Member-only story
Resume Membership on Medium?
Disclosure: I never had a paid membership; I was gifted one by Medium after a successful piece I published in 2018. “Successful” here means it earned me north of $300 and attracted thousands of readers and claps. I should also note that my successful story, after it drew a respectable amount of external traffic, was selected for “editorial polishing” and promotion at Medium.
While the subscription was active I did marginally more reading on Medium than I do now, but not much. I found the click-baity titles that Medium presented to me every day on my landing page more off-putting than inviting. Today I find the offerings on my landing page even less engaging. I usually stay on the site just long enough to check notifications and responses and review my stories’ stats in some detail once a week.
From my perspective as a reader, the platform’s algorithms for assembling what they infer will be of interest to me are a fail. It’s not that there isn’t some good writing on Medium; it’s just not easy to find and I don’t have the time to go digging for it, especially when good writing is easy to find elsewhere — on The Conversation, for example, or on Substack.
Why though?
Medium targets a narrow demographic that omits a big chunk of the reading public (including me)
