“Please Bear With Us” at Medium

Yeah right. We’ll see.

From Medium, in my inbox:

Thanks for the feedback.

We have a dedicated Creator team now investigating major improvements to the entire experience. Please bear with us.

If you wrote in to have a say, bet you got this, too.

The past weeks those of us who have put in seriously dedicated time into our Medium relationships and readership have watched our stats and readership plummet. Kind readers have let me (and by way of that, you) know that they can’t follow us, that they don’t get notifications when their favorite writers publish. I most certainly have noticed that those writers whose work has become deeply important to me have disappeared.

I’ve published those comments, and by doing so, many more of you were inspired to go take a look-see, and in doing that you found out all kinds of things no longer gelled. You couldn’t find writers whose material made your day, lifted you up, and engaged those important parts of you needing to be fed. You found that your profile got hacked down to nothing, and that key identifiers which might have made you and your work intriguing to new readers were gone.

People used to getting your stuff, now think you’re not writing at all, and here we are tripling our output thinking that it was something we did wrong.

Say it ain’t so.

Because not only are we still writing, many of us who saw our stats plunge, plunged ourselves into even more work only to finally realize nobody who likes us has a clue we’re still alive. I could go on.

Speaking of “on,” I have no idea what the Medium team was “on” when they embarked on this particular slash and burn journey. The landscape they left behind is akin to what has happened to the lush forests of the West, now burnt to the ground.

For so many of us who did the hard work of chopping wood and carrying water to establish ourselves, who reached out and commented and engaged and clapped and linked and supported other writers, work that took untold hours and weeks and months, the commitment of emotion and interest and care and time to earn the right to have readers, all of it was gone in a heartbeat.

In an attempt to get the point across to those folks whose tinkering and manipulations completely torpedoed not only our relationships with writers we like but also our earnings, I not only published your comments but also sent them to Medium. All of them. That would include articles by the esteemed Dr Mehmet Yildiz, who above all editors and publishers on Medium has done the kind of superhuman work to create a pub that is the envy of so many others.

His work, like our work, got slammed by these changes, his profile diminished.

There are terrible costs to those things. Trust, for one. For I can’t speak for you but I no longer believe that Medium has the writers’ interests foremost in mind. If Medium is indeed currently valued at $600m, as one writer claims, I can tell you that the majority of the top tier writers are no longer seeing their share of what they worked so hard to earn. So while I am sad to say this, the comments I get from Medium staff are met with a certain disregard if not outright derision, for I have to ask the obvious:

what the fuck were you thinking?

Based on what I see and hear, not only do we not receive notifications when our faves publish, but the follow buttons don’t work, so….really? If nobody reads our shit, nobody gets paid. Kindly, Medium gets to keep all the income from all of us, we keep producing material which brings in readers, but we aren’t getting PAID for that work because 1) apparently we can’t follow folks any more, 2) our profiles don’t identify us with the kinds of attractive tags that might bring readers and c) nobody who likes us gets notifications of our work.

Call me a cynic (you may, for I am, I follow the money), the end product of this seems to be that Medium gets all the quality writers, they keep most of the income from the membership including mine, of course, and we keep right on pushing out good content sans the income.

I would like to be wrong. I am not interested in hearing what new writers to the platform have to say about the way to be successful on Medium is to “personally engage your readers.”

WILL YOU KINDLY. Those of us who got burned the worst did precisely that.

In what appears to be a badly-bungled attempt to force writers to do what the best writers did, modeled, taught and regularly demonstrated, Medium appears to have punished those same writers for doing just that.

And did so without giving us the courtesy of fair warning, that changes were coming, and bothering to do what leaders do: ask its best people for ideas and suggestions.

Far be it for me to suggest that those who read my articles are smarter than I am.

Far be it for me to intuit that those who consume my product might have something to teach me.

Kindly, at the risk of pointing out the VERY OBVIOUS, Medium is chock-full of incredibly smart folks like Dr Mehmet Yildiz whose input prior to all these changes might have been useful. People with social media smarts and software smarts and hundreds of us who were committed to the Medium model.

They didn’t. And now we continue to have a hot mess, with far too many folks who were hoping to make a ha’penny a day having to start all over again.

Being told by newcomers to Medium that the way to make a million on this platform is to engage your readers.

No. The cynic in me believes that the way to make Medium worth $600m is to throw your platform into disarray, strip your writers of their readership and pocket the income while your writers struggle to pick themselves up by the bootstraps.

After something like six or seven rather hotly-worded emails from me, articles from others who had the same thing to say, helpful and revealing comments from frustrated readers, again, this:

Thanks for the feedback.

We have a dedicated Creator team now investigating major improvements to the entire experience. Please bear with us.

The use of the capital C on Creator may be a typo but it’s revealing. Because they did play God with their writers and their writers’ incomes and communities.

If Medium is the place for good ideas, then it might be a good idea to pay those folks whose good ideas MAKE Medium such a good place for good ideas. It might have been a FAR BETTER idea to ask the community of awfully smart folks what their ideas might be to improve the platform. But again. Far be it for me to make the inane assumption that anyone in my audience might know anything more than I do. Silly me.

But I am not waiting around. I continue to explore other avenues, if for no other reason than Medium has demonstrated a shocking lack of regard for the intelligence of its writers, their dedication, and their right to make a fraction of a cent for work they produce at a time when that kind of theft puts people in further jeopardy.

When a platform states that it is full of good ideas but doesn’t possess the courage or competence to dip a spoon into that rich brew of ideas BEFORE they utterly ruin the model that makes them worth $600m, it has no right to ask us to bear with them. They bear the burden of this mess, not us.

Those of us in the business world have watched this kind of implosion over and over and over again. It is almost always the arrogance of people who don’t seem to understand that their constituencies probably have more ideas, better ideas and suggestions than they can come up with because…..

…after all, we Medium writers have the most skin in the game to have the system work, be equitable to Medium and its writers, and to be the shining city on the hill.

Right now it’s rubble.

Call me sour grapes if you like. But as a military person, my focus is not solely on my pocketbook. It’s the community I built, that my fellow writers built, that all of us were building that got torn asunder.

I am exhausted from putting out articles day after day and continuing to watch said effort go further into the ground.

Bear with us? Medium, you might have borne the responsibility of asking our fucking permission first, and if not that, you might have tapped your best folks on the shoulder for ideas before imposing this monumental clusterfuck on the entire community.

But that’s just me. For all you brand new to Medium writers who are SO VERY EAGER to tell the rest of us how to make a million by doing what we have been modeling for years, kindly just PLEASE.

Wait til it’s your turn to see your hard-won earnings plummet lower than whale shit when Medium once again decides that we’re making too much money.

The way I see it, trust is earned. My trust in Medium is broken. You cannot squander the good will of working writers, aspiring writers and all of those who made this platform what it is (was) with our sweat equity then strip us of our earnings.

Good luck with that model, Medium.

But please, bear with us.