USER BOOSTS
How User Boosts Could Work Without Getting Out of Control
A new ‘scout follow’ category could give us extra pairs of eyes in the Mediumsphere
Intelligence is at the heart of any successful strategy. Acquiring information, processing and analysing it, and passing it on via reliable channels to allow action on the ground.
OK, cut the pseudo-militaristic marketing/management pep talk bullshit, already!
It’s true though.
As any LLM-bot will tell you in its inimitable style: ‘In today’s fast-paced digital world, we are often overwhelmed by the volume of information available. Making sense of this volume of information demands effective filtering to avoid being overwhelmed.’
Medium is no exception. There’s a hell of a lot of great stuff out there. And just a teensy wee bit of slightly less great stuff.
Served up by an algorithm that, bless its digital socks, does its darnedest to offer us the kind of stuff it thinks we would like.
And then there’s the Boost, which aims to ensure that the very best content gets more widely distributed, but which inevitably will never have the coverage or focus to catch everything of interest in its net.
Hence the suggestion made by many that there should be a button allowing each of us, as users, to boost individual stories by forwarding them to our followers, in much the same way as on Mastodon or other social media platforms which shall remain nameless. Almost literally in some cases.
As far as I know, Medium management haven’t publicly engaged with this idea — please disabuse me via the comments if you know better. Though I can well imagine that they are fearful of putting an element of distribution in the hands of general users.
Partly because they do like their ‘behind the curtain, Algo of Oz’ opacity, but also their (legitimate?) concern that users will abuse the system — those pesky growth-hackers! — and have people unfollowing or unsubscribing in droves as they get flooded with crap.
One solution to this could be to have an opt-in, where you can choose to set certain users (the ones you most trust and share an affinity with) as personal ‘scouts’ or ‘recommenders’. So if they click to forward a piece, it gets sent only to those who have explicitly given the message ‘When Person Y recommends a piece, send it my way’.
This could be either by immediate email notification or a daily/weekly digest — ideally all these options would be available. Or it could simply use the existing home page feed, by boosting your scouts’ picks personally for you. That would be more seamless, but also more complex in programming terms, I imagine.
By functioning as an opt-in it avoids any unwanted overload — you could choose to have 0 ‘scouts’, or 100.
Right now I ‘follow’ 400+ people. I prune it now and then, but it’s a pain — I can’t even remember who many of them are, or if I actually am interested in their stuff. But I could quite easily pick 30–40 off that list whom I would activate as my ‘recommenders’, since I know through interaction with them that we share a lot of interests and tastes.
It would serve as a more organic and naturally human way of achieving the capillary spread of great articles than just ‘follows’, ‘topics’ and ‘Boosts’.
Any thoughts, folks?
This piece grew out of (when I saw ‘grew’, I kind of mean ‘copy-pasted’…) a comment I left on this piece by Bette A. Ludwig 🔍, who raised this same idea of a personal boost button.
And as an alternative method of targeted content distribution, here is the link to my ‘List of Lists’ where you can save any of my content category lists to get an alert when I add something new. I don’t yet have a ‘Medium meta articles’ list. Though in any case all that stuff is posted here on All About M.
But feel free to pick anything else off the menu: