It happens in fashion: what was hot and made you shine a few years ago will look hopelessly outdated now.

It happens in every industry: your old toaster, car, TV, whatever may look like it needs to be renewed, even if it still does exactly what you bought it to do; it still works as it has always done, and was always meant to do.

It happens on the Internet: certain websites become popular, and then, a few years later, they die out and may end up closing completely.

It happens all around us, because we – the humans – are in constant movement. It may be movement on the spot, when seen from the outside – I imagine that aliens visiting us in their UFOs with some years in between may not notice such a big difference as we, ourselves, think that is there – but we can’t see it from the outside, and from the middle of it, we feel that the world is moving fast forward.

It leaves a lot of clothes behind. It still works but is no longer being use. And a lot of toasters, cars, etc., are scrapped and melted into new ones, or are simply dumped into a still unoccupied hole in the ground somewhere, for future archeologists to enjoy finding.

Books, of course, are abandoned by the millions: a few years ago, everybody had a bookshelf, with books in it. Now, almost nobody has that – so what happened to the books? Probably they circle around a bit, from the attics to the garage, to the dumpster. But they are not being read anymore, if they ever were, and now they end up being burned or used as landfill.

What is more interesting, however, is what happens to the lost projects on the Internet.

The net is so old now, that many websites have been made by people who are no longer with us on this planet, and some of those sites still exist. Sometimes they are taken over by others, so the sites are still alive, but often, the sites die with the owners.

When a website dies, it may be in a place that keeps it up. That’s what basically happens to our social media pages, that contain so much valuable information (for the social media companies, that is), so they will be reluctant to delete it. But also the relatives of the deceased profile owners may want to keep it running, as a memory.

Other kinds of websites may be closed and deleted when the paid-for period is running out, but if it is in a place where webpages can be had for free, it may just stay there.

And then there is a special case. Maybe nobody died, actually, but they just ran out of enthusiasm.

I have seen that a lot the last few days, where I have been combing the Internet for Esperanto pages, as part of making my new Substack about Esperanto – finding out that many of them were enthusiastically maintained during a period, only to be left behind at some point in time, so that they are now still there, still owned by the local Esperanto club, for instance, but nothing has happened there since 2016, or 1994, or whatever.

At times, the front page is being updated, but a lot of what is behind is getting older and older, and is, for instance announcing upcoming events that actually took place many years ago, or linking to other sites that have long ceased to exist.

Having made many websites myself throughout my life, I fully understand what is going on.

Sometimes, you get fascinated by a topic, want to tell the world about it, and you do it, see some interest, feel motivated to do more – and then, after some years of spending a lot of your life on this, you are dragged away from it. You may get married, get a new job, run into a technical problem with the web hosting provider – losing your login, being unable to upgrade to more megabytes, or whatever it could be. And while the site updates are laying low, the readers disappear.

That by itself may be completely demotivating, so you decide to just leave tha page behind, but even if you try getting it up and running again, you may not be able to attract the old readers, or any new ones, so you give up.

Organizations are popping up now and then, especially when there’s a wave of something in fashion, and they work enthusiastically with a lot of things, but gradually, they will drop out – for millions of reasons, and sooner or later, the rest of them decide that it is not the same as it was, so they stop. But for old times sake, they keep the website running. Maybe some others will appear, who are interested in taking over?

Youth departments of organizations are driven by people who become too old to be in the youth department, but the new youth isn’t interested in the topic in the same way, to the same extent, so they don’t want to maintain the website.

This has happened during about 50 years now. Every day something is started enthusiastically, and every days something is left behind.

So, the world is now full of abandoned websites, and dead links to websites that were even closed down completely. Many web apps, that could do something on the screen for you, no longer work, because the technology they used, be it Flash or Java Applets, or anything else, simply isn’t supported by modern web browsers.

Now, we have a huge consumption of energy and “rare earth minerals” and other stuff to keep the Internet up and running. All this abandoned enthusiasm on the Internet isn’t exactly contributing to minimize the consumption of that.

Also – we all keep getting confused when finding a website and then only after spending several minutes there notice, that it was last updated 20 years ago, and nothing there is still valid. Names, addresses, even books or other things for sale – nothing works anymore.

So, while the old clothes get burned, the old toasters get melted into new ones – what will ever happen to old websites? Or will they keep accumulating forever, until there’s more abandoned stuff on the net than active?

Will the Internet drown in memories?

A recent study showed how 50% of people in the USA get their news from TV, with a smaller percentage from social media and other news media, respectively. In other countries, the share was different, with the Scandinavian countries significantly different: about 15% from TV and 50% from social media.

As some will know, I feel that Substack Notes works badly, as it allows for some people and posts to thrive, while others are ignored completely. There are, occasionally, some of the non-thriving people who complain, and at even rarer occasions their complaints are being heard and answered by others with a “just keep on, sooner or later your posts will be read by some” – which then comes true for some of them, but not for all.

When Substack was first established, only people from the USA were invited to take part in it. Later, when the Americans had established a functioning culture on the platform, with their idols and paid VIP participants who could lead the way forward, while the other participants were watching, other parts of the world were accepted in waves. Some would have their own language implemented on the platform, allowing for them to build up a parallel culture, completely out of sync with the English-language one, while others had to subscribe to the English version, which, as mentioned, was already established.

Entering into an established culture isn’t easy. You may have noticed how many companies, when hiring, are requiring the new hires to be “a good fit” for the existing company culture. It is never expected that the culture will take in what the new people can bring, adjusting to give room to all of it – no, the new ones just have to fit in from the start. It is even a specific discipline in the Human Resource sphere (now often called something like Humans and Culture, but still being the same thing) – methods and mechanisms, and tests, that can determine if you fit in. Most don’t, so it is a brutal sorting mechanism. The older the company, the worse.

Entering into an established social media culture is similar, and I will, a bit harsh, claim that most newcomers do not fit in. The existing people there will not want to take in what the newcomers can bring, they will instead feel that if the new ones behave exactly like the existing, then they may be allowed to be there – but they will not be allowed to shake the bag or rock the boat in any way; just to silently slip into the mass of anonymous watchers, who can admire the established idols and paid VIPs.

For Americans, this is natural. They are, apparently, used to just watching the TV, not participating actively, and they do not understand at all why people from other countries might want to be heard – why can’t they just read the posts from the VIPs, like everybody else?

Americans find it annoying when anybody speaks up to suggest a more open and inclusive way of using the social medium, and with the new mechanisms for blocking people at hand, it is easy to get back to status quo after such an interruption of the peaceful and uneventful existence on the platform – just block the noise, just rule out the attempts to create room for the newcomers.

This is then enforced by the different topics, the newcomers want to talk about. In the cultural sphere, there are very many things that are, by large, unknown to Americans – if it isn’t promoted by American companies, it doesn’t exist. The fact that the world is 20 times bigger than the USA doesn’t seem to have much influence on an American’s curiosity. Actually, they prefer to block everything that isn’t American.

Foreign languages? Block. Unknown musicians? Block. History? Block. Science and rational thinking? Block.

The American unparticipating TV culture leads to non-participation in other aspects of life as well, and to building a wall around the Americans that keeps anything else out.

Substack is dominated by Americans. They were here first, they own the place, they decide what fits in, and they don’t want their boat rocked.

But all of this may be a bit strange to read for the one who knows how engaged Americans can be: I mean, TV shows like Oprah Winfield and Dr. Phil displays how enthusiastically participating the audience is. People are not just watching, they are shouting, standing up at times, having a fight in between each other, and much more of that. It may be theater, of course, but if it would be completely unrecognizable for the TV audience, they probably wouldn’t accept it as real.

On the other hand, the USA is also the land of show wrestling. A parody of a sport, where nothing is real or genuine. Which counts for boxing as well, mostly fixed games there, I could probably include politics as well, American brands which are in reality from China, and many other aspects of the American society. All fake.

Americans don’t want real. They don’t want genuine. They want to watch. And what they watch should express the emotions and the level of action they don’t have themselves. It reminds them about how great everything is, even if it is only on TV. They also don’t want anyone to question if this is good. Of course it is! It is the national standard culture, the one we watch every day, have watched all our lives, and hope to grow old watching, they think.

So, they want everybody on their platform, Substack, to obey to that simple principle of not introducing anything real, not to interfere when the VIPs are talking, not to expect anything, not to question anything, and not to introduce anything new.

Stability!

So, we from Scandinavia, who get 15% of our news from the TV, and I guess an even smaller percentage of our lives in general, we do not fit in. We will not be let in, because our expectations are different, and hence, we are not wanted. We can still watch, the most generous Americans think, but we shouldn’t disturb them in enjoying their culture.

Why is this behavior self-destructive?

Because it stops development, making it impossible to adapt to changed conditions, and therefore allows for events and external developments to overrun these people, take them by storm. There will be no resistance, as it is more interesting for the Americans to just watch it all on TV, without taking part in it.

Their potential wish for action will be saturated by watching those, fake, actions being taken by others, on that same TV. It’s all one big Oprah Winfield show for them, which they enjoy while the world is on fire.

Enclosing themselves around a stable definition of what their culture is, will allow for the sand to gradually float in and stop the traffic to the harbor, eventually ending all inflow of any new inspiration.

Social media is not a new invention for the Americans: it is a continuation, on a new platform, of an old paradigm, the passive watcher of news and other entertainment.

They will not be able to separate true from false, and indeed, they will not even care, because it is more important for them to be part of the official truth, even if it is fake. They live in a lie, thereby becoming unable to react correctly, even if they should one day decide to actually do something, because they have no idea what the real world looks like.

They will be fighting windmills, at best.

Do you agree?

That old car cannot continue to carry more weight.

The Internet was a great idea with room for expansion built-in — but social media wasn’t, not when all the developments it has seen since its invention are considered.

Maybe you have, like me, felt how the news aren’t reliable? And I don’t mean whether you can trust what they say, because that’s already a big topic (with a serious tendency to news being untrustworthy in the way they describe things) – no, I’m talking about news being there or not, when you would have expected them. If they “show up” as promised.

The last few days, there has been a remarkable lack of news about some of the big things going on in the world. There were just small notes about the situation in Ukraine, a very limited coverage of the new war between Israel and Iran, and a very sparse coverage of the mass-protests in the USA (“No Kings”), and even, surprisingly, no live coverage and hardly even a mention in various news media of the self-pronounced king’s military parade in the USA.

It is hard to tell what has happened. Recently, some news websites have been hacked and blocked by internet attacks, and perhaps also the news distribution nets behind them have been exposed to such things? If no news is coming in, no news is being told. Of course, the journalists know that things are happening, but they cannot tell about them if they have no pictures and no interviews with key people.

Also, it could be that some of the news by dictate from government institutions of various kinds have been muted.

Whatever the reason, news was absent or bleak.

In such a situation, you would want to rely on your direct network, getting information from people you know around the world and to whom you are connected – through social media. But here’s the thing: social media was just as silent as the news media.

Posts were posted, comments were made, and advertising was poured out all over the social media, as usual, but there was no mention of the events of the world.

Again, this could be a matter of various organizations intervening, or the platforms themselves censoring the posts, which does happen normally and for some reason could have been intensified these days. Or it could be a matter of social media simply having died, quietly, being strangled by the increasingly heavy commercialization and control of the contents by the owners of the platforms.

This meant, as a strange thing, that I could look for information about the lacking news on, for instance, Substack Notes, and find nothing. Only some generic posts about the difference between good people and bad people in the USA, as always, and an increased amount of empty feel-good stuff, that didn’t tell about anything in particular and were of a “timeless” nature where you couldn’t determine when it was written or posted, if it wasn’t for its date-stamp.

Social media has run for too long now to be offering anything useful, as it has been grabbed by commercialism and self-promotion and has stopped being an exchange of thoughts between real, feeling and thinking, people.

So, is this the end?

Yes, in one way. There is nothing to come for if you are seeking genuine connections and free speech, because such things are close to extinct by now on most platforms, only popping up as a rare post that is then even being largely ignored.

And no, in the sense that this non-informative environment of exchanging platitudes and fabricated thoughts and influencing comments will live long, since there is nothing else to take over, so it can be allowed to just slowly fade out.

I have mentioned before how we often don’t have a real alternative when seeking social connection, as the old forms have largely died out:

• You don’t, in many parts of the world, go for a walk in the city and find some of your friends sitting with a cup of coffee at the corner café nearby, to sit down with and enjoy a chat, before you move on and find some more friends and acquaintances to exchange a few words and smiles with.

• You don’t decide to write a letter to the people you know, who are further away and can’t be stumbled upon at the café, but who you want to stay connected with anyway.

• And you don’t get a call now and then from old friends who heard some news from your area and wanted to check if you were okay and if it affected you.

What you have left, as the first, last, and only way of staying in touch, is often the social media. And even if these are defunct, you will keep trying to get something useful out of them. You will read (doomscroll) through all the crap in the hope of finding something that can enlighten you or cheer you up, perhaps even make you feel that you are part of something, not just a leftover from the lost Internet revolution, the attempt to make the electronic world become alive and full of real, open talk.

It is there, but it isn’t social media. It is media, that’s true, but it isn’t social.

Social would imply a feeling of being a human amongst other humans when using it, and that feeling is hard to find now.

Today, on Notes, I saw one genuine little post by someone who felt some actual human feelings and also felt that she had to almost excuse the mentioning of them. Better than a censored ad, that’s for sure, but why is it necessary to excuse being human?

And that is where I feel that the social media concept has finally died, reached its end-of-life, probably to be schematically supported during a period after this, but heading towards its final day, when it will be switched off and forgotten.

