On Medium: A Enjoyable Place for Writing but a Controversial Place for Reading

After nearly two years of hiatus from Medium, I decided to make a comeback in the fall of 2024. But why? I stumbled upon a sensitive topic that I felt comfortable writing about without revealing my personal details: embarking on a significant career transition and transitioning to freelancing.

Since my return to Medium, I have published quite a few stories, created and designed a Medium publication to gather them under one publishing umbrella, and made the associated newsletter to reach out to people by email. I have rediscovered a writing platform that is exciting for creators but can sometimes be unsettling for readers. If you are wondering about Medium for writing and sharing stories, or if you are contemplating the idea of joining the platform as a paying member, please read the following.

A brief history of Medium

Medium is an online publishing platform launched in August 2012 by Evan Williams, a co-founder of Blogger and Twitter. It was created as a space for people to share ideas and stories in a long-form format, offering an alternative to the character limitations of Twitter or the casual format of blogging platforms like Tumblr. The goal was to create a place where quality writing could flourish, and authors of all levels could connect with readers.

Initially, Medium was an invite-only platform, emphasizing a clean, distraction-free interface and content organized by themes rather than authorship. Over time, it opened to the public and evolved into a hybrid platform, blending social media elements with traditional blogging. Medium’s algorithms and editorial curation helped highlight quality content, encouraging professional writers, journalists, and everyday users to contribute.

In 2017, Medium pivoted to a subscription-based model to prioritize reader-supported journalism and quality writing, moving away from reliance on advertising revenue. The platform introduced a membership option, providing paying users access to premium content and compensating writers based on reader engagement with their stories.

Medium has faced several controversies over its business practices and policies. The platform’s abrupt shift to a subscription-based model 2017 frustrated writers and publishers who relied on ad revenue, while frequent strategic pivots created uncertainty about its long-term vision. Its content moderation practices have been criticized as inconsistent or overly broad, with accusations of censorship. Medium’s algorithm has also been accused of favouring mainstream or clickbait-style content, limiting visibility for niche voices. Additionally, its writer payout system has been deemed opaque and disproportionately beneficial to popular creators. These issues and an exodus of prominent publications have raised questions about Medium’s reliability and commitment to fostering a diverse, writer-friendly platform.

"Liking a story more than once, also called “clapping” is unique to Medium."

The consuming experience

Let’s talk about Medium’s content-consuming experience. While reading an article, a typical reader on Medium can trigger these interactions with the author: clapping the story, text highlighting, and responding to the author’s story. Let’s see how each action forms the basis of the interactions between readers and writers.

Readers can clap at a story to show appreciation, similar to a thumbs up on YouTube, but a single reader can clap many times. The clap count can be pretty high for some stories, with a disproportionally low comment count. For example, this story of mine got 50 claps from a single reader. It's unique to Medium. Clapping is not reserved for the main story but for responses that someone might write to a story, which is also unique to Medium, to my knowledge.

Readers can highlight text portions in a story and post a comment. That’s one of the best features for readers who wish to engage in conversation with the author, but it is also an excellent feedback feature for the writer. Medium will mark the most highlighted text to the author. In other words, It’s a great conversation starter between readers and authors. As a writer on Medium, I find this helpful. Here are some examples of text highlights.

In the following example, someone is writing a response to go with his highlighted text. People can clap to the comment, too, or reply. These interactions are shown on the right portion of the content.

The top highlight label is shown if many readers highlight the same text portion. It gives an idea of where people are paying attention in a story. But what is less clear is how many readers must select the exact portion to get the mark “Top highlight”?

The other way to interact with a writer on Medium is through Medium’s Mastodon instance. The following shows my profile page on that instance. People can react, boost and repost my stories. Strangely enough, as a writer, stories aren’t automatically cross-posted on Medium’s Mastodon instance; it is a manual process for now. Weird.

Each story can be individually shared on X, Facebook or LinkedIn, but not on Mastodon or Bluesky. Many publishing platforms settle for the most popular social networks. Come on, Medium, it’s 2024! How could they skip Mastodon? Medium does offer their instance! How strange this is.

