Blogging reflections
Should Medium Control What We See?
The debate over meta-stories.
New Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine recently wrote a frank and generous article outlining his intentions for the platform. You can and should read his story here — there’s no need for me to summarize it!
Since then, there has been a proliferation of stories about the change in Medium’s boardroom, and honestly, I am loathe to add to them.
However, I was particularly struck by two comments on Tony’s article
They came from smart and experienced Medium writers (both with over 50k followers), yet contradicted one another starkly:
Zulie Rane said the following:
I’d like to vote for demonetizing stories about Medium… the complete influx of “I’ve been writing on Medium for X months, this is what I’ve earned” stories is confusing.
Then, Ayodeji Awosika said this:
My $.02 as someone who’s been writing on medium longer than anyone else in these comments. Let the readers decide what’s quality and what isn’t. I have found that pretty much every platform that thinks it’s smarter than its audience fails.
So, which is it?
- Should the algorithm or the MPP be used to decide that some stories are more worthy than others?
- Or should it be left to the audience to decide what they want to read?
A further complication
Another issue for me is what counts as a meta-story (by which I mean writing on Medium about Medium).
Zulie referred to stories about earnings, and other commenters also stated that they were fed up with stories about how to get rich on Medium.
I get it.
Articles that say ‘I did this and got rich, so you can do it too’ are basically selling a lie.
However, would suppressing Medium-focused content mean hiding articles like the one you are reading right now, or like Tony’s, or like Ev Williams’s announcement that he was stepping down?
(Perhaps it is a little ironic that so many of the commenter’s on Tony’s article were asking for such articles to essentially become invisible to them…)
And what about hiding or demonetizing articles on:
- how to blog well
- how to use tags
- how to format a Medium blog post
- announcements from publications
- submission guidelines or contests
- changes to how Medium works.
Personally, I find those sorts of posts really useful! And I can’t be the only one that likes to keep informed about how the platform works.
Honestly, I’m not sure I can see the rationale for demonetizing such stories. Are they great writing? Not always, no. But they are informative. What makes them any less valuable than posts about dieting or cryptocurrency?
To me, it seems like whether an article is high quality is more to do with its content than its topic, and about the needs of the reader. Hiding them is not a good move.
The link below is one of my most popular recent posts, and people seem to genuinely find it useful. It is undoubtedly a meta-story:
Is there a resolution?
Overall, I think both Zulie and Ayodeji make great points. There probably are a few too many posts about how to earn more $$$$ on Medium, and if they fill our feed, it can be at the expense of more illuminating content.
In addition, such stories are much less likely to be useful to general readers out there on the web — they are only for us writers.
At the same time, stories about Medium can be useful, and it’s perhaps not a good move to have the boardroom trying to pull the strings, deciding what we should and shouldn’t see.
A compromise position would be to make certain tweaks to boost content, without going as far as to segregate different parts of Medium’s offering, or exclude certain topics altogether.
These tweaks could include:
- Clearer and more transparent tools to help each reader control what they see in their feed.
- Showing more from writers and publications that we have chosen to follow (including meta-stories, if that’s our thing.)
What are your thoughts? Would you like to hide or demonetize meta-stories? Are they a guilty pleasure? Or do you think they should be treated the same way as any other topic?
Let me know in the comments!
Hi, and thanks for reading! If you’d like to hear more of my thoughts on writing and blogging, subscribe here to get my article updates by email.
I also share a lot of fiction on Medium. You can explore my short stories, web-novels and poetry via this list, or check out my ‘Choose your own adventure’ publication.