It is not nice to look at what is going on at Medium these days.

I know, I’ve left the platform, but I still check the new posts there now and then. And some of these have appeared here on Substack as well.

What happened, if you didn’t notice it already, is that Medium apparently has made adjustments to their algorithm in order to get rid of some of the spammers and scammers that they see increase on the platform.

However, most of the ordinary writers have been directly hit, seeing lower engagement rates in terms of views, reads, claps, and comments, and what worries most of them more: they earn close to no money on their articles now.

People went from earning several dollars, or even tens or hundreds of dollars on each article, to now earning cents. They show examples of how even well-visited articles with many readers still earned them 3 cents.

It is of course a sad situation for everybody there — disruption isn’t nice, and we can expect many of them to move over to Substack, just like it has happened before. I, myself, had long planned to set up “a substack”, long before I left Medium, but since things began getting bad for me there a while ago, my old plans were brushed up and effectuated.

I am happy that I made that choice. I never earned a lot on Medium, but there was an increasing earnings curve, until there wasn’t. When I quit the Friends of Medium (FoM) program, I sort of lost all readers, and all earnings. This happened to collided with the time of Medium opening their commercial doors for 1751 new countries, so it may not have been because of the FoM exit — it could have a stronger connection with many new people wishing to earn money.

Whatever happened back then is the past now, I don’t think much of it any longer.

What I do think about is how people see these platforms, and how they react to changes.

Medium has been in a death-spiral for a long while. Every now and then, some changes are introduced that effectively leads to their most earning members earning less, and some of those then decide to leave the platform. This seems to have worked its way down the hierarchy, so that smaller and smaller accounts were hit by each new change. This time, it hit everybody.

Every single account making money there, now makes less.

And what happens each time?

The biggest earners bark the loudest about their losses. Maybe that is natural, since they are losing the most, but it reveals how everything they do there is tied to the earnings. With reduced earnings, they feel personally attacked by the platform, and they start looking for a new platform that will treat them better.

Substack isn’t much different. The discussions here are not about the platform ruining their earnings, but there is a lot of talking going on on Notes about which kinds of contents fit in, and which other kinds not.

Another popular topic on Notes has a dualistic nature: On one side, people try to convince others that they can teach them how to gain more paying subscribers; how to earn money, in other words. On the other side, there are people complaining about this kind of posts and activities, as these people would rather see discussions about the written, not so much about the earnings.

What very many writers/members on both Medium and Substack have in common, is, hence, an interest in how to earn money on the platform, and how to increase the earnings.

There is an old saying about “when the money goes in, the friendship goes out”, and I believe that it counts for social media too. The money may be what the platform owners earn, or want to earn, or it may be what the users potentially or really earn.

The money, and all the talking about it, steals the attention and makes people think about all kinds of tips and tricks for earning more, rather than about enjoying their time here, or writing better texts.

Medium is, as I see it, in serious trouble right now. Not because they are about to lose all their users — such a thing will take some time, and not because they now again have managed to scare away another bunch of their better earning users.

The trouble for Medium is in the reputation they have built for themselves: That they used to be a place where you could earn money on writing, but now it isn’t anymore.

How are they going to attract new users? What should convince people that there is a good reason for joining that platform?

If it had been only about the money, then it may still have worked, but there is another part of the reputation, saying that Medium is now full of spammers, scammers, and AI-written contents. This, along with readers having left, somehow, and everyone getting a lot of attention only gets it from bots.

While Medium still has many users who can talk friendly to each other in the comments, that part seems to be in decline as well — the horses start biting when they are running out of food.

What the reputation said previously was basically the opposite, that you could find great writing there, as well as a “built-in audience”. So, anybody, even those who were not already active online, could start writing, see some comments and appreciation for whatever they did, and they could develop their skills and build up an audience of their own. At the same time, they could take part in a big and friendly community, where everybody was there to help and share.

As I see it, Medium has killed off all attractive elements there once were on the platform.

Substack is spoken about by its users in much more positive terms, and the reputation among all other people who have heard of the place but are not users yet, is at a much more positive level.

There are some negative stories about Substack refusing to demote Nazi contents and other bad things, but it doesn’t take up a lot of space in the media in general.

So, Substack still has tailwind and can keep growing, people using it can stay happy.

Until… I think it is expectable that Substack will think out various changes and additions to the platform, that can help them earn money on it. I don’t know yet what that could be, but it is likely that it can cause some of the users to become less happy than they are now.

Over some years, Substack may develop a similar track record as Medium by changing things over and again, each time making it less easy to earn money here.

My take on the situation with Medium is that Substack must pay attention to growing some values for the users that are not about earning money. So far, this is not what they have done.

It has from the start been clear that users should be attracted to Substack by the knowledge that some other users (the initially invited celebrities) could earn millions here. After a while, it will become clear to more and more people that they cannot repeat this trick – the number of millionaires on this platform will not continue growing. Instead, like with Medium, the investors will start demanding from the management that Substack will start earning money. And the management will willingly obey, since they will get shares or more millions as bonuses, if they deliver this.

I am not sure what else than money could be the attraction. The point is, if users are not earning money, then Substack will not earn any either. So, focusing on the social aspects, better promotion on the rest of the Internet of your writing, etc., would probably lead to a need to pay for being a user. Or, alternatively, have an A-team and a B-team, where the first one earns money, the other one either pays or gets it all for free, since giving back some of the earned to this group will help keeping things running.

The money aspect is not possible to avoid completely, but as others have suggested, it can be problematic to continue with a model that requires readers to subscribe to individual substacks at a rate of minimum $5 for each. This price level means that most people can subscribe payingly to a few substacks only, but we all subscribe to dozens or hundreds, and, hence, many substacks will have to provide contents for free.

A model similar to the one at Medium, where those who pay, can earn, those who are here for free, cannot, could be a way forward. And a way of bundling or pooling subscriptions could also be a way forward.

Whatever will happen with the money, I just hope that it will not become like on Medium, where the perceived benefits of being a user once per year will be reduced, so that there will be an increasingly bad mood hanging over the platform.

It is better to aim for a model that regularly can add something positive to the experience.

Wait a minute!, you may say — why am I suddenly writing an article about a specific business of an Internet coach?

Because I’m not!

You see, the world really is full of Internet coaches, and they all have their communities of one or another kind, which is good. The people who engage with such a community will often feel heard, helped, and happy.

The coach has some kind of background knowledge to share with their followers, the community members, and, additionally, they spend some time and energy on being there for the members, doing something that can help the members structure their efforts towards whatever the community is about, which is often covering all of people’s needs.

The community is the people in it, not the coach. While the coach may be facilitating it, the community itself consists of all the relations and mutual activities between the members. And the very feeling of belonging.

I have written about communities before, and I think it should be clear that I am not against those. See, for instance, this article:

Because of the many coaches who want you to pay for being part of the communities, it can easily look like there is always just a strict business plan behind any of these.

There often is, and it is often mainly about making money. But sometimes, you’ll run into a concept that isn’t (only) about that.

It may take some time to develop, some efforts in various directions and an analysis of their effects, to see for the founder what this can become. Maybe it was meant to become another income stream, or maybe it was meant to display some skills that could then be promoted elsewhere.

But along the way, the community gets its own life. Because the bonds between the members grow tighter, and because the members sometimes behave differently than the community founder had imagined. Some offerings and services are more appreciated than others, and something quite mundane often becomes the main attraction — such as a chat forum or a list of contact information.

What seems to be most likely to survive from the palette of services, are the facilities that help establish a connection when people need each other. In other words, a platform that can offer help and assistance, undisturbed, away from the buzz of a typical social medium.

That’s what a good community mainly consists of. Not so much the fact that the coach spend time on each member and share wisdom and advice, and not so much the provided templates, courses, and other useful tools, even though such features are valuable too.

The members feel that they can help each other, because they have something in common. For every community, this can be something different. Often it will be the wish to become successful and “grow your Substack”, but there can be some more profound commonalities, such as for the Multilingual Writers’ Community (MWC), where the glue consists of — multilingualism.

Every person on this globe who wants to become a successful writer will need to write well. How that is defined vary, but in the age of the Internet, writing is very often to be done in English. Anyone who doesn’t have English as their native language will feel like an outsider, or outright be treated like an outsider, in many different contexts.

At times, being an outsider is an advantage, such as when an actor has an exotic accent — think about Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sophia Loren — and this somehow adds to their popularity. But at other times, less so. Many of us have experienced a somehow discriminatory behavior from, e.g., editors or the panel of a writing competition, because they couldn’t see beyond the knowledge that this was a non-native writer, no matter how good the writing actually was, thereby missing the gems that this particular piece of writing may have held.

So, in this community, members have this together. But otherwise, they are all kinds of people, with many different skills, different positions in society, different jobs, different backgrounds, and different problems.

The interesting thing is that when first people feel tied together by something, they are more inclined to offer their assistance to each other. Like, “okay, you are also multilingual, so I’ll help you with your bookkeeping” — or maybe less outspoken, maybe smaller bits of help, but still. The assistance we offer each other isn’t just about the commonality that brought us together, it can be anything.

I wonder how many multilingual writers exist in this world? And, in particular, such who need or want to write in English, which is not their first language?

According to Wikipedia, there are up to about 2 billion people who can speak English, of which about 400 million have English as their first language. Corresponding to about 25% and 5%, respectively, of the Earth’s population.

The 1.6 billion people who speak English, but as a second language, are all potential members of the Multilingual Writers’ Community :) That is, if they are professional writers.

The share of professional writers can be difficult to calculate, since people may write as a profession in itself or as part of another profession. Many jobs require an employee to write something, and if this is a significant activity, requiring good skill in writing in English, then they are in effect professional, multilingual English writers — and potential members of the community.

By the way, it’s interesting to consider, given these numbers, if, perhaps, the number of highly skilled non-native English writers could be higher than the number of native English writers? Certainly, the non-natives will have to spend more energy on adding that second language (and for some it’s even the third, or fourth, or…) to their resume. The non-natives also spend a solid amount of time during their lives on comparing expressions between different languages, and they pay attention to cultural differences. All of this simply because they have to, but it adds to their skills.

All members of the MWC are highly skilled in English, and some of them are as fluent in all aspects of English as a native. So it is not so much about language skills, except that we have to prove our skills more often than natives — and having that extra level of command that can come from additional training, on top of already good skills, may be exactly what it takes for us to get accepted when writing in English.

I believe that people will seek the communities where they feel that they belong, when social media continues their development towards doomscrolling platforms without any real social interaction.

We do need social interactions, and that counts for almost every person alive. We do not have the same needs, though, and very many people find it intimidating to publish their thoughts in a forum where billions of strangers may see it or ignore it, may think anything about it.

It is more safe and more life-confirming to publish in a smaller forum with people who share something with you already, with whom you can feel connected — a dedicated community. There, you can be yourself without fearing anything, because there is a friendly atmosphere and the others understand you and want to show it, being affirmative and supportive.

This particular community was founded by and was, initially, for paying members.

Now, Phil has decided to make it free for everybody! That is, instead of a payment there is a requirement to qualify for it, so that not just anybody can become a member. The qualification is as simple as answering a few questions, and then Phil can take a look and see if the aspirant seems to fit in.

The point of a qualification is that it would otherwise be too easy for large amounts of spammers and scammers to enter, which has been seen in other communities, and this usually ruins them.

If you are not a multilingual writer, you may seek a community that circles around a different topic. You may be a Star Trek fan, or a collector of coins. For such major areas of interest, there are no doubt a plethora of communities to choose from. But of course, you may be more special, having less common interests, a less common background — which could speak for becoming part of a community of people more like you.

I am not sure which other communities exist, but there may be one for you, or, otherwise, this could be the time for you to start one.

It should be appropriate, based on my own life experiences, to suggest that you will look in the same direction as Phil has done, trying to find something that can sort people — in the good way — so that the community will consist of people who can find that common ground they need, and so that the community will not be flooded by people with little interest in the topic, who perhaps are there with a hidden agenda.

A membership fee usually works but can be problematic for those with a limited economy, and it also requires some administrative work, so the application process with qualification could be a good alternative.

Good luck if you go that way! You will most likely enjoy it.

All of this is my own words, my own thoughts and feelings, just to inspire you.

I may want to try digging a bit in the community world, to write more articles about the phenomenon, so please feel free to mention any of these that you know of, and your experience from the area.

You can find the Multilingual Writers’ Community here:

https://englishwritingcoach.app.clientclub.net/communities/groups/multilingual-writers-community/home

It had another entry point previously, but that link is not in use anymore:

https://englishwritingcoach.uk/mwcommunity

Social relations can be rather complex, but there seems to be some simple rules that often apply.

One of these is: blame the one who cannot defend himself, rather than the one who’s guilty. The stronger, more powerful, often get free of charges when someone else is blamed instead.

I have experienced this many times in my life, and seen it around as well. I suppose we all have. We all understand how unfair people can treat each other, simply because it is the easiest.

Three stories

These are true stories from my life. As always, when talking about “truth”, everybody involved will make up their own. This is partly due to having experienced different things, thereby not knowing all the same details, but it is also by choice: the preferred truth is selected and remembered.

1. Play with fire

I was visiting my classmate from school, Michael. We were not very old, maybe 10 years, and he lived in the same town but in the other end, more or less, so I went there by bicycle.

Well, he was home alone, almost — his mother was there but was about to leave. Michael had been playing at the kitchen table with some modelling wax, and it was lying there in bigger and smaller pieces. I suppose it was winter, since there was a candlelight on the table as well, which would be a natural thing during the dark time of the year. The mother left but reminded us to not forget to blow out the candle if we would go anywhere.

