Hi again, Ariel. I’ve managed to take a break from the urgent translation of a gas tanker’s stability and buoyancy booklet -don’t ask- to write a bit more of a deep-dive comment in response to your piece. So here goes…
The first points are about perceptions, and I guess you already know this, hence the post itself. You make the point about Medium being a smallish start-up with limited resources. I imagine this is in a way a response to the implication expressed by many of us (myself included) that the company is some kind of tech behemoth with endless cash and people to throw at any issue and resolve it straight away. Point taken. I think here the problem is that when the founder is a famous tech bro billionaire, any project they are associated with is ‘tainted’ by that. We tend to imagine that instead of fixing issues on Medium, Evan’s spending his cash on phallic skyrockets and suchlike. Even if that’s not in any way true, the current media climate, with other tech moguls looming so large over it, means it’s going to be a hard one to shake off – good luck with that!
Another perception vs. reality point comes with the importance of the Boost. If we didn’t know it existed, and we posted a story that got few views, we’d just think ‘oh, well, that bombed’. Or ‘damned algorithm’. But the very fact that the Boost does exist means that we instead tend to feel ‘if only it had been boosted – that would solve all my problems’. We see the Boost as a silver bullet, largely because the stats that we are presented with suggest it actually is, at least for those of us with follower counts in the hundreds, and subscribers in the (very low) dozens.
The numbers you put out about how many successful stories aren’t in fact boosted at all address that perception, but again, I’m not sure if that rings true to ‘small’ and ‘new’ writers.
Sure, Cory Doctorow can get 15,000 views without a Boost, but that’s because of a pre-established reputation and cross-platform profile. Which he had to work for, of course, but it means that not all stories are born equal in terms of their ability to attract big numbers sans boost.
I guess that it would be more helpful (though perhaps not possible) to see like-for-like stats, which I suspect might show that for lower-profile writers, boosted stories in fact make up a far higher proportion of the highly viewed items.
Continuing with the numbers game, there is the whole issue of the Boost roll-out. What some of us have been realising recently is that there seems to be a mathematical barrier, or bump, a little way down the road. If there are now 100 (?) active nominators, each nomming 20 titles per month, how does the whole thing work when you scale that up to 1000? In terms of the pay they receive (wouldn’t the current rate bankrupt the company?), but also the effectiveness of the Boost itself in algorithmic terms, which would surely be watered down, the more stories are included.
In other words, we’ve moved from thinking ‘why’s it so hard to get a Boost?’, to ‘will it actually be better, or might it be worse, once it’s much ‘easier’ because every other pub is nomming left, right and centre?’.
Anyway, thanks again for all the info you offered – this post just sets out some of the ways that I (and others) see things right now, and my feelings in response.
