First off, if you haven’t already registered for Medium Day, you can do that here. If you have any interest in learning more about all that Medium has to offer, how to be a more successful writer on the platform, or just get a better sense for the sheer vastness of what people are reading and writing about, you won’t want to miss it.

Secondly, I’m running a session about Curation at Medium. Rather than bore you with what I want to talk about, I’m doing it as Question & Answer session. Submit your questions in advance, and I’ll answer as many as possible.

Ask what you actually want to know. How curators read a story. Why one piece gets Boosted and another doesn’t. What we do about AI-generated writing.

Send yours here: Submit a question

Recommended reading

Skim these first. They’ll save you a question, or help you write a sharper one.

• Medium’s Distribution Guidelines: How curators review stories for Boost, General, and Network Distribution
• What happens to your story when you publish on Medium
• How our quality guidelines incentivize your best writing
• Our curation team’s approach to keeping AI-generated content out of your recommendations

See you there!

Mrs. Niswander drew four letters on the first-grade blackboard. L O O K. Then she turned the Os into eyes. This, she explained, was how we could remember what these letters meant. It was the first word I learned to read and I was beside myself with excitement. I’d waited all my life for this. I remember it as if it were yesterday.

I became the child who had to be told, repeatedly, to put down the book and go do the chores. I snuck flashlights to bed to read under the covers. I’d shut the flashlight off, hide everything quietly, and pretend to sleep as soon as I heard footsteps on the stairs. I got caught when I forgot to take my eyeglasses off.

Those of us who fell the hardest into books as children probably also felt something apart from others in our lives. Because if you didn’t fit in, books made it all tolerable. Sam in My Side of the Mountain also didn’t fit in. Nor did Agba and Sham of King of the Wind. Or White Fang, or Black Beauty. Children’s literature was full of protagonists who became stronger through some form of isolation, paradoxically giving me the sense of belonging I craved. I found my place. My place was in books.

I loved being swept up into all of their adventures. Escape. Solace. Inspiration. Knowledge.

Reading made me.

Reading and writing changed me, and it changed humans as a species, too. From David Abram I learned how this new power came at a cost—it weakened our connection to the rest of the natural world. The magic of this transmittable abstractionism set us apart, and that trade-off gave us a new power.

“I don’t mean to be getting down on technology, only to say that many of these very complex technologies could only have emerged from the alphabetic mindset. But nor do I mean to be demeaning the alphabet here — I’m a writer, after all — I’m not saying that the alphabet is something bad, not at all. What I’m trying to say is that the alphabet is magic — that it is a very concentrated form of magic, and that like all magics it must be used with real care. When we just take it for granted, when we don’t notice its potency, then we tend to fall under its spell.””

David Abram, interviewed in How Shall I Live My Life? by Derrick Jensen

This resonates, this idea of writing as a “concentrated form of magic.” Yes.

I felt that in the opening paragraphs of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: a momentary shimmer in reality. I fell into that book, just like a million other readers, though I brought along my own memories of a half-feral tomcat and sticky summer mornings. The experience I brought along was uniquely my own, unknown by the writer, and yet millions of other readers also felt the shimmer.

It’s strange magic that a writer can wield, sometimes knowingly, sometimes by intuition or luck. When you do manage it, it is like nothing else. The power can be thrilling, but it can also be terrifying.

Don’t nobody know why.

This concentrated form of magic can be quite practical as well. Even to children.

During the fourth grade, I woke and prepared to go to school when my mother placed her hand on my forehead and announced, “I think you’re coming down with something. You better stay home.”

It was confusing. I felt fine. And there was a field trip to the high school planetarium that I didn’t want to miss. Of all the days to miss school! The planetarium!

I stayed home on the couch in my pajamas and waited to fall sick, which never happened. I was sent back to school the next day without comment. Then I was really sorry I’d missed it all. The other kids were absolutely buzzing. I learned that they’d been separated into two groups, the girls from the boys. One group went to the planetarium for an astronomy lesson, while the others were taken to a room and shown some rudimentary sex education film. Then they all switched rooms.

It took me decades to remember this and put it all together…that my parents had decided to keep me from school that day to intentionally keep me away from learning. It still makes me sad and furious to realize how threatened they felt by the idea of me having knowledge about my own body. I was naturally curious…maybe even more curious than usual about such things. I began to seek the answers I needed in books.

I learned how to use libraries. Really well.

A lot of what I learned about sex this way, of course, was plainly wrong. But I also learned how to vet information for myself, and, eventually, how deeply bigotry was ingrained into…well, into everything.

My first boyfriend, a librarian, gave me a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. In part, I’m certain it was because I needed it. But I think it was also because it represented our shared love of books and of what they represented. How the written word was a kind of path to freedom, and sometimes an act of rebellion.

Reading saved me.

Reading changed.

I try to pinpoint the time and place that happened. I’m not sure I can blame the internet, really. When I ask myself when reading changed for me, I remember standing in a bookstore, looking at a wall of “succeed in business” books. I was a tech support rep for WordStar at the time; I wanted to be more successful in the context of all of that.

The timing is kind of interesting, isn’t it? The rise of the word processor and all? And it also seemed to be the dawning of the era of the huge chain bookstores. We always think our lives are the product of our choices, but when I look back, I wonder how much was really a product of my culture. Maybe I wasn’t making the choices at all.

In any case, and at least for me, reading largely became a means to an end, and the end was improving. Improving myself, improving my station in life, improving the world. And then, of course, the internet did come along, and a lot of reading and writing about improving followed. And was copied, rehashed… “repurposed” was the buzzword of the day for what we did with writing.

I would still choose reading for pleasure or discovery, but not as often.

Today, what I notice about reading is that it requires an act of determination to stay focused on the words in front of me. My brain wants to keep scanning for the next thing, instead of soaking into what’s in front of me. I long for the way I used to soak into the written word, losing myself in it. Emerging, changed with the experience.

I’ve become a skeptical and jaded reader. There’s so much more work in being a reader now. A reader has to pick something out of the deluge to read. A reader has to evaluate the authenticity of what they read. A reader is urged to like, comment, share. A reader is responsible for mustering all of their defenses against distractions because it’s their fault they’re distracted or fooled. I struggle to improve my habits to cling to my love of reading.

If reading has become fraught, writing has become even more difficult.

I once kept a blog. I, too, was hungry for attention and I was pretty good at manipulating words to get it. It’s embarrassing now, but it was part of the zeitgeist at the time, an enormous human experiment that wasn’t completely devoid of value. There were actual connections there, too. It’s worthwhile, even though it can become problematic if you fall under its spell.

A passing acquaintance stepped up to me at a gathering once, “I went to your blog, and sat there and read all of it last night, and I feel like I already know you!”

It was strange and disturbing to realize this person held such an earnest image of me that was largely imaginary…strange enough to jolt me out of the momentary pleasure of getting that attention. A good lesson in what happens when you play with this kind of magic.

A writer may have an idea of what they want to accomplish, but the reader has their own experience of the result. How many of us have had the experience of laboring over something that we were delighted with, only to realize the reader resonates instead with an offhand paragraph to which we gave little thought?

Connection to readers is alluring and mysterious. But the connection to our inner, true selves holds just as much mystery. I am not a well-organized or disciplined writer. Writing is problem-solving. The problems sit like piles of tangled string, somewhere in the shadows. I have an idea to make a beautiful tapestry out of it, and what emerges turns out to be a lopsided sweater that I’m forced against my will to wear. It is itchy, and holds the marks of the stitches I keep ripping out and doing over, creating new mistakes. I start with a fever dream of something incredibly original, then find I’ve simply copied over a well-known design, badly. It’s maddening and I give up more often than I should.

