What’s So New About Social Media?

I have been writing a daily story or sometimes multiple daily stories for one of the aggregate blogs, Medium, for more than a year. My page has some 3,300 followers and I put most of my stories behind a paywall, so every month I earn a few bucks.

I used to write a weekly story about guns and gun violence for Huffington Post, I also had my own blog which also focused on issues having to do with guns.

I went to Medium because the site not only had a much larger audience than I could ever achieve on my own, plus shifting from the subject of guns to talking about politics brought me in contact with what I believed would be a much more diverse and, frankly, more sophisticated reading group.

The problem with writing about guns is that the subject is so emotionally charged that what you end up attracting are a lot of very angry people on both sides of the issue who are determined to be as nasty and offensive to the other side as they can be.

So, what I ended up with when I was writing about guns was endless spam, endless attempts to disinform my readers with whatever stupid, nasty or disinformation could be generated on both sides.

I thought that by switching to a more mainstream blogging effort with a content that would attract a more intellectually civilized readership that perhaps the…