How can you have clean communication channels on Medium?
My quest for focused rooms for writing
I decided to experiment with publishing news in a humorous way. But will that be noise? How do I allow readers separate noise from signal? Medium Publications? Not really.
Introduction: Signal versus Noise
Since the days of Google+ Circles I was fascinated by Signal versus Noise in social media. Long time ago there were blogs with RSS feeds. Blog often had one feed, sometimes it had multiple topical ones. That was actually good. You could keep better control over your channels.
Rise of filter bubbles
Then came social media. And decided to do away with that. Instead Twitter and Facebook were megaphones. You write publicly to everyone and everyone gets everything from people they friend or followed. It became unruly, so they introduced algorithms.
They started to track and build your profiles, trying to figure out what you like when and filter. Now, I do not think this is bad. Problem is that its a black box we do not control… They measure how we engage and give us more stuff we engage with. But is engaging stuff noise or signal?
Death of Noisy Channels
Facebook feed is dead for me. It has more noise than signal. signal. What happens when channel of information has more noise than signal? We skip. We skip and skip and skip. We learn how to ignore it. How to close cookie popups on auto pilot, how to switch attention to phone when advertisement is on TV. Our brains know how to optimise resources. If something is not interesting it becomes invisible.
Solution: Multiple Inputs and Outputs
Later when Google+ came out it had interesting feature. By now Facebook copied it but does not matter. Feature was to group your contacts in circles and than publish to chosen circles.
It was interesting step back to giving users little bit more control over signal to noise ratio. But some how from opposite side. Now writer needs to decide for who its noise and for who it is not.
I actually wanted this to happen from both sides and differently.
One person has many interests, as does another. Some overlap, some do not. Why can’t I subscribe to only par of person interests? Why do I need to subscribe to it all of it and than allow some algorithm decide how to filter and manage signal to noise ratio for me. It does not really know me. Does not know how I feel.
Creating clear information channels on social media
Now what is interesting is that LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube do allow somewhat easy creation of separated channels.
LinkedIn and Facebook allow creating pages and you can than post there.
YouTube allows multiple channels per account.
What about Medium?
Medium? Medium allows creating publications, that was only suggestion I found. But I did an experiment and its not what I need. When I publish something to publication it also publishes on my account. This just makes my main account a noisy mess.
Now I have 3 choices:
1. Register new Medium account — nope
2. Publish everything on my account — nope
3. Create multiple publications for my interests, so people can subscribe to them instead of noisy main account — meh but no better option
Looks like choice number 3 it will be… Will see. What do you think?
Publication for experiment
I am lately playing with GPTs a lot and found funny use case. News reader that rewrites news in some entertaining ways. I was thinking to experiment with that. Make a world building exercise iterating on it with ChatGPT, while tuning lore of a certain world, and than putting recent news trough that prism. This is pretty radical and I have no idea how people will react. Could be very noisy. But I had a lot of fun with it so far. An reactions from people were the same.
So here is publication for content because of which I started to think about it https://medium.com/tales-from-digital-realms-of-aisteros
