Medium Sucks In March?
Happy Friday,
For the last 3 years, March has been my worst month on Medium.
March 2019, 2020, and 2021.
The. Worst.
This year isn’t looking much different. lol. Worst month since last March.
I don’t know why that is.
But here’s a cool thing you didn’t know…
Some people think emotions are what separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Others think intelligence is what sets us apart.
Nope, and nope.
What sets us apart from other animals is pattern recognition.
Not even kidding. Pattern recognition happens in the neocortex, which is a part of the brain found only in mammals. 80% of the weight of your brain is the neocortex, and it contains 300 million “pattern recognizer” neurons.
Basically, your brain is a pattern seeking machine.
No one has been able to develop a computer algorithm that can outperform the human brain at detecting patterns. Pretty cool, hey?
The downside of our own brilliance…
According to scientists, we humans are so good at seeing patterns we even see them where they don’t exist.
Pareidolia is when we see things that aren’t there. Like the man in the moon, or a face in a rock, or Jesus on a slice of toast. It’s fun to lay on the grass and point out bunnies and eagles in the clouds. As long as we know they aren’t real.
Apophenia is a general term for when we perceive meaningful connections where they don’t exist. That’s the one that bites gamblers who are absolutely sure “this” one is going to be the win. So they go all in, because they saw a pattern. Then — nope.
There are so many ways the human brain gets pattern recognition wrong that statistical misinterpretation has become a field of study unto itself. It delves into topics like causation versus correlation, coincidence, and more.
Long story short, we see patterns so rapidly that we’re wrong more often than we’re right. But we don’t know it and won’t believe it. Seeing is believing, as they say.
According to psychologists, once we “see” something, it’s easier to fool us again than to convince us we’ve been fooled in the first place.
Interesting, no?
I don’t know why Medium sucks every March, every year. At least for me. Is it because Medium has to file taxes the next month? lol. Is it because people are finally going outside after a too-long winter? Is it something I don’t see?
Or is it just something weird that happens to me, but not everyone else?
Heaven forbid, I don’t want to jump to wrong conclusions. And I don’t want to feel paranoid, like it’s only happening to me. But maybe it is. Haha!
So I’m curious — is it the same for you?
How’s your March going?
More reading…
P.S. If you are reading this in email, you can click the title to see the online version, where you can leave comments, just like on Medium.
xo,
Linda
Being only a reader on Medium, I'm somewhat of an outsider looking in here. Declining payouts is a universal complaint from the top writers that I follow, and some of them are migrating to their own websites, or paid subscriptions on Substack. I was initially motivated to join Medium two years ago because it offered good writing from intelligent people. Since that time the world is in a tailspin. The pandemic makes a convenient scapegoat, and I'm sure it had some impact. But it's also clear that intelligence is declining, at least in the US. A few days ago a post on Reddit featured a young woman, old enough to be through high school, debating with a man of similar age. She was adamant that gravity was something invented by someone years ago, and we no longer needed it. When "influencer" is an actual occupation I think we've just about scraped bottom. This has to be hitting Medium's bottom line, and they are countering by going the route of clickbait, and trimming payouts to keep the lights on. That of course sets off a spiral effect that leads to loss of readers. It puts talented writers in the same category as writers of old, looking for patrons, scrambling to produce more work. This is just another system that needs to be fixed in our universe of broken systems. Regarding the March thing, that was not a particularly good month for Julius Caesar either.
I’m having a lousy March, but then I haven’t published much. I published 28 stories in February and made under $150. I’m over halfway through March and haven’t hit $50 yet. I’m trying to decide if all this is worth it.