I’ve Fallen Out Of Love With Medium

I’m not here to complain

Medium is making me dread writing.

Writing has been the love of my life, the one constant amongst the many, many changes of adolescence and early adulthood.

Lately though, I’ve been feeling an existential dread at the very thought of sitting down to write.

I promised myself a long time ago that if writing ever started to feel like work, I’d do something about it, I’d change something.

This article is me doing something about it.

Emotional Patience

Medium’s minimum length of an article in order for it to get curated or boosted annoys me.

Because I don’t always have the emotional and creative bandwidth to hammer out 800+ words.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve woken up excited to write but I simply didn’t have it in me to write a whole ass article.

Medium still doesn't have an encouraging ecosystem of short-form content.

So I’ve had to resort to posting on LinkedIn.

The thing is, I’d much rather post on Medium, I’d much rather put up those posts every day here. But I feel like they’re simply unwanted on this platform, it feels like there’s no space for them here.

What are we supposed to do as writers if we want to write lesser than 800 words without it affecting the audience that the writing garners?

The Gatekeepers

Let me just say that I love Medium.

The interface, the features, the partner program, all of it…except the gatekeepers.

Above all else — I love Medium because it’s the only respectable platform that pays its writers. But I’m just not in love with it anymore.

This is because of mostly one reason: how unnecessarily difficult Medium makes life for writers.

• The gatekeepers: something I hate just as much as I love Medium

We are writers, we are creatives, we’re human beings that go against the grain. We don’t like being told what we do. We want to express ourselves as artists.

So when publications tell us that our writing cannot be published because the article doesn’t fit into their box, we want to tell them to go to hell.

The fact that it’s next to impossible for your article to get traction unless you publish in a publication is infuriating.

Not only is this incredibly restrictive for writers but it also goes against the whole purpose of what the platform was built for: to give stories a home.

• The partner program: a boon and a bane

I live in India. Despite now being the most populous country in the world, the MPP does not allow Indians to even apply for it because Stripe has limited functionality in the country.

In 2023, a time when any functional adult uses multiple payment solutions, why can’t Medium?

Why can’t this behemoth of a corporation just figure out a way to pay these writers what they deserve?

Why exclude a billion people?

The Virus Of Self Help

I’m a self-improvement writer, and even I can’t stand most of the self-help articles that get published here.

Robotic, repetitive stuff that’s incentivized to prey on the reader’s worst fears and insecurities — disgusting.

I will never stop being surprised by how some writers can wake up every day and choose to keep writing about the same shit over and over again.

To be fair though, it’s not entirely their fault, Medium’s algorithm seems to have a bias toward self-help content.

When writers get rewarded for writing about the same boring and misleading content repeatedly, they can’t help but worship cold showers and no fap streaks.

I’m so completely, utterly, and unequivocally bored by the articles I’m shown on this platform.

Quantity > Quality

Medium as a platform clearly prioritizes quantity over quality.

It’s basically impossible to get a lot of views unless you write:

• sensationalized, misleading headlines
• pump out article after article every day

I don’t want to do either.

I write because I can’t not. I write because I love to.

I don’t want to write trashy headlines or force myself to write crap I don’t want to.

But that’s what pleases the algorithm.

Don’t get me wrong though. I’ve read so many articles bashing the platform and always felt like although what they were saying was true, it achieves nothing.

Complaining never does any good to anyone.

The Solution

Manage your expectations.

I don’t rely on this platform for my livelihood or business.

Neither should you.

I’m extremely grateful Medium exists but it’s not exactly the most reliable platform, at least when it comes to consistency and direction.

Nothing is guaranteed here.

The ones that make the most money on Medium are the gurus that sell courses about how to make money on Medium.

So I’m now here just to write for fun. I’m no longer holding myself to a high standard of quality or quantity for a platform that doesn’t seem to care about its writers.

I’m not quitting, I never will, I like writing too much to leave any platform for good.

But I’m going to stop putting so much pressure on myself.

I’m going to remind myself of the real reason why I got into this: it’s fun.

Or at least it was supposed to be…

It’s stopped being fun now, so I need to make it fun again.

I’ll write when I want, what I want, how I want.

Because that’s what I find real joy in.

I’m not optimizing for views, money, or followers, but for happiness.

I hope you do the same