Stories of fighting with the algorithm and confusions over the new updates
and I was very confused for a LONG time 😅
So it seems like many moons ago, Ev Williams released an update on Medium publications. For those of you even later than me to the party, Aimée Gramblin has a good roundup of good / funny / serious commentaries from writers who chimed in on the issue.
As someone who never broke into the world of Medium-run publications, I misread the whole situation. I thought all publications were being phased out, which was a little bit heartbreaking, considering how The Brain is a Noodle has grown over the past year.
I had this flashback moment of gratitude and appreciation where I just reviewed everything I learned from running TBIN (as if publications were truly in their final dying moments):
- I built up a workflow — not only to edit and publish — but to efficiently and supportively promote writers’ pieces across platforms.
- To achieve this, I extended my existing Python skills to learn how to a) build a database of existing published pieces, b) randomize and share these database pieces so that all pieces ever published in TBIN get promoted over time. Many publications will tweet out their writers’ pieces once, which is great. I wanted some longevity in how pieces are being promoted, not just in the initial moments after being published.
- I learned how to set boundaries more strongly than ever before, finally putting my foot down to some unpleasantry that was happening. I endured far too long in the name of kindness and politeness and making that final decision was so empowering.
- Part of that empowerment is that I had a wonderful community to reach out to whenever I had questions or concerns about what’s been going on. Also, being a part of Writers and Editors of Color (even though I’ve never written yet — soon!) has been such a blessing.
Luckily, all of this amazingness isn’t actually coming to an end. All these before-death flashbacks were just … my scrambled brain’s dramatization of misinterpreting the changes.
Sure, publications won’t have the same weight as they did before. As some pointed out, community-based publications will still thrive as they have before.
In addition to Aimée’s publication Age of Empathy and Tee and Allison’s Writers and Editors of Color mentioned above, I also really love:
- ScienceDuuude’s Woodworkers of the World Unite — a place for wood, work, wit, wisdom, wonder, wee wuns works. It’s such an interesting idea for a publication!
- Michael Burg, MD’s “Doctor Funny” for all things funny but Doctors of all sorts. It’s a huge honour because I’m neither funny (on demand) nor a doctor (though I’m working on it!)
- R. Rangan PhD’s Science and Soul — which houses nourishment for science AND soul and has amazing sciku (science haiku!) prompts
There are many, many more amazing publications out there but when I think of community-based, these are the ones where I truly find pieces of myself, and where I feel like I belong as a writer.
Thank you all for existing and building a community.
Without publications though, my biggest concern went to how writers would get their work noticed by readers. The biggest existing problem is that the algorithm is selective and … surprisingly hard to train.
What do I mean by that?
Well, with every single platform where there is an algorithm generating feed content, I consciously “feed” content to my algorithm from time to time. For example, I specifically search certain hashtags (or tags) or scroll through and interact with specific types of accounts on a more regular basis.
For something like Medium, in addition to searching tags (not interests! they’re different!) and then manually sorting by recent instead of most popular, I bookmark pieces from writers who aren’t getting distributed but write about topics that I’d like to read about.
On Medium, this is the most tedious process ever. Even with a regular schedule of checking these tags, Medium consistently defaults to sending me to flavourless self-improvement content or relationship advice that I do not remotely trust with clickbaity titles. Y’know, the ones that say “6 Reasons You’re Still In A Relationship With A Narcissist” or some other non-scientifically backed piece like that.
I also have private lists on Twitter where I actively engage with my favourite Medium writers. I’m there, secretly and quietly bookmarking pieces so that I make sure I’m reading new pieces from these writers.
This is more effort than I’ve put into “training” these algorithms than for my Instagram feed and Twitter timeline.
Yet, while sometimes it budges a little tiny bit for a short period of time, it snaps back into regular old “12 Reasons No Man Wants To Have Sex With You”, which frankly, it’s 2021, please, for real.
I know a lot of writers are backing up their content and moving it to another platform just in case, and I’m beginning to do the same.
There’s this Chinese saying:
唔怕一萬，只怕萬一
Pronounced mm pa yat man, ji pa man yat, which is this clever play on words to say:
Not afraid of ten thousand, but scared of the “one” in ten thousand risk.
(Trust me it’s 10000000x more elegant and witty in Cantonese than the clunky English translation!)
At the same time, I’m also making sure that I’m following, subscribing to newsletters for writers that I love because as much I’m technically a writer (even a poet?), I’m actually on Medium more as a reader.
Because if Medium goes down, what am I going to fill my Medium void with??????????? More Twitter???????
We really don’t need that.
Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) is trying this new thing out where she sometimes writes for an audience but sometimes writes for herself, because both are healthy ingredients to pushing writing forward. This is the latter.
