From the day we started the fantasy sports section, I’ve gotten one question, repeatedly: “Why Chris Vaccaro?” But a close second is, “When is The Athletic going to get into sports betting?” My friends, the answer is … “today.”
You might think that just means they’ll provide coverage targeted towards gambling, but no, it’s worse:
As you may have seen pretty much everywhere, we’ve partnered with BetMGM. This was not, by any means, a short process — I think it’s been about eight months in the making. I want to assure you that your overall experience on The Athletic will mostly remain unchanged. And in most cases, it’ll get much better and deliver way more value.
[…]
So whether you want to tinker with our models before you place a sizeable wager, read some columns and simply enjoy the insights because it makes you a smarter fan, or maybe you’re like me and want to try a $3 longshot parlay across a few sports that will pay back $213.10 — we’re here for you. And we’ll be here in the comment sections for your feedback, questions, concerns, or general razzing of bad advice. (Try as we might to avoid it, there will be bad advice. That I can promise.)
I don’t doubt that most, if not the majority, of money that funds publishing is corrupt because it is impossible to earn a dollar under capitalism without stepping on someone else, but it is difficult to imagine a more brazen hijacking of the process of reporting than explicitly joining, and thus foisting your readers directly into, gambling.
Incredible but maybe not entirely surprising for an outfit that was originally born out of the notoriously libertarian Y Combinator start-up program.
IGN recently fired an editor that covered Nintendo platforms and software, Filip Miucin, when it was discovered that he had plagiarized a review for Dead Cells from another video review.
This situation was awful enough, but IGN’s managers did a good job of resolving it quickly, and I thought it could be an opportunity for the journalist who plagiarized to grow and learn a valuable lesson. That isn’t at all what happened, he posted a video apology to YouTube and it is just completely insincere garbage that I won’t embed or link to. ResetEra has a transcript.
Portions are excerpted in this retort from another writer that Miucin plagiarized, Chris Scullion:
The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.
His goal is to break this pattern. “If I learn that every time I drive down this road I’m going to see more and more car crashes,” he says, “I’m going to take a different road.”
[…]
For five years, Mr. Williams has been refining a communications platform called Medium. Its ambition: define a new model for media in a world struggling under the weight of fake or worthless content. Medium is supposed to be social and collaborative without rewarding the smash-ups. It is supposed to be a force for good.
Medium feels to me like it isn’t as popular as Twitter, but it is a thing that I suspect most people reading this would have read a few articles on.
The article talks about the business model of Medium, how it exists as a platform for writing. I think it misses the real problem with the site, the reason why Medium exists is to profit off of the work of writers. Not that Evan Williams is a bad person — he tried to create a space for good writing in Medium — the real problem with Medium is that it is yet another business that exists as a parasite on a writer’s work without providing them with a living wage or an identity.
The Times article goes on to talk with one writer who made some money on the site. She received $50 per article, when they were paid, and went on to write about 100 in the same year. Not all of those were paid, and $50 isn’t bad at all for a new writer, but even if she had been paid for every article $5000 a year isn’t going to pay the rent.
Whether the business model is correct or not, I read many articles on Medium, I link to very few, and I can’t remember who the authors are of most of the articles I read on the site. Their identity is subsumed into Medium and they no-longer own their writing when it is read on Medium.
The only opportunities for an author to express themselves on the page are their byline, and any auto-biographical text that they write in their bio underneath the byline.
In that article by Jose Moran, it is an article exclusively about that author’s work experience at Tesla. We might remember Jose a bit more than anyone else because he works for Tesla, which is an important company in the electric car field even if I don’t like the way they treat their employees.
Here’s how his byline block appears:
Here’s the banner at the bottom of the page when you’re not logged into Medium:
Now let’s pick a recommended article from just above the bottom of the page. The first one is another article about Tesla and it takes us to ThinkProgress, a site that uses Medium as a host for their writing.
Here’s how the author’s byline block is on a page hosted by Medium:
The bio gets cut-off at the top of the page, but there’s a larger version at the bottom with the full text.
Here’s the banner on that hosted site:
What are you signing up for? Medium. Not ThinkProgress, not Jose Moran. You might incidentally get updates from ThinkProgress or Jose after signing up, but Medium-the-business doesn’t give a crap if you do, so long as you keep using Medium.
In both cases the author loses control over their byline as well. Did Joe Romm want to display just part of his byline at the top of the page? We’ll never know, because Medium decided for him.
Does Jose Moran want you to sign up for more updates from him in case he posts an update where Elon grows some balls and lets his employee’s Unionize? Medium decided that no, what you want to do is sign up for Medium.
The only person that has an author’s best interests in mind is that author.
When an author has their own site, they are totally free to express themselves with more than just a byline. Nuclear Monster is to my taste as a modification of the free software WordPress. At the top of the page, that’s a logo I made with the feedback of friends. I picked out the colors of the site, and what code I wanted to use. I decided what the site’s focus should be. Medium pages are identical, generic and bland, because they express the identity of that site instead of the identity of that author.
Those bylines above are actually an improvement over the original Medium. Back in 2013 the author’s byline looked like this:
It is possible that the 2013 byline looked a little better, I have cribbed it from the archive.org version which sometimes isn’t able to preserve the entire detail of an archived page. However, it matches my memory of the site. No author photo or bio.
When you follow an author who has their own site by subscribing to their RSS feed, or on Facebook, or Twitter, you’re going to get to their site as the destination to read their work.
That author gets to decide if they’re going to link off-site at the bottom of their article page. I don’t personally like those kinds of advertisements, so I just have a rotating group of related articles from Nuclear Monster, but at least I have a choice and could decide if I wanted them. Jose Moran has no option after choosing to use Medium to host his writing. There are links to whatever articles the Medium algorithm picked.
As a writer, I hope that Medium fails, because it can’t exist as a functioning business without exploiting authors who need to establish their own identity in order to survive. I want to see more writers own their own websites or choose to work collectively with others instead of seeing their work stripped of identity and authorial ownership to another business intent on exploiting them.
The problem with San Francisco area startups is that they are all car crashes intent on smashing into as many people as possible before the money dries up and they leave without insurance to clean up the mess they left behind.
When Medium fails and is sold to Verizon, it will leave writers bloodied and bruised in its wake who haven’t established their own identity and they may be so frustrated with the experience that they give up on writing entirely.
Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.
