CLUB MEEDZ VICTORY LAP

The Explorers Are Dead

Long live the time of human authorship

If you’ve lived under a not-so-small and not-too-big rock the past few weeks in Club Meedz, it’s time for an update. The human authors of Medium suffered a relentless attack on our story sovereignty by scam bots called “Everyday Explorers.”

I uncovered this scam reported in a humor expose called “Going on a Bot Hunt.”

[link after the story]

Who are they?

The Explorers were a group of fake profiles who showed deviant community behavior of following 20,000 people, subscribing to ALL our emails, and posting 28 stories a day of AI table scraps. Tapestry of tapestries, these stories were blooming terrible. It’s like they set the AI generative style to “write a story that’s the literary equivalent of farting into a pop music Autotuner.”

Where did they come from? My personal theory is they are sentient bits of leftover computer code from when Microsoft retired Internet Explorer. Regardless of their origin story, they’re a nuisance.

Because the Medium community thrives on relationships and reciprocity, these fake accounts took advantage of thousands of writers who were too busy or kind to object.

So what?

There are scammers on Medium all the time. What makes this group so unique?

They all came from the same obvious source and didn’t try to hide it.

What are the chances of twenty-ish different writers publishing the same insane story volume stories with numerically consecutive email addresses? Everydayexplorer1, Everydayexplorer2, Everydayexplorer3, and so on.

So Amy, Amanda, Andrew, John, Lori, Griffen, et al. subscribed en masse and churned out gallons of secondhand shark chum. If you blocked and reported one, two more followed you the next day. ¹

They proudly went toe to toe with Medium leaving their burning bags of poop on Coach Tony’s porch, ringing the doorbell, and running away laughing. “Do something about it!” their behaviors shouted — an unapologetic challenge daring the tech gremlins to intervene.

What happened

After my alert and several related stories, hundreds of writers reported the Everyday Explorer club and Medium brass went to work.

What did they do to eliminate all these accounts? Why did it take so long for an intervention into prominent scam activity?

I have no idea.

Technology and coding are not my jam. What I do understand is the interconnectivity between human perception and how organizations operate.

When you have a problem that seems obvious and can’t observe the people tasked with a solution, it feels like help takes THREE times as long as it should. It’s a universal constant in change management.

Five days of staring a crisis in the face have a subjective experience of two weeks or more when we can’t experience the progress. Convinced of our martyrdom, we shout to the rooftops, “Why isn’t anyone doing anything about this???”

They are. But we don’t perceive the repair with substance until it’s clear that someone with the skills, time, and resources to deliver is actively working on the case.

The Explorers Are Dead

Shoutout to Isabella, who noticed that the Everyday Explorer club was scrubbed from the platform.

Thank you to Tony Stubblebine and the Medium team for seeing the problem and finding a solution. It’s easy for writers to complain about the quirks and irritations in the Medium ecosystem. But when a problem is fixed, they deserve the metaphorical high-five for getting the job done.

Final Thoughts

A piece of sincere and unsolicited advice for Coach Tony — that will likely be ignored because it comes from someone known for satire, not his day job as a management consultant and corporate facilitator.

There is no such thing as overcommunication for a leader.

Especially when updating employees about progress toward known pain points. The moment you are so tired of repeating your message that you will vomit up fish tacos if you say it again— is when HALF of the people finally hear you.

Footnotes

¹ Even the scammer’s profile names and images were uninspired. It’s like they googled “Pictures of Instagram models” followed by “List of generic names for boring white people.” Tom Smith? Crushed it!

Here’s the link to the original story, as promised.