What I Want From Medium

Thirsty Soul Blogger Is Still Thirsty

It’s amazing how Medium can continue to evolve, change their business plan six or seven times, add publications, dump publications, add back publications, curate, uncurate, curate again and constantly feed the sacred fire of our polis, the “Algorithm”, yet despite all the changes I’M STILL ANNOYED THAT THINGS ARE NOT THE WAY I WANT THEM TO BE.

You know, that was a funnier line when the platform was free. I love to complain about free things. Now I pay $5 a month, and while I know that my writing here is being heavily subsidized by venture capital (ha, ha, suck it, you unicorn hunters of Silicon Valley), it’s not as fun to complain when I am a paying customer.

I’m sure that many of the things I’m about to ask for are technically or financially impossible. OK. You have to understand that I don’t know how anything works anymore. Almost ten years ago I went to buy a new lawn mower. There was no choke or primer button on it. I asked the guy who was selling it to me, “What do I do if it doesn’t start?” He said, “You bring it in to the shop.” I was against it on principle, but you know what? The thing has always started.

I don’t understand how hotel rooms get priced, who paid for the Boss’s ECT treatments, how to get rid of toxic shit like used mineral spirits and naptha, or how many sick days I really have. All you have to do to bring down the cloud of unknowing is put the information on a website “portal”. Maybe I’m just getting old and my memory is getting worse, but there is so much information on my collective portals that I never had before, but I don’t seem to remember any of it.

I went to the eye doctor and before the exam a tech read me my list of medications. One of them had been added the day before. I asked how they knew, and she said, “through your insurance.” I replied, “that’s funny. When I went to the emergency room they had to ask me. I fucked up and forgot a medication that could have reacted badly with the contrast for a IVP or something and, thank goodness the X-ray tech wasn’t asleep.”

My point is, I don’t understand how Medium works. I don’t understand how they will ever make money. I hope they make enough money to keep the joint going, because I haven’t found a better place to hang out online yet. My love affair with GoComics is almost over.

Many of these things I’ve asked for before. If you’ve had children, you know how effective it is to throw pragmatism to the wind and just keep asking.

See My Own Posts

Algorithm is a cruel goddess. She foists on me what she thinks I should read, the righteous selections… for who would question the choice of the gods? But why won’t she let me see myself? Vanity? Narcissism? Doth the goddess want to protect me from my own mean desire to see how others view what I have written? How come? Can I not befriend myself? Should not my stories be included in my network? What network is this that prevents me from seeing my own reflection? I am no one in the feed. I am invisible. The goddess has schooled me in humility. I am chastised, but I ask… WHY?

Fix Comments

Comments suck. They still suck. They sucky suck. FOR A SITE THAT HAS 10,000 ARTICLES A DAY ABOUT UX, WHY DO I HAVE TO CLICK “see out of network responses” to see anything? I wrote a post yesterday… get ready for the plug… breathe… here it is:

That wasn’t so bad, was it? You kind of liked it, right? No? Oh, you’re never clicking on that link again? Really? Never? When you say “never” do you mean like “really never” or “until you forget how bad that was”?

Lot’s and lots (like ten) people wrote responses to that article. You should read their responses. The responses are better than the post. THAT’S THE POINT OF COMMENTS. On the Gawker of old and GoComics of the present, the lamest “content” has been known to inspire the comment geniuses to spin gold out of straw! I’m not kidding. The Internet is chock-o-block full of Rumpelstiltskins! My belief is that most of the best commenters are appellate court justice waiting for clerks to finish writing their decisions, biological and chemical researchers waiting for the centrifuge to stop spinning, bank workers waiting to go home, and DMV workers waiting for the person at the front of the line to get over their shock and move out of the way. In other words, really smart people who won’t, or can’t, make BORING, LONG MEDIUM POSTS because they are… you know… “working” .

Get the Sexy Back

Look, I’ll say this as carefully as I can. I need more dicks, tits, and fucking. I’m not sure how to solve the problem. I know that stuff exists on Medium, but if I start clicking on “erotica” stories (which I don’t like to read but, you know, they often have what I think I might be looking for) then, inevitably, the goddess Algorithm serves up a title like “He Pissed on Me in My Office Chair” with an Upsplash photo like this:

I sometimes read Medium in church, which makes this a problem. I mean, if the homily doesn’t grab my attention, I just take out my phone. What? That’s wrong? Let me tell you something, there is a woman who walks into church every Sunday with an iced coffee and puts it down by her feet. At least in the old days, people smoked on the stairs. What’s next? Dogs? Oh, THAT’S ALREADY HAPPENED.

Where Are the Kids?

Please understand, when I say “kids” I mean people between 27 and 35. You might be alarmed because this is right after the “sexy” item, and you should be alarmed. Is it wrong for me to want to see more profile pictures of people with healthy skin and hair? But that’s not really the reason I am distressed by all the alta kockers kicking around here. The truth is, I only want to TALK to people who remember life before the Internet, but I want to LISTEN and MOCK all of the younglings. The way I impress my nephews and nieces is by knowing what they know about when they know it. I do that through the Internet. I got a lot of mileage out of making fun of avocado toast early in the cycle. How? Some twenty-year-old wrote about it on Medium. I was the fucking hygge king here in the provinces because of Jonas Ellison’s first article, which you can find by reading this excellent post:

What Else Do I Want?

I’m bored now and want to stop writing, so I’ll make a list! God, I FUCKING LOVE BLOGGING.

• The ability to gift memberships by screen name, not e-mail
• The ability to see the “latest” stories published to a tag. I used to be able to do this but can’t find it anymore.
• Netanyahu to not be elected. THIS WOULD BE FUNNY IF I COULD STRIKETHROUGH ON IT.
• Strikethrough
• The ability to see which story garnered the views in stats. Check this out.

• The return of all the great writers who have abandoned us.
• More listicles!

Enough. Thank you for reading this far into the mire.

More Like This: