Medium has become a clickbait factory.

Then again, so has much of the internet.

Did you know that both Facebook and Mailchimp are dead but neither of these sites knows it yet?

Well if you’re scrolling through Medium’s various publications you’ll soon find out! Jared A. Brock, writing in ‘Better Marketing’ offers up these two headlines:

• Mailchimp Is Dead (It Just Doesn’t Know It Yet)

• Facebook Is Dead (It Just Doesn’t Know It Yet)

And no, in case you were curious, it’s not just these two. I just happened on both of them almost back-to-back. No, most every big app/site is dead and doesn’t know it yet. Crazy!

I was actually looking for some of Medium’s most egregiously clickbaity posts, most of which come from parenting blogs. This is where the real fun’s to be had.

Oh here’s one: It’s titled ‘Don’t want to be a mom anymore.’ I guess its author couldn’t be bothered to say “I don’t” but that’s neither here nor there. You will find dozens of posts just like this one and while they may seem like posts designed to elicit advice or empathy they’re really just clickbait.

Oh you think it’s hard to have a six-month-old baby? You don’t sleep as much as you used to? The baby takes up all your time?

Welcome to parenting. How is this a blog post?

Let’s scroll down a bit further and ah, okay.

I can’t decide if I want to keep reading. That opening line really says more about the author than it does their sister or nephew.

The very next post, dear god in heaven:

Moving on, we come to this poor woman and her shitty wife:

I love my wife, hence why I am doing this anonymously. We have 2 kids (7&8) that are doing school from home because of the pandemic, and I work from home, she goes to the office so I’m here to supervise. She’s gone before they get up in the morning and comes home around dinner time but will go upstairs and dick around on Pinterest or Reddit until dinner is ready and then again once we clean up.

She goes on to point out that she is basically a working stay-at-home mom who does all the cooking and cleaning and child care while her wife contributes almost nothing. So she ends up booking a hotel for a couple nights to take some time for himself and her wife is pissed.

Actually the revelation that this is a woman and not a man comes at the end, like a surprise twist. It’s weird. But I’m sitting here wondering why this is being published on a blogging platform like Medium instead of on reddit where it belongs.

All of these posts are just “I need advice to deal with my shitty kids/partner/parents/siblings” and they belong on r/parenting or r/AskParents not on a blog!

But wait! Look at this! Here’s a post on Modern Parent at Medium titled “My son (15) is turning into a controlling boyfriend, can I stop it?”

Here’s the exact same post on reddit with the exact same headline. Not linking to the Modern Parent article. It’s just a question there. Are they really just reprinting reddit posts? Good grief. These posts make sense on reddit. They make sense because reddit is a forum and these forums are literally designed for people to ask personal, often anonymous questions about parenting and relationships and so forth. They do not make sense on a blog.

And on we go. It’s not just the parenting stuff. It’s how to make mad money, yeah for sure you can make $20,000 in four hours if you just follow these simple steps!

It’s clickbait like this nonsense about how we “shame women into online dating and it needs to stop” as though women aren’t freely opting into dating apps just like men.

Or, um, this piece arguing that we should “un-gender menstruation” because clearly, clearly that’s not something unique to biological women. Clearly. If you weren’t born with a uterus you aren’t going to have a period…period. We cannot ‘un-gender’ this; we can only assault language—in order to be “inclusive” we must reference “people who menstruate” rather than just saying “women” and “transmen.” Both women and transmen have periods. We don’t need to un-gender anything to acknowledge this.

But I digress. Bigly.

I suppose Medium is just a reflection of the wider publishing world. There are plenty of terrible headlines out there. There is no shortage of bad writing; we are not at risk of running out of bad takes. There are also great writers with clever takes and helpful advice and brilliant insights. One must sift. It’s just an awful lot of sifting these days at Medium, which is a shame.

Meanwhile, with recent mysterious changes to Google’s algorithms, traffic has dried up for a lot of sites and only the clickiest of clickbait seems to really land. Things will get worse before they get better, I’m afraid. Thank god for Substack.

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