You Can Write Rubbish and Be Extremely Successful on Medium
Towards a more democratic and egalitarian space.
Medium isn’t a democratic platform. It never has been and chances are that it will never be one.
Why am I writing this?
First it was the publications. Back when they existed and wielded so much power, it was they who were the arbiters and gatekeepers of what was good writing and what wasn’t. There was something about the arrogance and the bias of the editors of these defunct pubs that really pissed me off. I quickly cottoned on to this and I was quite vocal in my denunciation of the huge pubs.
Ev Williams listened and shutdown a great number of these over bloated publications and used the money saved in awarding bonuses to writers, who had shown their mettle for four crazy months in 2021.
But It is fair to say that the problem hasn’t gone away but has simply mutated.
Today, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a huge revelation in terms of what gets pushed to the millions of readers around the world and what gets relegated to the background.
Over the course of the last month, I was left with the abiding impression that the nonsensical and poorly researched articles were given much more of a push by the algorithm than pieces which had a…