We were sitting there, at the kitchen table, and Michael decided to put a match into the fire, burning the match this way. For a 10-year-old, this is presumed to be fun, so I also did that. He did another one, and I thought that I would expand the game a bit, so I took a small piece of modelling wax and held it over the flame.

I had thought it would burn, but it didn’t, there were just some drops of melted wax dripping down on the candle, which probably made Michael think about what his mother would say when she saw it, or maybe he was afraid that we would somehow end up ruining the table, so he said that we should go out in the garden and continue there. He took the candle and went out, and I followed.

We had put a couple of other small things on top of the candle and were already getting tired of that game, but then came a couple of other schoolmates, Frank and Flemming. They found us in the garden, saw the candle, and then they also wanted to play with it. I think we told them that we were about to stop, but especially Flemming wasn’t a boy you could tell such things. He could be quite brutal and would in general get his will, so it continued. I had lost interest and stepped away a few steps, and Frank also looked nervous — Frank was in general easy to scare and maybe not as developed as the rest of us, mentally, so he would often stay a few steps away from everything.

Suddenly, Flemming went into a macho-mood of some kind and said to Michael that “I certainly dare to stand next to the candle while you pour ethanol over it”.

Michael was himself a rather tough guy, so he eventually took the “challenge”, even though he hesitated a bit. I tried, on the other hand, to talk them out of it, told them that it was stupid and too dangerous, but that just seemed to inspire both of them to move on with it, so Michael went into the house to get a bottle of ethanol.1

Frank was scared to death, almost, started crying and ran to the furthest corner of that yard we we were in. The garden was arranged like that, rather small and with the house on two sides, an adjacent house on the third, and a tall fence on the fourth. As the door into the house was effectively blocked by Michael and Flemming, another door was locked, Frank couldn’t run away completely, otherwise he would have done so. I stepped even further away but felt that I had to try to convince them not to proceed with the madness, which, of course, they didn’t listen to — after all, Michael and Flemming were the tough ones, those who not long ago had threatened me with a gun to do shoplifting for them.2

Michael came back with the inflammable liquid, took off the lid of the bottle and held the bottle a bit tilted over the candle, which stood in its candle stick holder, placed on the ground. Michael tried to make it look somewhat ceremonial, while Flemming looked like he was the toughest boy on Earth. I again said “don’t do it”, and they told me to shut up. Frank was crying loud, trying to become one with the remote corner he was hiding in.

Suddenly, some drops spilled out of the bottle, causing big flames to flare and hit Michael’s hand — his reflections worked fast, causing him to drop the bottle and retract the hand, which then caused the bottle to tilt over and a lot of ethanol pouring out of it — out over Flemming’s leg. Standing next to the flames meant that Flemming then started burning.

We were all shocked, but Flemming was then also in pain, and before any of us could do anything to help him, he started running around in the yard, screaming. I don’t remember for how long he ran around, and how we managed to stop the fire, but I do remember how he was squatting next to the wall, looking very scared, and crying. He was in great pain but also completely shocked.

Frank was not present in this world, being as frightened as any child can be, just squeezing himself against his corner, but Michael and I tried to find some calm and reason and wanted to call Flemming’s father. This was what we children did, when something was out of our control — we involved someone’s parents. Flemming lived in a big house, alone with his father. It was indeed a very big house, much more fancy than any of the rest of us lived in, and I guess his father was a successful businessman. There was no mother, so maybe they were divorced.

But Flemming went very angry and threatened us with all kinds of bad things if we would tell his father. In fact, we were not to tell nobody what had happened, or else…

Then Flemming left on his bicycle, still crying, on his way to the after-school centre, where he was expected to be already.

Frank also disappeared, and it was again Michael and me there, in the garden. As far as I remember, we removed the candle and then I went home.

Next day, in school, our teacher wanted to talk to us. Not friendly at all, she was going to tell us how terrible we were. Michael and me, that was. I don’t think that Frank was yelled at, but Michael and I definitely were. When Flemming had arrived at the after-school centre, they had immediately sent him to the emergency room with an ambulance, and he had apparently explained a version of the story that made Michael and I the bad guys.

The teacher didn’t care at all what we had to say, and when I tried to explain that I had tried to stop it, so it wasn’t me who was guilty of anything, I was just told to shut up.

It took several months, as far as I remember, before Flemming was more or less back to normal, but he had got a severe wound from the fire, all over the lower part of one leg. Flemming’s father called my parents to tell that I was not allowed to play with Flemming any more.

So, somehow, both our teacher and Flemming’s father had found comfort in blaming me for the mess. Michael was probably also blamed, but he was already considered a bad guy (for obvious reasons, I would say, considering the story with the gun). Frank somehow was considered too weak to be guilty in anything. Fair enough, as he definitely wasn’t guilty, but neither was I.

2. Helping our teacher

I was in high school (upper secondary school), and even though I was on the mathematical nature science line, I was required to also study a foreign language. The school was rather small and could offer only French, so, I was in the French class.

Our teacher was somewhat fragile. A woman in her midlife, clearly nervous for speaking to a group, which of course was problematic for a teacher, but she also had some more serious problems. It was clear to me, and other students saw the same thing. I tried to speak kindly to her, making her feel that at least I was not an enemy, no matter how she may look at life.

We behaved in general nicely towards her, but life was definitely tough for her to go through, and one day, she broke down in the middle of a lesson, just sitting there at her desk, crying.

We students were 16–17 years old, she was supposed to be the adult one who could fix all problems, so we didn’t do anything on the spot to help her. As far as I remember, she then left the room, and we stayed until the scheduled time had passed, without knowing if she would come back.

Some of us, though, got together and talked about what to do. She clearly needed help, we found, but we had no idea about what and how, so we went to the school master to talk to him. He was an old man, seemingly wise and friendly; such one who liked to tell us stories about how he became a teacher, and how he started the school, etc., and we trusted him to know enough about life to be able to help with this. Also, she was his employee, so he had a natural duty to do something, we thought.

He was surprisingly cold. He couldn’t do anything, he said, unless we wrote him a letter with all our signatures on it, telling him that our teacher had a problem, and we wanted him to do something about it.

So we did. Disappointed that he wouldn’t take the task on him immediately, but we were eager to help our teacher, so we wrote such a letter, went around to all the students of the class for their signatures, and we were happy to give it to the school master later that day.

Next day, the door to our class room was abruptly opened, and there, in the doorway, stood our French-teacher with a wild expression in her face. “What have you done?”, she shouted. “ This letter…!”, and she was waving with our letter. And then she looked directly at me with what looked like hatred in her eyes: “And you too?!”

She left, and we never saw her again. We never got an explanation from the school master either, even though we went to him to hear what had been going on. But, obviously, he had fired her, and he had used us as a vehicle to make that happen.

I have never heard from her since, but I can still feel those hateful eyes blaming me for having her fired. And all I wanted to do was to help her.

3. The car fun

At the end of the high school years, we were a group of students who were partying, and along the way were going from one place to another, and we were passing a parking lot — where our biology teacher’s car was parked. It was Michael (another one, not the one from my childhood) who knew that this was his car, and Michael was somewhat drunk, so it was apparently easy for him to decide that we should make some fun with it.

This was in Denmark, and there beer came in glass bottles; these were again put in some rather solid plastic crates. Michael decided that we should lift up the car and place it on such beer crates, because, as Michael imagined, then the teacher would get into the car, start it, and become surprised that it wasn’t going anywhere (as the wheels wouldn’t be touching the ground).

Rational me, who wasn’t drunk, tried to explain to Michael that it was a stupid idea for many reasons, but mostly because it wouldn’t work. First of all, such a beer crate may be strong, but a car would weigh, how much, a ton? It would squeeze the crate flat, rather than be lifted by it. And even if that wouldn’t happen, the teacher would definitely notice that the car was a foot higher than normal, so he wouldn’t try to start it, wouldn’t get surprised, just annoyed and angry.

The logic didn’t catch, and a flock of others joined Michael in the activity. I stood nearby, trying again to talk them out of it, but having no luck in that direction.

What happened was, of course quite predictable. A car is heavy, and these maybe five people couldn’t lift it, however, they managed to tilt it a bit and squeeze in the crate, but when the lowered the car, the crate was indeed squeezed flat, as I had predicted, but someone also got something stuck (an arm or a leg, I don’t remember), so I stepped in, helping to lift the car a bit, this way trying to rescue my fellow student.

The arm or leg was rescued, the crate came out again, and then we saw it: a big dent in the car. Apparently, Michael had been so eager to push and lift, that he had pressed his full body weight against the car, which its thin steel couldn’t survive.

Next day, there was no way out of going to the teacher to explain what had happened, and to arrange whatever would be needed to have his car fixed.

We all went there, both those who had done it, and those who had just been in the flock. It made sense, because young people believe that a flock is a flock is a flock. We were in this together, somehow, and we would stand up for each other, bidding in with all we had seen, all we knew, to have this settled well.

What happend was then that the biology teacher saw me, for whatever reason, looked with a hatefull view in his eyes at me and said: “And you also took part in this?!”

Obviously that was somehow either confirming or surprising to him, and my attempt to explain that I was there but I didn’t do it, wasn’t listened to. I never got any kind look from that guy again, as he had apparently decided that it was me who had ruined his car.

Lessons learned

These are not the only stories from my life where people who were supposed to know better, who had some kind of power over me and others, failed in seeing the situation with open eyes. They decided which truth they wanted to believe in, and they didn’t give the accused any fair chance to defend himself.

Some of my schoolmates and fellow students would never be blamed for anything, as this would only cause trouble. Being a simple school teacher didn’t allow for putting oneself up against one of the rich people’s children, and if these people where strong and successful, their children would in any case automatically be free of all charges — the teacher probably honestly believed that such a rich boy couldn’t be guilty in anything, so it had to be someone else, and the usual suspects were then blamed.

Actually, it happened at school also once where I and a couple of other boys hadn’t even been in the class at the time where some trouble had been happening there. At that occasion, a lot of yelling was done at us, a lot of blaming, etc., as usual, but somehow, as a rare exception, I managed to tell that we had not even been there, so it definitely wasn’t us. And what happened then? They kept yelling, because, as the head master said: “But it would have been you, if you had been there”.

This was too easy. Instead of moving on in their investigations, or even beginning to doubt what some others had told them, they just decided to blame those who were the easiest to blame.

The two teachers at highschool both decided something out of their view on the world situation, and they didn’t bother to check if they were right. They didn’t give an opening for explanation. As for my French-teacher, she is excused, as she was in a terrible situation, and I can only feel sorry for her. But maybe, if it hadn’t been customary to simple move to conclusions, maybe she would, even in that situation, have been able to get to an understanding that she didn’t look at a bunch of enemies when opening the door to our classroom, but rather to a group of friends who had attempted to help her.

Social relations are often in the way of reason. We do not approach each other in a way that makes sense, if we see differences in status or experience. We also do not expect others to have more thoughts than we assume must have been behind what we see in the act. As we cannot know what others think, we often assume that they don’t think at all.

But there is so much we don’t know about each other. Always. So much we could talk about to become wiser. So much we could learn from each other that would strengthen our bonds rather than breaking them.

There is a lot of blaming in this world. It is often wrong, often the wrong people being blamed, and often wrong in general to blame anyone, because much of what happens isn’t really anyones fault, it just happens as a result of the circumstances.

Much better than blaming is dialogue, with the purpose of finding solutions.

When algorithms entered the life of the common man or woman, until then untouched by the magic spells of the programmers — until then just using a service that was easily predictable, like a telephone or a food processor — well, when that happened, they lost all control.

Suddenly, they didn’t see their friends on social media, instead they saw other people — strangers — and they were not heard themselves by their friends, even though they kept posting.

“Gaming the algorithm” became a thing, until then a fantasy of cyberpunk writers who saw a future where people had to live in a fictitious world that, at the same time, was made very real in that we all decided to live in it.

Social media.

If you don’t control your life, someone else does. The times are gone where we would attribute all events to the will of a master, a dominant spouse, fate, or a god. Now, our lives are controlled by algorithms.

But there is a catch. You can twist the algorithm. And it works more or less the same as praying to a god, in that you cannot know if the algorithm will listen to your wishes.

If you have a website, for instance, you can pray to the spiders/crawlers that they will leave some of your contents alone, not including it in the search engine results, but these robots decide for themselves if they will listen to your prayer. In fact, they will most likely index everything you asked them to not index, just marking it in their database as something that should not be displaying to just anyone searching for something. These data are reserved for other purposes, such as selling advertising or demographic information to companies, who can then target you on the basis of what you had so deeply wished would not be used by the search engine companies.

The algorithms of the crawlers may know about your wishes, but they obey a higher command; that of the commercial interests of the search engine company.

If, on social media, you have some expectations to the tone and topics of the posts and discussions, and you feel that some of the other members of that medium behave in a way that doesn’t match, then you can often block them. The social media platforms are, in general, not happy to let you do that, but somehow they have felt that they should allow you the pleasure to feel that you control a small part of your own life.

If you block someone, you will probably not see anything the one posts. So far, so good. The algorithms tend to work that well. But if your unblocked connections enter into a conversation with the blocked one, you may or may not see part of that — and a funny thing here is that your blocking at times can end up reaching much further than you wanted. You just wanted to block that one person, but if many other people’s replies in threads where that one is present will also be blocked, then you have sort of exploded a bomb in your social world rather than just closed a door.

Sometimes these algorithms allow you to tell that you “don’t want to see more of this kind of contents” — whatever that means! How can any algorithm know if you would consider another post, perhaps from another person, to be of the same “kind”?

