Yes, good point about the value of using wording that doesn’t sound as harsh! I appreciate your thoughts, Carol.

I foresee a potential problem with wording that’s more generic though (e.g., “This is not research-based.”). I’m afraid it would become like the “Do you accept cookies?” pop-ups on every single website nowadays: people tend to just dismiss the fact that those are there. In Medium's case, the vast majority of pieces here aren't academic or journalistic. At the same time, there’s a lot of stuff on Medium that wasn’t professionally researched in the process of writing the article, yet the perspectives still track with what qualified/educated professionals would indeed say. (Example: writers like me who have advanced degrees and often incorporate insights and theories we're familiar with from our fields, but we do it in lay-speak so as not to alienate readers who need to hear it.)

So, for instance…. if we flagged ALL non-expert-authored content, we’d have situations like an incel screed receiving the same “warning” banner that a (healthy, sensible) feminist essay would also be slapped with — simply for the fact that the latter wasn’t academic or journalistic in nature. (Even if the feminist essay did reflect the latest perspectives in academia and promoted healthy perspectives in support of equality.)

I guess…. as I think more about this…. I do believe non-problematic pieces on Medium shouldn’t get the same label as the problematic ones; if they did, it would kind of defeat the purpose of the labels. Also, given that there’s already a process for reporting certain kinds of harmful content (e.g., hate speech, bullying), I see flagging “unhealthy” content (whatever we might call it) as an extension of that approach. I believe we genuinely need a way to flag harmful content uniquely as harmful.... even if the language is gentler than that.

So in sum: I’m all for a reporting-and-review process, I’m all for a banner, I’m all for language that doesn’t shame the writer, but I’d prefer to see a solution that doesn’t end up painting ALL pieces that aren’t overtly research-based with the same brush as the truly questionable ones. It’s a tough conundrum….

(Sorry if I've written too much about this, but this has been on my mind for months and it really grinds my gears.)