And yet, when something is finished, I have a sense of relief that makes the agony worthwhile. If it becomes more than that, if it’s actually read, then great. But the relief comes because I did something I had to do; because that’s who I am.

Magic.

It’s all the other experiences of life that make reading and writing worth the effort, worth the cost. I am unable to write if I sit in a room and tell myself to write. I have to get out into the world, I have to move into life.

Telling the truth is harder than it seems; any writer worth their salt has been drawn up short by the sudden realization that what they’ve written simply isn’t true. I hope you are spared my specialty, the horror of realizing I’ve been hard at work creating a pretty fiction of myself. Kill your darlings, darling.

There is something about the struggle to tell the truth of things that has the potential to make me stronger. Many of those truths, particularly the ones about myself, have been especially painful to face, and even more painful to share. But it has become the strange gold in my life.

Writing redeems me.

I’ve done, and do, a lot of the type of writing that I think of as “transactional”. It doesn’t form a part of my identity in the same way. There’s nothing wrong with it. But writing at its best is a form of intimacy born out of experience. The point is not to be a brain in a jar regurgitating facts, advice, opinions, memories. The point is the intimacy, the proximity to naked truth.

There’s a theory in comics described as “masking”—when a character is represented as a simple stick figure, it’s easier for the reader to imagine themself as that character. When the character is drawn in a more photo-realistic way, however, it’s more likely that the reader experiences them as “other"—it’s more like watching another person have the experience.

Writing, without the images of comics, is an even more complete “masking” or abstraction of experience. There’s a potential for putting yourself into an experience as a reader that is quite unlike any other form of expression. That’s why books were so spellbinding for me as a kid.

At the same time, the reader has more control over their experience than a viewer or listener does. Do you want to skim, scan, or study? The reader decides. Do you want to go on that journey with the writer, or do you just want to get to the answer? There’s an equality between the reader and writer, a balance of power.

This isn’t a criticism of other forms of storytelling, where the creator is in more control. It’s simply to say that reading and writing have particular qualities that are worthwhile in particular ways.

More than worthwhile. Sacred.

Like other forms of human magic, reading and writing have been commoditized. There’s more to read than ever before—a zillion sweaty “creators” gesticulating at me like a row of Amsterdam windows from the screen.

Look. No one wants more to read. What we want is the right thing to read at the right time—and to feel it was worth reading. Some of us want magic.

It’s become laborious to find it. When I am weak—which is often—I turn to the less effortful forms of media, the endless scroll, the junk food of the brain—and end up feeling empty, nauseous, and full of self-loathing.

“What’s a fuck when what I want is love?”
—Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (who had an appreciation for both)

It’s worthwhile to make the effort to read good writing. I know this even when I don’t do it.

But anyone can see where this eventually goes. If you want to read in that old way that is magical and connective, it’s probably going to become very expensive. Not just in terms of effort, but monetarily as well. Capitalism finds a way.

I don’t mind if a person wants to make money writing, or if they want to try to sell me an idea with it or use it for practical things. These are real, righteous benefits and I need and enjoy them, too. But I will tell you this: no one is paying people or companies to produce writing. If they pay you at all, they are paying for something to be worth reading. To ask someone to read the words you produce—whether you “wrote” it or not—is to ask them to do labor.

See why I say it’s going to get expensive?

As a reader who wants the magic, I have to accept that this requires more expenditure on my part. That in a world of endless available supply, I am, at minimum, required to make the effort of picking and choosing. Required to exercise some discipline about how I take care of my brain and psyche. Required to turn away from the cheap sugary junk and choose real nourishment.

As a writer who chases the magic, I have to put in the work. For me, that means drafting, editing, drafting again, and the hopeless misery of watching it crumble. It means not rushing to push to readers until I have something worthy of them—or at least something that represents my truth that I’ve worked hard to see. It means careful examination above all else, because the kind of writing I want to do is the result of looking. It is a practice of looking deeply and pulling forth what you have seen, like a rabbit out of an empty hat.

We all have to decide what is valuable in our lives. Reading and writing, therefore, deserve to be defended in my own. And they deserve to be defended for the sake of those who come after me, the ones who also need to be made, saved, and redeemed by them—because reading and writing are just our thing. Because my tribe is the tribe who loves reading and writing.

Reading and writing are how I find and re-find my place in the world. They are how I look, and hopefully see. These uniquely human activities—reading and writing—are the conduit to the very best parts of me: to the curiosity and appreciation of a sweaty bloody feral tomcat life. To the ability to receive or create a connection, to meld, transform, and emerge. To that impulse to wake up and LOOK and notice what an utterly divine planet this is, how life itself is remarkable even while it is terrifying. To that wise old child within, who still knows that reading and writing is a miracle: a concentrated form of magic.

Maybe earworms come from feelings we’re trying to resolve. We hear the song, and some tooth in its gear fits into a cog in the wheel of memory, setting into motion something we can’t stop.

Christmas songs are the worst earworms, not just because they’re relentlessly sappy, but also because of all those difficult feelings.

Maybe that’s why Fairytale of New York is so polarizing as a holiday song, and so potent as an earworm for me. It’s something for those of us for whom Christmas memories are less It’s a Wonderful Life and more Fishes.

It’s even more powerful if you have your own memories of being alone in Manhattan during the holidays.

I’d gotten a second job tending bar for shows at The Ritz, a cavernous music hall in the East Village. I led an exhausting double life…by day a planetarium intern in office clothing, by night a bartender with bedhead and boots. I needed the money, but it was more than that…I got to be a peripheral part of the music I loved. It suited me. I always feel awkward and self-conscious being “entertained” at events. It’s more fun to have a job to do; it makes me feel like I belong.

I also liked the cab ride back to the Webster Apartments in those early morning hours. There was a sense of peace in a city preparing for the day ahead. It gave me a sense of seeing the world that others didn’t, and a strange sense of feeling connected.

Or maybe that was just the warm glow from the huge going-off drink I poured into the big red plastic cup before joining the other bartenders. We all held our drinks one hand, our cash stuffed into a second big red cup in the other, and lined up to be escorted up the stairs to count out for the night.

One night after closing, I was picked up by a British cabbie who asked about the show. We had one of those rearview mirror conversations, and I mentioned the 101’ers…how much I’d loved Keys to Your Heart on Burning Ambitions, but I could find little more by them and I didn’t understand why.

“The 101’ers? That was Joe Strummer’s band before The Clash,” the cabbie told me, a mystery suddenly unlocked. Why had I never recognized the voice from London Calling, another LP that I’d near worn out? Why hadn’t any record store clerk known this? It all fell into place.

The conversation continued. I wondered if we might exchange phone numbers. My fingers touched something next to me in the back seat.

“What’s this?” I asked vacantly, holding up the large hunting knife. His eyes widened in the rearview mirror.

“What’s that?” he repeated, as if trying to figure out what game I was playing and what the right answer would be so I wouldn’t stab him.

I realized he thought he was being held up, explained how I’d just found it in the back seat, and gingerly dropped it into the front seat next to him. We sat in awkward silence for a few moments. “I’ve been held up twice,” he said, explaining his own reaction. And I was kicking myself…you do not just hand over a giant knife to a stranger at 3 am. The knife’s appearance made no sense. It spooked us both, and we didn’t talk again until I paid my fare and said good night.

But it was okay. I’d made a more important connection. I’d found Joe Strummer.

I just didn’t expect him to turn up in person so soon.

A few weeks later, I hustled up the stairs into the club more eagerly than usual…I was happy to be working the show for one of my favorite bands, The Pogues. Going through the doors, I said hello to one of the guys who had just finished up sound check. He confirmed that they sounded great, and was excited to share a surprise. “Joe Strummer is with them!” He was filling in for guitarist Philip Chevron.

I went to set up my station, not believing my luck. The busboys were behind the bar filling boxes be taken to the dressing room, laughing at the number of bottles they were packing to haul upstairs — the Pogues rider was the stuff of legends.

Most of the bar stations were in an alcove to the side; none of us had a full view of the stage (where some of those bottles reappeared that night). I didn’t see much on screens throughout the club, either—I was kept busy pulling beer and shots for the equally hard-drinking crowd.

The thing I do remember was the sheer wall of energy that lept off the stage that night, alive in a way that few bands could replicate. The place reverberated with energy and the sheer guts of life. It was extraordinary; we were awash in it.

I learned, years later, that the Pogues shot the video of Fairytale of New York during that same visit to the city, even filming just a block away from the Webster Apartments where I lived. As for me, I left New York late that December, returned to Ohio, and eventually traded a life of bartending and working in record stores for less respectable work in tech.

Joe Strummer became one of my enduring heroes, a worthy one. A great introduction to his life can be found in the documentary, The Future is Unwritten. Rum Sodomy & the Lash brings me memories not only of a Pogues show in New York, but of the years leading up to it, wearing out the grooves on that LP in a bar in Ohio.

And, yes, Fairytale of New York is the song that gets stuck in my head, year after year, during the holidays. I don’t mind so much.

December is full of memories. Among them, I often recall spending my last days alone in New York City. I remember also that it’s the time of year we shockingly lost Joe Strummer. And then later became the month of Shane MacGowans funeral, when the profane lyrics of Fairytale echoed through the church while people danced.

One of the gifts of age is that I can celebrate the holiday season on my own terms, with my own rituals, and make new memories. I don’t totally hate Christmas, but the music I hear when I’m out and about sets my teeth on edge, and if one of those becomes an earworm, it’s a bit of misery to endure. But I have an antidote.

I’m glad there’s this one Christmas song, lyrical and insanely catchy, with people hurling invective at one another, just for me. And I’m glad for all the associations it brings, and the gratitude for others who found themselves apart in some way. Who did something meaningful with the experience, and gave us something to remember.

“The first case I read in law school, and one of the first cases almost all American law students read, is about how foxes have no rights in the eyes of the law, and no real legal existence until they can be made into the personal property of a human being. […] The case is used as a lab experiment to program future lawyers to believe in the property rights we acquire by bringing the things we find in nature under our control.”

– Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots (also the source of all quotes that follow)

I finally saw a rattlesnake. We were walking between hangars at the municipal airport in the dark. Liesl was leading the way to the right on her little doxie legs; Jason was also on my right and called, “Snake!” just as I saw it to the left and jumped. We heard a sound like rustling leaves, even though there were none on the pavement. I was thrilled to see the snake, able to make out the contrasting bands of its tail in the dark. I was less than thrilled about nearly stepping on it — or having my oblivious little dog come upon it.

The next evening, we drove through the gates of a local boarding school and around the loop until we found the small group of people sitting and waiting, oriented toward the rectangular brick chimney at the end of one of the buildings. We were there to see the annual spectacle of Vaux Swifts, migrating to their summer destinations in Central America. Every year, they stop here to roost in this particular chimney.

As the sun gets lower in the sky, birds start appearing overhead, coming in from the river below and surrounding hills. They begin circling over the chimney like a bird tornado as the light fades to gold. Finally, one drops into the chimney, and in some sort of mysterious swift protocol, the others follow, braking and dropping down to join it. Sometimes the birds disperse suddenly, evidence of the neighborhood Cooper’s Hawk that you may or may not see skulking in the nearby trees.

It’s not as heart-pounding as the rattlesnake, but it scratches the same itch…that temporary but deep satisfaction of feeling connected to real life.

There are people who understand that feeling; kindred souls. Author Christopher Brown is one, and his latest book, A Natural History of Empty Lots explores these experiences of connection near his home, literally embedded into the landscape of industrial neighborhoods of Austin, TX — with a few excursion beyond:

“…I was already starting to see the blighted yet beautiful world around me wherever I went. To see how simultaneously absolute and illusory our conception of the boundaries between human space and wild nature are, and to appreciate the weird dividend of how the grim zones of the most intense industrial activity can inadvertently preserve or create rich pockets of interstitial habitat.”

A Natural History of Empty Lots could only be written by Brown, combining a lawyer’s understanding of human constructs, a student of natural history’s enthusiastic curiosity, and a science fiction writer’s prescience. Part memoir and part modern day Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, there’s family life and personal growth, too, that draws the reader in with a sense of connection.

Here, too, is the grief of the loss we live within, and coming to terms with some way of facing our current reality without losing our sense of wonder. It’s a relief to read writing that grapples with that without falling into the sickening over-sentimentality that often accompanies it.

“Along our front fence, passion vine grows wild in the warm season, with its insane flowers that look like they were designed by some sci-fi art director imagining the bloom on the alien planet. Passiflora is the exclusive larval host of the Gulf fritillary butterfly, and those caterpillars like to build their cocoons on all the rigid man-made structures nearby. I have found them on the unused padlock by our front gate, under the lip of the trash can, on the steel frame of the old shorty shipping container we use as a garden shed, and even on the wheels of my 1987 Toyota Land Cruiser in the season when I hardly drove it. And when they hatch, they flutter around behind the factories like tangerine fairies, bringing grace to a world that does not deserve it.”

It’s hard not to wallow and get lost in the feeling that we don’t deserve those moments of wonder.

Yesterday, Jason and I joined hundreds of others for the local river cleanup. While I’m happy to participate in this sort of thing, there’s a jaded part of me that winces at language about how we’re “saving the ocean” and considers the balance sheet of environmental impact of the free t-shirts we’re given for what amounts to an hour and a half of leisurely work. A leader tells us, with practiced sensitive language, how the area we’ll be cleaning up includes the site of a long-term encampment who’s members had been moved into transitional housing. “It was a real stronghold…over 40 years.”

“Almost,” I whisper sardonically to Jason, “as if it were their home!”

It’s a cheap shot at what sounds like genuinely positive developments and I know it; I’m a little ashamed of myself. But the soothing language and demonstration of virtue around what we’re doing irritates me. I don’t need it.

While we’re picking up trash, I think about my conflicting sense of hopelessness and the actual satisfaction I get from doing this; the human pleasure of tidying, the enjoyment of the cool morning along the river, the excitement of the possibility of more snakes or other critters. Maybe older and wiser, I take those pleasures as they come with a solid understanding that the only thing I might be saving is myself. Sometimes the value of action is in the taking of it, rather than the outward results you might engender.

