The Cold War Between Writers & Entrepreneurs on Medium

In the spirit of the zeitgeist, I suppose I'll just jump right into the maelstrom, and join the circular meta discussion that's taking place across Medium, and enter the conversation that has in large part replaced the many other much meatier topics that were once explored more fully on the site, i.e. meaning literally anything that is not about Medium. 

As Medium evolves, political writers are being censored, true crime writers are being murdered, satirists are being laughed out of the room. 

What topic works on Medium, then? What still performs well?

Medium on Medium. That's what works.

This seems to be what the audience craves, and what the algorithm rewards. We're all rabidly chasing after the same precious few readers, after all. Where once a writer might try his or her hand writing about foreign affairs or politics or finance, now the only thing any of us ever see on our homepages is articles about Medium. 

It is what it is, I suppose. Supply and demand makes the world go round.

There are still a few talented writers that don't write exclusively about Medium that are doing really well, like… Umair Haque and Jessica Wildfire, although she occasionally does write about Medium. 

It sometimes feels that way at least, as lesser writers with lesser followings cannibalize one another, and the written word itself, in the battle to score a few more views.

It seems I'm guilty of this very thing myself. One does what one must.

The angry dilettantes and the entrepreneurs 

The battle taking place on Medium is both ideological as well as stylistic. What should one write about, and how should one write it? The recent slate of changes on the site merely accelerated this simmering conflict, and increased the necessity of answering these two critical questions.

It's the battle between performative clickbait and classical writing. 

At its essence, though, it's kvetching dilettante writers decrying hordes of vulgar blog-about-blogging viral entrepreneurs. 

For now, the latter are in the lead. They're making money and getting clicks.

There are many writers who take themselves a trifle too seriously on one side, perhaps. They're screaming into the wind about the quality of the writing on Medium sinking precipitously, while saying that views are tanking. They're not wrong, though.

They see Medium becoming a self-obsessed bubble universe, incapable of producing anything beyond endless mindless introspection. A facebook with literary delusions.

They're furious about the flood of talentless hacks making a killing pumping out mindless tips on Medium about Medium. The dilettante writers feel as if they're a minority here, that good writing is a thing of the past. They have a point.

On the other side, are the more business-savvy libertines and digital entrepreneurs. They might respond by telling these dilettantes that they're far too self-precious to be writing on a blogging site, and then universally say something to the effect of "stop criticizing Medium on Medium. If you don't like it, leave it."

They sound a bit like Republicans in America who tend to tell liberals and immigrants critical of the United States to either "love it or leave it." It's a crass but effective rebuttal.

That said, it's also a bit reductive. After all, doesn't the quality of the writing matter? Aren't we all writers? Perhaps not. 

The algorithm seems to agree.

Algorithmic irony

At the end of the day, the platform gets what the platform wants. An ironic byproduct of this Medium Cold War are the many articles calling for a ban on all other articles about Medium. It's a bizarre thing to be saying don't write about Medium, as you're writing about writing about Medium.

It's all feeling a bit trite, a bit hollow. A bit self-absorbed.

The truth is that the algorithmic incentives are moving the conversation, and pushing writers to engage on one side or the other of this endless debate.

It reminds me a bit of something in a book I'm reading, which is describing the vicious internal literary battles that took place inside the Soviet Union after the October Revolution. 

There were a group of proletarian writers who wrote scathing attacks against established writers who were not ideologically pure enough, and who were seen as not sufficiently toeing the communist party line. The battle went back and forth for years, and it never really ended.

Ultimately, the result was the creation of the infamously repressive USSR Union of Writers and the widespread censorship of anything remotely critical of the Bolshevik's policy or leadership. The formulaic dregs of Socialist Realist propaganda replaced the literature of Alexey Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulkgakov, and Maxim Gorki. 

For years, Russian literature was dead and buried. Rather than write literature, authors wrote to please Stalin and Khrushchev, at least if they wanted to be successful in Russia. The choice was between being invisible or a liar. 

It feels like there's something similar happening on Medium.

There's a central authority censoring and promoting writers, an opaque algorithmic commissar, responsible for curating everything that happens here.

The Soviet Union could only dream of such an effective mechanism for silencing troublesome writers and internal critics. 

In this brave new world of reading and writing, who can say where the algorithm begins and Medium's editorial staff ends? It's a hall of mirrors.

As far as the ongoing battle happening on the platform, it's the same battle lines that have always existed in literary arenas. Quality versus bankability, except that it has been supercharged by the economic possibility of the internet.

In other words, the algorithm can and will be gamed. At the end of the day though, the algorithm is only what Medium decides it to be.

As the pandemic shut us into our homes, and as writers flocked to online writing, these questions will continue to play out. Their answers will increasingly decide the new winners and losers in this online literary era. We can't shy away from this debate, as our world moves online, and as writing assumes its new digital form.