Is the Algorithm Broken?
By: J F Turner
Tags: Data, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Algorithms

Is the Algorithm Broken?

I wrote a story that traveled around the world … to all the wrong people

A few weeks ago, I wrote a story I thought would help content creators, like myself. I’d made a mistake thinking I had the right to use an image I did not have the right to. I wrote about my journey — and ultimate defeat — by a “copyright bot.”

I prefer stories with a happy ending, but such was my luck.

Though the post had the words “bot” and “algorithm” in it, my story was not at all intended for an audience of technology professionals. However, that’s precisely where it went — around the world to a bunch of people I don’t think will benefit from it at all (except, maybe, from a user-experience perspective).

I submitted it to three different publications, none of which accepted it. (I didn’t understand that. Copyright infringement is a big deal for content creators, and not everyone understands this. I might argue most people don’t.)

So, I gave up and published it on my own, sure it would be a flop.

The next morning, I woke up to a note of congratulations. Medium’s editors had picked it up as a featured story.

I think Medium’s algorithm has some machine learning to do

The morning after I published it, it had 755 views. It has continued to get reads every day for the last few weeks. I’m new to Medium, so this has been a big deal for me. Today, the story is closing in on 3,000 views.

I was happy it would be shared widely. I like to think my stories might help people, and this was a terribly expensive, totally avoidable mistake.

But what I’ve found, over the course of the story so far, was that content creators, for the most part, weren’t seeing my story at all. Neither, it appears, were many of my small group of followers.

Instead, I gained fans and followers from all over the world with these interests (which is a little ironic, since technology was the bad guy in my story):

Screenshot: Author

The tags I usually write for are writing, content creation, religion and spirituality. Some people have followed me who were interested in mental health, which didn’t seem that much of a stretch. But the results these last few weeks have surprised me. I keep watching and digging into who is reading and clapping.

I’ve had fans in India, Nigeria, Croatia, Romania, and a gamer from NYU. There was one Australian, two Italians, a few Indonesians, one Czech and a researcher from the horn of Africa.

There were programmers and Cloud analysts, data scientists, software engineers, two theoretical physicists, a hedge fund guy, an astral projector, a tree scientist, and a cannabis expert who writes from Mexico. (Straight from their profiles. I’m not making this up!) These are some interesting people!

One day, everyone who engaged with my story worked some kind of tech job in Brazil.

This leaves me with some questions:

If this story makes it around the world, I’m hoping some of my new tech friends will help me with a few questions.

1. Why didn’t the article get to its intended audience?

I used the right tags: content creators, marketing, copyright, photography, and technology. (My original story didn’t say “Content Creators” in the title. I added that later, but I’m sure it was in the sub-headline.) Was I relying too much on the curators to read and understand who I was writing for?

2. Why did Medium’s algorithm send my story around the world?

I actually love this. I’d love to know how to make it happen again. I just wish it had reached content creators. (If you know one, maybe you can share it.)

3. Why didn’t my followers see my article?

Only one person I follow (and follows me), who creates content — and writes in the same categories I do — clapped. (Thank you Joseph Serwatch.) Medium has said much about followers being more important since the recent updates, but their actions don’t seem to back up this bold statement.

4. What can I write for these people who probably have little in common with me?

The most complex technologies I use are my iPhone and WordPress! If you’re one of my new techie readers, maybe I can take your request. What does a programmer in Brazil want to know about religion and spirituality or good writing?

5. Is the algorithm okay? Is it broken?

Dr. Mehmet Yildiz recently pointed out something similar to my #3 above in this article. (He has a lot of followers and math skills I don’t have — so his calculations may help one of you smarter than me to figure this out.) He worked to build an audience of followers and cultivated that group of readers by giving them more of what they wanted to read. But with the new updates, he’s no longer reaching them. He’s not the only one I’ve read who says this. He just made the most compelling case.

Another piece to the puzzle — The curators are not to blame

As I was writing this story, Zulie Rane published this article about how to find out which categories your post was curated into. (Thank you, Zulie!) I immediately went to my Copyright Bot story to see if the problem was with the curators. Did they curate the story in technology? Was that the reason it went to data nerds worldwide?

Image: Author’s screenshot

Looks like the curators did exactly what my tags told them to do with this story. They did everything right! Yet my story did not get to writers, creators of media, and marketers.

The mystery remains unsolved.

Hey — I’m not complaining. I feel grateful, actually. The story made me a little money, and it seems people are still reading it every day, a handful of them actually writers.

It’s just strange.

Medium belongs the former CEO of Twitter, “the third largest social network in the world” (according to Wikipedia). It seems that, of all the blogging platforms, this one should be most able to laser focus on audience segmentation. But it’s also been suggested that algorithms take on a life of their own. Maybe this is a bot even Ev can’t control.