How I fixed my broken Medium feed

Hint: the AI takes [ Unfollow ] seriously

I was tired of Medium and the endless drivel I was seeing on my daily digest email as well as when I logged in and read the top stories as organized by Medium’s algorithm based on what it thinks it knows about me.

The collapse is coming. White people are evil and are the cause of — see above — impending collapse. This famous person is a racist. Here are 6 micro-aggressions you should stop doing immediately. The banking system is run by white supremacists. Men have no idea how to be trustworthy. And so on…

The algorithm isn’t all stupid. It understands the topics I write about and also the stories I clap for and perhaps it even understands from my comments which articles I feel positive about. But then its cleverness begins to run out. It feels I should rad all the handwringing crybaby stories about victomhood and the infinite evils our society. I do not want to read any more of these.

I went through and unfollowed many of the frequent fliers — authors whose material always gets to my screen — and also went to some of their stories and left dissenting commentary (unsure if that had an effect on the algorithm though).

Then I edited the topic I’m interested in. This likely had the biggest impact on my feed, which is now brilliant. I did leave in some social, political and philosophy topics, as I have to be honest in that these topics are important to me. I added AI, data anlytics…