Among the social platforms, Medium is especially bad and especially sticky. Good old partial reinforcement. When you start with a good experience, you keep hoping for another one. I started with some good reads by Avi Loeb, and Medium continued to provide about 1 out of 20 interesting pieces. The other 19 were aggressively harmful. I joined to enable comments, then started pointlessly “punching back” when I felt punched. Now Medium has banned my comments.
Good. Forces me to GET THE FUCK OUT of a bad place. Like getting kicked out of a biker bar. There was no reason to enter; the signs were perfectly clear.
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This is the default business model for media now. Thinking in terms of pay for value, it’s a truly peculiar bargain.
1. Writers are paid to punch readers.
2. Readers pay to be punched.
3. If readers try to fight back, they’re in deep shit.
4. Profit.
Paying to be punched used to be the province of fictional superheroes like James Bond and Honey West, who hired martial arts experts to attack them unexpectedly. Ordinary readers aren’t fictional superheroes.
Polistra's Mill 