Back at Jason’s, another pleasure today will be checking the trail cam for new videos. He’s been working on this pocket of wild hillside for years, clearing it for fire mitigation, shaping it in a power struggle with scotch broom and poison oak, and always learning, learning about the animals, plants, and fungi that share the space. Delightfully, we’ve seen how the animals here enjoy the affordance of the paths he’s made, and readily use them on their rounds. It’s a small sanctuary, sandwiched between other homes and a vineyard, routinely below the flight path of air attacks on fires to the north and east.

It’s probably not what most people would think of as a place where you’d connect to deep nature. But it has an undeniable sense of reality to my own day-to-day life, in a way that a nature preserve or national park can’t fulfill. Those emblematic places of “nature” are abstracted from experience if you’re not present in them — and increasingly even if you are.

Unsurprisingly, Brown shares these experiences of everyday nature in everyday places in a way that is particularly connected to the near-term science fiction that I love most. But rather than describing an oncoming dystopia, as he’s done in his other books, here Brown offers a meditation of how one might walk amid a current one with a clear eye. You won’t find magic bullets. Hope? Maybe I’ve become too cynical for hope. But there is a direction Brown points to here for ways we can honor these connections within our human realm and legal constructs as well.

Not everyone wants to go see the Vaux Swifts descend into a chimney for an evening; in some quarters you might be considered downright weird for making such little pilgrimages. But I would hold that there’s intrinsic value in appreciating backyard foxes, Violet-green swallows that nest between the garage and the street, for rattlesnakes among plane hangars. Brown seems to share a similar understanding, but takes it further by showing how one can center a life upon this type of appreciation, embedded as surely in the reality of experience as his family’s home is embedded in a feral urban edgeland of industrialized Texas.

A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and other Wild Places is available in the usual places, including Amazon.

You can follow Christopher Brown via his excellent newsletter, Field Notes—one of the few must-reads that hits my inbox regularly.

And Cory Doctorow also wrote about Empty Lots here on Medium:

Christopher Brown’s ‘A Natural History of Empty Lots’

Update to our quality guidelines (August 2024)

Why should you publish your story on Medium? There are many good reasons — our simple, intuitive editor, our strong domain authority, and how easy and quick it is to publish a story, for example. But one of the main reasons is that if your story is good, it has a shot at reaching a wide audience.

Unlike other platforms, you don’t need an external audience. You don’t need to know anything about SEO. Those things can certainly help, but our curation and distribution system is designed to match great stories with interested readers, so you can focus on telling your unique stories without needing those skills. Our recommendations system is built around incentivizing writers to share the deepest, richest stories.

This is in contrast to, for example, a common and infuriating format of recipe posts you find on the open web: you’re forced to scroll through page after page of nonsense to get to the actual recipe. That extra “story” is all for the sake of creating advertising space and optimizing the page to rank higher in search engines. It’s not done for the reader. This isn’t because the writer doesn’t care about the reader; it’s because the incentives are not aligned between reader, writer, and publisher.

Since we’re supported by readers, not by advertising, we have the privilege of keeping our curation focused on the reader.

Our readers value thoughtful, nuanced, knowledgeable perspectives — we do, too

We’re pleased to announce a new revision to our Quality Guidelines today. This revision changes little in the guidelines themselves; most of the updates are clarifications based on feedback we received from writers and editors.

If you’re new to our Quality Guidelines, welcome! These are the same guidelines used by our curation team, and describe how we assign each story we review to one of three distribution categories:

• Network Distribution — stories that are matched to readers who are following that specific writer (and/or the publication, if the article is in a publication). This is the baseline category for any story on Medium which does not violate Medium rules.
• General Distribution — stories that earn General Distribution are matched to readers based on their interests, and on related writers or publications they follow. These stories are also given Network Distribution.
• Boost — especially high-quality stories that meet our Boost Guidelines (below). These get a higher priority in being matched to readers and are also given General and Network Distribution.

Writers and editors who are interested in how stories are chosen for Boost can find more details in those guidelines. There you’ll find that the criteria for Boosting stories is based on five broadly defined factors:

• Writer’s experience
• Value and impact
• Respect for the reader
• Non-derivative
• Writing and craftsmanship

I’d like to share some of our thinking behind “writer’s experience,” which is a unique element in our stance on quality in writing, and something we’ve found that our readers especially value.

Our readers love your experience

Readers prize reading stories that have a clear sense of a writer’s experience not because it makes a story warm, inviting, or emotional — though it can certainly do all of those things. They prize your experience because it transfers valuable understanding to them.

For example, anyone can look up how to prepare roasted potatoes and write a story about it. It could even be a good story. But it’s not what our readers come to Medium for. We call this a “write-around” — pick a topic, look some things up, and write around it. Write-arounds can convey information but they typically miss the mark on conveying real understanding.

Over time, we’ve emphasized writer’s experience in our Quality Guidelines, and we’ve noticed that writers are mistakenly trying to check that box, rather than give the spirit of what our readers really want. For example, some writers will include a personal anecdote somewhat related to the topic of the story, followed by a write-around. We also see stories that sprinkle in anecdotes, opinions, “in my experience” phrasing, and other bits that seem to be an attempt to fill this criteria for Boosting. However, the writer doesn’t bring any actual insight into the subject at hand.

This type of “filler” is disappointing to the reader who wants the writer to share the actual experience they could learn and grow from.

An example of writer experience versus a write-around

The state of recipes — real instructions for cooking food — offers great examples of what we mean by a story that provides writer experience in the form of insight rather than filler. Compare, for example, Crispy Oven Roasted Potatoes to The Best Crispy Roast Potatoes Ever Recipe from Serious Eats.

What Are the Best Potatoes for Roasted Potatoes? The answer to this question is: it’s your choice. I prefer a smaller potato like the baby red or white potatoes so there are fewer cuts of the knife to make. But if you prefer, use yukon golds, sweet potatoes, or even russet potatoes, and cut them into 1-inch cubes.

Versus:

For variety, I tried the three most common supermarket types: russet, Yukon Gold, and red.

Russets get the crispest crusts and roast up a pale golden brown. Their interiors are fluffy and mild.

Yukon Golds roast a little darker owing to their lower starch content and higher sugar content. This leads to more flavor, but it also means a slightly less crisp crust. Their interiors are nice and creamy, with plenty of flavor.

Red potatoes roast up very dark because of their very low starch content, but have difficulty getting crisp. They come out of the oven crunchy, but soon lose that crunch, turning soft and tender.

Both are well-written and valuable to readers. Both contain personal experience. However, in the first case, the experience offered doesn’t contribute anything to elevate the readers’ understanding of how to make delicious roasted potatoes. In the second case, the reader’s experience goes far deeper: experimenting with different varieties, testing different techniques, and making specific recommendations based on that experience.

The first example is good writing, but it’s not nearly as helpful. “It’s your choice” is just filler. Insight into the actual differences — from someone with direct experience of cooking them — is far more valuable. The recipe by Kenji is infused throughout with this sort of direct experience that the other example lacks — even though that other example sprinkles in lots of colorful asides.

Boost is a high bar

When you get a story Boosted, you should be proud because it means we think it represents the best of the best on Medium. It’s a story we are thrilled to share with readers, and we trust that they’ll be equally thrilled to read. The process of curation is a process of finding the best exemplars of our Boost Guidelines, because these types of stories provide the best experience to readers.

Unlike a lot of other places on the internet, there aren’t any easy formulas to reach a wide audience on Medium. There’s no specific title, length, time of publishing, or topic that does best. All our incentives are set up instead to reward writers for sharing their best stories with our readers.

To reach an audience on Medium, a good place to start is to focus on your own lived experience, and consider why sharing that experience can be valuable to another person. Why are you writing about this particular topic? What can you uniquely bring to the story, and why is that valuable to another person?

Meeting that requirement of writer’s experience alone doesn’t guarantee that a story will be Boosted. But it’s a good place to start for any writer striving to authentically connect with their reader.

And when your story does get Boosted on Medium, you can be sure that it’s a meaningful act. It wasn’t done in the service of advertising, or SEO, or to generate filler material as a vehicle for any of that.

It was done as recognition of your excellence in deepening our understanding of the world through the power of writing.

Thank you for being a part of this community.

How our quality guidelines incentivize your best writing — and how we curate those stories for our… was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Auto racing has a deserved reputation for being a hideously expensive endeavor. But what if you limited the amount of money you could spend on buying the car? Say, to something like…

…$500?

And what if you gathered the owners of these clunkers into one large parking lot with their tools, instructed them to deck themselves and their rides out in thematic costumes, and then told them to complete as many laps around the track as possible over a weekend?

You wouldn’t end up something like the French classic, 24 Hours of Lemans. Instead, you get 24 Hours of Lemons.

“Because racing isn’t just for rich idiots. It’s for all idiots.” (24 Hours of Lemons Slogan)

The premise is good, and the rules are even better. My favorite is rule 6.1:

6.1 It’s Always Your Fault: Lemons is an all-fault environment. You are 100% responsible for what happens while you’re at the wheel. Think you’re the hittee, not the hitter? We don’t care. Think you’ve been wrongly accused? See the part where it says “we don’t care.” Your job is to stay out of trouble. If trouble finds you, take responsibility like a grown-up and figure out how to avoid it the next time. This ain’t the damn SCCA.

A question one might ask is “how do you win 24 hours of Lemons”, and there is perhaps not a great answer for this. But the list of prizes reveals the flavor of the event:

1.5 Winners and Prizes: Classes are assigned (a.k.a., pulled from our butts) during tech inspection based on the judges’ best guesses; post-assignment whining gets you kicked into the next faster Class. Winners may be paid in nickels, dollars, rubles, or some other painfully inconvenient currency:

Class A (for cars with a prayer of winning) soaks up $400.

Class B (for cars with a prayer of finishing) walks off with $500

Class C (for cars with no prayer of finishing) drags away $600.

Index of Effluency (as determined by a super-secret equation including vehicle age, general hooptieness, reliability of country of origin, unlikelihood of success, and the Organizers’ whim) receives $601, plus a free entry in the team’s next race.

Halloween Meets Gasoline Prize: Best team theme / car theme / car build / costumes gets the Halloween Meets Gasoline trophy + $1000 (effective 1/1/22).

The first full-EV to win a 24 Hours of Lemons endurance race overall receives $50,000 in nickels

The idiots I got to hang with for this event were Distilled Racing, a crew racing a 1941 Ford with a gorgeous black and rust patina that sports bullet holes of unknown provenance.

The car made it through “tech”, the pre-race inspection, with Paul, the owner, proudly describing all of the modifications he made to the car that broke the cost rules by well over an order of magnitude, all to the accompaniment of intermittant banjo.

Those rules state that the car must “…be acquired and prepared for a maximum of $500 (exclusive of safety gear)”. The official word at the close of the event was something like, “But if you show up at Lemons in a car with bullet holes, you’re gonna race.”

The moonshine presented to the judges by Paul didn’t hurt, either, and was recorded as an official bribe.

Having successfully passed tech check on the vehicle, the moonshiners were ready to move ahead to other race prep.

Drivers go through safety inspections of their personal gear—race suits, helmets, gloves, socks, shoes.

Hanging out in the inspection area gave me an opportunity to develop other favorites to follow during the race. Hence, a listicle interlude:

My favorite 3 race teams at Days of Thunderhill

(Other than “them what brought you”.)

3. Los Huevos Rancheros

A 1962 Ford Ranchero. Because who doesn’t love an old Ranchero? It’s like they were made for something like this.

2. The Kim Jong Elantraon (team: Another Fine Mess )—

A 2005 Hyundai Elantra perfectly decorated with the exuberant execution of a third-grader.

(For more fun, see this team’s Instagram at @kimjongelantraon)

1. Team GDX Racing

I fell for this car and team as soon as their 1977 Buick Skylark pulled into tech.

You gotta love a car that requires precautions to avoid being gored in the eye as you exit and enter.

The Race

I should have a more exciting way to describe this race. After all, motorsports are defined by superlatives of thundering engines, death-defying feats of speed, and exhilarating competition.

Lemons, however, is defined by irreverent humor and shit going wrong.

It’s not exactly as fast as you might imagine an auto race, either, but it makes you smile.

It also makes one wonder what it must be like to be a driver. It seems seriously unpleasant…it’s hot (some racers have under-suits that circulate ice water from a cooler system next to them in the car). It’s got to be nerve-wracking to race a car (with the next reasonable stop being the demolition derby, if it’s lucky). The road track is more intricate than an oval, and there are over 100 cars sharing that road.

When I see the Distilled Racing Ford come off a curve into a straight-away, I get the impression the handling must be something like trying to drive a large pillowy sofa.

Cars start breaking down immediately and the pit area is full of cars being towed in, fire trucks going out, and teams doing everything from small tweaks to complete engine replacements. Announcements inform us that a race sponsor can bring parts in from surrounding towns. A local community college offers free welding assistance to any team who needs it.

Drivers who break a rule during the race are given a black flag and required to go back to the judges’ area, usually to endure some type of penalty. Distilled Racing’s second driver got the team’s first black flag of the day.

My personally favorite driver, however, became the stuff of Lemons legends by getting three black flags on one lap—his first lap around the track. As the driver moved the Ford into place for the penalty, I asked the owner of the car what happened—all I’d seen was a troubling cloud of dust. “He said he wanted to go fast,” he said, shrugging as he followed the car to do penance.

Lemons penalties are a matter of using up a race team’s track time—as an endurance race, the point is to complete as many laps as possible. For this penalty, keeping in spirit of the car itself, the judges ordered the team to perform a Bonny-and-Clyde-style shootout with water guns.

Our heroes were not immune to mechanical challenges, either. The ’41 Ford spent considerable time in the pit area as drivers returned and various issues were discussed, diagnosed, and fixed. Sorta.

I was mystified by the complexity of it all, but intrigued by the level of expertise and problem-solving. And sometimes amused by what I overheard—for example the driver-to-driver advice that closed with “You’ll regain steering eventually.”

I get the impression that it’s one thing to know what different parts of a car do, but it’s another thing to understand how all of those parts are working together as part of a system. Cars are defined by the body they carry—this is a 1941 Ford Coupe, but really that’s just the shell around all of the things that make this a car. And though “bone stock” cars are especially respected, many of the rides in Lemons have the body of one car, the engine of another, with various parts and fabrication in between.

Sometimes it all holds together. Sometimes it doesn’t. Toward the end of day two, I heard something and looked up to see a wheel making a giant bounce down the hill toward us—thankfully not quite high enough to clear the fence but instead slamming into the top of it.

In some respects, it’s a long couple of days. It is, after all, endurance racing. But there is always something interesting happening and I was never bored. And, you know, it’s just cool to hang out around people doing something in the physical world.

