Beginning in 2019 I’ve written hundreds of Medium articles on philosophy, religion, politics, and history, and responded to thousands of comments on the platform. My greatest frustration here is with how Medium struggles in its attempts to reward so-called “quality” content and engagement. How are those qualities measured? Democratically, by editorial judgment, or by algorithmic quirk?
There’s nothing more disheartening and baffling than seeing what I consider to be very low-quality articles routinely pop up on my Medium home screen. This kind of article somehow receives thousands of “likes” and dozens of comments, it’s written by someone with only a few hundred “followers,” and is itself just a very short, simplistic piece of tacky propaganda for the creator economy that presumably games the algorithm.
Possibly some hacky articles might go viral democratically by chance. But there’s always the suspicion that the algorithm somehow selects certain dubious topics or styles to promote, or wrongly buries others. And what are the algorithm’s “tastes”? Are they artistic or purely business-minded?
I write mainly philosophical, often subversive, anti-delusion articles. I don’t expect them to be especially popular because philosophy isn’t as conducive to making folks happy as is, say, self-help charlatanry. The editors and algorithms aren’t going to change the interests of the readers en masse. If most people want to consume drivel and sophistry because they’re reading these articles while sitting on the toilet, that’s going to be the content that’s democratically promoted. Favouring unpopular content on elitist editorial grounds because this content is more important from a better-educated standpoint isn’t likely to work. Certainly, that editorial bias would frustrate those writers who don’t make the cut. And different editors have different tastes, so this would be almost as arbitrary as the algorithmic discrimination.
Ideally, the platform would be upfront about exactly how the algorithm works. How is the platform automating which articles are promoted and which are buried? But no sooner would that information be provided than presumably some writers would try to game the system with that information in mind. And if the algorithm were left out of the mix entirely, and the readers themselves were to choose which stories to read and which are best, I assume the overall quality of the content would plummet. Pure democracy is far from meritocratic since it’s vulnerable to demagogues, sophists, and hacks, as has been known since the time of the ancient Greeks.
I wonder whether the “claps” function should be removed entirely from Medium. The “likes” generally in social media are supposed to make the experience more addictive, but this function is counterproductive in lots of ways. Of course, addicting the masses and helping to turn them into easily distracted, anxiety-ridden jerks is itself flatly diabolical. But this token show of approval also gives a false sense of quality. For one thing, the claps on Medium aren’t democratic since you can clap more than once, and claps are superficial since they’re produced by relatively mindless mouse clicks.
The comment section provides a better sense of how the audience feels about an article. What’s the quality of the comments, and is there a community of commenters that flocks to certain articles and authors? Perhaps the comments section should be expanded and the claps function done away with.
Anyway, I don’t envy the job of Medium’s managers. There’s no easy solution, so my expectations are low.