Again, your action, based on a wish, end up being nothing but a prayer to the algorithm god, and there is no guarantee for this to end up being what you hoped for.

I have described a couple of situations where the algorithm blocks too much. But the opposite can easily be the case. If there are millions of posts added to a platform each day, the algorithm will fill up your stream with some of it. If you were unhappy to see sexist or some other wrong contents from one person, you may successfully have blocked the one, but then there will be a gap in your stream that the algorithm will cover with posts from other posters — who could happen to be just as bad.

Depending on the platform and your tolerance level, you may never get to an end with your cleaning session, as there can be uncountable numbers of bad people there, and you just keep seeing new ones.

You may also be so lucky as I was once, when Facebook freaked out in right-wing xenophobia, filling up the stream with one more brutal claim or threat than the other. A terrible atmosphere there, and I felt it as if the platform had been taken over by psychopaths. However, instead of closing my account (at that time), I made one attempt: began blocking the accounts that seemed to be the worst, and after about 100 blockings, my stream was completely free of all the hatred and xenophobia. Only normal people talking about all the normal social media things.

100 accounts was what it took, nothing more. These few accounts had infected the platform and made all newspapers and politicians scream at each other at increasing volumes, many of them claiming that a demand from the people, on social media, should be obeyed — all foreigners should be expelled. And similar madness. But all that negative, all those “demands”, came from 100 acounts out of millions that didn’t express such things.

I had checked each of the 100 accounts before blocking them, and they basically all followed a certain pattern with a fixed set of posts on their walls, obviously fake personal information, and a picture of a dog as their profile picture. Clearly fake accounts, and based on the behavioural pattern it was clear, that most of them were operated by bots.

A hatred machine, simple. A swarm of locusts, eating all the naivity and good will of the normal users for breakfast.

But it was possible for me to clear all that out of my bubble on Facebook. Sadly, everybody else seemed to not do the same, those I talked to didn’t want to listen, didn’t believe me when I told that this was all a storm in a glass of water, all made up and controlled through 100 bots.

Later, Facebook would adjust the algorithm so that I no longer could shape the stream, such as I had done it here. Again, an overwhelming amount of right-wing propaganda filled the scenery, and it no longer helped to block the bad accounts — others just took their place.

On Substack, I have met quite many bot accounts so far. They are kind and conversating, not trying to tell me anything bad, even though some of them have a strange setup of “Reads” on their accounts, such as supersticious substacks, stacks about UFOs, about Trump…

I wonder if it really is possible to participate in shaping the world we see on Substack. It is already being shaped. Things do not happen all by coincidence, at least not when looking at what you see in your Notes stream, which follow-recommendations are given in Notes, and which articles are being suggested.

You can mute, block, like, restack, and interact in even more ways. But what will it actually do to your stream? Will the Notes algorithm and the recommendation algorithms hear your prayers? Do they, like the Internet search engines, have a higher master whose wish matters more than yours?

I don’t know. I just know that my food processor does what I want from it — follows my commands, when I push its buttons. Social media doesn’t.

So, it isn’t my fault, really, what may happen to other people’s posts if anything I do may influence the algorithms’ selections of posts and recommendations for me.

Not my fault, but I still tend to feel guilty. After all, in the real life, “blocking” someone would mean that the one would know about it. Something about not answering phone calls or emails from the one, maybe even going to court and have a court order made that this person must stay away from me.

But is social media blocking similar? Does it hurt the blocked one? Of course, maybe they really behave badly, and I shouldn’t feel bad myself for restricting their bad behaviour a bit, but often these people are not necessarily bad people: they just talk about things I don’t want to hear, or they fill up the stream with nonsense, where I was hoping for something meaningful. And one person’s nonsense might lead to another person’s insights, you could say. “Nonsense” is in itself a nonsense word, as it says more about the listener than the speaker — more about the one calling the words nonsense than about the words themselves.

So what happens if I block or mute someone? And I am not speaking about the bots, as these hardly can have any feelings to hurt. Do the real people feel somehow that they are blocked — through less attention, distrusting comments, perhaps, maybe they feel frozen out altogether?

No. Most often, they will not even know it. Their stream will be full of other people’s posts, even if they don’t see yours, and they will hardly notice that yours are not there any more. And their own posts will be distributed to many other people’s streams.

Each of us has such a carefully, algorithm-made bubble that we don’t even know about, at least not in details, how exactly it is made, so pushing one person out of our bubble will not change much. The days I experienced with Facebook are over now, algorithms are much more independent, less listening, always trying to feed us all with an endless, smooth stream of posts.

It’s a fantasy world. Nothing hurts for real in there. Nothing is real. There are real people behind, but sort of cartoonised, just shown as a sketch. Many are even there under some invented name, telling invented stories about themselves, adding more fantasy to what is already not real.

In such a world, you can only affect the story a bit, for a short while, or make the characters there apparently react with real emotions — like the characters in an adventure game on the computer, where “the gnome casts his fishing rod” each and every time you say the magic word to him. And he will do it whether you listen to him or not.

In a social media fantasy, nothing hurts.

It was right after I had started writing on Medium — I read an article there, telling that everybody on Medium should also also get a Vocal account and publish a copy of their Medium articles there.

The benefit should be to get twice as much out of it — publicity, money, growth.

So, I tried. Set up an account, a free one for a start, as I wanted to see what it all was. I started following a couple of other accounts there, read some of the other member’s articles and stories, and put one of my own stories there.

Vocal has a front page where it is possible to find articles, and there are recommended articles as well. My expectation was that somehow my article would also appear there, even though I saw no mention anywhere on how the mechanism was supposed to work. An algorithm, like other social media, perhaps?

Fast-forward to today: Still, nobody ever read that article on Vocal. And I didn’t put anything more there, because I didn’t know how to make it active. Publishing wasn’t enough, apparently, but what then?

Also, none of the comments I made, or the likes, led to any response. A longer comment on a short story did, eventually, lead to a somewhat harsh comment back from the writer, who clearly would have preferred that I hadn’t written anything.

In other words, I didn’t experience Vocal as a friendly place. Rather, I felt like a gate-crasher entering a closed party and having everybody there looking annoyed at me. Clearly not my party.

Ever since, I have wondered what the idea was, how I was supposed to get going with that platform. If at all? Maybe it really was a closed party. Maybe I really was gate-crashing.

My account still exists, and it still has that article on it, which nobody ever saw.

There are several, if not many, such social media platforms that I have made an account on but never really felt at home at. I don’t even remember all of them, and some have probably closed, others merged. Who knows what happened to all my login information…? Probably it is now goodies being traded on the dark web.

I believe that many people have an idea of only a few social media being there, those we hear about all the time: Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc., and some of us then also know about Medium, Substack and other dedicated writing platforms.

It doesn’t look like anyone knows how many platforms exist — many articles are talking about top 10, top 50 or something like that, but I haven’t seen an attempt to map them all since my diploma in social media management, several years ago.

I am curious, however — what platforms do you use? And have you, like me, made accounts more or less everywhere without remembering all the places?

Finally, I pulled myself together and killed my Medium membership. It was annoying to know that I paid $50 per year for the potential to earn money on my writing, and then I was in reality seeing a profit of 3 cents per article (which I will not even get, because they do not pay out less than $10).

Something has gone completely wrong over there, and where I did have readers from the start, did earn money, then, suddenly, it stopped.

I have told about it before, so I will not go into details with how Medium suddenly decided to stop working for me.

I don’t know if the platform is cheating with the view counts, or if it has stopped distributing my posts to people – or, indeed, if people still see my posts and all of them simply decided to stop reading them, simultaneously.

No mater what is happening, I find it grotesque.

Especially, because Medium promised that all I had to do was write — then they would bring the audience. That should be the main advantage with that platform over other writing platforms, “comes with a built-in audience”.

Have you tried anything like this — on Medium or elsewhere? I would love to hear about it.

It is always hard to say goodbye. Almost 100 articles, 1,000 followers, many, many comments that I have made, claps I have given, and I can see now that it was all made of dust and mirrors, able to vanish by a spell, in a second.

To finish off decently, according to my own thoughts about it, I wrote a general post, telling about the problem and that I was leaving, plus a post for each of the two publications where I have accepted and published other Medium-members’ articles.

The first one is called Sunset, and I’ll put a copy of it here below as well, just because I found it almost too nice for the occasion, especially since it is not being read.

The other two, “Current State of…”, basically tell the same but for each of the publications’ audiences and writers.

I’ll put links to them here, if you should be interested – they are not paywalled.

Current State of Modern Leaders

Current State of Language Talk

Sunset

it was intense while it lasted, but then you turned your shoulder on me

I don’t know what went wrong, really.

At first, I was excited about our relationship and made use of every moment I could escape from other duties to go and see you — write you letters, see your responses and feel your presence.

It was so lively, so immediately rewarding. So meaningful.

When you made it clear to me that you wanted to go further, I was all happiness — “Yes!”, was my immediate reply. Yes, yes, yes! I also wanted to take it further, because, the thing we had going together was so good that more of it only could be even better.

At first, it was merely a declaration. And some costs. Nothing changed, really, only the fact that we expected something to change, which just didn’t happen.

A disappointment, for sure.

Funny, how things can get worse without changing, just for not getting better.

And as I felt how this couldn’t go on, we couldn’t continue feeling sad about things being as good as they always were, I decided to roll back our relationship to what had worked well.

Maybe that was wrong. Maybe I really should have stayed in the sad situation for longer to show how I was dedicated to making it work.

But it happened that way. You then lost interest in me. Completely. I still spent a lot of time with you, but you ignored me. Ghosted me.

I soon began longing for those other duties when I was with you. They were not as cold and distant, they did at least pay me some attention. And then I started staying away for periods, which just made everything worse. You clearly started considering me a non-existence.

One day, I then took my things and moved out. I had found another, but not officially, just on the side. As I was already air to you, it was difficult for me to see how that made you feel, if anything.

However, I got more and more convinced that you and me had nothing left to do together. You didn’t read anything I wrote to you, though I really tried to make it interesting, to make you feel that spark again that I am sure you once felt when I was there.

You have new friends now! Many of them. That could be a reason for forgetting about me. I don’t know if they are more charming, if they write better, have more money, show more gratitude, or whatever it is that makes them more interesting, but you spend a lot of time with them now, and, of course, it makes me happy to see you happy. Somehow.

But as we have no life together, and keeping my toothbrush at your place just feels like a farce, like hoping for something that is completely impossible, I decided to leave for good.

I just now sent you the final letter, giving you back your key. Signing it with a “Leave”, as you requested. Silly, I think, as I was leaving no matter if I would write this or not. But if that makes you happy…

Who knows what the future will bring. I still love you, somehow. Or what you were, perhaps, not so much what you are now. But maybe the old you is still there, somewhere behind that cold facade.

You can always contact me. I’ll leave my new address below. It is all up to you.

Message from the author:

I joined Medium many years ago, however, didn’t start writing on the platform until the beginning of 2023. After about a year of writing and a flirt with a Friends of Medium membership that wasn’t fulfilling, I quit the latter — and found that I was afterwards frozen out of the platform, with no distribution of my posts at all. No readers, an earning of 3 cents per article, if any.

Maybe the freeze had nothing to do with the cancelling of the Friends of Medium membership — maybe it was rather a matter of Medium changing everything to fit into their new, bigger world; with all the new countries that got the possibility to become earners, not just paying members as before. Or maybe it was the platform’s new preference for fake accounts and bots writing and commenting. I don’t know, but the net result for me was that I became air on Medium, nobody reading my posts any more.

So, just a moment ago, I finally pulled the plug and cancelled my Partner Membership.

If anyone by chance sees this post, which doesn’t look very likely, considering the way things have become, it is possible to see me over at my substack, A Rich Life — you are welcome, I’ll serve you a nice cup of tea if you drop in :)

Oh, and who knows: If things again look better some sunny day in the future, I may decide to try again with Medium.

I am sure that you have seen such a curve before — it has been used in a plethora of situations, of which some are appropriate, others not.

When people experience a loss, for instance through death of a loved one, this curve is used to describe what stages they go through before eventually getting back to normal again.

When I studied change management many years ago, the same curve was used to describe what was not allowed to be called “resistance” against the change, but had to be described as a natural reaction – and then again, with this curve, everything was considered to be “just a phase”, so you wouldn’t, as a change agent, need to pay much attention to people’s anxiety, anger, etc., because it would pass.

Hence, the curve needs to be used with caution, and, to be honest, I don’t think it is 100% fit for the introduction of a new social medium, a new technology, etc., because there will be an initial upwards going curve based on the (often unrealistic) hopes and expectations to the new thing. Only then, people will start getting more sceptical, and probably the general opinion and mood regarding the new thing will split, so we will see those who become ambassadors and those who become machine stormers.

Nevertheless, social media do have a down-curve after a while, and this is what I describe here.

The main problem is that the initial positive treatment of the users will, always, be replaced after a while with one after another of frustrating changes.

At first, users start discussing these as “algorithmic changes”, and they can quickly get to an agreement that they can be overcome by just knowing more about how the algorithm works. Some clever people then immediately set up themselves as experts and start selling courses and books about it, and for a while, things look good again.

But then comes a new change, and another, and a third.

It gets more and more complicated to find out how to navigate the platform. You used to have friends or connections whose posts you would for certain see when you opened the app, but they are somehow gone. You used to be able to write something that would be seen by those same friends, but they are no longer seeing it.

If you used to have 500 likes on everything you wrote, then, one day after yet another change, there will be 5 — or none.

