Medium - Letting it go
I just don't get their business model and the quality of what I see is most definitely a non-compelling value
My relationship with Medium has been up and down1. Early on, I wrote a few things and posted them there, long before they began monetizing, and frankly, it wasn’t really an audience growing system. Yes, I know that some of the early contributors hit it big, and when monetization happened, they got rewarded.
But I never found a constituency there, so I went back to blogging (and now writing this and my other ‘stack). I never really cared that much about going viral, this is just an outlet to pour my thoughts into.
That is a roundabout way to broach the subject of my paying for a membership. A SciFi author who writes many pieces on the intersection of politics, modernity, tech issues, and life, Cory Doctorow, was publishing great themes on Medium, and I wanted to get around the paywall.
Last Thanksgiving, there was a $20 for a full year subscription to Medium, so I pushed the “buy” button.
Over the next year I have come to discover:
The notifications I used to get for Cory’s articles (as a free subscriber) pretty much disappeared. Instead I got random notifications for shit I wasn’t interested in
There is a population of prolific writers, people who publish 3 or more articles a day that are thin gruel, and just gum up the feed.
The algorithms seem to do a real shitty job of extracting my preferences from what I click on.
So damn many of the creators on the site are just so click-bait-ey that the cringe is off the chart. Just a very low signal to noise ratio
Many creators just change their views as public opinion. I was following someone who was a total Musk/Tesla stan, and then when Musk started going batshit insane, he totally switched to bashing Tesla
In short, as the year went on, I drifted away from checking it, and as the year was ending, and I got the notification that it was going to renew, it was a no brainer to take the steps to cancel.
And nothing of value was lost.
Mostly down
WHY THIS PLACE WILL DIE SOMEDAY SOON
I'm with ya, Geoff. I just started seriously putting my words online using Medium and here - duplicating everything! That's nuts. Now, a writer has to write and maintain his words in multiple places?!? I used to get paid directly from a REAL publisher, not this techBro fake publishing crap, at a rate of at least 10-20-50-100 cents per word, whatever even more, why would I even care to remember things like that). And when I used to write something, I'd send it and forget about it, the healthy usual way to write back in the 90s, and as done since the finger found media in a cave somewhere.
Both these platforms will fail because they will never be able to support a writer's living wage, no matter how many stacks or mediums the words flow to. And I am sorry, I read the ones that MUST be getting the very big bucks because of "love" counts, and I don't get it. My bet is the algo is rigging the game. And why not? The internet looks like a giant casino from where I sit (in a jungle, in Nepal).