WRITING

6 Strategies to Make the New Profile Work for Us All

Portfolios and self-created topics will do the trick. And what Medium can do to help.

Many of my sister and fellow writers here have commented on the new profiles Medium gave us. I did the same when I was part of the beta group and thought I could have a little influence.

But no. Their mind was made up. And many of us don’t like the outcome. We’re lacking in skills to make the new profile work for us. So, let me shine some light on what I think Medium is trying to do (and they mean well for all of us, honestly!) and what they might consider instead.

And let me end with 2 tips on how to make the new profile work for us anyway if Medium does not change anything soon.

Dr Mehmet Yildiz wrote this story some days ago. With suggestions to Medium on how to change the design features with design thinking. There’s lots of truth in it.

I agree with the urgency to act. People are unhappy. They lack the skills to make the profile look nice. And I also think looking nice is not the issue here. Nobody will go to my profile just because it looks nice. We want one thing more than all others: browsing features.

We are writers. We are writing longer stories because we want to give nuance to our readers. We want to make emotional rants. We want to give our readers value with lots of background and a build-up of arguments.

If we were in the business of quick soundbites, we would just stick to Twitter. Medium is a unique platform for writers of longer stories and I love you for it! Our stories perform best when they are 1000–1500 words long. But we can elaborate and reach 2000 words when the matter we write about is complex.

So, what do I think happened? And how can we solve it?

The Trend in Social Media

Social media is all going for short and fast nowadays. Twitter has proven a fast platform for framing political messages since Trump embraced it. All big platforms Facebook, Insta, and LinkedIn have added features to go live. And to add a post that disappears in a day. And even YouTube has a feature for shorts nowadays, as Krystal Wascher explains.

Why? There are two reasons. And they are all connected to the reductionist business models that are common in our world.

• Urgency. The value of a post becomes more valuable when it is newsworthy. Our world is fast. We have a limited attention span. We have become used to quantity over quality.
• Limited availability. If someone says to us you can only buy this today, we will buy it more readily. And we don’t want to miss a thing. It taps into our FOMO. Fear Of Missing Out.

The popularity of TikTok has proven that this works. And now all social media are going this way. Make it short. Make new stories more valuable than old. Make posts scarce and people will read them.

The communication Medium has given us about the new profiles strengthens my view. They say: please write more. Please write shorter posts highlighting your longer posts. So they will grab the attention today. And do that every day. Recycle your work like this and you’ll be successful anyway.

Also, the formatting of the big publications such as The Writing Cooperative, ZORA, GEN, and others strengthens my view. They don’t have any overview anymore. They just place the latest story at the top. And you have to browse to see more. I must honestly say, I don’t like it and won’t write anymore for pubs using this format. I talked to some of them about it, but they don’t agree with my view, sadly.

One other reason they might have done it is the enormous workload of curation and top writer statuses. They had to put stories with topics to categorize them. Sadly, it means that curation only says ‘distributed’ now and the topics and top writers are gone.

Medium has also given us something in return

• They’ve given us new algorithms that are meant to link writers more strongly to their followers. Whether it’ll work or not I can’t say. I’m not an AI expert and it’s too short a time to see what it does for me personally
• They promise the paid reading time includes the browsing of our profile stories. If people linger on the first 150 words without clicking for the longer story, we will be paid.

Okay, enough about the causes. What about solutions?

This is what Medium can do about it:

• Please, Medium, give us a business model that fits your innovative and big-hearted nature. Please use abundance instead of scarcity to make the model work for us. What does that mean? I want one story to build upon another in my full portfolio. I don’t want to make my stories scarce and hip. My best performing story is one from July 2019. I want that one to keep shining. And I want to build more value on top of that. No urgency, no limited availability. Some of my later readers want to find this one too. Please let them.
• Give us a portfolio instead of a one-off-scarce-story. We are writers. We are nuanced thinkers. Our vast minds don’t fit into one story. We want full portfolios that use synergy and abundance to work their wonders
• And if you allow us portfolios, we need profiles where our readers can browse. You don’t have to put the topics to stories for us. The automatic tags can do that. Or, my preference, you give us profiles as YouTube has. Where we can categorize our own stories with our own terminologies. Take a look at the YouTube channel of Charles Eisenstein. For me, this is great for browsing through the portfolio of a man covering as many subjects as the vast universe herself

But what if Medium Staff doesn’t listen? Can we still make the new profiles work for us? Make us into successful, value-giving, influential writers whose work matters?

This is what we can do ourselves:

1. Of course, we can take the route Medium suggests. Write more. Write faster and make 150-word posts framing some of our longer stories. Here’s Thomas Smith’s story about short form. And how other Illumination editors are experimenting with it. Britni Pepper here and Tree Langdon here.
2. We can combine social media to make a name for ourselves in the bigger world beyond Medium. Keeping Medium for the longer stories and building a following on other social media attracting readers to our work. We can use strong SEO words to let Google do the work for us and help our readers find us by topic. If you think it’ll take too much time, read here how Dr Mehmet’s six-minute strategy works
3. We can combine social media for the short work, Medium for the longer work, and a book as a portfolio. Publishing and marketing our own book is no rocket science anymore. And if we have built up our followers, even an official publisher might see the value of adding us to their stables.
4. We can republish our Medium stories on our own website, creating a template where readers can browse by category
5. We can make our stories into short YouTube films and do what Charles Eisenstein has done. Create our own categories in our profiles
6. Connect to other people out there and use the synergy of each other’s work. Illumination and Illumination-Curated do this excellently. They know that by connecting honestly and shining a light on other people’s work, our own work will start to shine brightly too.

Keep up the good work, Illumination! I’m using all 6 strategies to make it work for me in an honest and enlightening way. And all the while, I’m hoping and praying that Medium will see the light too and adopt an abundant business model to make our honest writer-success with new and old, short and long stories easier for all of us.

If you want to connect, you can find me somewhere on this beautiful planet, admiring Gaia’s abundance. Or we can connect via Linktree.

© Désirée Driesenaar