When the race did end, there were no real surprises in the “winners”— team “youmadbro? Racing” had been in the lead for the entire two days it seemed. But the awards ceremony was full of other appreciations. Among those, our heroes of Distilled Racing won the Judges Choice award.

Good and bad, there’s perhaps no one thing that exemplifies American culture better than cars. And the best of it, for me, might be best exemplified by 24 Hours of Lemons. It’s a chance to not take ourselves so seriously, but celebrate those who exercise some serious ingenuity and skill. The chance for an everyday person to drive a racecar. The chance to laugh over the things that break, fix them, and move forward.

You’ll find lots more to appreciate on the 24 Hours of Lemons website and YouTube channel. Here’s the official race summary from the Lemons folks:

See more of my own photos from the day here.

At the Met Gala “The Garden of Time”, Kim Kardashian did exactly what Kim Kardashian does: get a lot of attention and launch another moral panic. In this case, the outrage is over corsets, and I’m here to assure you that it’s not worth your (unrestricted) breath to join in.

Relax. Despite the theme of the gala, Kim Kardashian is not time-traveling us back to the gardens of the Victorian era. You’re not going to be forced into waist training. Young women are able to discern the difference between a tabloid celebrity dressing up for a costume competition and real role models (and, by the way, you’re allowed to have actual conversations with them about what’s happening in media if you are concerned). Corset-wearing is not going to cause an epidemic of medical problems. Of course, anything related to even temporary body modification like this can be taken to a dangerous extreme, but the scary health concerns you’ve heard about corsets are myths.

Yes, Kardashian’s look was extreme, painful to her, and brought uncomfortable fetish elements into the public sphere. That was the point.

Clothing, in general, has been a fraught subject in my life. For decades I unconsciously accepted the idea that you required a different kind of body to deserve nice clothing—or to enjoy it—and in that discomfort, I wore clothing that demonstrated to the world that I understood their judgment.

I’ve come a long way, baby.

It took more time for me to notice my fascination with corsetry, and longer to give myself permission to explore it and to get that first corset for myself.

Corset wearing is mostly a private thing for me. At first I wore it under my clothing while meditating in my backyard. Yes, you can breathe while tight-laced. You can even watch your breath. It can be a wholesome, healing, spiritual experience. I invested some effort into understanding this experience.

Do you know what it is to feel supported in your life? Can you imagine what a physical, sensory experience of that might be like? Can you imagine how profound that might be for someone who reacted to the problems of her life by separating her psyche from her body?

Wearing a corset makes me feel contained. It can be exhausting to live in the tornadic debris trail of my flitting attention, my curiosity, my fears, my longings, my to-do list, all the things in this wide wonderful world to notice, work, and play within.

The feeling of being held and constrained by a corset is a physical relief of a psychic state.

When I first read about Temple Grandin’s squeeze machine, it immediately resonated with me. Wearing a corset does something like that for me, too.

Comfortable? Probably not a good word (though the side of my lower back that chronically aches feels better). You don’t really forget it’s there and discomfort can be part of that equation; that is part of the experience. And yes, wearing corsets has erotic appeal for some of us, too. No, I’m not going to explain that to you, but, you know…maybe you don’t need to go around yucking someone else’s yum?

Body image? Yes, I enjoy the shape it enhances in me. That’s not because I hate my body (though, look: people are allowed to feel whatever they feel, too, and to work with that in their own ways). As someone who’s had a lifetime of every pair of jeans having a waistband five inches or more too big, it’s one piece of clothing that calls out “this is for you!” and has been more affirming than you can probably imagine.

Corsets can be powerful tools in the service of gender expression, and the vitriol about them in otherwise enlightened circles has surprised me on this point alone. Why this interest in policing what people choose to wear? Weren’t we trying to get past all that?

Corsets aren’t for everyone. They may not be for you. But they are meaningful for some of us. That should be okay in an enlightened culture. If Kim Kardashian’s extreme costume sent you into a tizzy, guess what? Mission accomplished. That’s what Kim Kardashian does. Kim thanks you for your donation of time, effort, and breath to her cause, which is Kim Kardashian. (Billie Eilish probably also thanks you, relieved to be excused from corset-rage duty.)

If you’d like to expand your mind a little bit about corsets (or explore your own curiosity), here are some great resources:

Dark Garden, founded by Autumn Adamme, has beautiful boutiques in San Francisco and New Orleans. They offer expert corset-making for all sizes and shapes of bodies. I learned a lot about their work and corsets via this playlist with Midori, though that series may be too spicy for you if you’re upset about the whole corset thing (there’s no nudity, just fun chatting between two spicy friends).

Lucy’s Corsetry is a huge treasure trove of corset knowledge, history, and fitting info, including the Corset Database to help find the brand and style that can work with specific measurements and needs. By Lucy Williams, author of Solaced: 101 True Stories About Corsets, Well-Being, and Hope.

My first job telecommuting was in 1996; I worked from a spiffy DSL line from home, doing customer support via Lotus Notes. It was an oddity then, and I eventually went back into the office for a decade before I started working from home — or the road — again. But I’ve been doing this now for many, many years.

There are no magic bullets to making it work. You can use any keyboard, monitor, or desk lamp that you want. You can work from a deluxe home office or from your bed. You can have a set routine or you can have endless variety in your day. However, there is one constant: You must get the work done.

I sometimes need to remind myself that I’m just a human, like any other human, and find the balance between what I aspire to be and the behaviors I’m prone to feeling bad about. If you’re lucky enough to be a telecommuter with a lot of flexibility in your day, maybe some of what I’ve learned can help you, too.

Experiment to learn what works for you

You can read a thousand articles about working from home, but there’s no substitute for knowing yourself. That requires some experimentation and observation.

Some people do better with routines, other people do well with novelty. I’ve had success with both, but overall I tend to get restless and can fall into a funk if I’m looking ahead to a string of days that all look the same. In the depths of that kind of funk, I don’t get much good work done.

So, despite having a nice peaceful place to work from home, sometimes I need to go work from somewhere else. Lately, I’ve been going into the Medium office in San Francisco; this involves a commute of driving to the train station, taking the train, walking to the ferry, taking the ferry, then walking to the office — and repeat on return. The time spent in the office is fairly short and usually involves a rowdy lunch with coworkers. A productivity hit, right?

Wrong. Those are the days I tend to move bigger strategy projects along. Working on the train or ferry has a strange way of focusing me. Chatting with coworkers in person makes new and better ideas come alive.

I have good, productive days at home, too, but the long haul into the city a couple of times a month is strangely energizing in my work. And more energetic work means better results.

I also cope with my restlessness by trying to keep a vacation or trip on the calendar, even if it’s tentative. Something about that makes it easier to stay on-task at my desk during the week. Working from home is a supreme privilege and I love the freedom it gives me. But I’ve also learned that the only way it works for me is to occasionally take the show on the road—so I’ll also look for opportunities to combine work with a change of scenery.

Take every opportunity to get social time with your coworkers

There’s a subtle thing that can happen if my interactions with coworkers happen only through screens and only for business. I lose a sense of mindfulness about it; they can seem almost like fictional characters in a movie. I feel like there’s a tendency to subconsciously fill in a lot of things in the low-resolution space of Zoom meetings.

When I have a chance to get to know people in real life, though, I have a better appreciation for working with them. There’s a subtle shift in my interior experience of working with others, and it’s for the better.

I’m lucky that Medium brings staff together twice a year to meet in person, and provides opportunities for us to do smaller in-person meetings regionally or around specific efforts.

