I just had an Eureka moment since posting my previous response to this article. The answer to my Medium frustration lies in Dheeraj Dhobley ‘s article! I don’t know why it didn’t click the first time I read it.
Like millions of other Medium people, I follow the Medium Staff. When I first came to Medium I mistakenly thought that I needed to do this in order to get any technical updates concerning the platform. But thanks to Dheeraj’s eye-opening article I now realize that what I was actually doing was allowing the contents of my feed to be dictated by a bunch of twenty-something tech geeks sitting in the Medium offices in San Francisco!
Not knowing this, I have been complaining about the feed; about how the people and topics I follow don’t show up in my feed and about how my feed is filled to the brim with geeky/tech/start-up/rehashed self-help ‘pop writing.’ I have no interest in those kinds of articles but it is specifically those kinds of articles that the Medium geek team looks for and recommends and that is why they clog my feed…..even though I don’t follow those topics or the writers who write them.
But that is what the Medium Staff follows and recommends and that is why it fills my feed.
The answer now seems incredibly simple! I simply need to un-follow the Medium Staff! And that is exactly what I intend to do once I finish this response. I have a feeling that my homepage feed will radically change and I sure hope it does. Maybe I’ll finally start seeing stories that I actually find interesting by writers that I actually like instead of just what Medium’s geek team wants me to see. (My tastes and the young geek team’s tastes are apparently as different as night and day.)
Maybe I’ll stop getting pissed off and disgusted every time I check my Medium Feed. Maybe I’ll start getting excited again by coming to Medium. Maybe I’ll be freed from the extremely narrow spectrum of subject matter the young Medium geek team crams the feed with. Maybe I’ll be able to discover new writers who have important things to say and say it well but who don’t have the almighty blessing of the Medium Staff.
Wow, I’m getting excited already.
I can’t wait to un-follow the Medium Staff. After a few days I will write a post about how different my feed becomes. So stay tuned.
P. S. I’m curious what the average age of the Medium Staffer is. Is there anyone on the staff over the age of 30? Is there anyone on the staff who appreciates fiction? Who appreciates interesting and informative articles that have nothing to do with “getting insanely wealthy with your start-up by waking up an hour earlier each morning” and other ‘pop writing’ subject matter? I think the staff needs at least one or two people who are in their fifties or sixties or seventies. After all, there are Medium readers who are older. (At least I think there are. Maybe I’m the only one.)
