You can’t be a passive consumer of content online anymore.

Well, you can. But it’s a sucky experience, getting suckier over time.

Back in pre-social media days, you had to cultivate your online garden; nobody else would do it for you. It was only when the algorithmic feed was developed that it became more common to passively scroll, knowing most content served to you would be at least mildly entertaining. You might not consistently see the best of the best, but most of us enjoyed the scroll.

When did it get truly unbearable? A combination of factors caused quality to tip from “this is fine,” to “I need to touch grass right now,” but monetizing eyeballs was the worst offender. 

The incentives were lined up for anyone who could take advantage—any platform that didn’t figure out how to prevent growth hackers from hijacking attention in inauthentic ways like, “Stay till the end!” or “Comment ‘recipe’ to get my meal kit!” was flooded with that content. And then, worse—AI allowed anyone to generate that inauthentic content at scale, exacerbating the problem. 

So what can you do? Here at Medium, we’re going in two parallel directions: doing everything we can to deliver a better default feed from us, and providing more feed customization tools for you. 

For the average Medium reader, over 75% of stories on their feed are there because a human, exercising their taste, said they should be.