Some of this can be attributed to the need by the social medium to adjust unwanted behaviour. For instance, on LinkedIn, a couple of years ago, things had developed into a few big influencers getting huge amounts of likes and corresponding attention, and they were selling their presence to sponsors, making the whole thing a circus with the influencers in the manège and the rest of us on the spectator seats.

LinkedIn decided to, suddenly, change everything, so these VIPs saw their popularity (and business) be cut down to a tenth of what it was, literally overnight.

All other platforms have been through similar changes, basically disrupting the social scheme — breaking it down — and seeing a new one form out of the rubble.

Along the way, advertising and other monetisation schemes enter for the platform owners to benefit, and these will get increased priority, step by step, until the users experience the platform as pointless. However, users keep staying there because they still believe that the platform helps them keep in touch with their friends, and some still believe that there is a chance to build up a presence, a name, a successful business of some kind.

But social media keep dragging their users back along the left side of the curve, when first they have reached that stage in their development – that is why I keep telling that they are bound to die out.

In fact, they are committing suicide by not allowing their users to ever become happy with the platform, making it only a matter of time and outer circumstances when (not if) people will leave the platform.

Sooner or later, people will give up. They will understand that they no longer have a chance to stay in touch with their friends on Facebook, earn a living on Medium, build a business reputation or get a new job on LinkedIn, or become successful bloggers on Substack.

If there is nothing that supports users in their initial belief that they through curiosity and engagement can achieve something good, they will eventually stop believing in it.

I believe that social media started out, more or less all of them, with good intentions: They wanted to create a space where people could do something together, be social. But they did that for investor money, and the investors wanted, along the way, to get their money back plus earnings.

The founders of the platform also wanted to become billionaires. For whatever reason, it is not possible to start anything on the Internet without the intention of becoming a billionaire. What happened to just doing your work because you like it?

So, for billions to come in, user satisfaction is sacrificed, and then the whole thing escalates, because one billion is never enough — have you earned the first, you want the next as well, and the 100th, and the billionth, I’m sure.

But the trees do not grow into the sky. There is only so much you can do that makes your users unhappy before they leave your platform.

When will it happen? X has done a fair deal of annoying their users, and some have left, but most are still there. Facebook has become a terrible place for many users, but it is still used by billions of people. LinkedIn is the one place for keeping your CV readable for everyone, so if no other place can offer the same, people may stay — however, I feel that there has always been a very low active participation rate there, and now it is getting even lower. So it could be that the discussion part will die out (or be replaced with bots talking to each other).

Medium cannot survive for long. It doesn’t provide users with the dream of earning money any more. It is even official, that any money earned should be seen as a token of appreciation only, not a basis for living.

X will die. Trump’s version of Pravda (Truth) has never been able to attract more than a few million haters or everything, and when X turns into a similar platform, that same amount of people will use it. Of course, as a political vehicle, it may survive, but not as a place for general information exchange.

Substack?

I feel some unhappiness with Notes. I also feel excitement for Notes. Those who are excited, are those who are good at gaming the algorithm on other platforms and feel at home with this concept. Those who are unhappy are those who liked the initial incarnation of it, where writers told each other interesting stories on Notes.

The Publications have got video options, chats, etc., which is seen as bad by some of the old members. They liked the writing-only platform, and now it is no longer that.

Freedom of speech is possible on Substack, but that brings all of us in the same boat as those who abuse this to spread Nazi propaganda, for instance.

So, there are some tensions, and it is clear that the management of Substack are heading towards whatever will grow the platform. More users mean more money. They are quite outspoken on this.

Will Notes bring in more users? Yes. More activity, more gaming the algorithm, more memes, more pleas for likes and follows, etc. — all together, more like the other social media.

As soon as there is a sustainable platform size for introducing ads and sponsors, they will come. Substack denies that now, but so did all the others — until it came.

As I have also mentioned before, this will give us a time with Substack where it still works as we are used to it (unless we are from the initial group of members), but it will not last more than perhaps a couple of years.

What I don’t know, is what should bring me to the upwards going part of the curve? Some say that it becomes fun with 1,000 subscribers and above. Others that with time, a dedicated group of followers (no matter the size) will make it fun. And others have their experiences or hopes that they want to share with new users.

But all such ideas are based on what they experienced a while ago. When there were fewer users altogether, and where growth had the support of everything being new and exciting.

So, for the next couple of years?

I honestly don’t know. Community building works only if the community wants it, and even during the few months I have been here, I have seen a shift in who I see on the platform, hence, it has not been a steady community until now. So will it be from now on?

Just some thoughts. Comments are most welcome!

This text was written in the beginning of 2024 for being published on Medium. As everything that is about Medium itself and published there, it gained moderate traction.

It has a special property: it was “improved” by the help of the Hemingway app, as an attempt to see if writing like a 5th grader really would make anything better.

Now, today, I understand that this article may have been the first step I took to leave that platform — as I had been writing there for almost a year at the time and was beginning to find it a bit wrong for my taste.

Later, of course, it all fell apart completely, with articles getting no readers at all and the earnings dropping to almost nothing.

All to the better, because it made me jump into Substack, where I had an account since the time I began writing on Medium; I just had not used it. Today, I really enjoy it here.

There is a huge difference between Medium and Substack. Really, so significant that I think it may not be fully understandable for people who haven’t tried both. Hopefully, the story below can give a hint on what kind of thinking and writing people develop with the monetization model of Medium.

Have a look!

You may now laugh at me, but I have been naive. Stupid. Trusted people.

As we all learn from our parents and from life, we shouldn’t trust anyone. Especially not when there is money involved.

When money goes in, the friendship goes out.

I honestly thought that writers on Medium wanted to write great literature.

But then I studied the fine print.

Ouch!

How it is meant to be

Medium is a place for writers — and readers. Some like to write, others like to read what they write, and that should be a good match.

When Medium first started, it was for good writers. Those who could write long, well-researched articles in magazine quality, worth something. Worth some money.

Now Medium has redefined itself. Not this minute but over the years, and it is spoken about as a platform where people can learn how to write.

Try to taste the difference when saying it — “good writers” vs “learn how to write”.

That’s the official story. The reality is different.

How it is

Have you ever wondered why everything on Medium has been written in short phrases, with blank lines in between?

This is not how a printed book would look like, is it? But Medium has this style.

We have all heard of reading skills and statistics that say — write for a 5th-grader, then all readers can read it.

And we have heard that people have a short attention span — they need everything split into 5 second bites.

But these are not the real reasons.

The real reasons are — money, more money, and lots of money!

The trick is to keep you reading for 30 seconds or more. And to drive you to highlighting something, giving claps, and commenting.

If the text is super-simple, your eyes scroll over it with ease, you enjoy it and want it to last, and you quickly spot something to highlight.

Now we just need your claps and comments.

But why?

Medium pays money to the writers. Only to those who are members of the Partner Program, but that’s a detail, since very many writers are on Medium with the hope to earn money, so they are clearly members.

The purpose of Medium is — to most writers on the platform — to earn money. Writing is only the means to it.

What they learn here is not to write, it is to earn money.

They do marketing — like the sellers of watches, sandals, and other cheap crap from their booths near tourist attractions.

These sellers are not doing it to enrich the world with great merchandise — they do it for the money. And they know how to catch your attention.

Just like the Medium writers.

How it works

Medium has a formula for calculating the earnings. When you read an article, the formula determines how much the writer will earn.

In the formula are the elements:

• Read to view ratio (read-through rate)

• Point for a clap (one or more claps, it doesn’t matter)

• Point for a highlight (one or more, it doesn’t matter)

• Point for a comment (one or more, long or short, it doesn’t matter)

• Extra points if you follow the writer after reading the article

• Extra points if you were already a follower when reading it, or if you were already a follower of the Medium publication it was published in

• Extra points if the article has been boosted by the Medium staff

• Extra money if the reader is a Friend of Medium

The formula can be seen in its entirety at Calculating Earnings in the Partner Program, but you cannot calculate it yourself due to various blurry details.

The writers can, however, increase their luck by tricking you into giving them as many points from the above list as possible. That will earn them more money.

The read to view ratio is for the individual article and is new for each day — it is unknown to me if the ratio and the earnings are recalculated for the full day or if it is done for each read. A ratio means “number of reads out of number of views” — so, how many percent of that day’s viewers stayed for at least 30 seconds.

What happened to “good writers?”

Tricking you to read an article for more than 30 seconds is easier for simple topics that speak to everybody in a simple language — but it still may require some skills. Simplicity is not easy to achieve.

But is it good writing in a traditional meaning?

Would you buy a novel written that way? No, probably not.

Would you describe a novelist writing that way as a good writer? No, definitely not.

It only works on Medium and social media. It has no value anywhere else.

What happened to “learn how to write?”

This is similar to the question about good writers:

Do you learn how to write well by writing like a fifth-grader? Or by asking for claps and comments in your text?

The answer is probably both yes and no, depending on your initial skills. And if you intend to become a social media copywriter, then you may benefit from what you learn by writing for Medium.

But it will not teach you how to write a novel or a magazine quality article.

So, about that great literature

It may be here. Because, luckily, several writers have decided to pay little attention to the earnings — either because it is too complicated to find out how it works, or because they simply do not like that kind of writing it leads to.

I personally find that too many articles have little to no value at all, they are just there to make you spend 30 seconds and have fun with clapping, highlighting and commenting something polite but useless. They are not memorable — you quite certainly will not remember them.

But there are also articles, stories of all kinds, that do not follow the pattern above, and which can make you want to read more from the writer, want to buy a novel that this writer has written.

And some similar articles that you can recognize as good but which are just not for you, due to their topic or style, length or whatever, so you skip them (for now) but you may remain happy that they are there for others to enjoy.

And then, corresponding well to the name of the platform — there are quite many articles that end up right in the middle. They are of medium quality, with some skills behind them, with an idea and a great flow — but partly ruined in the attempt to adapt them to the earnings model of Medium.

All-in-all there is too much of the writing on Medium that is only or mostly for the sake of making a profit.

It was last year, in March. Unforgettable!

I had for a long time had an eye on you but didn’t dare to approach you. What if you would reject me and destroy my dream?

But one day, I pulled myself together and asked you.

When I first saw you

You were different, that was clear. But in a good way. Distancing the others by miles, being unique and almost divine.

And you knew it. You knew how special you were, knew how you could easily reject anyone approaching you and wait for the right one to show up.

Your intensity was unmatched, your exclusivity a minimalist enigma. Who would be the right match for you, who would you choose? And when would you be ready?

Fantasy

Of course, I would have no chance with you. You wouldn’t even notice my existence. You were dating the big guys, not such a zero like me. You preferred the long and intense stories, told professionally by experts. You wanted everything to be perfect, nothing less than that could be accepted.

You wanted to be seduced by the experienced lovers only, and you knew how to attract them — by playing exclusive to the max.

And there I was. Just watching the others, the professionals, be allowed to get close to you and be with you. Some of them you even talked about as fantastic and top class.

And I could only fantasize, only fool myself into a dream of us. Pretend in my pure imagination that we would be a couple, that you would smile at me every day, show me a bit of appreciation in return for my devotion to you.

A first step

You didn’t notice, but I did approach you several years ago. I wanted to be close to you, so I could watch you, see how you developed from the ever searching and overly quality obsessed young lady into a mature woman, who now knew about life and what was to be expected, and how it all consists of sharing, not taking. How a relationship must be built on mutual trust and respect, on unlimited appreciation of reality, of the real treats, not the imagined perfection.

I joined the inner circles around you, to be close. And I never said anything to you, so you never noticed me. And how could you when I hardly existed, when I never did anything at all to show my value to you.

Getting serious

1 year ago. The first measure to notice in this little summary of our love affair.

We have our anniversary this month, my darling!

The first year has been so intense, since, that day in March last year, finally, with my heart in the throat, palms sweating, feeling like I was about to die — I went to ask you if you would want to see me around. If I could become one of your lovers.

And you said yes!

Huh! How happy can a boy be! So happy that I didn’t believe it was true and I needed a couple of more months until I went back to you with my first love letter.

Everyday appears

Our relation has now become routine. I do enjoy it every day, but I am no longer approaching you with my heart in the throat and sweating palms — I feel a bit closer to equal, you could say.

What I learned was that your other lovers are not as perfect as you liked to say, that you may have had standards of another world, but you are, in fact, very much down-on-earth, allowing for all kinds of people to be around you.

Had I only known before, then we could have had a much longer time together. But I am happy for now, happy that we are together.

50 love letters, or thereabout, it has become during our first year. You have received them eagerly and with a big smile, as you love to get them. From me as well as from your other lovers.

While you read them soon after receiving them, and you keep them in a special box, just for my letters — which I really appreciate — it doesn’t look like you ever take anything out of that box to read it again. But I suppose you just have a good memory. This, of course, along with being busy reading the letters from all your other lovers. I know that some of them write to you ten times a day. What an enthusiasm!

Finding my place in your life

800 of your other lovers have put my name on their list, making a note of where to find your little box of my love letters to you.

It is a bit odd, I must admit, but nice to know that my writing isn’t just ending up in a black hole in cyberspace, but actually will be noticed by some.

So here I am, one out of millions, one grain of sand on the beach, together with all the other grain enjoying life as a support for your sunbathing and enjoying that occasional smile you send to me — or us, as you can smile to many at the same time.

And all we grain, all your lovers in our imagination, can hope for that rare, special attention that you sometimes grant a single grain or two by telling about them to the other grain.

A dream, of course, but maybe we will one day be holding hands, like real lovers.

You are my dream, my lover, my Medium.