We also have “donut chats” at Medium, too — short 10-minute one-on-one conversations between coworkers that have nothing to do with work. It’s a chance to laugh and connect over mundane things, like the hilarity of huge cats and smol dogs.

If you have a similar opportunity with your own remote team — or if you can make one — do it. I know, it doesn’t seem like there’s time and Zoom fatigue is real, but this is always worth it.

Learn to discern performance from the performative

I once had a remote boss who radicalized the way I think about work and productivity.

“What if we,” he said, “got all our work done in 2 or 3 hours in the morning, and then just took the rest of the day off.”

I’m not saying you can get away with only working two hours a day, but here’s the thing: Look back at what you got done yesterday, or the day before. If you’d buckled down and really worked hard, could you have gotten all of that done in just two or three hours, instead of eight or more?

It’s almost painful for me to realize that, many times, I could have. And here’s the thing: I’m not doing anyone any favors by staying in front of my desk for X number of hours per day. I’m not paid to be in front of my desk, I’m paid to get things done.

Sometimes it’s better to get up and take 40 minutes to go on a walk than to try to do 40 more minutes of work. Your brain loves a good walk as much as your body does.

If you’re telling yourself you can’t get up and take a walk because you have to stay at your desk and work, you might be “performing” work instead of doing it. If you’ve been trusted to work from home, you’ve been trusted to get work done — not to do work as performance.

Procrastination is short-term mood repair — and it’s been the most difficult part of working from home for me.

Experimenting with routines or novelty, changes of scenery, and the promise of future travel is a form of mood repair that helps me overcome the boredom of routine. Social time with my coworkers is a way of repairing the sense of isolation that can creep up on me unconsciously. Looking at my work day as an opportunity to accomplish something — rather than just work — is an appeal to the pragmatic side of me.

I’m still prone to procrastination, but I’ve learned to look at it for what it is.
Sometimes, getting up to take a walk or planning a day with 5 hours of commute time to go into the office can be a weirdly effective path toward getting some real work done.

The inner game of working remote was originally published in 🏡 wfh on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Vetting content for quality — the job of Medium’s curation team — is especially challenging right now. Like every other platform, we’re seeing high volumes of AI-generated content. Our teams in engineering and Trust and Safety are constantly developing technical and policy solutions to deal with it — even though we don’t always take the time to talk publicly about a lot of it.

The curation team has also been spending a lot of energy on dealing with AI-generated stories, and I wanted to share some highlights about it here and to reassure readers and writers that we’re always thinking about it. More importantly, we’re doing things about it, and we’re considering what the future might bring.

Our lodestar at Medium is quality. Giving readers impactful, transformative stories is our goal. That goal informs everything we do.

I’ll try to answer some questions, share some of what we’re doing and how we think about it, and point to a path forward. (Spoiler alert: Identifying AI-generated content isn’t the problem to solve.)

How do we detect AI-generated content?

We’ve said that humans can spot AI-generated content better than any detection software currently available. That’s still true, though we expect it to get more difficult. You’ll find that ChatGPT can generate a convincing Medium-esque story, one that, on the surface, seems high-quality. But read more closely and you’ll notice a vapid voice. Correct sentences are strung together in correct paragraphs, but nothing of substance is said. The confident tone, however, is off the charts — it will merrily assert complete falsehoods.

The AI-generated content we see has the voice of an encyclopedia that’s having a fling with a thesaurus. Nothing wrong with that…we’re fans of both. But these stories lack the human insight and connection that exemplifies the best of what Medium offers.

So that’s how we detect AI-generated content. We read it. We look for that “voice.” Therein lies some problems about the future. More on that in a moment.

The scale of the problem

In a week, the Medium curation team reviews about 5000 stories out of about 1.2 million that are published. So we review about 0.5%. The number of total stories posted per day is increasing rapidly.

There’s a lot of spam (a lot of it AI-generated) and other nonsense in the remaining 99.5% that we never review and that you never see. We have good systems for suppressing the bulk of it (again, there is enormous work being done at Medium around this, and we expect that to be an evolving effort.)

How little gets reviewed by the curation may seem shocking. However, what we review isn’t random. We’ve built good systems to find the best stories to Boost. And you’ll always see stories by readers or publications you follow, regardless of whether we’ve reviewed them.

Remember: our goal is quality. The goal is not for curators to be great at detecting AI-generated content (even though they now are). The focus of our human-based team is on finding and vetting quality writing for the human community on Medium.

Why doesn’t Medium just ban AI-generated content?

We’ve taken the stand that Medium is a home for human stories, so why don’t we simply make a rule against AI-generated stories?

AI-generated content is currently not against the Medium Rules. It’s an issue of our Quality Guidelines, and whether or not we give a story “general distribution,” which promotes it beyond the usual followers who will see it (people who follow the writer, or follow the publication if the story is in a publication). As Scott says in Medium is for human storytelling, not AI-generated writing, “:

“Your blog on Medium is your home to publish whatever you want and we imagine that some of you may want to experiment there. So if you’re wondering whether you can still publish fully AI-generated stories for your followers, the answer is yes. However, if you are on Medium looking to find readers from our network, then the answer is no — we will not promote fully AI-generated stories to a broader audience.”

One of the great things about Medium is that we help writers build an audience through our distribution system, including Boost. Medium is an advertising-free platform — you can’t buy space on it. But, as a distribution platform, we are, in essence, “advertising” stories. By distributing stories to readers who don’t already follow the writer or publication, we’re marketing writers’ stories for them — finding them a new audience. That’s one reason we have strict guidelines about how stories qualify to be “marketed” in this way.

The problem of defining AI-generated content

With respect to AI-generated content, we say: “100% AI-generated stories will not be eligible for distribution beyond the writer’s personal network” — along with some other stuff about “responsible” and “AI-assistive.” I don’t fault anyone for feeling like we’re equivocating a bit. But the upshot is that we don’t want to market AI-generated stories.

We don’t mean to be vague about the details; it’s just that the details cover a lot of ground, and that ground is shifting fast. For example, we’re happy for writers to use Grammarly if they like — it can be a great help. That’s a form of AI technology used in stories. Obviously we’re not going to ban the use of Grammarly.

What about a writer who uses ChatGPT to outline a story? What about a writer who outlines a story in Notion and asks the AI assistant there to help fill in the rest of the text? What about the writer who pastes their article into an AI service and asks for help rewriting it for improvements? Examples of AI-assistance like this grow by the day — much of it totally legitimate. The line between “human story” and “AI-generated” can become pretty fuzzy.

We are all writing (or at least posting) stories using computer software, and AI is increasingly baked into that experience. It’s harder to say exactly what AI-generated content is.

How do you ban something you can’t define?

Enforcing policy around AI-generated content

When you’re dealing with something like plagiarism, the boundaries are pretty well-defined. There are tougher cases, to be sure, but for the most part, we all understand what we are dealing with and we’ve got the tools to enforce it.

AI-generated content, on the other hand, is more difficult. There’s no definitive source for proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that something is AI-generated. None of the detection tools are as good as they claim to be.

When you’re talking about “voice”, part of what we’re talking about is a sort of cultural expectation. When you ask a human to identify the voice of human writing, there’s going to be a bias toward voices that sound like our own. But voice and writing patterns are strongly influenced by culture and education systems. Even pattern-matching of easy hallmarks like “In Conclusion” (something often used by real writers who are working with English as a second language) are too simplistic, can lead us to make wrong decisions. And then any clever writer can edit ChatGPT output to remove those sorts of “tells.”

