Thanks again, Jack, for the engaging discussion. You raise some good (and hopeful) points that things will be changing here in Medium. I too sense that they’ve moved too far away from the original eclectic mix that it once was. Let’s hope that things do change.

With regard to bots, I don’t mean just the Russians. They’re not the only ones trying to game the system (or influence people). I just mean that when money is involved someone will try to game that system (maybe getting fake clicks to gain visibility, I’m not sure what works as Medium has been all hush about it). This article shows the level of deception out there.

With Medium I do agree we have to roll with it, but I’m still in the team hope. In the sense that I think something good will come out of this, rather than what we see elsewhere on the internets.

How Medium curates their stories does matter, in the sense that this is where they’re sending their eyeballs. I too end up looking at the artists I already follow, but I want to find better discovery methods (thanks, for the rec, btw), so let’s keep up the discussion. Do you have other ways of discovering some exciting new writers? Anyone else want to chime in?