MEDIUM

Medium’s Engagement Crisis and Why AI Listicles Outrank World Leaders

The silent exodus of authentic voices

On Medium, algorithms reward a listicle more than a message from a world leader. Authentic voices are drowning in a sea of cliché happiness advice and AI-generated noise.

In the digital age, the quality and authenticity of content is more important than ever before. Yet, in determining what succeeds on the internet, they’re often overlooked metrics. With countless platforms offering a space for users to share their insights, opinions, and stories, discerning value isn’t always easy. And here at Medium, there’s a serious evaluation problem.

People who play the game of engagement are making more than even those of us writing full time, and AI-generated content is spreading like wildfire — outperforming even real humans.

Of course, AI has its uses. It can be a powerful editing tool and it can be a useful means for refining our pieces. But it should never be allowed to soar above the voices of real writers.

The following samples are from writers on Medium, and for each pairing of examples, I’ll ask the reader to simply consider which piece truly deserves their engagement.

A)

Clarence Avant was one of our favorite people. He exemplified a certain level of cool and street smarts that allowed him to move confidently into worlds that nobody had prepared him for, never doubting he could figure it out.

Clarence was part of a generation that served as a bridge from a time when there was very little opportunity for Black people to a time when doors began to open. He demanded the world make room, and he paved the way for the rest of us.

B)

I think whoever has at least read one self-help book in their life knows the importance of long-term goals.

Here, I don’t want to reiterate what you probably find easily elsewhere about why long-term goals matter and the like.

My purpose for this blog is to discuss why those important goals are that hard to focus on.

So, without further ado, let’s jump in

Would you believe that the first post was by Barack Obama, and that the second one more than doubled it in performance?

To drive home the point I’m making here, I’ll include another couple of examples.

A)

Here is the list of 6 Habits You Need to Give Up to Increase Your Productivity :

1. Multitasking

Multitasking, often hailed as a time-saving superhero, is a pervasive habit among many striving for increased productivity. However, numerous studies and research consistently unveil its dark side — the fact that juggling multiple tasks simultaneously can substantially reduce efficiency and overall output. To truly elevate your productivity, it’s crucial to relinquish the notion that multitasking is a viable strategy.

B)

On this date, 75 years ago, the nuclear age arrived, when the United States became the first, and so far only, country to use a nuclear weapon in war. The scenes of death and destruction, first from Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, still horrify us, three-quarters of a century later. They reach through history to remind us of the hideous damage nuclear weapons can inflict, and our collective responsibility to ensure that such weapons are never again used.

Would you believe that the second was published by the current president of the United States? And that it has one 16th the number of comments as the article above it, titled “6 Habits You Need to Give Up to Increase Your Productivity,” and which was more probably than not written by an AI with a bad synonym obsession?

It’s a classic example of the world’s Kim Kardashians prevailing over its Malala Yousafzais. This is Adam Sandlers drowning out world-renowned civil rights leaders. It’s Soulja Boys over Rachmaninoff’s and Chief Keefs over Bachs.

With any artform, it’s not typically the most talented people who find the most success. Great artists and musicians go undiscovered all of the time. The problem here isn’t unique to Medium. But when compared with other social media platforms, Medium appears far more equipped to address it. It has far fewer users, and exercises a great deal of hands-on control over what they see.

Half of the people in my feed are mustering more engagement than two out of three of America’s former presidents combined. This shouldn’t be such a challenging issue to solve.

Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang were routinely receiving engagement numbers worse than pieces with titles like: “Everybody should do something good in positive way for all of us and especialy for our planet — living home of human civilization. Imho, if this idea will be followed everybody than we are saved. Awakening of thought is essential as we do not need the leaders greedy for profits (which is done by majority for richness of minority of….” Yes that’s just the title, and it goes on from there. Scarily, though, it’s amassed more comments than Andrew Yang got on his 2020 article, “Your Data Should Belong to You — and Not to the Big Tech Companies.”

In fact, the former article, whose entire contents were contained within its glaringly long title, tripled the amount of comments Yang got on his June 2021 article, “Improving our city’s public schools for students with disability.” This was only one post before Yang appears to have astutely decided that the optics of being brutally outengaged by top 10 listicles wasn’t great for publicity. His final Medium post was September of that year.

Many may not have even realized that President Joe Biden was a regular writer on Medium until only recently. There was a period in 2020 where he posted near daily articles. But when articles like his August 2020 piece (cited above), “My Statement on the 75th Anniversary of Hiroshima,” were receiving not 100, not 10, but a mere 2 comments — one can only imagine why he had to stop publishing here. I’d be shocked if he couldn’t gain more traction opening a Myspace account.

Even on Twitter (I’m not calling it X), Biden’s Tweets regularly amass thousands of comments, tens of thousands of retweets, and millions of views. For Instagram and Facebook, the story is hardly different.

This past week, I was excited to see that my publication’s stats were soaring to heights that it hadn’t seen in the previous three months. At first, I assumed the success had to be at the hands of something Alec, Edward and I were doing very right. But to my dismay, nearly all of the growth was attributable to one listicle with an error in the second sentence.