LinkedIn, 18 years ago

I was a much younger man then, having just got a manager job where the main goal was to hire as many IT consultants as possible.

Now, where do you find so many IT consultants? Today there are lots of options, and not the least LinkedIn, where everybody seems to have a profile.

But 18 years ago, I had never heard about LinkedIn until my new boss told me the fascinating story of how he was very much into networking and was keeping track of all the people in his network, several links away.

I started checking up on this, knew about some theories but wondered how it was done in real life. As far as I remember, I found LinkedIn through this hunt for knowledge — some people found in a Google search endorsed it.

I got an account, and there were indeed several consultants on LinkedIn! How lucky I was.

But…

People didn’t like to be contacted. I was very polite, told them through an InMail how I had found their profile, and that I was in the process of finding and hiring more consultants, so maybe they would like to talk about it?

Almost everybody I contacted this way got angry, talked about spamming, intrusion in their private life, etc., and I was somewhat chocked. How could it be that they had put their CV on the internet — and then they were angry about being contacted?

Well, LinkedIn was a different place then, as was social media in general. People didn’t understand well what it was and how it worked.

And today

I am not hiring anybody, but I get almost daily contact requests and messages from people who want to tell how they are available for work, so if I should need to hire, then…

There are some opinions aired now and then in the stream about if and how to connect to others, but the main trend seems to be “playing precious” by saying that “I want a real explanation in the contact message, otherwise I’ll say no” in the posts and comments, but somehow people end up with thousands of contacts anyway.

Me too, even though it seems to be stagnating. A social medium only provides an echo of what you do — and if you do nothing, there is no echo after some time; it is slowly dying out and then finally disappearing.

What happens there instead

It is difficult to say exactly why, but I can browse through the stream for tens of minutes without finding anything personal or just related to people I really know. It is all just promotions from people who have something to sell, mixed with paid advertising from big companies.

Those people, having something to sell, are influencers of some kind, and they are good at making it look like they are interested in the people who comment on their posts.

It is easy, for a moment, to feel that they are some kind of friends.

But in comparison to real friends, they will not notice if you are away. They will also get scared and not answer if you touch a real life topic in a comment — because they provide a carefully crafted world of ideas, ideals, and services. Everything else is just a disturbance and potentially damaging for their image.

What I wonder

What happened to all the contacts, I connected to 18 years ago? They never show up in my stream.

How about all those hundreds of former colleagues, with whom I made a connection when changing my job? They never show up in my stream either.

And what about those many people who came in during waves from Facebook, at first bringing in their Facebook habits — which annoyed the “old” LinkedIn people — then adapting a bit to become one with the wallpaper but still talking? I never see any of them any more.

They are all in my connections list, but they are mute — to me, at least.

All those who are talking, all the influencers, are new on LinkedIn, having joined within the last two years or so.

It is like being in one of those science fiction movies where the main character wakes up one day, only to find out that all the known people around him have been replaced with some others. Waking up as someone else, perhaps, or simply having been teleported to another dimension.

That’s where I am on LinkedIn — in another dimension.

Now, about the bubbles

I have an education as a social media manager. I have managed many accounts on many media. And I have studied various topics around media, making it perfectly clear to me that I live in a bubble.

Like everybody else.

There is so much information to have in this world of today, that we all select some of it — and reject some of it as well.

We are creating a small universe that we can handle, made of what we can overview, ruling out all the rest. The algorithms of a social medium helps make that happen — if we are not clicking on certain types of contents, we will see less of this, and if someone is eager to tell us their message, we will see more of that.

If I myself post something on a social medium, such as LinkedIn, it will similarly reach only to the edges of my bubble. Nobody outside it will even know that I wrote it, and I will not know that they don’t know.

Many people seem to believe that they are talking to the world, feeling like big fishes in the big sea, when they are, in fact, big only in their little bubble.

With hundreds of millions of people using LinkedIn, my bubble of a few tens of thousands of people is quite diminutive.

I have been isolated.

My bubble owns me and keeps its protecting sphere intact, to prevent me from seeing that the universe is actually much bigger than I think.

And it is only because I have been there for so long that I can see how something is missing — some people.

We choose, but…

The common understanding of bubbles is that they are our own choice. We follow one newspaper, unfollow another, and that adjusts our bubble and the news we see, and how we see them.

Similarly, following people — and now also, with the new algorithms — interacting with them, will add to or detract from our bubble.

But knowing this very well, I cannot help thinking that a lot of adjustments have happened without my conscious decisions. Maybe what I did in a series of likes, comments, follows, connections, etc., were shaping my bubble, but it happened without me noticing what was going on.

The current situation

I feel like a stranger, like that science fiction figure in a universe where everybody entered a year ago and all the old friends, neighbours, colleagues, etc., are gone. And none of the new ones understand a word of what I say when I ask “where did they go?”

They never saw those missing people come, they never saw them leave. They may not even believe me when I claim that they do exist.

I feel like a ghost. Should have left long ago, together with the world I belonged to, but somehow I missed the train.

My old bubble must have burst and a new one swallowed me. Such a feeling. Is that what it is like to grow old?

When Virtual Reality hit the world some years ago, people were amazed: How fantastic it was to be able to experience some place almost real without really being there!

When virtualization hit the IT business, at least some people were amazed by that too: How clever it was to make better use of the server hardware and just have a thin client on an old computer for the users…

And then, what happened? Gradually, everything got virtualized. The servers themselves are not real any more, they are virtual appliances on other (virtual) servers. Clients are not really where we think they are, they appear inside a browser window and are actually just seemingly running on the client computer — in reality, they are running on the virtual servers, which again are running on their virtual servers.

The only real thing that exists now is virtuality — everything else is virtual.

But how does that connect to the old idea of producing and consuming that built our political and financial landscapes?

Hurray for service!

The fact is — it doesn’t! We have virtualized ourselves into a new paradigm of just simulating a production and, to some extent, simulating the consumption of it as well. We are faking our way through life. A movie like The Matrix wasn’t all imagination, I suppose.

When I grew up, long ago, people were in a mental transition towards the then new and somewhat utopian paradigm: the service society.

Of course, it was new, and therefore it was argued — “We cannot live from cutting each other’s hair”, a politician said. But he was wrong. This is basically what we do now. We give and sell services to each other. Sometimes in the shape of something that looks like a product — like software. At other times it is pure mind work — like this blog posting.

So we have reached a utopia. We finally got there — to the service society — thanks to giving up the idea of getting everything we buy as something physical. By changing it all into services, based on virtualization, we now really can live from cutting each other’s hair.

Changing landscapes

We have already seen solid consequences of this: Trade unions have almost vanished. Shops have closed (since the few real things we still buy can be bought in virtual shops). Political ideals have more or less disappeared — there is no difference in opinions and ideals any longer between those who own the production environment and those who work in it.

Also, capital has been virtualized — not just through Bitcoins, but through the fact that lots of things that used to cost money are now available for free. Why buy a newspaper or a book when you can read a virtual edition for free on the internet?

Even the society itself has been virtualized — through social networks, especially, but in general through an availability of information and connections to people across the former physical borders. Through an understanding that we must give something to these new societies, the social networks, that we must spend our time on them, we are at the same time withdrawing ourselves from and thereby reducing the meaning of the old society that was physically defined.

The Service Society 2.0

So, to whom do we now give service? Where are the services based? Do we care more about blogging to the whole world than joining a discussion in the street or in the nearby physical café?

What I believe — and please just correct me if you think otherwise — is that the new service society has opened up the world for people who might not have given services to anyone in the old days. It has also closed the ability to do so for people who would have been happy participants in the old, physically defined society.

The virtual societies do not look at much else than your ability to read and write — or to publish or share information in the shape of text, pictures, or videos. So those who are not good at that have difficulties finding any foothold in the new service society. Since the old production/consumer society doesn’t exist any more, at least not to the extent it used to, there are people now in this world who may find it difficult to fit in.

Hopefully, there is a parallel Service Society 1.0 — such one that hasn’t been virtualized but allows for people to actually meet in person and be the rich personalities they are. I believe that it is there, but are we losing it? Is the pendulum simply moving to the other side instead of finding its balance somewhere in the middle?

The virtual opportunities are a blessing to the world. But so are people. I think that we should try to make room for both.

First published on LinkedIn, August 21, 2014. Later on Medium, August 13, 2023.

Happy posts, advertising, and posts that tell how all the other such posts and senders are wrong, instead I should listen only to this one.

That’s all I see. I try to take part in the discussions in the comments, but it is difficult when all people comment is “That is so right!”, or “Haha, I will share that!”

And I am thinking back, just a few months…

An ever-growing universe of heavy influencers dominated the picture on LinkedIn, and they were really everywhere, all the time. Having scheduled an abundance of posts about everything and nothing, they didn’t leave much room in the feeds of ordinary people for seeing posts from their real contacts, those people they would most of all want to see posts from.

It had become a spammers’ paradise.

During a few months, more and more of these spammers began discussing — openly on the platform — how they had seen their views reduced by large factors overnight. New algo, for sure, but what happened more precisely? They discussed — or, rather, as they were all claiming to be LinkedIn experts, they told each other non-stop what was going on and developed more and more ways of tricking the algo to again letting them get those beloved high numbers of views.

Only, those tricks didn’t work, and most of these influencers have now died out in my stream.

I recently wrote in another article, Double Bubble Trouble, how my old bubble on LinkedIn had been swapped with a new and thinner one over night — full of new people, none of the old ones.

Now, finally, after monitoring the system and thinking about the behavior, I know what is going on.

The main element in the new situation is that people seem to disappear from the stream. People you have been connected to for years and who you know publish a lot, are not to be seen at all.

Another element is that new people you only recently got connected with — and people you are not connected with and not even following, are showing up all the time in the stream.

Apparently, the connection status isn’t what feeds your stream, as it used to be.

Now, instead, it is your activity pattern: those people you have interacted with recently, will have their posts shown in your stream. And in two levels, so to speak, as you will also see some of those posts they have interacted with.

Your connections are forgotten in the stream — unless… LinkedIn has added some bells and whistles, or at least a bell, which is to be found on each user’s profile, and similarly on each company profile — clicking on that bell will bring in posts from these parties into your stream.

What this means

LinkedIn has effectively changed the platform from benefitting many followers into benefitting interactivity. It is also now downplaying the very detail that made it popular in the first place: the connections.

As there is no way to send a message to all your connections, you cannot tell them to click on your bell, so you cannot expect that they see anything of what you write — unless you go to each of them, individually, and interact with their posts or send them a message.

In other words, you are no longer connected to your so-called connections, unless you take steps to reconnect. Sure, they are listed as connections, but you are not hearing from them, they not from you, so what kind of connection is that? Actually, the connections list is now just the equivalent of a phonebook.

The old bubble you had created by following and connecting has shrunk to a minimum size, just big enough to hold you and control you, and as your connections no longer define what you see — the social media part is made up of your daily interactions.

It looks to me like you need to maintain the interaction with people on a quite frequent basis — a couple of weeks without clicking on a person’s posts will make the one vanish from your stream until something new happens that could bring them in again.

So, going on a few weeks’ vacation without logging in should ensure that you return to a pretty empty stream? Well, I doubt. First, there are the ads. More and more of them, as I see it. Second, there must be a kind of minimum-fill mechanism in play to prevent the system from dying out — as it would, if the users started believing that nobody published anything anymore.

I have, indeed, observed how an occasional post from an old connection does show up — ready with 500 likes and many comments, meaning that I am not seeing it as one of the first.

Also, there are periods where the stream is full of posts from the last week. Posts that I have seen already or perhaps missed when they were new.

At least these two types of minimum-fills seem to exist.

In any case, LinkedIn is no longer promoting long-term engagement with other people, it keeps you in an ever-changing, tiny bubble that doesn’t honour who you know or feel connected to. LinkedIn keeps you strictly in that narrow slice of time that is “now”.

Why did they do this?

I believe that LinkedIn is doing all this to get better control of your stream. They reduce the number of posts drastically, ensuring that only contents that are calling for immediate interaction is spread on the platform, which in the mind of a social media company probably sounds the same as “high quality contents”, and they can better squeeze in ads on strategic places.

Ads are worth more if placed with relevant quality contents, so the whole thing is an attempt by LinkedIn to get more milk out of their cow.

What they didn’t understand (and never will)

When most of the users on social media see that their friends and connections have stopped being active, they do not automatically believe that it must be a new algorithmic feature meant for someone to earn more money. No, they believe that their friends and connections have stopped being active. People do not in general reach out for heavy analytical tools when observing something that looks normal — and it would be normal for a friend to stop posting. The friend could be busy, focusing on a different platform, having a social media break, or whatever.

And when all their friends leave, they will also themselves leave. What fun is there in being alone on a social platform?

By far most of the users of such a platform are not active — they log in, watch what their contacts have written, and log out again. Most people never even touch a “like”-button or write a comment. They just watch.

But watching is not interaction, so they will see a still thinner stream with the few posts still there being of a generic nature, as per the minimum-fill mechanism, and eventually concluding, what I wrote above — that they lost all their reasons for being on the platform: the posts written by their contacts.

At LinkedIn, some commercial managers probably never noticed that people by large do not interact. So there was never a hint in the process of developing this new concept, that they would lose their users this way.

No hint either, that I, as an active user, can see LinkedIn ghosting my friends on the platform om my behalf by not sending them my posts. So, whoever I am connected to and for whatever reason, will start believing that I am not active at all; may even think that I left the platform. I, for sure, have thought something like that about many of my long-term connections there.

What comes next?

