Wow. I suppose I am the nail that stands out deserving to be whacked.
I note that of your first twelve comments, not one required a 'read more' button. Short, pithy, dare I say unchallenging or bland, yet you may ask, what should they be?
Do we need an exhaustive discourse on brevity?
Where is the interaction?
I found the article intriguing yet not beguiling. (Ooops a big word. That blew my Flesh-Kincaid level to hell.)
I believe much of what you profess is relevant, but only so in the context of writing for social media or truncated journalistic/Facebook slices of rehashed/ over hashed content.
(That sentence came over more vitriolic than intended as it is directed at society's insatiable quest for immediacy. It is not intended as a personal slight.)
Sahil Bloom may have a large social media following but that is 'social media' or 'social writing'. My point is he may be the guy everyone knows in the bar and has a quick funny anecdote for everyone as he crawls through and slips out the back. Everyone says, 'Wow what a great guy.' Yet twenty minutes later they struggle to remember his comments.
I admit we can not all thrive as modern day Faulkner nor Hemingway.
I do not know Mr. Bloom's work but will soon rectify that and thank your putting me on to his work.
Are readers on Medium with the sole purpose of thrashing out brief reads like shots of tequila? Bang it down in one and move on? That is social.
Are readers on Medium to lean back in the corner with a few thinkers and pour over several Guiness and discuss issues that haunt the participants for days after? That is engagement.
It is a plague festering in our society that brevity and beige/bland content available through the simplistic and pruned platforms of social media has resulted in a malaise of lazy intellectual engagement.
Yes we must respect our readers time but so too we must respect the worthiness of our words.
Not challenging a readership is playing to the lowest common denominator as dictated by the algorithm of highest returns.
Minds and muscles are trained and expanded by challenge, not by succumbing to the dictates of the most profitable currents of the algorithm or lifting the lowest weights.
Your writing for social media and perhaps that of Mr. Bloom are no doubt profitable and impactful to a sector, but are they exercising and challenging the minds of your readers or do they only cater to the denominator of algorithmic acceptance?
I admire your work but am falling out of love with much of what I find available on Medium.
Thanks for writing.K