This is from a three-year old medium subscriber. I took medium subscription in 2019 when a dear and very successful friend of mine told me that he spends his time reading medium articles. And damn! I got inspired. I was spending time on Facebook, youtube and insta and here there is a guy with a little tinge of grayness in his hair and a neatly ironed shirt telling me on how they use their time to excel in their role. I was inspired and took my annual subscription right away!
Three years later, I’m spending more time on medium than I do on any other social networking site, but I’m a bit disappointed with the content that’s being presented to me on medium. Its not to say that the articles are bad and the authors aren’t terrific, I feel there is so much of potential in the site and instead its turning into a click-bait, get rick quick ponzi site. Ala, the experience I get whenever I visit news.yahoo.com.
Human nature is fickle and we always have bad actors or manipulators. These are the folks who will come and try to charm you with their snake oil pitch on growing subscribers, increasing fans and making five dollar figures. Fair enough, they have a living to make and if they invest in producing high quality content, they still have bills to pay. But, this is where I expect medium to create a conducive platform to reward authentic writing and to weed out sensationalism, click bait articles.
So far, I must say, medium has failed spectacularly. For starters, your title has too much weight, which means that you as an author needs to spend a lot of title writing the title. Then, the only signals you get are fans, reads and views. Given that there is a 50:1 ratio between fans and views and claps not being predominant, medium is too reliant on views. I mean, there are other signals like long reads and average read time, but having been in analytics, I can safely say that those are way too dependant on browse load time, network connection et.al and probably are more noise than value.
Fans are the most important signal and yet they are not clearly shown. Why would medium not make its user journeys highlight and incentivize fans? Every time, you have a good article and a user spends time writing comments or reading through its entirety, nudge the user to be a fan of the article. If the user still doesn’t want to be a fan, collect some signals please on what prevents them from being a fan. In my case, I don’t fan on articles, that are of poor quality and are click-baits. Get the signals when you can!
Also, the homepage needs a serious reorganization. Its just a bunch of articles that “I might like” or perhaps that are trending. Look at how exhaustive Youtube website is. It creates such a condensed view of all things I could watch and with such succinct explanations so that as a viewer, I can decide on when to click on what and if the experience is bad, I get to thumbs down the content. Can medium think along those lines to redesign the homepage to show more breadth of content than a long list of articles?
As an author, medium is really making it hard for my followers to see all of my content. How much I wish we had an author’s page where you get see the content of the author in a way for user to quickly glean their popular content, their recent content etc and then incentivize users to not just read highly clapped articles but articles catered to their interests.
Finally, I think medium has a tremendous value-prop for all readers, if not just wannabe authors. You have a unique proposition to let create high quality, thoughtful and well researched content that anyone should be glad to think of paying for 50$ as a steal and a bargain. Please use it wisely!
