No, Boost Nominators On Medium Aren't Boosting Their Friends. There Should Be A Penalty For Saying That.
The penalty should be having to find twenty posts the curators will accept and boost. Bwa ha ha. Can I watch?
Happy Friday,
There’s a Slack Group for Boost Nominators at Medium. It’s not official or endorsed by Medium, but it’s a place we commiserate. You probably know because I’ve mentioned it a time or three. Not all nominators participate, but more than half do.
Let me tell you a dirty little secret.
Every time some writer posts a rant about the Boost program, some nominator will share it in Slack. I don’t know why. Comic relief, maybe. More probably so we can vent our frustrations at how badly writers misunderstand the whole mess.
We dive in like vultures on a fresh carcass. A bunch will say nope, not reading that, not giving that a read, eventually someone will critique it, and a bunch more will say yup, what he or she said. Then it gets picked apart.
Here’s what most of those rant pieces say.
It’s not fair. It’s a small group of “in” people nominating their friends. Not fair, not fair.
Round and round, that idea just won’t go away.
Nominating our friends, nominating our friends, nominating our friends.
There should be a penalty for writing that.
The penalty should be that the writer has to go find twenty posts the curators will approve. Bwa ha ha. Can I watch?
Some days being a nominator is like buying a handful of those scratch-off lottery cards that only ever say sorry, try again. Sorry, try again. Sorry, try again.
Let me tell you a stupid story…
One day I nominated a story I thought was a guaranteed approval. We get a text box to say why we think a post should be boosted. So I did a short synopsis and then said this post has over 2K claps. Before being boosted. Dozens of comments. Clearly, it’s resonating with readers and that tells me it should have wider distribution. Did the curators agree? Nope. Rejected. Wtf??!? They did the writer an injustice.
It’s frustrating.
But yeah — okay, sure — I’ma just nominate my friends. Ugh.
Yay, me and my insiders club.
#sarcasm
Let’s play pretend. If I did that, and just nominated all my friends, the curators would just reject them and I’ve wasted a nomination I could’ve used on a kickass story that only took me three hours to find tag surfing, ffs.
Nominating our friends, wtf.
Look, Boost isn’t perfect, that’s for sure…
I like when I can find all my nominations in my own publications. But my publications are small and sometimes I don’t get 20 kickass submissions I can nominate in a month. So I tag surf to find good stories I think might be approved.
Or I come here and ask y’all to share your best writing.
How stupid of me not to realize I should just nominate my friends. *eye roll*
Here’s the thing about the boost program. It’s not perfect. Think of all the stories on Medium as a big pile of hay. Okay? Crouched around that haystack are dozens of people, poking their arms inside looking for the needles in the haystack.
The needles in the haystack are the stories the curators will agree to boost.
There’s got to be a better way to do it. And I don’t know what that is.
Sometimes I think it should be more publication focused. All publication owners are included. Bam. Keep your hands out of my publication. You want more to nominate, grow your publication. But it’s hard and also unfair to suggest that when growing a publication is unpaid labor. Basically volunteer work we don’t get paid for.
We all have bills to pay. We don’t pay our bills reading stories that need editing or reminding people to credit their images, or correcting grammar and typos.
I don’t know the answer. I truly do not.
What I do know is we’re not a bunch of schmucks nominating our friends and I don’t understand why the “nominating our friends” idea keeps making the rounds.
That’s a real question. I’d love to know what you think.
My newest on Medium…
If you enjoy my writing, please click the heart or share this post. Thanks. :)
xo,
Linda
Happy Friday, Linda! This must be so frustrating to deal with, over and over. I like your punishment idea; and they have to choose people whose stories they’ve never appropriately commented on before might be even more delightful, as we know these whiners aren’t genuinely reading other people’s work.
I know these individuals; they cut in the lunch line as kids, they cut in lines as adults, they cut us off in traffic. They’ve gotten lucky over the years by being friends with the right people who’ve given them the opportunities and promotions they never earned. Now they realize they don’t have what it takes to legitimately get what they want, and playing the victim, ironically, gets them exactly what they’re after; more clicks, followers, money. Because others just like them agree wholeheartedly.
If only all those articles, along with the “How I made a bunch of money here” and similar nonsense would have their own website that the rest of us never had to see.
Now I’m turning into a ranting fool. I’m going to unclench my jaw and let it go.
My short answer: Yes! to everything you just said.
My longer one: I said it in slack, and I'll say it again; I refuse to feel bad about about (possibly) earning money for a successful nomination. If nothing else, it goes a little ways towards offsetting the hundreds of unpaid hours I've invested in helping other writers, editing their work, giving them a platform to publish it on, etc.
I was also one of the loudest complainers abut medium's downturn over the last year or so, but I certainly wasn't alone. if this program is helping improve the platform, then that will ideally lead to more readers, which ideally leaders to more revenue for writers producing quality work. It's a virtuous cycle.
I think there are a lot of missed expectations behind these "hit pieces"--and it's always writers complaining never a reader chiming in to agree. It's easier to blame a group of people you've never met for your poor earnings than it is to recognize that A) maybe your writing isn't that good, or B) maybe you were sold a bill of goods regarding earning potential on Medium. There's a very real "late stages of a gold rush" energy there. It'll take some time to correct.
When even the CEO explicitly states that one shouldn't expect to make a living on the platform, one should listen. But we like to dream, so it's easy to ignore that and keep going (doubly so if you've already sunk a few hundred dollars into a "Mastermind" course, or whatever).
The 3rd part of that is that reader's tastes change all the time, and maybe what you were writing in early 2022 was knocking it out of the park, but no longer is. Length, topic, and style all play in here. I'm just one guy, and what I like has changed dramatically. Even within the very narrow scope of my music pub, I can see in real time what plays (heh) and what doesn't, and it's constantly evolving. The stats don't lie.
(big sigh)
Okay, rant over. lol.