MEDIUM

The Harsh Truth About Medium

The tight rope walk of free speech and quality control

It’s a truth as old as time — or at least as old as the internet. And it’s a truth that was most recently learned by Elon Musk when he spent a near world-hunger-ending sum to become the owner and brief CEO of the now-fumbling social media titan, Twitter. With an absolute commitment to free speech can come a host of issues.

Evan Williams, who co-founded Twitter and later established Medium, served as the CEO of Medium during its early years. Paramount to Medium has always been giving people an almost restriction-free place to publish their ideas. In many regards, it’s what’s defined Medium, and what separates it from so many other web-based platforms for writing.

Unfortunately, as Musk has experienced firsthand since his quasi-hostile takeover of Twitter, unadulterated free speech can open the door to unexpected consequences — from hate to misinformation to impersonation.

Though Medium has been largely spared from the spread of serious hatred, it’s certainly home to its fair share of unqualified research and misinformation. But more than a purveyor for misinformation, Medium often serves as a breeding ground for cheap nonsense, listicles, AI-written drivel, bad erotica, sycophantic horse crap and writers writing writings about how to write the writiest. By now, I think there might be a million or more articles about how to write on Medium, and the entry bar for publishing this by and large throwaway content is simply non-existent.

It’s nice to be completely unrestricted in our ability to publish, but the truth is that it congests the platform with content that the vast majority of readers on the internet simply won’t be connecting with. It’s a problem that’s opened many doors, but it’s a problem no less. It can’t be denied how many have found in Medium their first glimpse into the world of publishing, and connections with other writers that could last lifetimes. And maybe that’s what’s more important. But I can’t help but see a fairly serious dilemma in the approach.

Twitter and Medium aren’t the same. In reading published content, the average person expects more truth than they do from a Tweet. When they Google a question and land on a Medium article, there’s an expectation of legitimacy. There’s an assumption that the words will be true, that the writer is qualified, and the content will be well-written.

For aspiring writers looking for good-faith advice on how to succeed on Medium, they’re certainly not searching for a hundred articles with varying versions of the title “How did I collect 1000 followers in 65 days ⛳️.” They certainly expect that they won’t be written by frauds who conveniently leave out from their list the fact that they followed 12.4K arbitrary Medium accounts in their first *100 days on Medium — completely exhausting the amount of accounts per day that Medium even allows users to follow in the process. I wish I could say that I haven’t encountered ten other accounts offering their identically unearned wisdom.

When I think about the publications I value most, and why I value them, so much of that value lies in the reliability of what they offer. I know when I read an article from The Atlantic or The New York Times, it won’t be titled “5 Things High Value People Never Do,” “6 Best Passive Income Ideas To Make Money in 2023” or “I Write One Article Every Month And Get $2,000 Easily.”

Real newspapers would never deign to publish the vast majority of content that’s on Medium. It’s beneath them.

One of the worst aspects of Medium is its intersection between social media and news. It’s got all of the dopamine addiction and follower obsession as the other social media apps. And as a result, the content published here centers unhealthily around the desire to succeed.

When Medium announced their “boost” feature, the platform was inundated with articles about it. Reactions ranged from excitement to annoyance to confusion to opportunism. Many simply tried to monetize on the new policy by repackaging and paraphrasing it in their own articles.

Even months after the feature’s unveiling, I’m still coming across articles where people tearfully lament why they haven’t yet been boosted. In the vast spectrum of important goings-on, it’s stunningly egotistical how many people still resort to writing these same articles.

Even Fox News is above publishing articles with titles like, “Why won’t my bosses pay me better for the articles I write?” But on Medium, there’s just no quality control. There are legions of accounts that do nothing more than complain or offer hackneyed advice on success within the platform. There are thousands and thousands of articles written about nothing more than partner program earnings, and 99% of it is content that offers no real worth to anyone.

Medium’s status as a social media platform has toxified it in many ways. Even Twitter and Instagram are largely above bombarding users with content about “How to succeed on Twitter” and “How to get more followers than Kim Kardashian on IG.” But at worst, Medium can feel like a mirror reflected inward on itself ad infinitum — a self-perpetuating cycle of writing about writing about writing about writing.

I’m sure that none of us, when we envision the early years of our linguistic idols, imagine them squabbling in comment sections of “Read for Read groups.” Even if Hemmingway or Tolkien had been alive at the same time as internet porn, I doubt many of us could picture them feverishly clicking follow on every account that they could find — hoping enough might follow them back for them, too, to add their contribution to the growing list of “How I got 1,000 followers” Medium articles.

It could hardly be further from what real writing looks like, but on Medium, it’s often inescapable. That’s not to say that I hate Medium, only that free speech has its pitfalls, and that this platform has faced no shortage of them. The article format has a way of lending legitimacy to ideas, and when so many of the ideas here are repetitive, unoriginal, plagiarized, AI-generated or just plain value-less, it degrades the value of the platform as a whole.

When people who stumble onto Medium articles stop being able to depend on what they offer, it degrades what it is to even be published here. It confuses the concept of “publications” and leaves publication owners and editors stumped on how to do their jobs — and why to do those jobs without pay.

I’d never want to be an arbiter of what constitutes publishable content, but it doesn’t take a detective to see that Medium has a hoarding problem and could probably stand to shed a few hundred thousand articles about itself. I can’t offer any suggestions on how to get there, only my observation that these current norms can’t possibly sustain themselves before Medium falls on its face from the weight of its millionth “How I Got 1000 Followers In Just 30 Days” article.

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? 🧐