OUT OF WARRANTY

Medium Boost Programme vs. My Broken Oven Clock

Which is more useless and annoying?

In the comments on Michael Burg, MD (Satire Sommelier)’s recent analytical probe into the peculiarities of a boosted story and its mysterious provenance, Anthony (Tony/Pcunix ) Lawrence made the following comment:

I’ve stopped caring about Boosts. The two stories of mine that were boosted shouldn’t have been — they were nothing special at all, not even to me.

It’s a deeply flawed program.

It is certainly hard to argue with the ‘deeply flawed’ part. And ‘stopped caring’ likewise seems to be the inevitable consequence of that. If you have seen with your own eyes, have heard dozens of corroborating accounts, and smelt in the cagey evasiveness of the provider’s responses that they know it’s defective, you just stop using the product.

Even if you’ve paid for it. And in this case we are continuing to pay for it monthly. Through the (admittedly small) proportion of our (admittedly modest) subscription that is spent on inhouse backend development and editorial curation.

But more significantly through the proportion of the earnings pot that is being siphoned off by a skewed algorithm to stories that in some cases aren’t really anything special.

And as Tony says, even their own mothers might not love them. A couple of mine that have been boosted are, in my opinion, inferior to others that haven’t. The golden children simply got lucky that they were in a pub with boosting rights, and were deemed good enough to pass muster, fill the quota, balance the content spectrum.

Fair enough.

My own opinion should not be the one that counts — I don’t get to mark my homework. But should two other people be granted that judge and jury role, out of a readership of literally gazillions? Or a couple of dozen in my own case. And in fact, probably one person, as Medium HQ are likely just rubber-stamping nominations owing to lack of time/inclination/expertise in the subject matter.

The system is a feature we didn’t ask for (did we?), but that we have to pay for as part of the package, and that doesn’t actually stop us from using the perfectly acceptable parts we do want.

Which is where my oven clock comes in.

We had our kitchen redone a couple of years ago. This involved putting in a new oven, and although we chose the most basic ‘turn on, cook something, eat it’ model, this being the overdesigned 21st century, it came with a fancy-pants digital control module. This theoretically allows you to individually programme each ring on the hob, set the oven to turn on and off in the middle of the night and a dozen other pointless functionalities.

Oh, it also had a clock. Which sometimes matched the times shown on the microwave, my phone, watch and the actual kitchen clock. Past tense.

As with every electrical appliance, under EU consumer law it had a two-year warranty. And so as with every other electrical appliance, it broke down after two years and seven seconds. It started flashing erratically, failed to respond to inputs, and in short no longer performed any of its intended functions.

The oven still works fine. We never wanted or used the digital clock/CPU/Houston mission control anyway.

So in some ways I can just shrug my shoulders like Tony and say ‘I’ve stopped caring about it’. I don’t even notice the erratic flashing now, which has in any event dimmed to a rhythmically pulsating glow reminiscent of an abandoned spacecraft navigation console.

But we still paid for it. I would have preferred to have got the oven for €20 less, and just a non-programmable, analogue clock. Or none at all.

And it would be nice if the manufacturer acknowledged the problem, and let us know if and when they might be able to fix it, out of courtesy rather than functionality.

Until then, we’ll just carry on using the oven, but I really can’t be bothered phoning up customer service again.

Sound familiar?

The original story: