PUBLISHER EDITORIAL

Will Medium Ever Explain Themselves and All the Obvious Contradictions on this Platform?

Please make up your mind what you claim you want to promote!

I’m going to keep this short and sweet, because at this point, I’m not even certain anyone’s reading what I write, if they even discover it.

What do I attribute that to?

Possibly the fear of being associated with one of us old pesky meta writers that this platform is supposed to be so dead against these days.

Oh yeah?

Well, I call bullsh*t, and that’s exactly what I said in a Response I just wrote, after reading a story about the freaking “M” word (as we’re all so politely tap dancing around).

A very familiar writer Bin Jiang, one that I’ve always enjoyed reading — and still do — wrote the story you see in the screen shot below.

I was alerted to this story, thanks to the Medium Weekly Digest that comes and shows up prominently in my email. His story was nicely tucked, directly under the other stories in the Medium Newsletter, and labeled as “From your followers”.

Author screen shot

All while I read and enjoyed Bin’s story, I couldn’t help feeling annoyance at the administrators because they appear to be contradicting themselves, by promoting the story along with their regular email publication.

You can see what I had to say on the issue, in the comment I left on the actual story, after reading it:

Author screen shot

Honestly friends, I really don’t mean to come off like “sour grapes”, because I’m happy for the extra exposure that Bin and his story is getting. I imagine he really needs it, just like the rest of us.

But how does Medium explain or justify when and where they’ll choose to circulate and promote what is clearly meta content, according to their own standards of what that kind of content amounts to?

Or perhaps a better question is the one I asked when I wrote:

[embed]How Can Writers Follow the Rules When the Rules Continue to Change? When in doubt, leave it out!medium.com

Final Thoughts

If there’s one thing I’m slowly but surely starting to discover, I can’t stop talking about this platform, anymore than I can stop writing here.

And as long as I’m here, I’ll continue to call it like I see it, whether or not I’m being circulated, viewed, read or paid.

I’m still here…

You can show your appreciation and solidarity for a meta writer when you: