Dr. Y,

Not without humor, I might offer this: my being ripped at 67 clearly has little to do with being curated. All I can offer (before I get into my Epsom salts bath, and yes I really am) is that the Medium curation guidelines seemed to have righteously gone off the rails. I no longer write for curation, because if that were the case, I’d be driven mad by daily rejection. I have had perhaps two articles curated in the last month or so. TWO. The impression I have, rightly or wrongly, is several fold:

1. They are overwhelmed, even more than usual. I have often found myself unable to log in because their server isn’t working.
2. That leads me to think that they are having some challenges, because you’d normally hire more people, but that doesn’t seem to be the case
3. Again, my impression, and it’s only that, is that they have decided to make themselves another news source rather than follow the guidance they themselves developed. In the same way that far too many look to Facebook for news which is simply mad, I get the distinct feeling that Medium has moved in that direction if for no other reason than almost every single Editor’s pick since our Conditions began has been about only that.
4. And they don’t appear to be listening to feedback. The last time my stats spiked, it was because I was calling Medium out for this very behavior. Apparently that’s not particularly important to the curators right now.
5. Another piece of this, Dr. Y. is that none of us needs to focus our attention on curation per se, which refers to a comment you made in one of your articles. If we do, not only do we lose our voice in the scramble for curator attention, then we sell ourselves down the river for eyeballs as opposed to developing our skills as writers. Whether or not I am curated, people find me. That’s because I regularly comment (often using humor which gets attention) on popular writers whose work I like. If they read my stuff great. But none of us is likely well served worrying about curation at a time when the curators themselves are likely dealing with plenty of their own personal issues at home and professionally. Which leads me to this:

5. the other thing I have to wonder is whether income for Medium has taken a tumble, because all my Medium peeps have reported a more than 50% drop in stats. I think it’s safe to think that Medium itself has also taken a hit as people stop subscribing. To that, this seemingly desperate and to my mind deeply misguided attempt to compete with real news outlets may well be trying to grab their readership back. I can’t know that but it’s an impression.

In all regards, if any of us stoops to clickbait just to get curated, then we lose integrity. I used the reference to the anal sunbather to make a very specific point about idiocy. At this point, I no longer expect or really even bother hoping to get curated. Things are so upside down at the moment that the best we can do on Illumination is focus on our own quality, our own curation, our own writers and readers. There’s a good reason we’re growing. You can bang the insensitive doors of city hall, or you can build your own. We’re building our own.