A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO WRITING ON MEDIUM, PART 4
The Power Of The Mute Button
Just say no to self-help gurus, tech bros, sex confessionals, personal essays and poorly-researched thought pieces!
Note: This is part of an occasional series giving you the inside scoop on Medium. Here are the other guides: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, and Part 6.
When confronted by tech problems like Medium’s new homepage UX, do what I always do: take a digital sledgehammer and beat the shit out of it.
To my delight, this problem-solving method may have worked for the first time!
I was inspired by Linda Caroll’s rant.
While she restated the normal problems, Linda brought up two new issues. First, she said there are no author names on her homepage, only headlines.
(Note: I don’t have this problem with my computer, but at the time I wrote this, I added my name to the headline, so she would know this is my work — and ignore it. I updated the headline because I suck at writing headlines and hope more people will learn about this helpful feature.)
The second significant change Linda pointed out was that you can no longer dismiss a story.
She has a point:
“Just because a writer writes one story that pushes my buttons doesn’t mean I want to mute the writer.”
I had no idea you could dismiss a story.
Then again, I don’t have the time or energy to dismiss something I would ignore while cursing under my breath as I continue scrolling through my feed.
There are 47,000 articles submitted to Medium every day. Given the track record of the curation bots and corgis, who else can you trust besides yourself to filter out all turds floating in your feed?
There are three reasons your homepage is flooded with garbage.
- Somebody I follow liked something I hate.
- Somebody wrote something dumb about a subject I like.
- Somebody wrote something that fits into the annoying category “based on your past reading history.”
Note on #3: If you read a dumb self-help article just to laugh at some pompous fool (with no life experience tell me about the great illumination they received by reading the self-help article of some other pompous fool with no life experience who… and so on, and so forth until you get back to some quote by Marcus Aurelius or Mark Twain — in other words, someone who did something with their lives first, and then wrote about it), Medium will deliver this nonsense to your feed FOREVER.
While the rest of the world may be dealing with FOMO anxiety, I decided to go in the opposite direction.
I’ll call it fear of tapping out (FOTO).*
So I looked at my feed, clicked on those three little dots to find the mute option, and thought, “why the hell not?”
First, I muted every single Medium publication.
If 90% of the stories are the same old junk, why waste time trying to find something of value? You can 10x your reading motherfucking productivity just by giving up.
Winning!
Next, I muted every publication that had a story by the mega-popular content generators of self-help, productivity, startups, relationships, and political rants.
While one button-pushing article may not be the reason to mute a writer, shouldn’t a publication that drowns you in repetitive, poorly-researched articles be silenced?
You have the power. Mute them all!
Last year, my homepage looked like something out of Pravda.
Medium’s interface presented me with almost nothing I wanted to read.
35 out of the 41 stories on my feed were absolute crap. At the time, I wrote:
Ev Williams is pimping his business model so hard, he should have little avatars of hookers flashing their booty and saying “click on me, honey” instead of thumbnails of each article.”
Just say no with the mute button. You’ll thank me for it.
After I cut to my heart’s content, I did a test.
I scrolled down far below what most people would dare to do with a phone or tablet and did a screenshot of my home page and 37 articles in the feed.
The sections and stories below use the following color codes:
GREEN: The section of people I follow and their stories in my feed.
RED: A Medium-controlled space for their most popular trending articles. They have a right to pimp their stuff and I have the right to ignore it.
BLUE: Customize your feed with Topic You Follow and one of those rare situations where I find an article about a topic I like in my feed.
GOLD: This is an article I like while panning for gold in Medium’s sludgy waters.
NO COLOR: These are articles that escaped the wrath of my curation katana. They are either publications I don’t follow but don’t know well enough to mute, or are written by unaffiliated writers, so they deserve a shot.
Look at this beautiful feed!
These are truly fields of green and gold, filled with writers I know and respect.
Here’s a breakdown of the highlights from my ruthlessly muted feed:
- Articles from The Haven, one of the best humor publications on Medium
- Articles from No Crime in Rhymin’, another wonderful publication for music mash-ups and poetry run by my friend Joe Váradi, who turned a song by the Mamas and Papas into a dream of escaping the pandemic by going to Easter Island to wait for doomsday
- Stories from The Weekly Knob, a fiction publication run by my friend Aura Wilming. She, along with Weekly Knob writers Thom Garrett and Tre L. Loadholt, collaborated with me on The Tao of Blogging, a Curated Collection of Online Wisdom. That was a super fun project we did back in those innocent days before the infection in the White House. (June 2016, to be precise — type in the discount code “donut” for 80% off!)
- The Weekly Knob also features great fiction by my friends Tommy Paley and Dan Leicht who wrote hilarious chapters in Out of Ideas, Out of Time, “a place where collaborative stories go to lose momentum and disappear in a tiny dust devil in the middle of the desert.” Check out the Stark Mysteries these guys co-wrote with Mark Starlin, Terrye Turpin, Elle Fredine, Glenda Thompson, John K Adams, Karen Fayeth, P.G. Barnett, Jeff Suwak, Michael Stang, Indira Reddy, A Maguire, and me
- A story by my good buddy P.G. Barnett, published on The Top Shelf, a publication run by he and Sherry McGuinn to feature great work by writers who are ignored by the curation bots
- Stories by Susan Brearley, captain of the pirate publication Muddyum, the anti-Medium space with the stated goal of “infecting the world with humor,” and one by humorist Bebe Nicholson
- My sports buddy Brandon Anderson wrote an article ranking the best teams faced by LeBron James that ends with the praise “The 2016 Warriors are the greatest opponent he, or any other human being, has ever defeated”
- A new story by Bev Potter, who made me laugh so hard from her article How Not To Do Yoga that I became a lifelong fan
- This is Poop Patrol! is 37th and last on this list, but could be first in my heart for its absurdity — unless Gloria is her real alter ego. But with three stories by my dear friend Roz Warren in my personalized feed, how can I really choose?
Use the power of the mute button. It’s a literary colonic.
Here’s to better writing.
FOOTNOTE:
*FOTO: As in, I’m so tired of wading through the flotsam and jetsam in my feed that I fear that I will just tap out and leave the site.
Another consequence of drowning in this daily tstory tsunami is getting lost as a writer. And I’m not the only one who feels this way.
Other established writers are so frustrated by their anonymity that they are “resorting to a woman’s boobs” to get attention (Nice boobs, by the way, Christina!).
Or they try to cultivate favor with our corporate overlords by acting as unofficial Medium shills. (You know who you are, but I still love you when you write the good stuff.)
Like the song said, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”