My Monthly $5 Rant

My Green Eye Is a Red Eye

I meditate. I try to stay present. I am “aware” of the fact that most of the anxiety and distress in my life stems from the irrational belief that things should “be different” than they are. When I stand on line at the deli counter I mock my own thinking by using an overtone to say to myself, “There shouldn’t be this many people buying cold cuts on a Thursday” or “that kid should be more skilled at slicing meat than they are.”

I tell you this to preempt the inevitable comment, “Medium isn’t what you want it to be? Get over it.”

First, my interior judges have already said that many times. If you wanted to say that to me, you’re going to have to get in line. Just so you know, you’re behind the ghost of my mother, my childhood priest, and the “cool, smart girl” from middle school. Second, I’M NOT GETTING OVER IT. I PAY FIVE BUCKS A MONTH FOR THE LICENSE TO KVETCH ABOUT MEDIUM AND I’M GOING TO GET MY MONEY’S WORTH, MOTHERFUCKERS.

FYI, I did this last month. If you want to see the October edition, go here:

I know you didn’t go there, which is good, because I’m just going to regurgitate the same dreck here. If you want a better, and fresher, take on how Medium is failing us, go and read Christopher Daniels (Notorious DCI)’s latest:

Now, onto this month’s rant

Argument of the First Part: Medium Doesn’t Know Who Their “Friends” Are

After about a decade of telling middle school students “those kids who laugh at you for the way you talk are not your friends” it dawned on me that none of my friends from adolescence were really my friends. One day I woke up and looked back at my own childhood with clear eyes. It was then that I realized I had nurtured delusional understandings of my relationships all the way into middle age.

I think Medium doesn’t understand that all of the publishers and book people who say they think Medium is “cool” are full of shit and just looking for a “revenue stream” to offset their crumbling world.

Medium is like a rich kid who can’t figure out that everyone at the pool party only came because of the pool.

I won’t go into the debacle of De Gustibus, but it’s a perfect example…

OK, fuck it, I will go back and rehash the De Gustibus embarrassment. This publication once had a VIP room full of New York Publishing Elite on it’s masthead.

It was a brutal flop. I don’t think those folks found Medium on their own and decided “Let’s create a snarky food site”. I think they were all paid. Guess what? Nobody on Medium, or anywhere else, gave a shit what they wrote.

Fast forward to this week. I found an article in my stream on the latest Harry Potter movie.

I enjoyed it a lot. I think it is a very good read. It looked normal in my feed. I saw that the author was a former editor of the Gawker sub-blog i09. I left a positive note.

Somehow I saw the same article again a few days later. This time when I clicked on it I saw it had the “super secret squirrel” layout that Medium “columnists” are granted.

You know what is weird about that article? There are seven comments but not one response to any of those comments by the author. You know why? Cause he’s not HERE, man. Don’t you get it Medium? You’re pimping hippo splatter. Suckers.

Rob Bricken is not your friend, Medium. Chris Daniels was your friend, but maybe not anymore. I think you may be running out of friends.

Argument of the Second Part: Medium Doesn’t Know Who Their Subscribers Are

I’ve been whining for a long time about the need to be able to gift subscriptions. I only have about ten readers, and two of them aren’t about to become PREMIUM members. What I have wanted to do for a long time is gift them memberships so I can start putting dreck behind the paywall.

Medium introduced the ability to gift a membership recently, BUT THEY FUCKED IT UP. You can buy someone a membership if you GIVE UP THEIR E-MAIL ADDRESS. Let me ask you something. If your “friend” gave your e-mail address to Facebook without your knowledge, would that be an act of kindness or an act of passive-aggression?

Without anonymity, I’m out. Many of the stupid things I post here could get me fired… the hippo video above included. My “friends” on Medium are people I kind of know and like, but I have no idea who they really are because WISE PEOPLE SHROUD THEIR IDENTITY ON THE INTERNET.

I would gift subscriptions to people if I could do it by their username. The technology for gifting memberships to current users can’t be that hard to implement. LiveJournal was able to figure it out back in 2005.

The paying members want to gift things to other PEOPLE ON THE PLATFORM, not try to get their “friends and family” to join the chasm of suck that Medium is becoming.

The Third Argument Is “SAD”: I’m having more fun commenting on the GoComics Boards than I am here.

I’m not kidding. It’s really weird. I joined GoComics. I follow a lot of comics and then read the comments people write. There is a comic called “Frog Applause” on which the comments are more inventive and entertaining than most things I find on Medium nowadays.

I spend a lot of time on the Nancy boards. I really enjoy the folks there.

Guess what? A subscription to GoComics is MUCH CHEAPER than one to Medium.

Pheeew. Thanks. I think I got my five dollars worth.