Re: "Junk like most Medium articles" Thank you for saying this! I've been pressing Medium for a long time to be more aggressive at shoving crappy publishers of

Re: "Junk like most Medium articles" Thank you for saying this! I've been pressing Medium for a long time to be more aggressive at shoving crappy publishers off of the platform. I think what happened is that Medium was originally great for content marketers. There was a growth hack that let certain publications get big just by publishing any remotely relevant article. Many of these published 30 times a day (and still do). Additionally, the Medium algorithm seemed to reward articles mostly for having a clickable title. However! Medium made a recent change to manually review all articles before allowing them to get algorithmic boosts. That did a ton for weeding out the junk articles and removing the incentives for these content-mill publications. You can see this in action if you go to one of the big publications and append /latest. Most of the articles these pubs are publishing now are getting fewer than 50 claps. In other words, nobody is reading them. I think eventually, most of these pubs are going to end up leaving. Then on the flip side, Medium is partnering/paying a lot more for high quality writing. And as a result of less competition with content marketing junk, those high quality articles are getting a lot more views. I just published something the other day that I spent two years writing and researching, and it's got 250k views (and I think will make $10-15k in their network over its lifetime). I'm not going to link it, but I think it met a bunch of standards of quality that many past Medium articles haven't: all the advice had been tested on multiple people by the author, the article was peer reviewed, it was copy edited. My world is mostly personal development writing and we do have a partnership with Medium. It's just a weird middle ground where the old growth hackers are still around and have been offered a chance to participate at a higher level of quality. But I'm finding that most of them either aren't able or don't want to. From my world, the old definition of quality was an article that was a summary of something the author read but probably never personally tested, i.e. "10 Foods That Made Ben Franklin Crazy Productive." And what got us a partnership with Medium was putting together a style guide that had a much stronger opinion about what goes into a high quality personal development article. Style guide here, but you'd really have to be a nerd to read it =) https://betterhumans.coach.me/draft-style-guide-for-personal-development-articles-6f641023347f https://betterhumans.coach.me/draft-style-guide-for-personal...