Shitting Where I Eat

Medium sucks but I love writing here

Medium started as an experiment in 2012, and more than a decade later continues to tweak itself. At the helm until recently has been the cofounder of Blogger and Twitter, Ev Williams, yet despite new CEO Tony Stubblebine, long-term viability of the platform seems sketchy.

Writing “weblogs” goes back to Barger’s Robot Wisdom of 1997. Merholz jokingly broke the term into “we blog,” only to have Williams himself use “blog” as a verb and a noun, birthing the name and accelerating the trend. From Open Diary to Tumblr to Medium, the format has come a long way.

Yet blogging’s major challenge is common to all online content since Tim Berners-Lee uploaded the first blog-like post in 1992, announcing the World Wide Web and its software: monetization. Hypertext was so odd, innovative, and out there, almost nobody anticipated the Web’s potential.

As a result, Internet users adopted attitudes and behaviors that in retrospect seem insane. Since hardly anyone took the potential for making the world’s information instantly accessible, editable, and sharable seriously, absolutely nobody was willing to pay for digital content.

Building a simple website could cost you a fortune, since the expertise for doing so was rare, and the benefits for staking your digital claim were even then perceived as high — but content was de facto considered free, to the point copyrighted movies and porn were routinely bootlegged and shared.

The now obvious reality is the early Web set precedent for the evolving Web in ways that resulted in the systemic disruption, and often complete destruction, of entire industries. From journalism to broadcast TV, retail stores to taxis, free two-way synchronous data transmission changed it all.

Back to blogging, and my gripes with Medium: Plagued by consumers still not willing to pay for content, it teases out subscriptions through two programs: one that provides readers with unlimited access to exclusive content, and another that pays bloggers for that ostensibly great content.

Display ads and various forms of sponsored content provide additional revenue, so far keeping Medium afloat. Despite generating over $130 million in revenue by 2020, several M&As, and over 100 million monthly visitors, the company can’t make a profit, and is swimming in debt.

Part of the problem? I agree with the Medium slogan “Everyone has a story to tell” — the challenge instead being that too many people try to tell it. That makes me sound like a snob and an asshole, which far as writing goes is likely true, but one of Medium’s key challenges is content quality.

Don’t take my word for it, go look yourself. Since you’re clicking around, articles with the most claps and comments will percolate to the top. Don’t get me wrong, some stuff you’ll find is top notch — but the deeper you look, the more frightening the critters discovered in the damp and the dark.

Exacerbating this problem is the common, inversely proportional relationship between quality and popularity. Given the sheer volume of posts, differentiating good from bad remains challenging, displayed by badly written nonsense getting thousands of claps, countless gems ignored.

The paucity of good stuff and abundance of garbage also put the onus for finding good writing on the user. Such a tsunami of shitty content begs the question of their subscription model’s value, leaving readers to pay for the basic convenience of having millions of blogs in one enormous mess.

Medium empowers its readers to decide what’s good — a noble, democratic approach, but a bad idea, especially here. The result is clickbait headlines, bad blogs, and bloggers clapping and commenting on their peers’ posts based not on merit, but to grow their own popularity.

The best content should, in principle, generate the most views and claps. Yet some of the worst content, in practice, generates the most money for its authors. In a sense Medium is not much different than the rest of social media, where the most outrageous and triggering get the most attention.

Aware of this risk of viral mediocrity, while trying to diversify and expand its audience, Medium has for years “seeded” the platform with higher quality content written by professional bloggers and journalists across its own publications. You’d think that trend would continue to up its game.

Paradoxcially enough, the most recent change to their business model has been to reduce that professsional mix, and shift those payment dollars to “independent” writers. The rationale seems reasonable: More money should, one would think, result in better and more popular content.

Yet more popular content isn’t necessarily better content, the incentives going in the reverse direction, and the results. I can surely do a better job curating my dashboard, and as a writer better play the audience-building game, but this new strategy questions the platform’s overall viability.

To be clear, I’m not whining because I feel I deserve more attention. And to be honest, I love writing here because the interface is easy, and a few bloggers are cool. But as the AI bots start taking over, these content quality challenges will only mount. Until then, whom to read, whom to reward?