Facebook Isn’t Dead Yet and Is up to Its Old Copycat Tricks, and Medium Is the Target This Time

But fellow Medium writers, before you jump in as you did with Newsbreak, you should check out the facts.

Here we go again, Facebook, no shame.

What year is it? Oh, It’s 2021, and Facebook is back to its old ways, for lack of a better word, a copycat.

For years, we all know that Facebook has lacked in innovation. When something new comes out, they either try to buy it or clone it without shame. It happened with Snapchat and recently with TikTok.

It is not only Facebook; how many copycats do we have of the ephemeral Snapchat stories? Even Spotify jumped into the Stories bandwagon.

We also know how Facebook has played a significant role in electing Trump as U.S. president. It also allowed fake news to thrive on its platform. Bad actors have taken advantage of Facebook’s lack of will to say no to advertising dollars.

Facebook rolls out a Medium like writing platform for journalists and writers.

As writers, experts and journalists publish more of their work independently, we’re working to better support those efforts and make it easier for those content creators to build businesses online.

In the coming months in the U.S., we’ll introduce a new platform to empower independent writers, helping them reach new audiences and grow their businesses. We will start by partnering with a small subset of independent writers. The platform will include a variety of support focused on content creation and audience growth, including:

1. A free, self-publishing tool with robust styling options to create individual websites and an email newsletter

2. An integration with Facebook Pages to enable publishing across various multimedia formats, including photos, live videos, and stories

3. The ability to create Facebook Groups and nurture a community of readers

4. Features to help audiences easily discover new content and writers, and in turn, help those creators build direct relationships with their audience

5. Insights for writers to understand how content is performing

6. Monetization tools to build successful individual websites and businesses, starting with subscriptions

7. Accelerator services to help creators come together and learn best practices.

A large part of this initiative is aimed at supporting independent local journalists who are often the lone voice covering a given community. We’ll work to include them at launch, and build tools and services specific to their needs…

The independent creator space is growing. We fully support the work that others are doing and want to ensure that we can provide additional avenues for growth and monetization as well.

Facebook out to get Medium

Inday Espina-Varona first shared news of Facebook’s launch of a self-publishing platform for writers and journalists to monetize content on her Facebook feed.

When I shared it with The Social Media Geekout Facebook group by Matt Navarra, it has become a hot topic of conversation amongst its members.

It only means we are now in a subscription economy, and it is a good thing for writers.

Facebook, similar to Twitter, is trying to find ways to increase its revenues. It is why Twitter has bought Revue, another subscription newsletter tech company just like Substack.

The pandemic has brought new ways how people connect and how people consume content. We have already seen how Substack is gaining grounds attracting writers to start their own newsletters.

One of the most successful Substack creators is American historian Heather Richardson who earns $1,000,000 from her Substack subscribers by influencing how Americans think about politics.

But Medium was way ahead of its competition and the copycats. Ev Williams recognized early that advertising as a business model could lead to abuse by the companies that solely rely on advertising as a source of revenues.

It happened to Facebook, and we have seen it happen with Google and Youtube.

Medium: A platform for writers and their ideas

I had recently seen many complaints from established writers here on Medium, the ones who had a good run during the good old days of Medium, as they call it.

The way they referred to that time when they made a sizeable following and fortune. I never realized that Medium had a gold rush moment in its history.

Establishing themselves as writing gurus and thinking they have decoded Medium’s algorithm, they are calling out Medium for what they believe as an unfair business decision, and some of these gurus are beginning to sound like Trumpists and conspiracy theorists.

While most of them remain great writers, they have become too obsessed with the money they make on Medium. Some are beginning to act like spoiled brats.

Medium is changing as it should be. As a tech company, it has to. Otherwise, it can quickly go the path of Yahoo. Do you still remember Yahoo?

I am not a cheerleader for Medium, but I believe in Medium as long as Ev Williams is here, and I hope he doesn’t sell Medium.

The core values that I feel separate Medium from its competition, like Newsbreak and now Facebook, make it the writing platform I would continue to write and a place where I will share my thoughts and ideas.

Yes, I also want to earn from writing, and that is why I want to come out with what I feel can be valuable to my readers. I also commit to write more often and share tech news as it happens.

But I will not be motivated by money alone. I guess part of it is I’m in my 50s, and a big part of it is the lessons I learned from my mother’s recent death.

In the end, a life well-lived or a celebrated life doesn’t have anything to do with the amount of money or fortune you left when you die.

As writers, we have more than wealth to pass on. We have words other can take comfort from, others can learn from.

Because after we are all gone, only our words will remain. As writers, we owe it to those who came before us to use our words to change the world and not be too obsessed with dollars and cents.

While many are saying, Facebook Is dead or about to die. I still believe it can change only if it starts acting like an innovative tech company and stop using its war chest to stomp competition.

To stop creating copycats of ideas born out of sweat and tears by other tech entrepreneurs.