He accrued the success, not because the article was worth reading (anyone who made it through the first paragraph would have realized that), but because he took the time to scour Medium and leave swaths of inane comments for other writers. He inspired hundreds of minutes to be wasted reading redundant nonsense instead of Tolstoy. He caused tens of people to waste their time commenting on something head-scratchingly valueless instead of just writing something original.

But under Medium’s current system of payment, engaging with other writers is more important than writing something worth reading. Under Medium’s current system of payment, this pointless, waste of time reading is drawing in more money than leaders of entire countries. Just so long as it’s getting more claps, comments and highlights from sycophants who pretend to enjoy what they’re reading, the content doesn’t matter one bit.

Initially, I was unsure how to handle the publication situation. It was clear the writer in question was helping our growth. But ultimately, I had to take a stand and remove him so that more important words could prevail.

To further prove this point I’m making, I’ll include one final, closer to home pairing of writing samples.

A)

How to take care of doggy paws

1. Inspect the Paws: Regularly examine your pet’s paws for cuts, wounds, foreign objects, or signs of infection. Check between the toes and the paw pads.

2. Cleanliness: Keep the paws clean by gently wiping them with a damp cloth after walks. This helps remove any dirt, debris, or allergens.

B)

In the pre-GPS days, I once watched my parents battle it out with a map in the middle of the Mojave desert. With sweat trickling down their cheeks and ill-concealed looks of confusion stretching across their face, it was like watching suburbanites try to assemble IKEA furniture without the manual. Frustrations quickly flared and culminated in a full-throated shouting match as the air conditioner labored like a marathon runner in the final mile.

Even with memories of the Eisenhower administration, crank dial phones, and cordless lives, the map before them tested them to their core that day as the car stood there stalled along the sandy terrain.

The first writing sample received 63 comments and, like the example before it, appears to have been written by an AI, according to two different AI content detectors. The second one, written by yours truly, has yet to receive a single reply. That’s infinity percent more comment engagment for an article that most likely wasn’t even written by a human.

There have been times in which I’ve been able to shrug it off that the system works in this way, but there are other times when the objective reality of this is so biting that it truly bothers me. I’m not wrong to feel cheated by what’s happening here. It’s not only the selfish truth that I deserve more pay than people publishing AI-aided listicles, it’s the reality that every reader and writer on this platform deserves better.

It isn’t only stupid that throwaway content written about doggy paws is performing better than the work of most of our world leaders. It’s dangerous. It’s dangerous that, as the world suffers from climate change and struggles to deal with the advent of artificial intelligence, people are wasting their time here reading forgettable, soulless success advice that computers often helped to write.

It’s dangerous that, as despots across the globe prepare for a possible beginning to WWIII, that our Medium feed is delivering to so many of us listicles instead of words of nuclear caution. But Biden wisely left the platform; his words of restraint fell on deaf ears.

And people who’ve written nothing but varying versions of the same “5 Habits That Will Help You Enjoy Life More” continue to thrive in the absensce of real voices and leaders who’ve fled the platform.

The Boost system was an attempt to correct for this, by delivering a higher quality of writing to readers. But even as likely one of the program’s biggest beneficiaries, I can hardly overstate how broken the system is. Of the nine pieces I’ve had selected for Boosts, only one got more engagement than “How to take care of doggy paws.”

And the average engagement I get on even my most well thought out articles is being simply dwarfed by people writing hackneyed happiness advice. Even many who have outright handed the job of writing over to an AI are towering above the averages I get on the vast majority of pieces I publish.

It’s hard to see anything in this trend besides the platform failing to do its job. I don’t think that I’m looking at this with personal bias when I say that there’s a fairly enormous discrepancy in the writing samples on display. It shouldn’t be asking so much to insure that real leaders and thinkers perform better than veritable automatons. It isn’t an impossible dream.

So if there’s a takeaway from this piece, it’s this: when you find yourself engaging with someone who doesn’t deserve your time, stop it. Give it to someone who does instead. There are plenty of writers on Medium who do. If you find yourself reading and commenting on something valueless just so the writer will comment on your work afterward, stop it. Remember that engagement is payment, and the purveyors of recycled word salad and AI-written drivel don’t deserve more than pennies.

For any Medium staff member who might be reading this, is there no algorithm shift that would de-prioritize the garbage that so often reigns supreme here? Is there no update that would insure that articles with errors in their very titles don’t outperform the leaders of nations?

Is there no way of preventing AI content from stealing eyes and read time away from real writers? Could payment here be based off of less foolable metrics so that we don’t continue on as a reciprocal echo chamber of dwindling, authentic voices?

Buster Benson, Tony Stubblebine, Jon Gluck, Medium Staff, Scott Lamb, Ariel Meadow Stallings, Nouf Aljowaysir, Terrie Schweitzer, Alex Benzer, Harris Sockel, Ariel Meadow Stallings, Brittany Jezouit, Alexandre Bruneau, Adrienne Gibbs, CJ Baker, Greg Dougherty, Breana Jones, Chris Stiteler