Confused, Yet Grateful and Flattered
By: Dr Mehmet Yildiz
Tags: Psychology, Self Improvement, Data Science, Writing, Technology

Insights from Cognitive Data

Confused, Yet Grateful and Flattered

“What is going on? Entire Medium is talking about ILLUMINATION” said my data.

Photo by Conor Luddy on Unsplash

Weekends are my data analysis days.

Data analysis is fuel to my metal head.

Dealing with Big Data is my hobby, passion, and part of my profession.

My passion helps me earn my living, so I am grateful.

My favorite part of the Big Data process is sentiment analysis.

Data gives me insights into the feelings of people.

Learning about feelings is a compelling reason for me to invest my time on sentiment analysis. My playroom, I mean my lab, is full of sophisticated tools speeding up the process.

Today, I discovered something special.

Descriptive data analysis indicated that ILLUMINATION is the most mentioned publication on Medium.

Wow, this is a piece of fantastic news for visibility of 4,000 contributing writers. I thought.

By the way, according to TopPub, Medium has 13,109 publications.

When I established ILLUMINATION, TopPub was showing it on page #4557. After five months, it shows it on page #11.

This piece of data helped me see how big we are now and how much progress we made within five months.

This uplifting news from data made me joyful.

My next highlight was a bit disappointing.

A tiny bit!

In data terms, only 5%.

I am not upset or angry, but a little disappointed.

It has been absolute pleasure to support and contribute to Medium.

Since I love this platform, many friends, colleagues, and associates heard a lot about Medium on our conversations. I encouraged hundreds of people to leverage the beauty of this platform. I helped bloggers to be storytellers.

As a social media champion for positive speak, I don’t write about any controversial topics. I stay away from politics, did not pen even a single article about politics. I don’t criticize writers, editors, or publications.

One of my goals is to inspire and motivate writers. Therefore, as a principle, I don’t leave negative comments even if I disagree with the content. If I leave a comment, it is either deserved praise showing gratitude for the effort, or enhancing the content for the enjoyment of others. In short, I perform as a peaceful collaborator on Medium.

Considering my peaceful participation as a good boy of Medium, I assumed that there would be no negative sentiments about my involvement in this platform.

Data said, “this is your side of the story”.

My sentiment analysis disagreed with my assumption.

Even though 95% of mentions ended up in a positive and uplifting scale, 5% was awful.

According to sentiment analysis, 5% of mentions on Medium indicated anger, worry, envy, unhappiness, jealousy, concern, hatred and even stronger emotional terms which I’d refrain from mentioning publicly. Data is data. I respect it because it does its job.

When I asked my sentiment analysis tool to create a report for me on how it came up with these negative sentiments, it delivered it in less than three minutes.

The report showed that some people created stories and comments about me.

According to cognitive data, even though some did not use my name correctly, they smartly defamed my account using — my credential title Dr, the good doctor, the founder, the leader, the chief editor, and the name of my publication — .

My cognitive data tools, by the way, are now capable of sensing sarcasm. They perform much better than Sheldon in Big Bang theory.

Before ILLUMINATION, hardly anybody mentioned my name on Medium.

I don’t mind when people tag me. It is a pleasure to be mentioned by our writers and readers, pointing my attention to a specific point requesting my input.

The sentiment analysis tool indicated that people were associating my account with traits apposite of my character and identity.

Destructive criticism was disappointing. It is toxic.

I am a principle focused and value-oriented individual.

5% of those who mentioned my name slandered and defamed my principles and values.

Don’t get me wrong; I have no fear of criticism, positive or negative.

I love it and even solicit negative criticism to thrive.

But when I traced down the specifics, these destructive terms are used by editors of some publications. Some publication owners ban ILLUMINATION writers. They publicly documented statements like “either my publications or ILLUMINATION. You cannot write for both”.

I love and support all publications on Medium. We are part of the same ecosystem. I encourage our writers to write for other publications.

I even documented my views about freedom of our writers. I pointed out that writers contributing to ILLUMINATION was not exclusive to our publication.

I love publications so much that I offered promoting publications of our writers. I follow them and even submit my stories to some of them.

Despite my affinity towards publications, some publication editors created satire and poetic pieces to defame my publication.

Some publication editors passed the threshold in social media saying:

“only idiots write for ILLUMINATION”

However, according to ILLUMINATION, many smart and world class leaders write for ILLUMINATION.

And many Top Writers on Medium write for ILLUMINATION.

I ask the analytical data three questions:

“Why other publication editors hate my publication so much? Why do they try to stop me from growing my publication? What is wrong with my publication?”

The logical data had no idea.

If my Big Data analytics cannot figure out the rationale, no one else can.

Since the situation is beyond my control, I left the analysis and started my daily joyful exercises.

In the big schema of things in my life, noises on a content platform transformed to as little as an eye of a small spider.

After my break data delighted me with a surprise response.

Data said:

“since negative sentiments on your account and publication started, the growth of ILLUMINATION increased 60%.”

What can I say?

I just love it!

Since my critics helped my publication grow, I send them love and gratitude.

Since last half century, I learned that many situations are blessings in disguise.

Feel free to join my rapidly growing, diverse, and inclusive publication by sending a request.

Here is my 10-day old pilot project called ILLUMINATION-Curated, which is also multiplying. It is powered and illuminated by ILLUMINATION. Here is the evidence-based on visitors. A picture can tell many words.