I’ll have to address a few points, both good and bad.
First of all, the good. I do agree with the message. Skimming doesn’t help anyone. I never skim. I didn’t even skim on Shin Jie Yong’s medical articles, though I have to admit I couldn’t be further from being a scientist and the topic is not quite my forte.
I read as much as I can and even my writing comes short in this. I am home full time, I could churn out 20 poems and 10 articles a day, but I’m not doing that because I found myself lost in reading and Twitter.
I barely manage to get halfway through the first curated list of the day, then I get the next one in the mailbox already. I just can’t keep up. Since I also need to tend to followership on Twitter for the outreach, I’m picking a lot of Medium articles directly through there, as they get shared by Gurpreet Dhariwal, Dipti Pande, Karen Madej 💛 , and others. If it wasn’t for them, I’d miss out much more.
Just 20 articles of 5 minutes reading time each end up being one and a half hours, plus commenting, tweeting, sharing, caring, retweeting again, etc.
And I’m at home all day (only being incapacitated by my family at times). Others have jobs they have to attend to. So I suppose they have much less time for reading, not to mention writing.
We all read as much as we can. Since my claps have started bugging out two evenings in a row (the issue resolved later — Dr Mehmet Yildiz reported similar issues) I wouldn’t even hold it against anyone if they didn’t clap. Shit happens. I’m not here to get clapped at every corner.
Now the few bad things — I know, nobody wants to hear the bad stuff, but I hate being dishonest. I say what I think. Period. I wouldn’t back away from making enemies in the process if there’s no other way.
I just wrote an article about logical fallacies. One of these so-called fallacies is an appeal to emotion.
Your accusation of us not caring about Chris Hedges 🦄 is one such an appeal to emotion. An appeal to guilt. I disapprove of that. We all love Chris. And furthermore, by reading an article about Chris, we would not quite honor Chris, but the one who wrote the article about her.
Tell me, who would receive the praise, the claps, the reading time? The money from Medium? Chris? I’m not sure, you tell me.
It’s the same reason I wrote that I didn’t want to have any claps on the article “I have been Illuminated”, I’d tag people in it. They would simply read for knowing why they got tagged. If I would write an article and tag you all, you’d all drop by, the stats would go through the roof. But that would be dishonest both to myself and to Illumination.
I do not tag people unless I want them specifically to read it, praise them from heart or spread their stories. And I would never go and say “Don’t you Like Mr./Mrs. X/Y? Why didn’t you read my story about them?”
The average reading time for my Sun Tsu article (8min read) is 2min 53sec. You don’t hear me complain about it.
The average reading time for my article about my stats (7min read) is 4min06sec. It’s better, but not saying that everyone read all of it (if the avg. reading time is a reliable metric in the first place), but I’m not complaining.
The bottom line is: I do agree with and encourage thorough reading. But I disagree with ranting about people on here for not reading your stuff. That’s bad behavior. No one is doing this on purpose. But if you keep on ranting about how unfair it is, I’m sure people will start dropping you and avoiding your stuff intentionally.
And just before I get to hear this: I’m not saying this from a high horse with my awesome stats. They were and still are 100% the merit of all the Illumination writers who took the time to read and promote my stuff (while they could have written their own in that time)
I’m thankful for it and try my best to return that favor on every single day.
I’m saying this as one of the people who try their best to give back.
I’m sorry I can’t read faster.
With kind regards,
Kevin
