Medium Thinks Reading Time is more Salient than Claps

Medium is a paywall community for writers that used to leverage clapping from 1 to 50 times per article as a signal for its payments system under its Medium partner program. When Medium went behind a paywall it promised "words that matter", but the clap system was hacked by users on Facebook Groups that deliberately skewed how the payment system worked more or less a pyramid system for the top influencers there.

Now in a blog post by a product manager, Medium promises a more fair experience for how payments will work for original content.

Sadly user-generated-content on Medium has seen better days since Medium created its own in-house publications that dominate the front page and editor's picks completely. It's put Silicon Valley in charge of the kinds of stories that mostly go viral on the platform that boasts 120 million unique views a month.

Medium no doubt is struggling to compete with other publications behind paywalls that offer real-world value in short articles while promising more educational articles that focus on culture, diversity and the future of technology among other things. The Claps incentive created a lot of cheating on the architecture whereby "pods" grew up with the sole purpose of "self-promotion", hacking Medium's own data on what articles are real quality.

In addition to investing in in-house publications, Medium bought off many of the existing trending publications promising $10 per 1,000 views. This has created an inauthentic culture within Medium's core platform users to say the least.

Since 2017, Medium claims to have paid more than $6 million to over 30,000 writers, increasing payouts year over year. The chatter on Facebook groups mostly amounts to coffee money for the majority of writers there, so it's not quite clear what's going on, in that Medium is not transparent with its data as a private company.

Medium's pivot into subjective personal essays at the end of 2019, does not appear to have been a smart gamble.

But Medium's own in-house content has no special appeal since it's not real authentic user-generated-content from real people, but paid journalists and a few creators whose submissions are accepted and go through rigorous and soul-crushing editing. Thus Medium does not appear to have an identity worthy of consumption, at least for the $5 a month subscription it is asking for. Do I want to pay for clickbait created in New York or San Francisco yet again? I'm already bombarded with that in the NYT, Business Insider, WSJ, and so forth.

Medium has gone through so many pivots the product is barely recognizable from what it once was, an inspirational and entrepreneurial community for technies on the West Coast. It rooted out crypto content, its business and technology content is no longer trending, and its op-eds are carefully manufactured opinions worthy of the far left which it seems to believe is its core audience.

If you are a product all about inclusion, wouldn't it behoove you to have perspectives from all demographics? But it's made in San Francisco pedigree means it's skewed. Like we see with Google's dominance of referral traffic, it's skewed.

The quality of the content also appears to be a failed creator platform, with an in-house magazine rack that won't likely save the product. Here we find content quality to be in decline, just as fair and objective journalism is in decline by the platforms.

Medium now thinks reading time is a better measure of value than claps. You don't say? The startup is a unique place that pays writers for their originality, and has raised $132 million in funding to date and has side-stepped advertising with a paywall architecture of its own making which now promises subjective enlightenment and objective articles to make us smarter. Where did the internet go wrong?

If this is the best Silicon Valley can give us for writing creators to perform?

While famous programming publications and blockchain publications have left Medium, Medium has asserted its own power and centralized approach to the control of its content with its own publications, where independent writers are pushed to a sort of peasant class. Now they don't even want the peasants to clap, just focus on their "reading time". So goes the gig-economy, where exploitation creates cheating and algorithmic inauthenticity.

In an age of censorship and very unoriginal articles, Medium does not deliver quality. I don't care so much about manufactured articles from New York City or San Francisco. How about you?

In an era of information overload, to push down indie creators is inexcusable and a waste of investor money.

Medium has changed how indie writers and UGC works on the internet with the uncanny decision to raise up a few influencers, while the majority remain as peasants stripping away their "authentic selves" for a few dollars and cents. It's disheartening to have watched this from the inside.

Medium updating its earnings model to improve how writers earn for their stories through the Partner Program is not a big deal, or a ploy to gain the trust of unsuspecting writers. They have never been transparent with writers and even new kinds of stats won't help us create articles that make others smarter.

This is because Medium has a product has become centralized, and young people aren't interested in reading just another "story", your company brand actually has to have a brand narrative that makes sense.

It would appear Medium has lost touch with its original values that made it great. It happens to startups all the time.

By purging crypto from its platform, Medium has reduced the variety of topics on its platform. By promoting its own publications ahead of the content of indie creators, Medium has sold out its soul.

I no longer trust the platform, as I did a few years ago to bring me real stories of people innovating, or people talking about the latest trends in business and technology.

Medium's new publications promote the kind of headline bait that made publications like Business Insider powerful, in an era of Facebook News that has once again seduced over 200 publications to its News Tab. Medium tried to side-step Ads, but has sold out in its own method and madness.

Medium will calculate earnings with reading time and update those earnings on a daily basis. Previously, Wednesday was payday each week and payments were made monthly via Stripe.

Like Pulse on LinkedIn, Medium is constantly pivoting and thus lacks an identity that is attractive to readers. To writers who are mostly interested in hacking the platform for profit, it's not a great experience either, unless you are already an established influencer and can make incredible profits.

On Medium, a very small minority make the bulk of the payouts to actual writers. The Medium influencers. Yet their inspirational or vulnerable copy are the kind of blogs that could be written by any high-school student. So what I observe is a kind of failure of content and the evolution of the Western internet.

Yet another pyramid scheme of a Silicon Valley internet that thinks "views matter". Not exactly what it promises to be, is it? Sort of like false advertising. It shows the product doesn't know how to create a brand that matters or an experience for creators that is honest or worth ROI for returns of fair work for value.

It becomes a gig-economy content farm, where creators huddle together like penguins in disarray. Sadly that's not very inspiring. Medium makes money via subscriptions where writers are now baited to take part in their scheme. Yet their topic niches don't have legit audiences behind the paywall.

It took 10-seconds to clap 50 times for an article, now I love Medium's UX and its highlight mechanism for strong interactions between readers and writers. Medium has some wins on the product side, but by abandoning what it used to be, what it is becoming is not superior.

Medium has a lot of good about it since there is a complete absence of competition. Yet by promoting New York and San Francisco ideologies in-house, it has alienated a lot of its readers who appreciated the user-generated-content element whereby a talented writer could truly have a voice.

Like so many things in Silicon Valley, the business model takes precedence over ethics and creating a UX that's truly writer and reader-centric. When Medium decided to take control of its ecosystem by the throat, I lost a bit of hope for this product.

Medium tried to out-do Ads and became an advertisement in the process for a clickbait internet nobody actually wants.

Words don't matter if companies control and own our words and the narratives that are trending. That's not creativity, that's censorship.