Hi Tony. I've been with Medium for a couple of years now, and I want to share a perspective you might find useful.

First of all, I think this is a good step. I think this is particularly important for writers, because a fair chance at virality (for a lack of a better word) is Medium's key selling point to writers. I think there are much better tools to build an audience (Substack) and Medium is unique in that it can elevate a story written by absolutely anyone. This is particularly valuable for people who have other stuff going on in their lives (besides writing.)

Now what I really want to talk about is what this means for the reader. At the end of the day, all of us here are writing for other people. Medium is not a diary.

For a while now, Medium has been on a quest to cleanse itself of clickbait and other forms of cheap writing. This is definitely a good initiative. However, I feel like we've lost a lot of the liveliness the website used to have when I first joined.

When I first joined, Medium was heavily engagement-based. Curation was important, but it was widely available, and once your story was greenlit, everything was in the hands of the algorithm. The result was a feed of the most popular articles of the day.

Was it perfect? Absolutely not. It was overrun by a handful of writers who knew how to craft good headlines and squeeze the maximum reading time through clever formatting (e.g. one-sentence paragraphs.) However, once in a while, a really really good story would pop up on the feed. Something that connects so deeply with you, you'd happily scroll through a month's worth of self help just to discover another story like that.

I haven't felt this way in a long time. I don't know if it's some curator's idea of what's good or some algorithm that tries to play the part, but for over a year now, Medium felt like someone else's playlist. I just don't like someone else's judgement on what's good. I don't care what the topic is. I don't care who wrote it. Don't try to predict what I want to read. Just give me good writing.

Popularity is by no means a definitive predictor of quality, but it's a good qualifier. I liked seeing claps on the homepage. I would always check the popular stories, because they were usually at least decent.

Right now, Medium is trying its best to be a fair judge of what is good and what isn't. I know you guys have good intentions and that you're trying your best to make this all work. But, as you can see, this is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to pull off at scale. Look at the verbal acrobatics you have to go through just to define what a good article is.

Curation is an amazing tool, but it works best for small groups of like-minded people. If your entire team of 30 or so curators would spend their entire time trying to figure out what I want to read, Medium would probably be the best website in the world (for me.) With time, they'd get pretty good at figuring out my taste, and I would be the happiest reader on Earth.

However, Medium is not just me. Medium is a small country. You have absolutely every type of reader and every type of writer here. No group will have their interests represented equally (sorry, poets) but this should still be a democratic process. I mean, it's the best we have.

Curation, by default, is not democratic. It's someone else's idea of what's good.

The workaround you offer for this issue is to involve more and better people into the process. Dig deeper into the community. This is definitely a good step. But isn't this moving in the direction of... an engagement based Medium? I mean, aren't people effectively voting with their claps and their clicks and their reading time? Aren't people at large the best experts on what they want to read? Isn't engagement based Medium the ultimate community curation model?

What I'm trying to say is that at some point during this journey, the war on clickbait seems to have become the war on engagement itself. But who said that engagement is a bad thing? Engagement is a good thing. It means readers connect. It means they care and like what they see. Who are we to judge what Medium readers like to read?

Clickbait and cheap, manipulative, formulaic content is an issue that plagues all platforms, and there are (arguably) better ways to deal with it. I particularly adore Reddit in this regard.

But Reddit is, at its heart, an engagement-based platform. There is very little curation on Reddit (if any, to my knowledge.) What Reddit does have is a strict set of very clearly defined rules for what doesn't pass. If you don't comply with these rules, your post will be immediately removed without any prior warning. Do this a few more times, and you'll find yourself banned. Simple as that.

The result? One of the most amazing cultures on the internet. The algorithm doesn't try to big data through your browsing history, but rather simply shows you what's popular. I respect its choices, because they're not really choices-- it's the summary of people's upvotes. And Reddit's feed never disappoints, even if it doesn't cater to my specific taste (do I even have a specific taste..?)

At the same time, the mods take out the trash behind the scenes before it ever hits the homepage. I almost never see a post on Reddit that's completely dull or absurd or clickbaity. That stuff either never takes off or is removed as it gets traction or as it's posted. And I believe new Redditors themselves learn pretty quickly to respect the code.

In a nutshell, you let people decide collectively what gets popular, and you heavily police the stories (and writers!!) that break the rules. Topic experts can help craft rules that are specific to each topic (just like subreddits do.) That's how you can come up with really specific rules (like, a business topic could have a rule that says "No "[Business] Is Dying" articles.")

Does it really need to get more complicated than that? Curious to hear your thoughts. Perhaps I'm wrong.