What do Medium and Fascists Have in Common?
Both think reactively instead of forwardly and this story is a rant which unfortunately seems to perform well on Medium
One of the worst aspects of Medium is trolls who have nothing better to do than insult people. What does Medium do to counteract this? Code stupid AI, which would be ok, if Medium had enough support staff to answer complaints about the trolling it misses because the trolls don’t use trigger words whereas AI can’t tell the difference between a trigger word used innocently because AI is not smart enough to read the context.
Today I had a comment instantly delisted. This is clearly a new Medium function. I realized what and why it happened and it’s patently absurd, particularly when support does not send an email explaining the delisting and providing the opportunity to explain to a human being the misunderstood context of the comment.
Marilyn Flower posted a wonderful story that said in part:
“But I also learned a valuable lesson I didn’t anticipate. In my haste to get going, I overlooked some key folks. One of them, Marcus, had the audacious grace to call me on it. This gave me an opportunity to make amends. Thank you, Marcus.”
I commented:
I so appreciate how you received my “I call [horse hockey]” and the conversation that developed between us.
A few minutes later I went into my profile and for the first time saw I had one delisted story, which I then saw was that comment. I then left the comment again with a “____” in lieu of the swear word reference— delisted instantly [the comment used a common two-letter abbreviation for one being full of it — I changed it to horse hockey here in case this algo is hunting me].
Medium is a wonderful platform and every day I make more friends here and my writing makes a positive difference in people’s lives, which was what Marilyn was thanking me for and for which I was showing appreciation, and what many others have told me and I wrote about here:
I wrote a story about a year ago about stupid moderation AI employed by Twitter but lauded Twitter for having excellent support staff that quickly remedies undeserved takedowns:
I do give Medium credit for figuring out how to make a buttload of money while professing otherwise:
The other algorithm I shall complain about in my rant is the CFFD algorithm. I write wonderful essays about non-religious spirituality/spiritual awakenings and important topics such as suicide prevention and addiction treatment and great poems (at least the Top Writer in Poetry algo as me at #3). I have had one story CFFD among my over 400. A mentor advised me that the CFFD algorithm has me in curation jail because I group tag fellow poets at the end of most of my poems, many of which are in response to prompts and the reason for group tagging is the distribution algo is crap and I want to share my work with my friends and offer them the chance to participate in the prompt that inspired my poem. That’s community building, nothing more and nothing less, and it is antithetical to Medium’s professed goals to penalize us for this practice.
A mentor advised me to stop this practice. Does that make sense to you dear readers? Poets always thank me for tagging them. Wake up Medium and understand what community building is.
Am I tooting my own horn here as well? Damn right I am and as my friend Holly Kellums pointed out in this story, we should:
Thank you for reading. Good night. I hope I ranted out enough of my aggravation to go to sleep.
In Rama I create, with soul-energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,