Medium Kind of Sucks. Let’s Change That in 2022.
Let’s be honest for a moment.
Medium isn’t that great right now.
Sure, it’s one of the best sites out there for expressive, talented writers without a book deal to write about things they are passionate about and build an engaging audience, but Medium suffers from the same fate as all other social platforms: us.
Yes, us. The creators.
We’re responsible for what’s on Medium…and a lot of what is on Medium right now is a watered down version of what we’re able to write.
We mean well, I’ll give us that. We are are attempting to engage with others and express ourselves on a real level.
The problem is, we easily become more concerned with claps and subscribers and appealing to the Almighty Algorithm than creating the content we set out to originally create.
I know that 10,000 of us didn’t dream of writing 100,000 articles on “How To Make $7.11 on Medium In One Month.”
We don’t really want to use clickbaity titles just so that people will read our work.
We don’t really want to condense our points down to 5 for the sake of readability or omit 1000 words in order to hit that 5–7 read time sweet spot.
We don’t really want to force ourselves to publish 3x a week just for the sake of hitting a goal— especially if pursuing that goal drains us mentally and the quality of our work suffers.
But I see a lot of these things happening here on Medium…and I’m just as guilty as anyone else.
These problems aren’t unique to Medium.
If you enjoy YouTube and consume quite a bit of content there, you know that YouTube suffers from the same problem. A lot of my favorite YT creators no longer create the content that they used to.
They bowed down (either willingly or forcibly) to the Almighty Algorithm and pledged to post multiple videos per week because that was found to be most “effective”. As a result, they very visibly (and self-admittedly) suffered from creative burnout. I would have preferred that they create and post whenever they felt inspired or called to, even if it were just once a month. Had that been the case, I would have waited on those posts with bated breath. Instead, they posted so often that I felt overwhelmed by the backlog that had been created and eventually stopped watching their videos all together.
So how do we fix this? How do we make Medium a better place in 2022?
We go back to our roots.
We ask ourselves what our goal was when we started writing here.
Our goal probably wasn’t to build a massive following by using cheap tricks up our sleeve. What’s the point of amassing a following if who they are following ins’t us, but the shell of us?
Our goals were probably ernest when we began. We wanted to create meaningful content that promoted conversation, curiosity, and community.
I genuinely believe that Medium can be the GO TO place for raw, engaging, and meaningful content. A place for real writers writing for the right reasons. The claps and comments are sure follow if we keep to our roots and continuously remind ourselves why we’re here.
This year, let’s strive to change Medium from the inside out. Let’s be the change we wish to see (CORNY, I KNOW)
Happy new year, ya’ll. Here’s to many more hours staring at the white page —
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