Yeah thanks for your transparency but how do you go about fixing these problems? Like it's great to acknowledge them but the "Why NodeJS is dead" article was in the suggested sidebar for me yesterday
It's been frustratingly slow because our recs system is sprawling. Your main feed is populated differently than the read-more section you are referencing. Plus author behavior lags incentives. We actually had a clickbait about MILFs on a programming story the other day so it's worse than you are reporting.
Where we are today is 30% rolled out but not even announced to our authors. That'll happen in a week and is when I think author behavior will change.
That "X is dead" trope will disappear from your recs both because we'll have better things to show and because the new incentives make it not worth writing. An article like that is very sensitive to incentives because there is no authentic reason to have written it. Probably without Medium's payment, it never would have been occurred to the person.
You're almost certainly right, of course, and it's interesting how medium fell into the same cycle of amplifying junk. Netflix is another case study here of something where the incentives weren't as obvious as with advertising funded content but still fell into line.
But mainly I came here to note the irony of this frank, honest and useful discussion taking place under an "X is dead" headline of its own.
Do you see a shift away from clickbait in the long term across the industry? Publishing, search, social media, etc. have been devastated by it (among other factors).
Cutting the supply of money will kill the clickbait content alright but it will also kill vast swathes of "content, full stop". Somebody has to pay for hosting no matter what, and if I'm entertaining an idea of writing a fantasy novel in my spare time, I really don't want to be the one to pay. Or rather, I wouldn't want at the time in my life when I entertained such an idea.
I think more dollars is good, as it increases the number of opportunities. This comes with a lot of failed attempts at creating something of value, and that's ok. What we truly need, in a societal sense, is to make next generations recognize the current times as a crazed race after the least demanding content that they are, and to guide them in the direction of articles with enduring value, again. The generation that entered adulthood during these crazy times is probably already lost, the previous generation is busy raising kids, and the previous-previous generation lives in bunkers where only the guys who "go way back" can ever enter. If not the next generation, then we're probably done for, as the IT revolution will eat its children and their children too, like many revolutions before.
Theoretically, a subscription was supposed to be one part because it aligned us to the reader. But then we had a recommendation algorithm that was more aligned to an ad model. We're serious about changing our distribution to reward substance over clickbait and I think we will get there.
