Member-only story
Medium has a bot problem
And it’s going to destroy it’s loyal readership
People have talked about the fake Medium accounts for some time now. And I can’t find a good answer for it. If we’re trying to support quality writing, it doesn’t help to have a fake user base generating fake news. Quite the opposite, all these fake followers do is to pollute the signals that separate good journalism and writing from bad.
Though I write on this platform, I am primarily a reader. And I had no idea how much fake followers influenced the prominence of articles served to me on the platform. It’s the fake Instagram influencer metrics all over again. If Medium allows bad faith article rank manipulation to happen behind the scenes, the reader loses trust in the platform.
That is a big reason I cancelled my paid membership. I found it harder to find authors putting out good work. Most were using Medium as a gateway to a newsletter they planned to charge for. That was great — I was paying Medium for that privilege. The remaining content was more of the same.
I hope Medium gets this issue under control, but it benefits no one to have spam content floating around here.
