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Stop Me Before I Snark Again

This seems like a nice place. Let’s not wordlitter. |

Gabriel Piemonte
6 min readMar 29, 2023
The peace symbol in a word bubble overlapping a heart icon (like the one in the I Love New York bumper stickers) in a word bubble.
Image by Sylverarts, via Adobe Stock.

My honeymoon on Medium ended late this morning. I am saddened but unsurprised. Although I have been a Medium reader for years and published my first piece on the site in 2020, I am only now diving into this place as a community. There are a lot of reasons for that, and I will talk about them over time, but I will just describe this as a period when writing is urgent for me, and Medium is an excellent place to get one’s grounding as a writer. The neighborhood is thriving, there is a strong audience, and I feel some pressure to not throw just anything up.

But let’s be real — it exists online, so it is a de facto social media space. And because there are few limits to the kind of writing that is allowed here, there is ample opportunity for it to become whatever it is going to become. What it is, which has a real sense of beauty and integrity, is in large part a result of all of you who have been responsible stewards of the space for years. I also credit the founders and the people who keep it running every day, of course, but I feel that what I am describing is a culture, and that, fundamentally, is something ordinary people in any environment create. You cannot impose culture. It must be grown; that is, after all, the origin of the term. (ask your yogurt-eating friends lol)

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Gabriel Piemonte
Gabriel Piemonte

Written by Gabriel Piemonte

HI. Journalist, writing coach, & communications strategist in Chicago. Civic advocate. Publisher, Pummarola Magazine. Racism top writer. gfpiemonte@gmail.com

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