The Great Medium Cleanup

When I started writing on Medium, they only allowed three tags and had a liking system called “Recommendations,” where users would recommend articles to their friends by clicking on a heart symbol. As more people clicked on the heart, more folks got served the story in their feeds.

Now, Medium allows for five tags, and has a multi-tiered recommendation and content delivery algorithm that uses “claps” and human curators.

In the early days, writers were encouraged to ask their readers for recommendations, because there wasn’t any boilerplate text explaining the system. But now, it’s discouraged and the system is more exposed to users.

As a result, I have a massive pile of articles that ask people to click a heart button that doesn’t exist and use three tags instead of five. I’ve always meant to clean this up, and I’m finally working on that this week, so content will be a little light on the ground.

I’ve got a lot of stuff coming in the next few weeks though. I’m still plugging away at the Kingdom Hearts and Assassin’s Creed franchises, and I’ll have a review of the Lego Movie 2 Video Game soon. Spoilers: that game is a weird mess that may have thrown out everything good about Lego games in order to be “different.”

OTHER HOUSEKEEPING STUFF:

*I’ve got a new headset comparison up on Medium, if that’s your jam.

*The donate page here is now disabled, replaced with a Support My Work page. My hearty thanks to everyone who used my internet tip jar, but I’ve received 10 times the support from folks buying Medium subscriptions. It’s clear that’s the paid option you want, so I’m not going to ignore that. Everything here will continue as it did previously, and continue to be non-paywalled.