Merlin Star's Website

Recently, I did an article on the BBC’s ableist and racist coverage of a professor. I posted this both on my personal and on Medium.

I got some nasty comments on Medium. I’m used to nasty comments. That’s not the issue, though I shouldn’t also be used to racism.

The issue is that most of the decent comments I get are on Mastodon or on LinkedIn with discussion. Sometimes, I get the best dialogue from those that disagree with me. I like disagreement if it is done with thought.

However, almost none of the commenters that disagree with me on Medium are thoughtful at all. The few that are either soon delete their account or fail to respond back.

This essentially means that Medium is mostly hate comments with no depth with occasional comments that agree with me or a rare commenter that respectfully disagrees with me.

It makes me think to the environment that I want to cultivate for myself during my PhD and beyond. Do I want to keep subjecting myself to mostly thoughtless hatred for a few extra dollars a month?

I know that quite a few writers about racism had left the platform for alternative platforms that didn’t have this problem or the problem was significantly reduced. I’m not really writing for the money, so I might just switch to publishing on just my website again.

Ever since I got accepted into this PhD program, I’ve been really thinking about what life I want to set up for myself. I mean, I’m always thinking about that, but it feels much more concrete now.

So much of my life, I was pushed to groups that were malicious to me, presumably to break my spirit and prevent me from being a threat. In 2017, I had enough and started making my own life choices and felt a lot better since. LinkedIn and Medium are the only big platforms that I am using and seeing by the level of shadowbanning that is happening on LinkedIn, I probably will be banned in the next 2 months for no reason on LinkedIn. It is what it is.

That begs the question of what to do with Medium. Do I continue or stop? What do I want in life?

Either way, I will definitely continue to post on my personal website. Went ahead and updated the full list of posts. Also, thanks to the 6 subscribers for my website. Still confused on why anyone’s subscribed, but I’m not judging!