Anna Now I really, really like what you said about the feed; that you don’t want to be fed, you want to choose. I’ve been saying that for over a year now and it only falls on deaf ears with Medium. The very essence of the Medium system is to force-feed Medium readers what Medium wants them to consume. No one likes to be force-fed and that’s why there is so much discontent on Medium right now. We want to be able to choose what we consume and we want to be able to discover new things to consume that aren’t on Medium’s force-feeding menu.

Sadly, Medium just doesn’t get it.

And yes, I feel that it is imperative that we rebel. If we don’t Medium will just continue to ignore us.

I had an idea a little while ago while making potato salad. Usually I try to keep a completely empty mind while cooking so that I can put all my energy into cooking but I’ve become so disgruntled with Medium that I had extreme difficulty keeping thoughts about Medium from intruding into my noggin.

The idea was for all of us to start using a new tag; something like “99%” or “Medium 99%.” If we want to ‘consume’ something other than the writings of the 1% that we’re being force-fed in our feeds we can follow that tag and click on it when we want to read something written by members of the 99%.

But sadly that won’t work. Upon further rumination I realized that all a one percenter would have to do is use that tag and, since they have thousands upon thousands of followers, they would automatically appear at the top of the results for the tag. It would be far too easy for the one percenters to commandeer that tag and then that tag would become worthless; a mere reflection of what we’re being force-fed in our feeds.

I really don’t have an answer (yet) but we do most desperately need to work together in our rebellion against this very flawed and rigged system. Hopefully we can find a way.

It’s also desperately important that we all rebel on an individual basis. We need to stop giving green hearts to one percenters (even if an article is decently good) and start giving out massive amounts of green hearts to 99 percenters. Too often readers will not recommend a post if they see that it only has one or two or three recommends. And they automatically recommend posts that have hundreds or thousands of recommends just because they want to follow the herd and be just like everyone else. We must all become much more discerning in giving out recommends and uplift our fellow 99 percenters by lavishing them with green hearts.

Since Medium just doesn’t seem to care we must try to level the playing field ourselves. And we must do this both individually and collectively.

I am still hoping that someone comes up with a great idea. I will certainly be behind it. While it is certainly a good idea to search for options other than Medium (I’ve been searching, too), let’s not give up yet. Who knows? Maybe, just maybe, Medium will actually wake up and start listening to us instead of doing everything in their power to hide us. (I’m not holding my breath but stranger things have happened.)