The audio experience feature is pretty handy and works great on the Mac. I didn’t test it on mobile devices, though.

The writing experience

Medium’s writing experience is uniquely designed to prioritize simplicity, elegance, and ease of use. Its minimalist, distraction-free editor lets writers focus on their content while producing beautifully formatted posts with professional typography and layout by default. Rich media integration makes it easy to embed visuals and enhance storytelling, while collaborative editing tools foster a sense of community. Writers also benefit from detailed audience insights, helping them refine their work. By eliminating technical hurdles and providing a polished publishing environment, Medium creates a seamless and rewarding experience for writers of all levels. Let’s highlight a few points of interest.

Writers can add up to five tags (called topics on Medium) for their stories. These tags help the writer manage their content and serve as a discovery mechanism for readers. When selecting tags, a count of stories using them is provided, which helps select the most popular tags for a specific story.

We can create newsletters on Medium. This comes after making a publication where we, as authors, can submit stories. To my knowledge, a story cannot be published in more than one publication, which limits the discoverability of an author who wants to build a publication but also wants to share a story with a more popular publication covering the same audience.

As an author with many published stories, I can gather them under a publication that forms a website (see mine as an example). The overall design is pleasing and easy to create with a surprisingly powerful newsletter editor.

After setting up a publication, you can enable a newsletter tied to it, which, again, I think can be handy for writers like me who want to provide different ways for readers to consume their stories.

Some weird things about Medium

I do see, from time to time, Medium users clapping or highlighting text without writing a response. Those people look more like attention seekers or spammers. It’s a common trick on any content-sharing platform. These readers, who are not readers, will highlight some random phrase in a story and clap a dozen times to trigger the author’s curiosity to visit the spammer’s profile page. I find this irritating. One recent example is when a woman highlighted a portion of one of my stories, published a comment because she believes in cryptos and blockchain and tried to convert me to this nonsense.

Another new weird and recent trend is for readers to write fake and meaningless responses to an article using generative AI. This spammy behaviour pollutes the platform. Thankfully, Medium provides a moderation tool for closing a discussion, hiding individual responses, etc.

Another strange and irritating long-lasting trend on Medium is the proliferation of clickbait story titles. Stories about using THE best note-taking app are popular. This guy seems good at it. Or what about those stories about how to become rich in a month as a writer? Are they a waste of people’s time and attention? I wonder if Medium is attracting more people interested in making some money quickly than writing and willing to share authentic content with their readers.

Some shady stuff too

“The Useful Tech” is a web publication dedicated to Apple enthusiasts, offering expert tips, tricks, and the latest apps and tools to enhance users’ tech experiences and workflows. The author is a top writer on Medium, focusing on Apple, technology, and productivity, with over 63,000 followers and over 2 million views. The content includes tech reviews, tutorials, and Apple-related insights, reflecting its expertise and the trust placed in it by its audience.

Sounds impressive, right? Let’s dig a bit deeper. “The Useful Tech” is a member of a marketing platform called “Passionfroot”. As we can read on the website: “The fastest and easiest way to do influencer marketing at scale. Find the right creators on all platforms, book, collaborate, and pay - all in one place.”

Back to “The Useful Tech” website, according to the description, the author will mention your product in an article after you pay a certain amount of money. Let’s say you develop a Bluesky client and wish the author to write about it. You pay 200$ (the minimum), and the author will write an article around it, often in a round-up type because these are very popular on Medium.

Making money on Medium

My first experience with the Medium Partner Program proved positive, and I could recoup the subscription cost with the revenues generated by readers. Not anymore. Something changed in Medium algorithms because now I barely get a few cents for each story. It would take years before hitting the 50 US$. Or maybe I’m not a good writer attracting enough readers.

Final thoughts

A year from now, I might not write for Medium anymore. My return there in 2024 was triggered by the desire to share my thoughts and experience in trying to go freelance. Think of this as a dedicated project, which I’m putting on pause for a few reasons explained in this article. Beyond that project, I don't see other use cases for Medium. Time will tell.