To Understand Why Medium Changes, Put Yourself in Its Shoes

Companies don’t think like people

If you want to succeed on Medium, you can’t be frustrated every time it changes. You’ll spend too much time feeling sorry for yourself and too little writing. Of course, some people do both at the same time — and try to make a career out of it.

Besides a plethora of “How I Made $429 on Medium” posts, I see little in the way of “Medium Is Awesome Because X.” What there is no shortage of, however, is articles lamenting features, behaviors, and changes of Medium.

“The new reading time payment model is bad for me. Can we go back to claps?”

“My home page should be so-and-so, not what it is now.”

Of course, feedback is valuable to anyone operating a platform or service. In Medium’s case, however, most of these “feature requests” are voiced as complaints, and it shows little reflection on our part — which, as writers, is our whole job.

If you frequently feel the urge to complain about Medium or do so loudly and in public, I’d like to ask you: How much of an effort have you made to understand why Medium even made each individual change? Have you put yourself in the company’s shoes? Or are you complaining just to complain?

The first thing you’ll notice if you make an actual effort to look through Medium’s eyes is that it’s hard. How does a company even think? Does a company think at all? How are decisions made when a group of people is operating a business?

As an example, when Medium makes a change that’s bad for you, it’s easy to feel like “Medium doesn’t care about me.” That’s pretty accurate. In fact, Medium — the company — doesn’t care about anything. Only its employees and leadership can care about individual writers or even writers at large. How many of those people do you know? For most writers, that number is zero — no wonder their journey to seeing their wishes fulfilled is off to a rocky start.

This isn’t to say that networking will get you any favors, it’s to demonstrate that, often, when we try to analyze why things aren’t going our way, we’re looking at the wrong variable to begin with.

Once you look at Medium vs. you through the lens of people, you’ll notice this: A very small team is taking care of a very large number of writers.

Medium has somewhere between 100–250 employees. In 2018, more than 50,000 writers published on the platform each week. That was two years ago. My guess is right now, 100,000–200,000 writers publish on Medium each month. You’re one of them. One. 0.001%. You’re not alone. And all the other 99,999 writers have needs, demands, wishes, and frustrations — just like you.

Let’s take the move to pay writers based on reading time as an example to see how the different sizes of these two camps affect business decisions.

At some point, the following thought popped up on either side, maybe even around the same time: “If we’re paying people based on claps, and claps are largely based around views, we’re basically paying people for views — which is the same as the old advertising model. Maybe we should pay people based on what actually gets read instead.”

On Medium’s side, I assume this idea quickly reached the majority of employees, if not all. A discussion begins. Should we do it? What are the pros? What are the cons? What can we do if the move fails? Will this lead to paying more writers or fewer? Will payouts go up or down? For who? Why?

Meanwhile, in the Wembley Stadium full of writers, few authors are aware this idea even exists. Fewer still have come up with it themselves, let alone proposed it to Medium. Eventually, however, word gets out. Will it reach all writers before Medium launches the feature? Definitely not.

But, regardless of whether an idea formed organically among a small subset of writers or was seeded by Medium themselves, it’ll eventually reach a crossroads moment where it’ll either receive large-scale support or not.

I doubt this large-scale support is currently in place for paying writers based on reading time for several reasons:

1. Most writers are lazy. They’d rather write about “8 Shocking Things Kim Kardashian Did Last Week” than something that requires more research because pressing emotional buttons is easy and always works.
2. Most writers aren’t that good, and, deep down, they know it. There’s a proven, reliable way to get views (see above). There’s no proven, reliable way to actually keep people reading. It’s hard. Unless you practice writing for a long time, experiment a lot, and keep improving, you’ll just settle into the same, boring format — and it might not glue people to their screens.
3. Most writers are still mentally stuck in the advertising system of the past 20 years. Better the devil you know than the one that you don’t, right? Not really, but it feels comfortable, and it’s easy to get nostalgic about the days when 1,000 views paid $100 — even if you were never part of the group who earned money at these rates to begin with.

The whole question of how much backup an idea has before and after launch raises another point about big business decisions: They’re not one-way streets.

It’s easy for the 200 folks at Medium to make a change thousands of writers and readers scream for in advance. For more complex changes, like the reading time payment model, only time can tell the Medium team if they should reverse the decision — which is also an option that’s always available.

Considering changes to a product or service can receive acceptance or face rejection from the majority of stakeholders at any point in the process and that any change can be amended, reverted, and improved upon, we’re now looking at an interesting answer to the question, “Why does Medium keep changing?”:

Decision-making for big businesses is a never-ending dialog, not a simple series of yes-or-no questions and answers.

Several layers of conversations stack on top of one another, and out of this big, noisy bubble, a path forward for Medium emerges. There are conversations inside Medium, and conversations between Medium and readers, Medium and writers, and among each of the latter two groups.

The difference between dialog and how you make decisions as an individual is that you can’t neatly predict and file outcomes in the former. Communication is messy on many levels, and the sheer amount of noise on Medium makes it a challenge for the team to tune in — let alone successfully filter out what’s most important and likely to benefit all parties. As such, this process is always ongoing, and the outcomes are always changing.

Take the design of your home page, for example. You know how many iterations of it I’ve seen in the five years that I’ve been here? Dozens. I don’t care if it changes twice a day. It’s always a work in progress. If you’re new on Medium, it’s easy to feel like each change matters, like it’s a personal gift or insult, and that the status quo will stay forever — none of which is the case.

For most of 2019, the home page was dominated by articles in Medium-owned publications. Okay. For a few months now, it’s mostly articles from publications and people you follow. Okay. Guess where we’ll land next? Likely somewhere in the middle. And then — as the discussion continues — the design will continue to change.

This is why it’s no use to complain: Things will change again soon anyway. For the same reason, it makes little sense to ask for prescriptions, which is every self-conscious writer’s favorite pastime activity. Unfortunately, Medium can rarely tell us what to do straight up because they’d either have to reveal details they’re not yet clear on themselves or, even simpler, there are none.

Curation is a great example. When a manual review was first introduced into getting widespread distribution on Medium, writers immediately clamored for guidelines. “What should we do? How can we guarantee we’ll get curated?” But, just like us, Medium had to figure it out. We saw only the outcome, but Medium’s decision was — and always will be — ongoing.

Now, long after Medium released some best practices and basic quality standards, people still ask for more guidance when, beyond good grammar and proper formatting, quality assurance in writing is highly subjective. Curators are people, and people have different tastes. “Curation jail” doesn’t exist, just point two from above: You’re probably not that good yet.

This leads to my final and most important point: When what you ask for from Medium is mostly dictated by your ego, you’re probably out of line.

This journey isn’t about you. It’s about all of us. The only way readers, writers, and Medium employees win is if we all do it together. When you feel yourself wishing Medium was different, ask yourself who else might feel the same. Then, ask that person. Do they agree? Maybe you should start a group effort to send a strong signal through the noise to Medium staff. If you can multiply that signal a thousand times, chances are someone at Medium will hear it.

A company is not a person, but it still helps to imagine it as one. Apply some of that empathy you use so much in your work to the places you work in, on, and for. Have you really tried to understand the platform’s perspective? Will getting what you want make the team’s life easier or just your own?

Most of all, stop taking business decisions so personally, and don’t see them as hit-or-miss, set-and-done, or black-and-white. Understand that you’re a small part of a huge community and that we’re moving forward through a messy bubble of human dialog, not like figures on a Monopoly board.

If you stay in the conversation long enough, keep practicing your craft, and are kind to people along the way, I’m sure you’ll get what you deserve.