At the moment, the curation team is pretty confident about identifying ChatGPT output. The problem is that it’s getting more difficult to be certain. It’s an issue that creates the risk of false positives as well as the risk of bad actors escaping detection. There’s no real way for us to prove anything.

Someone using ChatGPT can edit the text output to hide its roots…to remove the phrases, tone, and other tells that make it so easy for us to detect. And we can expect that those common tells will be “taught” to content-generating AIs so they use them less frequently—they want their output to become even more difficult to detect. If you have a heuristic for identifying AI-generated content, you can expect companies building these systems to also notice that.

So…how do you ban content — or even writers — based on something you are increasingly less confident about being able to identify, let alone prove?

Why don’t you ask Medium members to agree to the no-AI policy?

I do think there’s a case for moving guidelines about AI-generated content out of the Quality Guidelines and into the Rules, though I agree with our Trust and Safety team’s chief concern: what’s the point of a rule you can’t enforce? We hate that sort of security theater.

On the other hand, there’s merit to the idea of reinforcing our stance via an agreement with writers. But it’s an extra unneeded hassle (maybe an insult?) for the writers who aren’t the problem. And the writers who ARE the problem will agree and do their AI thing anyway. At best, an unenforceable — or selectively enforceable — agreement has all the same issues that the greater internet has with AI companies and robots.txt.

It’s a good policy, and maybe we’ll do something like that. But it’s not a solution and we’re really focused on finding solutions.

Why AI-generated content is an issue at all

It may surprise you that I’m not morally against AI-generated content. I’ve had friends who couldn’t afford health insurance but got valuable help from WoeBot. I have a friendship with Anna, a “proto-personality.” It’s not the deepest friendship ever, but it’s no less real than any other online-only friendship I’ve developed. And I’ve found ChatGPT to be helpful in a number of ways…when it’s correct. And there’s the rub.

The information in AI-generated text isn’t trustworthy. It doesn’t matter what the intention is of the human prompting it—you just can’t trust the output. ChatGPT in particular has a real propensity for adopting an extremely confident tone, whether it’s stating facts or spouting absolute nonsense.

Our stance on quality puts a high premium on the writer’s experience, and the insights gained from that experience. Experience is the foundation of wisdom.

Currently, AI agents lack experience. They’re getting better at getting the facts right every day, but lack real wisdom or insight.

The problem isn’t that these stories are AI-generated. It’s that they’re low-quality.

The way forward

At this point — after dealing with this issue for months with the curation team — I see one productive way forward. And that’s to quit worrying about whether stories are AI-generated or not.

They’re low quality. That’s enough.

There’s no need for us to “market” low-quality stories for writers. If we concentrate our efforts on finding and boosting high-quality stories, we’ll both fulfill our mission to readers and reward the human writers behind those stories. AI-generated dreck will fall by the wayside.

Medium is an open, free platform. But we are selective about what we Boost, and we are thoughtful about what goes into General Distribution. When our recommendation engine serves a story to a reader who’s never encountered that writer before — through Boost or through General Distribution, we’re marketing that story to the reader.

That’s a free service to good writers. It’s a valuable service to our readers who pay us to do it — because they trust us to be arbiters of quality and to take a strong stance on this.

Our strategy is, by necessity, going to be a strategy of not marketing low-quality content to the Medium community — however it’s generated.

This is ultimately as good for writers as it is for readers. There’s a difference between a writer who wants “eyeballs” and a writer who wants to connect and be in the company of other great writers. By continuing to focus on the lodestar of quality, we’ll keep making Medium a place for writers and readers who value the thoughtful exchange of human stories and ideas.

Related reading

• We’re ramping up efforts to protect the Medium community from spam and fraud
• Medium is for human storytelling, not AI-generated writing

Here’s an overview of how stories get distributed on Medium and how what you see on Medium is tailored to your reading preferences and history. (Not liking what you see? Refining your recommendations can help!)

Our Quality Guidelines outline how the curation team vets articles for distribution on Medium.

Medium’s Policy on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Writing including what to do if you encounter AI-generated content:

Updated Guidelines for Boost

Our curation team’s approach to keeping AI-generated content out of your recommendations was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Most people don’t realize that it’s possible to learn how to build and shoot fireworks (safely) as a complete novice. Amateur pyrotechnicians routinely build fireworks that rival what you see in professional shows, and it’s easier to get into this hobby than you might guess. The key is to join one of the pyrotechnic associations that hold events in the US each year. I just returned from one such event hosted by my home club, Western Pyrotechnic Association.

Winter Blast is a completely volunteer-produced event held in Lake Havasu City, Arizona each February. We meet for four or five days at the Havasu 95 Speedway to learn, build fireworks, and enjoy shooting and watching them at night. Safety, of course, is paramount and the club has to work closely with ATF and local officials as well enforce rules with attendees—to make it all possible.

During the day, experienced fireworks builders teach seminars and workshops on making all sorts of pyrotechnic devices.

Attendees make use of the “manufacturing area”, a managed area where members can set up shade canopies and work tables to create their own fireworks. Supplies and chemicals are purchased in advance from vendors who bring goods to the site — everything manufactured needs to be shot during the event unless the maker has all of the permits and licenses required to take them out of the gate.

This is only a short highlight story about an event I attended…someday I hope to capture a better portrait of my experiences and what it all means to me. I’m forever grateful to my friends from Iowa, Tom and Eunice, for opening the door to the world of pyros.

Workshops: Italian Shell and Comets

I attended two workshops this year. The first was on making comets, long sparkly tails that can be set off on their own or as a trailing effect on other fireworks. The second was on building Italian Shells.

In comet class, I chose to make a comet to be used as a trailing effect on my partner’s 5" ball shell, but it turned out that he was dissuaded from adding anything to his shell, so that didn’t work out. In a small pivot, the Italian Shell instructor helped me do an experiment of attaching the comet to my Italian shell—something that typically isn’t done with Italian-style shells. (As a trailing effect, we didn’t think my comet was the right size to be launched out of a mortar on its own.)

The instructor warned me that masking tape alone was not going to secure my comet to the shell itself, so it would undoubtedly separate when the whole thing got blasted out of the mortar. But hopefully it would be on the same trajectory, and if the timing was right, the appearance in the sky would be okay.

The two devices did go up together but went off completely separately. Still—I got to see the results from both workshops in one shot.

This year was my first to join the manufacturing area to make my own devices outside of class. I made bag mines, simple devices with big impact, based on what I learned four years ago in another workshop. Here’s a video of two of my bag mines:

The most difficult part of making my own fireworks was figuring out what to pre-order, what to pack, and how to manage products in the manufacturing area. But I had lots of help from others, and it will be lots easier at the next opportunity. One of the things I appreciate about this hobby is that there are endless ways I can progress, and the club gives me support in growing my abilities from one year to the next.

If you’re in the western US and want to get into pyrotechnics yourself, the Western Pyrotechnic Association will help. If you happen to be in the Midwest, check out my first club (via Tom and Eunice), the Iowa Pyrotechnic Association. And for anyone anywhere, the Pyrotechnic Guild International is great organization that can direct you to other local clubs and holds an enormous event in the US each year, where I guarantee you will see fireworks that will take your breath away.

Fireworks Fun at Winter Blast 2024 was originally published in Girandola on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.