I wanted to do some kind of test or experiment where I would try to find out what is really happening, but there are some built-in obstacles in this that I cannot overcome:

• The algorithm is being changed all the time without my knowledge, so I wouldn’t know what my test results mean — they could tell something about how it was until now, or how it is from now on, or even how it was for just a short moment.

• There is no transparency with such algorithms. For some reason, the social media consider it most important to not let their users know what is going on with their posts, and with very many potential parameters it would be difficult to design a test — what should I focus on?

• A test should probably include making some old connections writing a post, so that I could check if it would appear to me. But I would have no idea of why a post would not show up — maybe it would just be shown at a time where I incidentally didn’t look at the screen, or maybe it simply had to compete with thousands of other posts about the space. So, a no-show wouldn’t prove much.

Ideas on how to determine what the algorithm is really doing are welcome! It could be fun to uncover bits of the nature of this virtual bit of the universe.

But, it isn’t my role in life to keep hunting for an understanding of the rules of the games other people are playing with me. I guess that both I and others will eventually just get tired of this game and leave it — letting the fans run around in the social media maze while I instead will go for a walk in the real nature, maybe bringing a fishing rod, a camera, a sketchbook, or just pen and paper for writing about the real world while observing it.

Walking, fishing, photographing, drawing, writing — isn’t all this of a much deeper, much stronger emotional nature than the pseudo-tasks of trying to understand an invented, commercial world that changes indefinitely?

Updates and additions:

After publishing the article, I was told by a reader how there are reports and tools that tell about the use of social media — and where the influencers are. So if you cannot find the influencers, try searching for media monitoring and influencer identification tools like Favikon or Digimind.

I should also mention that a LinkedIn guru is publishing a yearly report with insights in how the algorithm currently works — he is called Richard van der Bloom and the report can be found in his resources list on his LinkedIn page (requires login with a LinkedIn account).

In his latest report at the time of writing this, called “The Algorithm Insights 2024 Report” there are some details (on page 46) that can explain some of the behavior that I mentioned, but not all. Reading a report like this btw. confirms my feeling that LinkedIn is now all about marketing — which means that it is not about social or keeping in touch, and, hence, not about being interesting for the ordinary users.

I used to work with barcodes, back in the days when they were seen as something useful.

When I started out in a career as software developer and systems consultant, one of the first tasks I had was to make barcode printing work for a specific printer model. A customer had bought a bunch of these printers based on our advice, only to find out that the barcodes they could print with it were too big for their automated laboratory equipment. The code would be stretching out beyond the window through which it should be read by the machine, so the printers were useless.

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Codes were too big, and there was no way to make them smaller in a way that worked — until I was hired.

Some calculations and studies of the printer documentation, along with documentation for some other printers, brought me to a line of changes to our barcode printing software that would allow for the codes to become sufficiently small to actually fit.

As a fun fact, I had a discussion with my boss who didn’t understand why I would need a special ruler — such one that could measure points and cicero. But that ruler, which I had to go to the city center to buy myself, as nobody else understood what it was, made it possible for me to measure exactly which precision the printers were capable of reaching and, hence, which widths of barcode lines would be possible to create. An important knowledge for creating a solution to the problem.

Suddenly, the large wasted investment in printers became un-wasted, and in addition, the new program worked just as well with the other relevant printer models. We could from that moment design labels more freely.

Free as a barcode — or more precisely, free as a specimen requisition designer with extended barcode placement opportunities.

That was 30 years ago.

The code back then was of the type Interleaved 2 of 5 because it is the smallest possible barcode design available.

Years later, I took part in a project management course, and one of the other participants told an exciting story about how he had made a living out of applying QR codes in various contexts, thereby enriching the experience of, for instance, a visit to a museum — or a forest.

Interesting story, indeed, but… I didn’t know what a QR code was!

Life had happened without me, at least along that parameter, and I have actually never met any interest in my barcode skills or had any other tasks in the area since that first job, so it is not really strange that I was disconnected from it. But it felt strange at that moment.

Later, of course, I would see QR codes everywhere, and I would learn how such a code together with a modern mobile phone can bring web links into the phone as easy as a tap on the camera app.

And here it is that I have started drawing parallels. Isn’t it just like that eternal hunt for attention on social media, where we spread our links everywhere to make it easy for people to find us and follow us?

We have links to our email address and website in our email signatures, links to various social media homepages spread all over the internet in Gravatar or other profile apps, and on every social media we are on — link after link after link.

How often will anyone click on any of it? It is so easy, so it should happen all the time? No, it doesn’t, because people don’t care about links. They probably don’t even see them.

My good old laboratory barcodes would be seen every time. They were made for a specific purpose, and they were appreciated by the intended users.

But all of our social links have no particular intended users — they are just spread all over the world as kind of spam, or at least information overload.

Now, having a Substack page, I was able to get a QR code — another link, this time with my face sitting right there in the middle of if, making me the code with some dots around as decoration.

Will anybody ever point their mobile camera towards it and tap the app? If I spread the QR code all over the world, will then the temptation to hit me right there on my nose be so big that it will drag in thousands of new readers to my Substack?

Hardly, I’m afraid. My fascination of that other project manager’s QR business was back then, but we are here now, in a time when people are fed up with each other’s links and never click on any of them, never point their cameras towards a QR codes unless they have to.

So, my new life as a QR code will most likely become as quiet as my life as a barcode expert.

I wonder if Elon Musk is aware of the effect his purchase of Twitter and his behaviour afterwards has had on the microblog market?

Several alternatives have appeared, including both Mastodon and Threads, which may be the two most spoken about, but also Bluesky and Nostr. All of them basically modelled after Twitter, but with two major differences:

1. They are decentralised, not operated by just one owner who, like Musk, can change everything at will

2. People behave — speak more nicely to each other and leave out all the hate speech and one-eyed politics

In the youth of social media, it wasn’t a problem to have many different platforms. Each of them could proudly announce how they had reached 100k users, or a million. Google attempted its way into this too with Google+, and even they were happy to have just a few million registered users — for a while, until they gave up.

Today, everything must be counted in 8 or 9 digits or more, and with several competing platforms that all look almost identical and contain almost identical contents, posted by almost identical users… Well, in such a situation, none of them can gain a real momentum in the competition against X, the new name for Twitter.

Enter Openvibe.

A new app, brilliantly constructed to combine the efforts of all the above-mentioned platforms (not X, though) into just one and the same app, allowing for a post to be distributed on all the four platforms. Voilà! No more considerations about which of the platforms to focus on, no more quartering your time between all of them: you can, with a tap by your finger, service your audiences on all platforms simultaneously.

More platforms are on the way. Perhaps one day also Substack Notes?

And just to get it clear - it is an app for mobile phones. These days it means two versions, one for iPhone/iPad and another for Android, available by following the links at the bottom of openvibe.social. That’s it — no web app. However, on a Mac, it is possible to install the iPad version, which appears as an option when trying to install the iPhone version from the Openvibe website (using Apple’s App Store). I believe that it is possible to install the Android version on a Windows 11 computer, but I haven’t tried it.

I installed Openvibe on both my Mac and my iPhone, and each of them turned out to require a full setup — there is no login to Openvibe, so one installation cannot know what you have set up in another. But since the setup consists of logging in to each of the social networks you want to use with Openvibe, it is quickly done.

For me, the hardest part was to remember which network my Mastodon account belonged to — and in that process, I found out that I had two, on separate networks. I never use them, so I had forgotten! Other social media platforms to choose from are Bluesky, Nostr, and Threads.

Bluesky easily logged in by itself, as I was already logged in on both devices, while Threads didn’t work — I could not log in from Openvibe and got an error message about needing an active account. I have an active account, but Threads-support is in beta testing, so this problem could possibly be because it is all new and error-prone. As I didn’t have a Nostr-account, Openvibe offered me to create one with a simple tap/click on a button, just having to tell which username and password I wanted.

The next that happened was that I saw a stream of news, the main screen of the app, just like in each of the services’ own apps, only with a small difference: Next to each post is a small badge, telling from which platform the post has been gathered.

I tried immediately to send a post, and it turned out to be quite flexible: Above the editing screen is a small symbol showing a split-road, and tapping it displays a selection box for selecting or deselecting each of the connected platforms. As default, they are all selected, which means that the post will be sent to all platforms. If you just type the message and tap the Post-button, this is what will happen. I did, and a fraction of a second later, my post was out on all three platforms.

So, to sum it all up: Openvibe is simply a shell app that enters the APIs of each of the supported platforms and displays all posts gathered in one, combined stream. When sending, it can send to one, several, or all of the connected platforms. And that’s it! You still need to have an account on each platform, and you do not gain any additional features of any kind — just the possibility to talk to several platforms at the same time.

I find Openvibe useful in all its simplicity and cannot see why I shouldn’t use this instead of the individual apps. But it is important to notice that a reply, like, or other interaction with your post on one of the networks will not automatically be distributed to the others. So your friends on Bluesky will not know that your friends on Mastodon love your post and have liked it a thousand times.

I haven’t yet been engaged in discussions, but I could imagine that if it takes place across several platforms, people might get confused from seeing only the comments given on their own platform — together with your replies to invisible comments from other platforms.

The integration of the different social media exists only in your installation of the Openvibe app. It is your personal integration. But, of course, if everybody decides to use Openvibe for all their microblog communication, and they all have accounts on all microblog social media, and all have the same followers on all of them… You get my point? It is a nice idea, but we will never get to such a coordinated effort from every person on the planet, so it will never work 100%.

But I love collaboration and communication across borders — and here is a possibility for you to cross several borders in one go, without any efforts. I would say: go for it!

Postscript

Having tried out a bit more, I can see that the proposed confusion of readers and commenters not seeing everything will not happen — the reason being that each post you send will be separate for each of the social media sent to. Openvibe doesn’t try to integrate them into one thread.

Because of this, I now, with my three connected social media accounts, need to maintain a discussion for each of them separately after posting.

This makes the concept easier to grasp, easier to maintain for the programmers, but also a bit less advantageous.

If you have knowledge of any way of combining the threads on the different platforms into one, please tell about it!

Being part of the internet revolution and all that belongs to it ever since it started, made and makes me feel both excited over the possibilities and scared of the threats.

It is common to talk about the escalating amounts of data in the world and the incredibly huge numbers of web pages, blog posts, and other communication — but it is not so common to talk about the human consequences.

Most recently, AI has become a pet topic to debate, and AI definitely has a bunch of consequences for society — for technology, processes, collaboration, employment, and, indeed, people.

But people are already under pressure from social media. This is something mostly forgotten in today’s excitement over social media marketing strategies, building up a followership, making money on “low content publications”, and so forth.

The train is running at high speed, escalating even more, but we are forgetting to stop now and then in order to take people onboard or let them off. We have forgotten all about where we came from and where we thought we wanted to go — the only thing on our minds is now SPEED and more SPEED, believing that it leads to MONEY and more MONEY.

And we all want to be first, all want to win the game of social media.

So, being both excited and scared at the same time, I find that we must step outside of it and look at the whole thing in a bigger perspective. What is this doing to us as humans? How is it shaping our societies?

This game has some real consequences for the people involved — sucking out life and opportunities from the followers by taking away their voice, manipulating them into becoming part of a narrative that is constructed with the sole purpose of earning money to the winners. Making the followers feel that they are with friends, but such friends who speak to them only with the purpose of selling them something.

It is not a popular topic. When people are in that mood where they just want MORE and MORE, they hate to stop. They hate talking about what is happening, because they have no TIME, as all their TIME is needed for optimizing their followership, gaining more SPEED and MONEY. They are all busy cracking the code for the ALGORITHM.

When people hate to stop, they exactly need to do so. They have lost their sense of what is reasonable, lost track of the consequences.

Their minds are in gaming mode.

Holism

Seeing things in a bigger perspective is important, and so is every detail in that perspective.

Everything you do leads to something. Often a small thing at the moment, but it takes part in building a bigger construction over time.

Everything matters.

Your way of using social media matters. For you and your fellow users right now, and for the development of the social media going forward. As social media is a major component of modern society, it matters also for that; for the whole society.

Social media offers you many opportunities to enrich yourself. They may be part of the game — or not. You will at times feel inclined to bend the rules of the game or make your own parallel game, because you can, and it will lead to earnings now or more opportunities later.

It is a natural human reaction. We see money on the street and want to pick it up and keep it. We see money just inside of an open door, and we want to pick it up and keep it, thinking that it was almost just lying on the street. We see money in the back of the room, through a window, and we can easily break up the window and quickly enter the room, grab the money and run…

But you cannot just grab the money and run — it will haunt you forever. Even if you have no conscience, others may remember. Even if others forget, the medium and the society will take injure and adjust to avoid similar damage in the future.

It’s a matter of moral, and moral is a matter of creating a world in which we can trust. Safe and predictable surroundings for all. Without this, the world will become restricted and feel unsafe and difficult to navigate.

By gaming the system you change it.

By doing the same wrong that all others seem to do, you enforce the damage they are already doing to the world.

Therefore, we must talk about what is right and wrong on social media, what is good and bad, and what consequences any act may lead to.

The newsletter

There are many aspects of social media, and most of them are never really discussed — they may be mentioned casually, but people do not dare talking more seriously about them.

“What if that door will get closed before you manage to take the money? Better not say anything! “— We also want to take part in the rush, be among the winners of the game.

This newsletter, A Rich Life: The Social Game, will try to describe some of these, including those that are not commonly discussed.

There will be critical articles about the construction of social media, its development, and the way people think and act toward and in them.

But there will also be positive descriptions of what seems to be valuable from various perspectives, including both human and monetary.

And I will try adding some more general descriptions that are as holistic as I see the world — about such topics as history, practical use, and technology.

