Indie Bloggers Deserve More Respect Than We’re Getting

Stop un-curating our work.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

It happened again yesterday.

For the second time, I endured the bewildering experience of having a story uncurated. The worst part? Nobody told me (except the editor of the publication, who was also confused). There was no explanation. The story itself was performing extremely well, earning about 3k claps in a single day and dozens of positive comments. The post was substantive. It was earnest. It was everything this platform claims to want.

Let’s get real, this isn’t how you treat people — which was ironically the entire point of the post they removed. It’s not a way to earn trust or loyalty. It’s a way to irritate us, and increase the odds we start looking for another home for our work. Basically, nobody wins.

This has been happening to a lot of writers lately. While platform managers might nitpick our titles or call them “clickbaity,” they’re not fooling anyone. After all, everyone knows that political writer who’s taken up permanent residence on the homepage, churning out a steady stream of inflammatory content about how stupid Americans are and how the future is doomed. (I happen to agree with most of what he says. I also think it’s ludicrous to promote that while judging the rest of us.) If that weren’t enough, now we have…