In the mouth of Audrey. On temptation and feeding the monster

Happy Friday

Did you ever see the movie Little Shop of Horrors? It’s old (1986) but also something of a cult classic, so maybe. If nothing else, you probably know of the plant.

It starts as this cute little thing, like a bizarre Venus Flytrap, except that it talks.

Feed me. That’s what it says. Feed me. But the more you feed it, the bigger and uglier and more demanding it grows.

Sometimes people work that way, too.

This morning I poured coffee and opened the Medium Daily email to find something to read over coffee. Instead, I found something to write about.

One of the posts was some guy complaining about mediocre crappy writing on Medium and telling people to stop writing such crap. lol.

When I clicked — holy wow— almost 7K claps on that puppy.

He said the top reason for all the crappy, mediocre writing is that people write too often, publish too fast and focus on quantity more than quality. He said stop writing so often. Stop publishing every day. Focus on quality, not quantity.

So many angry comments I image he’s stopped reading them. Maybe he’s a glutton for punishment, I don’t know. People yelling that they can write however often they want. Telling him to stop policing the internet. The most common comment was if you don’t like it, don’t read it.

How do you know if you don’t like something unless you do read it?

He’s relatively new, it seems, and has less than 300 readers. So I checked the rest of his posts. Curiosity. You already know what I saw, right? Most of his writing had very few reads, almost no comments and most didn’t even get 50 claps.

Just that one, standing out like a beacon.

Strange thing is that I agree with both sides. I’m not a fan of policing how often people write, or what they write. But there is a lot of bad writing.

That one viral article? That’s how it begins.

We feed the monster.

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What I wrote this week…

• What American Mobsters Looked Like In Real Life (Not Hollywood)

• If Covid Caused Lesions Like Leprosy, We Wouldn’t Have Anti-Maskers

• A 5 Year Old Girl Was Mailed To Her Grandma For 53 Cents In Postage

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“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Clicking the ❤ is a nice way to say thanks. Reading in email? If you click the title you’ll be able to leave a comment. Thanks and have a great weekend!

xo,
Linda