Conservative Complains When Winner Take All Market Crushes the Little Guy - When It's Him: The Sequel
It's interesting to see a conservative free marketeer lament being forced to work within a winners take all tournament-type platform whose algos have built a winning writers' cartel. The only alternative is for writers to organize their own cartel, generally called a union, to negotiate algo-management with Medium. But that won't happen. Of course Medium has a profit-driven incentive to maximize the readership of fewer and incumbent veteran writers who need less support and curation. This is the future of our refeudalized gig economy labor market composed of an enserfed supermajority and a few platform and capital owners. Absent regulation by government, capital always creates a plutocrats' plantation.
I'd suggest conservative Little Guy call the DoJ's antitrust division, now that Bill Barr is gone. Maybe try Teddy Roosevelt? Maybe you'll have better luck with Biden's DoJ with Merrick Garland in charge? If not, then you should regret McConnell keeping him off the Supreme Court.
Reread Adam Smith, who knew that unrestrained, unregulated commerce always leads to monopolistic market failure. Conservative free market pollyannas always neglect the other Adam Smith who wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Maybe consider a government-enforced social contract that rebalances bargaining power between little guys and platforms that turn themselves into utilities and natural monopolies? Just a thought.
Your only weapon against monopolistic platform feudalism is a blue ocean niche strategy. I publish long articles about the mythologized history of WWII, the Vietnam War, macroeconomics, economic history and behavioral investing strategies. All combine a readable journalistic narrative style with academic journal caliber research and scholarly heft. Every one of them gets distributed. One with 54 reads made $22+. Another with 37 reads made $16+. Older articles keep making money every month and sometimes have spikes in viewership out of nowhere. Publish enough articles with permanent value that make a few dollars every month and Medium's slow motion compounding machine will work for this business model on autopilot, though it may take a couple of years. But Medium will commoditize intellectual fast food and evidence-free opinion and leave you exhausted like a hamster running on a spinning wheel.
