Writing

Medium is Dying a Slow and Painful Death

As followers rise and views sink, writers are suffering.

Allow me to just first preface this by emphatically saying, I love Medium. I really and truly do. It’s a brilliant platform that makes writing online a seamless pleasure.

It’s allowed me to make money doing what I love while connecting with millions of brilliant readers and talented writers from around the world. Medium is to blogging what the New York Times is to newspapers. It’s the éminence grise of independent online writing, powerful and mysterious and beautiful when it’s working properly.

For that reason, Medium would do well to heed the fact that many of its most devoted and gifted creators are seriously unhappy with the way things are unfolding here recently.

Allow me to explain.

I first started writing political opinion pieces, among other things, last winter, during the height of the pandemic, America’s near political collapse, and Donald Trump’s failed coup. It was a heady time for anyone remotely interested in politics, to say nothing of a political junkie and writer like myself.

In other words, it was an incredible time to be writing about politics, if also a terrible time to be an American.

But I digress. I write on Medium for the pleasure and for the views and starting from very few followers and not many articles, I managed to write several pieces that went viral in March, exactly 2/13 articles that month. Those articles hit 10 and 18 thousand views.

It was my third month writing on Medium.

The same thing happened the next month, in June. 2/9 articles went viral hitting 10 and 15 thousand views, respectively. It was fantastically exciting.

By July something was different. Out of 12 articles, two performed relatively well, and yet that only meant about 1k views. There’s a stark difference between 10 thousand views and 1 thousand. I figured it was a momentary glitch in the matrix, and that things would duly recover as time progressed.

Unfortunately, the opposite has happened. Things continued to get markedly worse statistically, even as I gain more loyal readers and far more followers. Indeed, my views have cratered, and virality has decreased until now it is almost nonexistent.

When an article did gain traction, it seemed that it could only go so far, to perhaps a bit more than a thousand views. It made no sense whatsoever, in lieu of my past performance and increased followers.

The more followers I had, the fewer views I got.

It was exactly backward from what you might expect or predict. This was what you would call uninspiring if you were being polite.

By October, my best-performing articles were having trouble even cracking a thousand views. My writing had, if anything, gotten sharper. It certainly wasn’t my fault, nor was it about how much I was writing.

Clearly, the issue is on Medium’s end.

Perhaps, this relational revolution finally ate its own children.

I hope not permanently.

When Medium first announced their recent slate of changes, and rid themselves of the bloated publications and extra staff to focus on their beloved independent writers, I was thrilled.

After all, I am, if nothing else, an independent writer. I subsequently received several bonuses, and I was generally quite happy with the way things were going, until very recently.

The fact is that articles that once used to generate many thousands of views are now only garnering a small fraction of that.

Instead of virality and access to a massive audience, we’ve got lists and listicles about how to game the algorithm.

It feels as if there’s a fix in at Medium.

I know I’m not the only one that feels this way.

In fact, I only wrote this after reading many other articles by writers saying the very same thing: views have tanked, earnings are consequently way down, and no one can say why. Oh, and there’s a surplus of terrible spammy writing.

It’s an extremely dispiriting state of affairs. Good writing is getting drowned out by a flood of mediocre tip sheets on exploiting the algorithm.

Personally, I liked the money, but I loved the views. It was the very reason I first chose to write here, and why I kept writing on Medium. But when you take away the views and the money, what’s left is an elegant website and not much else.

Well, there’s the clickbait.

Instead of high-quality writing on my homepage, it’s spammy bullshit about gaming the Medium algorithm for cash. It’s depressing.

This is not what I signed up for, as a writer nor as a reader.

Mostly, I just want to know what’s going on. I would hate to lose Medium, but I also want to believe that Medium would hate to lose its many brilliant creators, those writers it claimed to be focusing on when it revamped itself.

I’ve read about several writers contacting Medium and getting sad stock replies, so I doubt that will work. But perhaps if Ev or whoever is running things sees enough cantankerous writers unhappy about the direction and deterioration of the platform, someone somewhere will change something.

That, at least, is my fervent hope.

Happy holidays.

— Alex.

Subscribe here for free to see my latest work

Want to read more of my writing? Sign up for a Medium membership for $5/month to receive unlimited access to all my new writing along with all the other talented writers publishing on Medium. I’ll receive a small referral fee with no increase to your cost if you sign up using the above link.