MEDIUM

Is Medium a Meritocracy or Reciprocracy?

Is content really what matters most?

“…engagement is irrelevant to worth. It’s why Kim Kardashian has more followers than Malala Yousafzai.”

By nearly all measures, Medium is on the rise. Following historic lows in summer of 2022 and the installation of CEO Tony Stubblebine, Medium has undergone a series of changes that have by and large begun to reinvigorate interest in the flailing platform.

When 13 months ago Medium reported its worst month in history, with a net loss of memberships, August of 2023 is poised to bring in 100,000 new members according to Stubblebine himself. There has been no shortage of reasons to be encouraged by the changes taking place here on Medium.

But in its latest policy shift, I can’t help but see some slightly misguided thinking. With the changes implemented on August 1st, the way in which all of our pay is tabulated is now based off of new metrics. While before, pay was dictated almost exclusively — albeit a little loosely — by the time Medium members spent reading our articles, now there are new figures taken into account.

Moving forward, claps, responses and highlights are a part of the equation. At face value, it might sound like this is a useful way of determining a piece’s worth. After all, the expressed purpose of these changes is not only to draw eyes toward the stories that most deserve them, but to clear the ambiguity around the platform’s system of payment.

Medium isn’t the first platform to try this experiment, though. Algorithms prioritizing the posts with the most likes and comments is nothing new. And in implementing this change, Medium seems oddly oblivious to the social media giants that have already experimented with this route.

To evaluate worth based off of these engagement metrics exhibits a clear misunderstanding of how social media operates. It can be stated plainly on any other social media app, whether Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or TikTok, that it’s not typically the most valuable content that soars to the top. In fact, the tweets, posts, and videos with the most to offer almost never get the attention they deserve.

To act as though the worth of our pieces are dictated by their clap, response and highlight count is to ignore one of social media’s most hard-wrought lessons: engagement is irrelevant to worth. It’s why Kim Kardashian has more followers than Malala Yousafzai. And if the legions of commenters fawning over each of Kim’s ass pics dictate their artistic value, then the world is in a precarious place.

One of the features of Medium that’s frustrated me most since joining is just how little of our success is related to the quality of our content. Since joining, I’ve been relentlessly bombarded with articles about earnings, follow for follow, how to succeed on Medium, how to make money online and every possible variant on that formula that can be imagined. And not infrequently, these articles thrive.

Writers’ obsession with the metrics of success has long been one of Medium’s greatest pitfalls. It’s why nearly every day on Medium so far I’ve been followed by 2–3 people who just travel down lists and arbitrarily hit “follow” on every single account that they see. Because people can pad their accounts and create an illusion of success this way, thousands of writers have tried to game the system.

This stems in part from Medium’s decision to limit the partner program to only the writers who’d accrued 100 followers and written one story. And now, constantly fielding random follows is a near inescapable part of the Medium experience. Though Medium has acknowledged fault in the 100 follower approach, the latest shift in policy seems only to double down on it.

When it shifted user focus toward follower count, it spurred a culture of follower obsession beyond what I’ve experienced with any other social media app. Now, in shifting focus once again toward these new metrics of success, it’s made the platform both more insidious and easier to game than it was before.

In having new metrics to measure our success, we find more reason to obsessively check our statistics to make sure our words are resonating. It’s given us more reason to doubt whether the comments and engagement we receive on our articles are coming from a place of authenticity.

In my time on Medium, there’s always been an unspoken understanding that the support network here is reciprocal. To leave a clap is to be owed a clap. To receive a response is to owe a response. But now that there’s a financial incentive stamped onto every clap, comment, and highlight, it’s hard to imagine how much worse this problem will grow.

Even listicle-writing robots have managed to garner followers, claps, and swaths of responses — not because their pieces are useful, valuable or worth reading — but because they put in the time to reciprocate the community.

I think most can agree that in a perfect world, Medium would function as a meritocracy. The worth of our writing would be determined by its value and the standard of writing on display. Of course, these measures are nearly as subjective as they come.

But the idea that worth and payout can be calculated through these new engagement metrics has been one of the gravest mistakes of its social media competitors. Prioritizing what draws engagement over nearly everything else isn’t a new experiment. The formula has been tried and tested and its failure has transformed our entire culture. It’s what turned Facebook from an ad-free frontier for connecting with friends into an attention vaccuum of Reels, Kardashians, glimmering garbage and misinformation.

The shift in focus has been one of the driving forces behind our attention economy. It’s the reason why what’s outrageous reigns supreme in this digital world.

How payment should work on Medium is no clear issue to solve. Certainly, the time spent reading articles shouldn’t be the sole indicator of their worth. But that’s still a harder metric to fool than highlights, responses and claps. If an article is that bad, people might pretend to enjoy it, but actually putting in the time to read each word is something most won’t have the patience for. There’s something to be said for the thinking.

External referrals also offer one of the most useful glimpses into the resonance of our words. When articles make the rounds on other social media platforms, it indicates they have a value that extends beyond Medium. In essence, it’s these articles that bring people to Medium to begin with; it’s what brought me here.

And because the views are from outside of Medium, there’s no element of reciprocity involved in the read. When reading a viral article, people don’t go in with a personal bias or need to support a friend. When strangers read our articles to completion, and sign up for a Medium account as a result, it’s an earnest indicator that our work has value.

And yet, as the rules stand currently, external referrals have no bearing on our earnings. The member referral program was an attempt to correct for this, but will be dissolving by the end of August. This was due to a lack of interest, according to Medium.

By September, even an article which musters a million views outside of Medium and brings in a thousand new members won’t earn an extra dime for it.

To make matters worse, Medium appears to have quietly removed the 3 free reads it granted to non-paying members each month. Effectively, now the only way that a wider audience of non-members can see our articles is if we completely turn off our ability to be paid for them. Unless there’s something I’m missing here, I just can’t see any way around it. I’ve continued to get external referrals to my articles, but I can only assume they’re from readers who promptly get paywalled after completing the first few paragraphs.

On my end, the only means I have left for sharing my article with people who don’t have a membership is to share my friend link.

Lately, I can’t help but feel that Medium wants success on here to depend on reciprocity. They’ve stated that they want the income pool through which we’re all paid to be contributed to by each of us. Going forward, membership will be a requirement in order to be admitted to the Medium Partner Program. And in truth, there’s a lot of wisdom in the decision. It’s something many members have advocated in recent years.

But engagement shouldn’t function in this way. People shouldn’t succeed just because they put in the time to engage with other writers. They shouldn’t get the most eyes on their pieces just because they write the most shocking and provocative titles. They should succeed because their writing offers something genuine, powerful, important and useful. The move to monetize all claps, responses and highlights, though, is a huge step in the opposite direction. It feels like an admission that Medium is not a meritocracy, but a reciprocracy.

How exactly these new changes will effect the platform is still too early to say. I’m trying my best to remain cautiously optimistic. But if we’ve learned any lessons from the failings of other social media titans, there’s a reason to be cynical of this transition.

You know what costs just over 3/5 of a gumball per day? Supporting the aspiring writer whose article you just finished! Additionally, by the powers vested in me, I’ll grant you unlimited access to the work of all the writers on this platform. All you have to do is sign up through this link here! Can you spare the equivalent of just over 3/5 of one gumball per day? 🧐