Just In Case You Missed this, Medium:

This is called feedback. Reader engagement.

From Medium: Good Morning.

No. It isn’t. That would be because of you, Medium. I used to bounce outta bed so very eager to pen my next piece. Now, FUCK IT. Just...fuck it.

I no longer feel that joy I used to feel finding my fave writers. Hell, are they still around? Did they say fuck it and head out for greener pastures?

I’m looking for a few right now. Based on what I read, lotta folks plan to meet me where I land. Happy to serve you there. Looking forward to the ongoing conversation which got interrupted and largely cancelled by Medium.

I no longer feel that excitement to check my stats once a week. What stats? Fuck stats. They’re dropping faster than I ever did at terminal velocity.

I no longer feel any kind of loyalty to Medium, who, like an irritating husband, constantly moves the furniture around, sells shit that belongs to me, breaks my china and throws stuff I treasure out the window. Without consulting me, of course. Why bother? I’m just a top writer. What do I matter?

Well, for one, the quality of my writing, and other top writers BRINGS YOU PAID READERS, Medium. That’s why your top writers matter. You screw them over, they leave the platform, whattya got?

We all know the answer to that, Sparky. You got shit writers, like the one I tried to read this morning whose grammar was so execrable and their misuse of the English language so bad I wanted to cry.

This is what you got now, Medium? This is what stands in for curated articles, which used to be code for quality work?

‘Cuz I have no interest in paying for crap content, any more than anyone else does. Any more than I have any interest in busting my chops for nothing, which is where so many of us are right now, at a time when, for CHRIST’S SAKES FOLKS, all but the Bezos bastards of the world are struggling mightily.

Time for marriage counseling, or divorce, folks. Good morning?

Kindly. No. Mornings used to be my funnest time, time to pen something great, time to push my skills. Now, WHY BOTHER?

I got up this morning, as more than a few of my Medium peeps did, ever more confused. Do I bother to write any more (why on earth should I if folks can’t find my shit?). Do I bark at the Help Desk again (why on earth should I, if despite barking at US about reader engagement, they utterly screw the ability of both writer and reader to engage with each other?) when what I get is “we’ll get back to you on that.”

Yeah, right.

HEY MEDIUM. THIS IS CALLED READER ENGAGEMENT.

Please do yourself the courtesy of reading what a few of my followers had to say about what you did to them in response to this article:

You want reader engagement? You got it. You got writer engagement.

YOU FUCKED UP. You took a fine place to be, to which a great many of us felt deep loyalty, would fight to protect, wrote for with gusto and love, and fucked it up totally and completely.

I am quite sure your intentions might have been honorable. But nobody who is honorable strips already grossly underpaid writers of their ability to earn, they do not strip key indicators of competence off profile information, they do not make it nearly impossible for us to easily share information across platforms. Please see:

This is feedback.

Medium is now a hot mess.

I have a long list of article titles that right now, I could give a flying shit to complete. Because:

What on earth is the point if after these years of hard work, years of earning folks who like my shit, years of engaging with those folks, linking to and supporting and highlighting and engaging, doing precisely what the inert-sperts of Medium tell us what to do to be successful…..

You totally fuck up the entire platform?

Feedback, Medium. This is called engagement.

Please see:

Oh I could list quite a few. These are good writers. Solid folks. People with talent and ability and a real commitment. These folks committed to the platform, to their readers, to quality work.

You are losing us.

Don’t care? Doesn’t matter to you? You happy to host all those folks who can’t write their way out of a match box but are happy to bark at the professionals about how to make money on Medium?

You go right ahead. Because when you do this to your best people, you shove them out. You can only exhaust people’s good will that many times before they happily inform you where to put your tinkering, your undermining, your compulsion to constantly throw Stillson wrenches into an engine that does not need your fixes.

Oh you’ll fix Medium all right.

Currently it’s fixed the way the house is fixed against the gambler.

I’ve gambled almost three years of my life on Medium, was doing well, and the house changed the rules.

Here’s a very simple truth, Medium. Your platform got infected with a whole buncha get-rich-quick folks, the same folks who fucked up Facebook, the same folks who fucked up Linked In, Twitter, you name your social platform.

NOTHING YOU DO, nothing that you try to change to incent said folks to learn to write, to engage readers, to do the right thing will change them. They infect platforms. Bring them down with their trolling, their bad behavior and their schemes. You cannot police them once they are on board.

You might want to read this two-year-old story which is where we are now with Medium:

From the article:

So bad actors — conspiracy theorists, trolls, and fake news writers — have been tremendously successful in using these platforms to spread false and divisive content that exploits people’s tribal instincts.

You didn’t fight to protect us from this shit. Now it’s here, and daily we find ourselves blocking trolls and entertaining utterly useless material. I find curated stuff that I wouldn’t use for toilet paper. Curated? You gotta be kidding me. I realize we don’t always agree on taste, but please.

Medium used to be THE place. Now it is fast becoming yet another social media platform from which people flee because it was poorly managed.

It was what I fled to, just a few years ago, out of a deep desire to add value, do good work, and on occasion, make bubble gum money. I worked my ASS off to build a following, honor the rules, value where I was, and do All the Right Things.

I am hardly alone. Those whose work I read, people I respect, all did the same thing.

You don’t reward those folks by making life impossible on Medium.

This is a dumpster fire.

And just a note. That you folks at Medium shut down the ease by which we could link our stuff to LinkedIn and Facebook and ONLY to Twitter, which is a con artists’ playground and big time dumpster fire, you gotta wonder, folks,

What the fuck?

Nobody does anything that stupid without an agenda.

To that I offer this:

From the article:

It offered nothing worthy to its users, and, for that, it is now where it belongs: extinct.

Yah. Sounds familiar.

In my opinion, which is worth the paper it isn’t written on, Medium is on a fast track to becoming a once-terrific platform, THE perfect place for real writers and real aspiring writers, and is being invaded by the same trolls and cons and assholes who merrily used all those other sites to kinda do what they do so very well.

When you drop your standards, change the rules to favor the lowest common denominator,

Guess what you get?

You get overwhelmed by the Lowest Common Denominator.

Not company I wish to keep.

As I wrote here before I have loftier aspirations.

Not a good morning, Medium. You want good writers? Well here’s a Big Realization for you:

You have to earn them.

And by the way, just in case you didn’t hear me/us/them, I just got this from my Medium buddy Jim Roye:

“Whatever is happening at Medium IS NOT writer-friendly…”

From the other end, it isn’t reader-friendly either.

When I refresh my main page and get ONE story/article to read and get it 400 times (Yes, this is happening!), you have to wonder if anyone running this site bothered to do any beta testing.

I have a hard time believing that during a 24 hour period only ONE new article has been submitted. And even if that were true (it isn’t!), why would they feed it to me 400+ times?

So not only have the messed with the writers, they’ve made it near impossible for readers to find articles of interest.

Why is it every change Medium makes ends up making the site progressively worse to use? But hey, they are very proud of their new logo!

And again, this from Jerry Lowe:

Gang…I’ve been in the tech field for more than 20 years. I’ve seen this kind of thing before.

Medium is demonstrating many of the signs of a failing enterprise on the verge of imploding.

This isn’t tinkering…this is wholesale, panic- driven, throw anything to the wall and see if it sticks change.

Not looking good.

My thanks to you smart, funny, challenging, intense and fabulous folks who are hanging with me. Hang in there long enough for me to invite you elsewhere.

Dumpster fire, folks. Dumpster fire.