Medium's Boost: The Worst Of Two Worlds

The largest bird on Earth is the Brighton seagull. I'm serious. It’s “natural” weight might only be about one kilogram, but after stealing enough food from hapless tourists, it grows into a muscle-bound beast of nightmares that can fly through concrete. Your only defence is to flee north.

Go too far north, however, and you'll encounter the Highland midge, a minuscule biting insect that renders most of Scotland uninhabitable during the summer. Thousands of them descend to feed simultaneously, turning your skin into a writhing mass of tiny zebra-like wings and small red welts. I fell foul once. I needed to pee halfway up a mountain and had one hand holding my junk and the other the defending both my face and my groin. Mid-flow, the results were messy.

Luckily, the territories of the Brighton seagull and the Highland midge do not overlap. You never have to experience the worst of Britain's far north and far south at the same time - geography spares you. I wonder if the leadership at Medium might take note. The online self-publishing platform has inflicted the worst of old media and the worst of new media on its users. Its Boost program is a disaster.

The way old publishing works, away from the internet, is through wealthy and connected gatekeepers. Publishing means printing, so supplies of paper and ink have to be sourced and a production line is necessary to put them together. And distribution is physical, so deals have to be made with bookstores, convenience shops and newsstands. It takes money to get every word printed and more money to get a single word read. Since publishers hold the purse strings, they decide what flies, and it isn't always based on quality.

Different publishers have different content preferences, tastes and ideological leanings, all neatly wrapped up in editorial policies. You can't expect a left-leaning newspaper to publish a pro-Trump article or a sports magazine to hire a political columnist. But you can, at least, meet these gatekeepers (or their representatives) to pitch ideas and gauge their wants.

Online publishing isn't like that. Online, you can publish whatever you like - you just can't make anyone read it. The web already has enough content to fill the next gazillion years of consumption, making everything you publish a tiny drop in an enormous ocean. So, if you want to be seen, something has to put you in front of consumers.

That something will almost certainly be one or more big-tech algorithms - Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. If you're marketing content, you're almost certainly relying on these companies' algorithms to put your content in front of their users. The problem is that you don't know what these algorithms want, and you can't talk to them to find out.

So you write long-form content because an online "guru" tells you an algorithm wants it, and you write short-form content because you're told another algorithm wants that. You write focused content, diverse content, lots of content. You include more outbound links, more images, more video. It's awful and mostly pointless. Algorithms don't talk to anybody, least of all gurus who sell "insights" into their inner workings.

But algorithms do change. They exist to capture and maintain users' attention, so they must adjust themselves to meet users' preferences over time. They do this in silence, they do it unexpectedly, they make changes that throw established creators to the wolves and raise new ones, but at least they provide a counterweight to human gatekeepers. If you think there's an online audience for your content but no human publisher agrees, you can publish and promote it online anyway, and if an algorithm agrees with you, it might distribute your content widely. Algorithms are opaque gatekeepers, but the gate is wide.

Medium's Boost program claims to elevate the best content on the platform without using algorithms. Instead, it uses old-fashioned human gatekeepers. But we don't know who they are or what they want. We can't talk to them, and the gate is small.

The process goes like this: You send your article to a Medium publication, which is a kind of sub-Medium run by another community member - who you can talk to - and, if that publication's editor likes it, they nominate your article for the Boost program. From there, it might as well be up to the Gods.

Some unknown group of Medium employees decides if your article will be boosted. If it is, then it will get lots of views. If it isn't, it will languish with almost none, even if you have many followers because Medium is now all about the Boost. You won't get any feedback from the gatekeepers, and you can't protest. Essentially, Medium has an editorial policy, but they won't tell you what it is. That's the narrow gate of old media and the opaqueness of modern algorithms.

And it leaves writers with a choice - either create content with little to no idea if it'll be read by anyone, or publish their work somewhere else. Many and more are choosing somewhere else.

Thanks for reading. If you think anyone else might like this article, please share it with them.