Medium’s Yin And Yang

Mostly yang as it turned out

Yesterday held some hope on the Medium progress front. A few days ago, I wrote a quick story about how Medium as a whole isn’t really the place for me to be writing. On balance, subscribers are Silicon Valley people and not alt personality types who would be interested in what I have to say.

Regardless, an editor sent me a private note requesting that I allow him to publish the story in his publication. Given that there are like a trillion publications here on Medium, it came as no surprise that I wasn’t familiar with his.

And when I researched him (and it), I found that all the editors are Medium paid staff. It looked like something real. Ya know, an opportunity to get curated again and maybe even resume having more than 3 people read my stories.

So of course, I responded favorably to his overture and submitted the story for his publication. Still, I wasn’t sure why he found it so compelling (he did say how much he liked the story) given the downbeat mood of the piece.

After sending off the story, I continued as usual with my day — which generally includes writing and publishing at least 2 stories here. Nothing changed as far as that was concerned.

It is now one day later. From the standpoint of number of views and revenue generated, yesterday was my worst day in 6 months of writing almost every day on Medium. I kid you not.

And what about the story that might launch me into the stratosphere? The editor still hasn’t published it. Is he too busy? Did somebody tell him “you didn’t get the memo? We canceled this guy.” Was it a way to get me worked up just for fun? Hard to say. As with all the algorithms and such, we never really know how all this works.

Who knows? Maybe he’ll publish the story today, it will get 10k views, and 30 of my stories will suddenly get curated as they did back in March. Yeah, and as Wayne used to say: “Maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt.” If I had to bet, I’d place my money on the latter.

Here’s the story: