Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine on AI Slop, Quality Content & Social Media Fragmentation

After the introduction of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, the blogging platform Medium got ten times busier, says CEO Tony Stubblebine — and that was not a good thing. "Most of it was slop," he says. "Our job got a little bit harder on the filtering side. Actually, a lot harder on the filtering side." Luckily, Medium had already built human-run systems to combat spam, and began deploying them to filter out AI slop. Under Tony, the company has worked to focus on high-quality writing for humans, by humans. Today on Revolution.Social, he and Rabble talk about the enduring human need for storytelling, the role of incentives in shaping online communities, and empowering busy experts to start writing. Tony also explains why podcasting resisted monopolization while other Web 2.0 formats were captured, and why the post-Elon fragmentation of Twitter into smaller platforms is actually good for users. Follow Rabble: ⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠⁠ This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from ⁠⁠LightningPod.fm⁠⁠, and executive produced by Alice Chan from ⁠⁠Flock Marketing⁠⁠. To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit ⁠⁠https://revolution.social/