Goodbye Deep-Dives by Experts, Hello Thin Content From People-bots

I’ve been on Medium since the beginning and as with all things, it has changed over time. But the changes have not all been for the better.

It seems that the deep dives by experts and journalists that I used to enjoy regularly have been almost completely replaced by thin-content produced by “people-bots” with clickbait titles and repurposed “news”.

People-bots: People who repurpose other people’s content or news stories about trending topics with one sole purpose. Get more views. They don’t care about readers. They don’t care about the content. They don’t care how valid, correct, or truthful their writing is. They just want views, like the bots that roam the Internet scraping content and rewriting it for endless PBNs and affiliate sites.

I’m not standing on my soapbox gate-keeping the writing of the online world. I’m just stating an observation. Like modern search engines, where every keyword you can imagine has been worked on by an SEO company or affiliate marketer, the results become worse over time. And I should know, I wrote “Crush SEO” all the way back in 2015.

But there was an honesty in addition to the commercial intent of writing great content with purpose and useful answers to specific people’s problems. Helping a small business reach an audience is different than some corporate SEO control, like Hubspot spending millions taking over every top search position in the marketing world with content so vanilla, it could be used in a Starbucks Breakfast Milkshake.

Just a few years ago, you could create great content and the user-signals of people reading it and sharing it would help that content win the SEO battle. But the clickbait has won the war.

Unless Medium, Search Engines, and other data warehouses change their weighting to favor the in-depth and opinionated, than people-bots and AI-powered blogger bots are going to bury the world in a mountain of essentially useless content.

The AI systems will seep into our lives, and they will answer the tough questions, and search will be just to find products. I often find myself using ChatGPT-4 first, before I resort to a Bing search and then maybe a Google search, if I’m desperate. Usually that search is “reddit + [query]” or “stack overflow + [query]”. I don’t bother looking at organiz results unless I REALLY have to. And most people will as AI adoption continues.

Just like no one wants their Google Search History to be seen by others, people will not want their AI history available to others either.

Trust me, I wrote the book, “Will AI Take My Job?” and in our marketing agencies we use several generative AI programs on a daily basis, as well as developing our own.

As a writer who has never made money on Medium so I have no dog in this fight, I feel that Medium needs to focus on deep-dives by experts. They need to focus on opinions and experiences by people who’s had them and not the people-bots who are recycling an AI-summary of other people’s work.

A focus on nuance. A focus on people. REAL people. REAL writers.

Maybe this can be done with a committee or a volunteer community who want to help surface the hidden gems to rest of the world. Or it could be that perhaps Medium is turning more into a “rag paper” and less of the home of experts I uesd to enjoy more.

Don’t get me wrong, I still find interesting reading but it happens less often. As I see the trend continue, I read fewer things I find worth my time.

And since time is our most valuable asset, we don’t have much to waste. Much like the current garbage-filled search results of the modern search engines, Medium could head the same direction. And as their audience dwindles, they will cling to the algorithms showing how many people opened and read the clickbait garbage and those “engagement signals” will destroy what they’ve built.