The Seven Deadly Sins Of Medium
The Highway To Medium Hell
Serial tagging — we have probably all been caught out by this one — the writers who tag loads of us at the end of an article, and since we all love to be mentioned, we end up trawling through a long, tedious article about the finer points of coding in Basic, Morris dancing in East Anglia, or something equally enthralling, only to find we are nothing special, just one among a list of 100 or so other people tagged! Please just don’t.
The lone clapper — it is ok to only clap once if you are Tony Stubblebine, and clearly a VIP. Otherwise only clapping once is a sin, like giving a child a lump of coal for Christmas, or those people who pretend to drop a coin in a busker’s hat and walk off.
Clickbait — we have all been caught out by a headline which promises riches, or a sensational story, only to find out we have been fooled, sold short, robbed of precious minutes that could have been spent far more productively watching Netflix.
The 29 second reader — with the new earnings formula, a read has to be at least 30 seconds to “count”, so curtailing a read so close to the finishing line is surely one of the seven deadly sins!
The stochastic highlighter — this is the habit of picking completely random bits of an article to highlight which drives me up the wall, usually a crime carried out by a well-known Medium bot who will remain nameless for the purposes of this article, though if you already know the name do mention it in the comments! Random highlighting has to be on the list, unless the highlighter is David Perlmutter, in which case it is a privilege to be highlighted extensively.
The non-reciprocal reader — this is the person who invites you to read their article with a promise to read yours in return, but a day or so later you find you article still has zero reading time, and you realise you waded through the finer points of bird-watching in the Algarve for no reward in return.
AI content — although Medium claims to have clamped down on AI content, I can still spot it a mile off in some articles written in its cod-folksy, conversational, bland, repetitive, regurgitated semolina style, ending with a neat summary or conclusion. Please just make it stop!
EXTRA BONUS SINS! October 2023 update — Since the above article was written, I have written an update to include all the extra sins pointed out in the comments, which you may also enjoy-