Thanks for this, Zulie. One debate I've seen and engaged in recently - amid the merry Medium moan maelstrom of May - is the perceived 'hostility' shown by the Medium distribution system towards poetry and fiction.
'They only promote stuff about business and tech' is a summary of a typical opinion held by poetry/fiction-writers.
My take is this: first of all, the numbers seem to show that there are an awful lot of Medium members who are indeed from the business/tech worlds, which makes sense. This is a digital platform which appeals to that segment for on-the-go factual content delivery, whereas many poetry/fiction fans still prefer to access such writing via an old-fashioned book or magazine. There's a contextual bias towards functional non-fiction work online, even in the 21st century, and Medium's readership skews more GenX/Boomer than the online average anyway, I suspect. Middle-aged fiction fans are likely also to be paper book fans.
But secondly, I feel it's much harder to find an appropriate audience for 'fiction' or 'poetry'. What even is that? I hate most fiction or poetry I might read here because it's mostly (a) irrelevant to my personal tastes, or (b) frankly very poor quality (I think some of my own may fall into this category!).
If I mark 'Fiction' as a topic, how does the algo know what kind of fiction I might like?
Whereas if I mark 'Python programming', or 'Apple', or 'Six Sigma' (whatever that actually is), there is a very good chance that any given piece labelled with those tags will be at least of some relevance to me (and so will inherently get a better read ratio from the start, through a lower natural 'Nah - not for me' rejection rate, just because it's easier to target).
In short, I feel that this perceived 'hostility' or 'rejection' may have a lot more to do with the numerical and data-driven difficulty of finding the right audience for a poem or short story, compared with a factual article about a development in AI, iOS, Python or Scrum.
It would be interesting - and I think a useful mythbusting or outreach exercise for Medium - to read a piece actually drawing on the numbers you have access to on the staff side of the veil, and explaining to an extent how the process of matching content to readers works for those different segments.
Does that sound relevant and feasible?
