By Jan Oberg
January 4, 2019
TFF has been on Medium for years, the blogging platform started in 2012 Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone. More about it on Wikipedia here.
It’s not that TFF or I have sat down and written for this platform. What we post on other social media is shot out to Medium via the social media management tool Sendible.
But here is our latest – and last – post and below it, are the reasons.
• For more than 12 months, actually, since we got on Medium, we have had 262 followers. Never 261, never 263. You see it in the screenshot.
That means either that that figure is somehow manipulated or that there is no activity whatsoever. No such place with daily new posts can have exactly the same number of followers over such a long period of time.
• Our address there is https://medium.com/@janoberg – but you can’t get to it. This what you get:
Interesting! Well, yes, if it wasn’t for this fact: If I as the administrator log into Medium first, then I can access TFFs page.
However, if I click on Medium’s home, or frontpage, I can access everything else without being logged in.
If I cannot read TFF’s page on Medium without being logged in first, I guess no one else can. And that may explain where the number of followers is constant – there are not followers or readers. Or the system is beyond words idiotic.
If when I am not logged in, I can get to everything else on Medium but not the page I administer – to see what it looks like to others – the system must be manipulated, censored or God only knows what.
The blogger platform is very closely integrated with Twitter. So who would be surprised if there is a political limitation? However, exactly the same TFF materials are posted by us via Sendible on Twitter and there we can be found.
Here is how Medium describes itself:
“Medium is a place where the measure of success isn’t views, but viewpoints. Where the quality of the idea matters, not the author’s qualifications.”
Well, I am not sure that that is a very healthy formulation…
Next, it says about itself:
“The world has reached a saturation point of shallow, thoughtless content, and half-skimming through these pages of filler is increasingly unfulfilling. Every day, your Medium homepage is full of stories with depth and meaning – stories that make you laugh, cry, and actually feel things.”
Word, words and more words… and TFF and I have no time for that. So, goodbye, Medium. You know better than we what happened to our account and page with you and why.
And that’s enough for us. Because if we asked you, we’d probably only get even more words about depth and meaning and how unimportant authors’ qualifications are to you.