Medium.com: my impressions as a user

Paulo Laureano December 21, 2021 Opinion

I must get something off my chest: Medium is crowded with money seekers, people looking to gamble the algorithm for fun and profit, in a search for El Dorado.

First impressions

Everywhere I look, half the articles are about "how to make it." — beating the Medium algorithm. Some more articles about "how much I made with approach X" or "my article that went viral." and a lot of creators complaining about how the golden days are long gone.

I just got Medium.com. I don't care about the platform itself. I care about reading good articles about pretty much everything else other than the platform. I care about finding an audience for the pieces I plan to write.

I get the weird feeling that I arrived late for what once was a great place. But, listen, I don't care about the money. Medium is not my day job. It's not a job at all, not for me; it is not even a side gig. So, I am happy to pay the five bucks a month. But, I would feel a bit more comfortable if I did not look like a large percentage of those around me are (would be) creators attempting to get their money back.

What I have been writing on the platform

Everything I publish there (on Medium.com) is also here, on my blog, with no paywall, no ads, no shenanigans of any kind to get your hard-earned money. So if you want to read my content for free, this is the place.

It's hard to escape the subject of money-making strategies while writing on Medium, since you get the impression that a large number of the platform users value the topic. So while I will not write about it explicitly, I will (from time to time) mention the subject.

Can you make money on the platform?

Yes, you can. That is part of the problem. A lot of the platform users will never make it. I find it rather sad to see so many misguided users arriving on the platform with high hopes and very little knowledge of what it takes to be a content creator.

Like on Youtube and Twitch, it requires serious commitment from content creators (like publishing content regularly), and you need to have it in you to achieve greatness on the platform. Your content must be excellent, and you have to keep the same level of excellence over time.

Could I do it? Nope. Not in a million years. And even if I could get there, I would never be able to keep it going for long. Life as a content creator is not what people make it out to be. Very few ones actuality live the dream. Suicide rates are also high.

Authors deserve to get paid. Everyone that consistently writes on the platform (daily, in English) will __easily__ make their subscription money (plus the Grammarly subscription you will probably find helpful) back and some profit on top. More than that, turning your social activity into a job requires a level of commitment and hard work that I, for sure, am not personally interested in and could never reach.

There are a lot of misguided souls lurking on Medium.com searching for El Dorado. Most will be disappointed. You have to get through the noise created by people who just write about the platform. They produce a lot of trash. Mostly on playing the algorithm and getting some more exposure and stories about how much they earned. Their content is the single thing I dislike on the platform. Everything else is excellent.

Do I recommend it?

Yes, I do. You get much better content from Medium than you could ever dream of getting on other social networks.