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Calling All Artists on Medium

Help us be heard so Medium can adapt to us

Steven Clifford
4 min readFeb 6, 2020
Image by Jan Alexander from Pixabay

It’s been my observation that Medium favors mediocrity over art, which is not Medium’s fault; People generally don’t read poetry and fiction online, but tabloid-like articles or jazzy clickbait-listicles. Internet-audiences have short attention spans and don’t want to be challenged emotionally, psychologically, philosophically, morally, etc. This is because users don’t have patience when the internet operates on different time, faster time, because of the amount of noise being bombarded at users. Medium is different, though. Right? Medium has no ads. Although, Medium is saturated with articles on how to write on medium. Medium is constantly advertising itself by proxy. Therefore, Medium itself is an ad, albeit unintentionally.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I would like to believe Medium is a different type of platform for artists, one that’s a little slower, a place that suspends our attention spans. It’s not Medium’s fault people don’t read, but I’m sorry, Medium; You’re an enabler, to the culture of short attention spans. I don’t want to be that cynical, bitter guy that believes people don’t read work with substance. People are out there who read…

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Steven Clifford
Steven Clifford

Written by Steven Clifford

Clifford is a writer and poet from Long Island, NY. He’s “mentally Ill” but considers it a gift with consequences from a generous muse.

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