Hopefully, you will enjoy reading the articles and think of them from the different angles you see relevant for you. And hopefully, we can all learn to talk about what works, what doesn’t, and which good and less good perspectives we see in the different developments taking place.

Talking about things is needed to develop them into becoming mutually beneficial, making the world easier to enjoy.

I would like to see a world that we can all easily enjoy.

Time is a thief.

You cannot trust that anything lasts, not even your self-created refuge on social media, your bubble.

Much has been said about these social media filter bubbles that allow you to see only a fraction of the world but make you believe that you see it all.

You create them by selecting people to follow, posts you like, and by commenting, viewing, and searching.

Everything you do helps shape your personal bubble. And there, you can feel safe, knowing that you will be exposed mostly to such contents that you like.

But what if you someday wake up and discover that your bubble is different? That nothing is as you remember it, the bubble you are now in is someone else’s or a fake bubble that has captured and kidnapped you, now showing you an unrecognizable world.

A first, unknown bubble

When we were young, on the Internet, we didn’t know about bubbles. Maybe they had not been invented, who knows? We thought that a search on a search engine, when they appeared, would show us results from all over the Internet.

When chat-apps started appearing, along with emails getting widespread, we believed that we were in touch with the world.

When social media were invented, the first, weak attempts of them, such as MySpace, Friendster, and Ecademy, we genuinely believed that we had cracked the code to becoming a global village — everybody now being able to meet each other, learn from each other, and help each other.

We were excited about the new opportunities and looked forward to having access to the world and all of its people and information.

What perspectives we could see! Information at your fingertips, a digital revolution.

The sudden appearance of bubbles

It became too much. All that information led to information overload.

At the same time, several clever people and organizations could see a purpose in not telling it all, keeping you in a partial information vacuum. you would get lots of information, but not equally much of it all.

LinkedIn was first out, I think. Based on the idea of “Six Degrees of Separation”, and a trend in network-building, seeing people trying to draw maps of their networks and maintaining these by regularly contacting key nodes in the network map.

Six Degrees of Separation was such an idea, actually an old one but with some renewed attention in the 1990s, that you are actually connected to every single person in the world through at most six other people. So, your contact has a contact, who has a contact, and so on — at most six of them will be needed for mapping your connection with anyone, even Santa Claus or The Wizard of Oz, I suppose.

But the people behind LinkedIn were clever — they allowed you to see only three levels of connections, thereby creating a bubble around you. You simply could not know about the existence of anyone outside your three-level bubble.

And everybody else followed troop. You became isolated, without even knowing it. I can tell, because people kept talking about the global village long after they had lost free sight of it.

Google took over the search world and started isolating you there as well, providing a paid picture of the world as advertisers wanted you to see it.

The world became a construction.

The first bubble is the deepest

I joined LinkedIn in 2006, as far as I remember, expanding my newly found bubble by understanding how connecting to people around the world made me see a growing part of the world around me.

It took a while from there before anyone started talking about bubbles, and it was not until maybe ten years later that some people started talking about the phenomenon as a problem.

The problem consists of everybody around you apparently having the same opinions, same view on the world as you, simply because you, knowingly or unknowingly, have sorted people according to their way of thinking. And that all makes you believe that the world agrees with you.

Facebook and Twitter in particular became exponents of this problem. There could be extreme and wild discussion wars going on about current topics, such as migration or various conflicts of the world. And everybody participating believed that they represented the majority in their point of view, since all the people they were connected to seemed to think likewise. Those monkeys from another tribe who dared to claim something else were by definition wrong and in the minority.

My LinkedIn bubble and its side-bubbles and extensions on other social media were, as I believed it, representing my choice of friends and influencers, my kind of news. And only gradually, I understood how the bubble was limiting me, stealing my understanding of the world as it is and replacing that with a skewed and fake view on many things.

Same as the advertising world does, actually, but totally embracing, impossible to find your way out of.

But it was my bubble, I thought, and even though it became more and more absurd, so that I decided to quit Facebook and Twitter, trying to get news and opinions of people from all over the world in more neutral ways, from outside that bubble, I did stick with LinkedIn, because it had become kind an address book and the replacement of the now vanished phone books. If I wanted to talk to an old colleague — or find a new one — where else could I go?

Waking up

Then it happened, not long ago.

Looking at the stream of information, the feed, the list of notifications — the people who somehow informed me or contacted me — I suddenly realized that they were just about all people who had joined LinkedIn within the last year or so.

My thousands of old connections were completely silent. I saw and heard only the new ones.

I think that there are very many science fiction stories of that type, where someone wakes up, only to see that the world around them is different from the one they remember from when they went to bed. People are no longer the same, and the awakening person starts wondering what happened and if they themselves are the same. Maybe the “knowledge” of the past was just a dream, maybe they have somehow made it all up and that remembered world never existed in reality?

And that was how I felt. Suddenly, I discovered that my bubble had been replaced with a different one.

The second bubble is only a surface

As I am now navigating this new and strange bubble, trying to get acquainted with its inhabitants and their behaviour, I realize that it is all superficial. Like an AI-generated image of a world that doesn’t really exist and with people who, if you look closely, have weird fingers and three legs.

The behaviour is nothing like the good old “do you remember when our boss did that silly thing, and we were all laughing?”

No, now people say the equivalent of “the others are all idiots who just want to catch your attention to sell you something, but I am the real deal, having the only course, newsletter, coaching, whatever, that really is worth something.” This, mixed with posts about how things are, often with an illustration showing that there really are just five things to consider when looking for a job, for instance.

It is all very superficial, competitive, and meaningless. It is nothing but the surface of a bubble, not even a real, filled-out bubble as my old one.

But a bubble it is, and it does limit my view of the world, letting me stay in the unknown about how many people are there, how many thoughts and needs, how many practical developments and improvements, what philosophies have been developed, which trees have been planted.

I wonder what happened to my old bubble. Is it still out there, in the universe, or did it cease to exist at the moment I woke up in the new one?

Or did it actually never exist in reality, was it just a dream, after all?

This story was previously published on Medium. I thought that Substack was different, but recently, I noticed a post from one of the substacks I subscribe to, inviting people to join a special chat and use that as a starting point for taking part in a “liking club” where everybody likes each other’s posts… Here we go again!

I am sharing the old Medium-story on Substack to inspire people to think about what they are actually doing.

Wherever there is money, there will be people trying to grab it.

Medium has money — meant to be given as a reward to writers when their articles are being read.

But as a writer, you need to be lucky: your article must get noticed by others, they must decide to look at it — and various rules that Medium has set will then decide if the writer will get anything, and how much.

But why count on being lucky, some will then say.

The myth about quality writing

Medium has spoken a lot about how they want to promote quality writing.

There are various activities for ensuring that quality writing may be rewarded, individually and human-read-based, through the Boost concept.

Medium’s Quality Guidelines describe how this works.

The same guidelines also tell about how an article (or a “story”) will be distributed, according to its contents. So, if it is not boosted, it may instead be set for General Distribution or Network Only.

In short, the three distribution models imply:

• Boost: Will get higher priority in the story to user matching. Meaning, the algorithm that decides what to suggest to you in the various places will more likely prefer this story over those that are not boosted — leading to the boosted story being suggested more often. A set of criteria guides the people who select stories for boosting.

• General Distribution: The default — most stories are treated like this. They will be suggested in various places, such as the end of stories you are reading, the “For you” tab on the front page, and the Medium newsletters. They will be matched to the reader’s interest and who the reader is following.

• Network Only: A long line of reasons may limit the distribution to only the writer’s direct followers and the followers of the publication in which the story is published. Stories about Medium, for instance, are limited in this way — so the one you are reading now will most likely have that limitation.

In reality, you will see lots of the expected Network Only stories in your suggestions, and it may have various reasons — for instance that you are following back when someone is following you. You will then see their stories suggested, also if they are about Medium. A special tag should be added voluntarily to the story to ensure that it will be restricted (I wonder, though, how many writers would want to use such a tag?)

So why do I call the quality writing a myth?

Because everybody seems to follow a lot of writers — the general style of using Medium leads to this, as does the user interface’s strong promotion of the fact that someone is now following you, allowing you to follow back with a single click.

You may then see the boosted stories in your suggestions, but you see also many others.

Also, the boosted stories seem to me to be focused on what Americans like to read. A lot of it is about the USA, in one way or another, often including local references to politics and events relevant only for people who live in this geography. This part, however, is something I will dive into later.

As I understand it, the boosted stories can be found in the Medium Staff Picks list.

How to get your stories read — in theory

Either you are very lucky and see your story getting boosted, so that it will be suggested many times to many readers, or you are not that lucky.

This is one of the game elements on the Medium platform — you don’t know how many people will ever get the chance to even know that your story exists.

Or your story is suggested to your followers only, due to the Network Only distribution, and in that case publishing in a publication will effectively increase your amount of followers relevant for that story.

Or you may, in addition to your own followers, also have your story suggested to “strangers” — such people who are not already following you.

In all cases, there will be a matching mechanism in play, trying to find stories to suggest that match the readers preferences, based on several factors, such as the selected topics (from the front page’s “Recommended topics” section), what those people the reader follows are reading, clapping for, etc., and probably also various promotional factors, which the boosting could be seen as.

But the chance of having your story suggested to potential readers is still only a chance game. It may be suggested to many or few, it is almost out of your control.

The only bit of influence you can have on this is to use a catching headline and image. If then your story is suggested to a reader, the reader may on this basis decide to click on it — and it then has a view.

Please check my article (on Medium), Writing for Profit — A Primer to see why a view is not enough; it needs to become a read. If you want to earn money, that is.

How to get your stories read — in reality

A few years ago, Medium saw a phenomenon happen: the Read-for-read.

It works by agreeing with other writers that you will read each other's stories.

Quite innocent, apparently, and honestly, a good way for learning writers to become better, as those other readers may comment with some useful feedback that could help you move on and see new angles.

But that was not the reason for doing it. People wanted to make their own boosting, so to say, and make sure that their stories would be read by many — thereby making more money.

The read-for-read concept became a milking concept, dragging out the money of Medium’s pool of funds meant to pay writers.

Today, you will find many read-for-read arrangements on Medium, stretching from simple agreements between friends — or even just polite reading of friends’ stories without a specific agreement — to organized clubs of mutual readers.

With Medium’s updated earnings scheme as of late summer 2023, the mutual reads became supplemented with mutual clapping and commenting, as these elements add to the payouts made.

So, calling them clapping clubs is not wrong — these are organizations of people who pump up their earnings on Medium, often on the basis of simple writing without any particular value for anyone, and often through publishing many of these stories. It can be five or ten per day, none of them adding anything useful to the literary scene in any way.

The clapping clubs are often arranged through publications on Medium, where the writers must obey to a rule of reading “at least ten of their fellow publication writers’ stories each day”, or whatever they have decided. Or they are arranged elsewhere, for instance on Facebook, where there are large groups of people who this way promise to drive up the earnings of each other.

More recently, special Friend of Medium clapping clubs have appeared, designed to drag out the money that Friends of Medium were supposed to be charitably giving to the writers in need. Seems like many Friends consider their own needs to be the most important.

From time to time, you will see how people complain about such agreements not being honoured, leading to blocking each other and other sanctions, making Medium a battlefield for the disappointed, betrayed clapping club members.

If you want to reach the big earnings that some writers write about — and you must have noticed that there are huge amounts of stories about exactly this topic — then you are not really getting there by playing the chance game, as designed by Medium. You will have to create and nurture your luck with such arrangements.

People who struggle to earn anything, or who may have one good month with 20 $ earning — in the line of “less than 5 $”-months — they are not doing that. It may be that they write excellent articles about interesting topics, but when all the money goes to the clapping club members, there is nothing left for the normal writers.

The end game

Well, I am not the one who can end that clapping game, but for this article you are now reading, the end has been reached.

An ironic detail of the Medium story distribution system is that an article like this one will by definition get a limited distribution — because it tells about how Medium works — and therefore, many people, who may have wanted to know about this phenomenon, cannot be reached.

As I am not trying to play games, there will naturally be many other writers on Medium who earn the money, not me. Friends of Medium will earn more money through the special clapping clubs for Friends of Medium, and that has led me to the conclusion that this apparent concept of charity is, in reality, a big hoax.

Medium is by definition a game, having an economical reward system based on a chance game, but wherever people a gambling for money, there will be clever parallel games developed to challenge the official game and steal the money.

A slot machine may be challenged by a magnet (according to some movies), and a card game may be challenged by mirrors, so you can spy on your opponents’ cards — and the Medium game can, obviously, be challenged by the concept of clapping clubs.

I just wonder if this is already known or even foreseen by the Medium staff?

Postscript

On Substack, there has seemingly been a flood of chat requests - at least, I have seen people on Notes talk about them and also myself received many. Most recently, I decided to actually talk to one of these - after checking, that there were some activities behind the pseudonym who asked, i.e., not just an empty account.

Most of such unsolicited contact requests are attempts to sell something - or to initiate some kind of scam. This one, however, was a somewhat weird concept that turned out to be a chatbot - it admitted it directly in the conversation, so there can’t be much doubt about that.

So, we have liking clubs, scammers, and bots contacting people.

While this all may seem quite negative, it also indicates that Substack is seen as part of life. Like a marketplace, which attracts such as pickpockets, grey money exchange agents, and cheating sellers who put four apples in the bag when you actually bought five.

Cheating is a sign of life, you could say. We have so much life here, generating so much value, that people see a potential for grabbing something out of it.

This means: If you were in doubt about spending time on Substack instead of the real world - well, you are in the real world :)