journalists then professional writers employed to produce articles. This is a model of writing that already exists. We call it a newspaper.

Publications, like newspapers, are organisations, they are subject to group-think, they are subject to interpersonal bias. Publications have an ethos shaped separately from the ethos of Medium itself.

In the Newspaper model, a small group of people wields creative power, influence, and finance. You have to go to them and you have to impress them with your work. If you do then they will publish it, If you don’t then they won’t.

Without getting too political about it, Medium publications have now become a literary oligarchy.

All writers are equal, but some writers are more equal than others

The publications and editors that run them wield too much creative power. They have formed a Medium elite. This elite predominantly comprises of left-wing journalists and socially progressive bloggers. People who know and admire each other’s work and writing. That bunch of elite writers and editors can give each other work and an audience…and by extension, wealth.

The inevitable outcome of this is that the pool of selected elite writers gets smaller and their output gets larger. All I see featured now are stories with a left-wing agenda. Anything critiquing Trump, anything in support of feminism, personal stories that show ‘wokeness’. Medium is curating left. If you write left, you’ll fly off the digital shelf. If you don’t, your work won’t be curated and you’ll be buried into obscurity.

For the record, I fully expect this piece to be buried and I have made peace with that. It doesn’t matter how well you write anymore, what matters is who you write for.

After a while, this sort of writing only ever preaches to the converted. A little bubble of self-righteous agreement in a corner of the internet. Like Breitbart for woke people. I can already see this happening with GEN in particular. The writing becomes lazy. The writers know exactly which buttons to press to elicit claps. They have no motivation to write in depth, only to write often and to say the same things that were successful last time.

A top-down Newspaper and publication model like this removes the option of intelligent discussion. Those writers rarely engage in reading the comments or debating their ideas. There is no conversation and no exchange of knowledge. Nobody learns anything and in the long run everyone is short-changed.

Medium is moving at break-neck speed toward being indistinguishable from a left-wing newspaper. There’s a reason I don’t subscribe to left-wing newspapers. I know what I’ll find there. I already agree with the political points they’re making. I know the sort of people are going to be writing there. I don’t want to be in a bubble, it doesn’t help. I may as well cancel my Medium publication and support ‘The Guardian’.

Writers in the publications are now guilty of doing exactly what they spend their days condemning. Nepotism, elitism and a lack of equality and opportunity. Champagne socialism from behind the safety of a computer screen.

This is a beautiful piece of irony.

What’s wrong with that you ask? Nothing. But it’s not what I signed up for. The beauty of Medium was that anyone could write for it. It was a window into the myriad of political views and niche interests. It was a place where what mattered was the quality of the writing, not what was being written. That’s important. The change from egalitarianism to Medium controlled publications is important.

This is the way Medium ends, not with a bang but a whimper…

What began as a rather interesting social experiment is slowly being suffocated. It’s been bastardised into an additional income stream for an elite group of professional journalists. At their best, they are very readable and entertaining. At their worst they show equal and opposite levels of bigotry to those they decry.

Bigotry comes from both the left and the right. It means an intolerance of people who disagree with you. Medium would do well to realise that before it loses its moderate centre ground audience. Paying to be preached at does not feel good in the 21st Century.

Medium used to be a place of disagreement and debate, a place where the comments were a part of the process of growth. It is slowly becoming an echo-chamber, bereft of intelligence and insight. Today, after lurking for a week I’ve decided to pen this article, out of a heady mix of frustration and nostalgia.

I can still find the writers whose work I love to read. I now have to dig deep to find them though. I want those people curated and featured. I want to read the views of insightful, funny, normal, everyday people.

I want to read writers whose work might not be of a journalistic standard but whose world views didn’t come off the peg. Those are the people in the class of ’18, and they’re what got me to subscribe in the first place. Everything else just feels like more of the same sort of unhappiness social media has brought.

Literary Marxism. Writing by the people, for the people. I’m bored with the left-wing bourgeoise in this new incarnation….

To be frank, I’m bored of elitism whatever its flavour.

UPDATE: Now with added Manifesto