A recipe for a strawberry cheesecake is more popular than me on Medium
and more musings on the “Cut and Paste” generation
Well my beautiful son has returned from his holiday in Wales with tall tales of Cardigan Bay, a new Harry Potter book and winning at night-time card games and all is well with the world once more: He’s here with me and back in his gaming world of chasing around radiated zombies in “Fallout” and I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor at a small coffee table akin to a badly dressed Buddha, sucking on the end of my pencil and wondering aloud why a recipe for a strawberry cheesecake is more popular than me on Medium.
Great isn’t it?
Let me paint a larger and prescient picture for you: In recent days alone I’ve released articles old and new. The brand new articles are packed full of original images taken and captured in a tiny historic town on the banks of the River Severn in central England with the oldest iron bridge in the world as a centrepiece. No generic, vacuous, boring, free to use “Unsplash” images. Real life, captured in the moment, a pictorial stroll through history of the oldest iron bridge known to man and woman surrounded by a tiny toy town and, very recently, a “World War II Weekend” full of pageantry and human beings enjoying their pastime with enthusiasm and a smile, laughs and dedicated passion.
Response on Medium?
Square root of fuck all.
I’ve also re-released a number of my older articles that have become chapters in several self-published books, ranging from the existential to the surreal, the madness of The Matrix to the maddening upside down nature of our world. Included too are very personal pieces of elongated writing on my dearly missed and dearly departed parents, loves of my life, favourite film reviews coupled with my Youtube channel and nearly every article has a sprinkling of images full of the sunshine of summers past and present. All captured by my fair hand, in the moment, a pun intended picture in time of the historic ruins of a 12th Century Augustinian Monastery or Castle or the canals, rivers and waterways that snake their individual ways through central England.
No copied and pasted rubbish copied and pasted from someone else or a chatgpt generated article that reads as though it was created by a 7 year old with blunt crayons and subsequently, boring as fuck.
Care to take a guess at the responses received on Medium?
To save you the trouble of guessing at the responses received, here’s a few examples:
“Nice written”
“Nice”
“Good Article”
“Interesting”
So far, so horribly vacuous. But here’s the rub:
Have you ever noticed how the people (I’m thinking they’re robots or bot accounts but don’t listen to me as I’m a very unreliable narrator) but have you noticed how their articles (which they DEMAND you read) are incredibly verbose (even more so than some of my lengthier pieces of writing) yet all they can be bothered with in terms of comments is just one or two words of utter emptiness? But there’s more: Have you also noticed that these articles are almost exactly the same in their construction? An opening paragraph before a numbered list because you dear reader are obviously a child and you can’t navigate your way through a simple article without it being chopped into numbered pieces.
It’s almost as though, well, it’s been copied and pasted from somewhere or they’ve asked a machine to write the article for them.
What larks!
And then there’s
“29 reasons for visiting Egypt”
“7 sure fire ways of making money with Bitcoin”
“5 tips to make money on Medium”
“10 reasons why Android phones are better than an iPhone”
All exactly the same.
All number driven headlines.
Zero originality.
Zero thought.
Zero humanity.
Just another grift.
Just another copy of a copy of a copy.
Alas it matters not what I write about or put digital pen to digital parchment, the response on Medium is always (very rare notable exceptions aside) the same. Generic, one word rubbish that has zero relation to the article. Then these people (if indeed they are human and not bot accounts) DEMAND I read their copied and pasted or machine generated rubbish and what’s more, on a completely unrelated topic to my article. I could pour my heart out on the tragic last days of my dear old Mum and how she was mistreated by the system supposedly there to take care of her, or a pithy spoiler free review of a film, strolling beside a river or canal in some summer sunshine, thoughts on watching cricket through the night or my favourite football team or perhaps some existential thoughts on life or the carnival of the bizarre that is social media and guess what reactions I receive on Medium?
Again to save you the trouble of actually guessing, the answer is next to NOTHING of any relevance to the topic of the article. Zero thoughts on the film under discussion, or the supposed freedom of speech afforded us all on Twitter, the hundreds of pictures taken and supplied here or the tangential piece of writing surrounding them. Nothing at all on cricket, the sport, the game under discussion or the wider net it now casts all around the world. I’ve written nearly 200 articles on Liverpool Football Club, one of the top 5 “brands” in world soccer (“brand” and “soccer” in one sentence — wash your mouth out with soap and water Stephen!) and not once, NOT ONCE, has anyone on Medium ever said “I’m a Liverpool fan” or “What a great game and goal from Mo Salah” or widening the net, anything OF ANY SUBSTANCE WHATSOEVER on any of the topics I write about.
EVER.
Just “nice article”, “good article” or “interesting”.
So a one minute article and recipe for a strawberry cheesecake is more popular than I am on Medium. An article posted by someone with 25 followers that has garnered thousands of likes and 10 times the amount for all of my recent articles. Combined.
Great isn’t it?
There’s obviously something rotten here and yes I’m jealous and yes I’m as bloody annoyed as you should be. Just think of the “traffic” flowing to your articles if it wasn’t for the cut and paste and chatgpt grifters who aren’t just pissing in the pool but taking a ginormous dump in the shallow end.
We’re swimming in the effluence of mediocrity, of machine driven banality, of copy and paste merchants who couldn’t think of an original article even if they went to a shop named “Get Your Original Ideas Here!”.
A recipe for a strawberry cheesecake is more popular on Medium than I am.
Hooray!
Postscript (for the leadership team at Medium)
Not that you’ll ever read this, but this is spoiling your “brand” everyone. Machine written, copied and pasted rubbish that climbs the algorithm will see readers heading for other blogging destinations. They’ll see the popular articles here for what they are: utter, vacuous garbage, and they’ll leave.
Anyone fancy a piece of strawberry cheesecake?
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.
Yeah- what Medium thinks is important differs from what its writers want it to be.