Facebook Groups and the death by mediocrity on Medium
and it’s YOUR fault for letting it happen.
Originally posted on Medium but it may give some of you a giggle here.
Or maybe it won’t.
Who knows?
Let me tell you a story
Earlier this week I posted the following article to both Medium and Substack:
Picnic Breakfast for two in Toy Town
Some Wednesday’s are better than others in The Matrix and today, hence far, has been one of those days. OK, the sun didn’t shine but the rain didn’t pour down eit…
Not particularly exciting I’ll grant you. Just a silly article about enjoying a picnic breakfast with my son in the historic town of Ironbridge by the River Severn in central England and, I’d hope you agree, I used a rather wholesome, family friendly image alongside my headline. Flowers, Bacon sandwiches (delicious), some fruit, crisps, hell even some sugary treats from the town’s “Old Fashioned Sweet Shop” (just please don’t tell my son’s Mum as she’ll give me the thousand yard death stare!). So we have a silly article containing all of this plus swans, ducks, a picture postcard toy town of historic proportions being as it is the site of the oldest iron bridge in the entire known world.
Are you with me so far?
Good.
So I posted this to those horrible fucking Facebook Groups associated with Medium and some fuckhead thought it fine and dandy to link immediately below my article with (drum roll…)
“Indian Rape Case”.
What, may I ask, does this have to do with my article on a picnic with my son sat upon the grass of a public park having fun, larking around and playing silly card and board games?
It’s a rhetorical question, but endemic of the rotting carcass that is Medium and the mediocrity that rules here and especially so within the vacuous, vermin infested Facebook Groups associated with it. Only today did someone state it was MANDATORY (and in all caps too) for me to read his article (MANDATORY!) and guess what? He’d linked to another of my silly picnic stories with his article, entitled “How to make money online”.
Yes I can see you all rolling your eyes and saying something akin to “Well, that’s the internet for you” and you’d be right and indeed wrong. You see, for good or ill, I write my articles, putting weight and thought into them, as well as including genuine photos I have taken from real life (remember that?) and not relying on boring “stock” photos. All my own work, birth to death, idea to creation.
Here’s another rhetorical question for you:
Have you ever delved into any articles such as the “case” noted above? No? OK, I’ll give you the grand tour as it won’t take long. Numbered articles. Boring. Rigid. Machine like. Boring. No deviation whatsoever from the topic. Straight forward “make money online”, “7 reasons to visit Paris”, “10 reasons to buy Bitcoin”, etc, etc, boring fucking etc. Almost as though someone else has written the article. You could almost argue that AI has written it. ChatGPT perhaps or worst of all, just copy and pasted from someone else who copy and pasted it from someone else who copy and pasted it from someone else who copy and pasted it from someone, or somewhere, else.
And therein lies the rub. With reciprocal claps and groups guaranteeing people will clap for whatever is put before them (or “clap for crap” as I call it) they scoot up the algorithms of internet death with their utter fucking dogshit and I, maybe you too, sink to the bottom of a murky pond.
Have you also noticed how these articles are so verbose, paragraph after paragraph of grammatically correct if boring prose? Amazing isn’t then that the comments they leave are so poorly worded? One would almost suggest or indeed question the veracity of who wrote the articles in the first place? Or is that one too many rhetorical questions for one article?
Medium is dying of mediocrity, but so is blogging in general and no-one will ever read this (oh they’ll PRETEND to read it just so I read their machine generated guff) and I’m a real writer and I’m fucking annoyed.
You should be too.
Anyway, wanna buy some Bitcoin?
Thanks for (pretending) to read this article. Come on, dig deep and treat yourself to some more opinionated gibberish written by a human being and first published in March of this year.
"At the end of a Storm" - link to Amazon
