There are many reasons which led to this decision. As a writer, you want to have control over your work. You want to be able to share your voice without limitations. That's why I quit writing on Medium. Medium is a great platform, but it's not the right place for me. Here are seven reasons why I made the switch to DEV.
1. Their Editor Is Too Basic.
Their editor is too basic and lacks features like code highlighting and table support, which is essential for my workflow. I needed something more powerful and robust to handle my writing needs, so I turned to a different platform, like DEV.
Additionally, the Medium team was unresponsive to my suggestions for improvements. I think DEV is a better platform that offers a better experience for both writers and readers.
2. The Quality Of Article Has Decreased.
Many people realize that the quality of articles on Medium has decreased significantly over the past few years. The platform has become more saturated with low-quality content, making it harder for readers to find good content to read.
Few factors have contributed to this decline in quality. For instance, the number of people writing on Medium has increased dramatically. This is great for the platform as it means more people are using it, but it also means there is more bad content to sift through.
In addition, the ease of publishing on Medium has also increased. There are a few publications on Medium, like TowardsDataScience, where you need to be invited by an editor to post on their platform. However, there are loads of publications where anyone can create an account and start publishing articles. This has led to a lot of people posting content that is not well thought out or well written.
3. Prioritizing Money Over People.
I was not happy with the way Medium is dealing with the pandemic. The company furloughed many employees and made it clear that it prioritized profits over people. It is not their first time doing so. This did not sit well with me, so I stopped writing for the platform.
I understand that businesses have to prioritize their bottom line, but I was not too fond of how Medium handled the situation. It felt cold and heartless. I'm sure there are loads of platforms that care more about their employees in the first place, their writers and readers.
4. The Lack Of Interaction With Other Writers.
Many users are only interested in consuming content, not engaging with it. I put a lot of time and effort into my writing, but I was not getting a lot of comments. This was frustrating, and I decided to focus my energy on other projects.
I understand that not everyone is interested in engaging with content, but for me, it was an essential part of the writing process. I want to thank those who took the time to comment on my work. I genuinely appreciate it.
5. The Feeling That One Is Writing Into Abyss.
I used to write on Medium. I enjoyed it at first. But eventually, I started to feel like I was writing into a void. It felt like my words were falling on deaf ears. You pour your heart into a piece, hit publish, and then...crickets. It can be incredibly discouraging, especially when starting on a platform like Medium.
Back in the day, I remember when I first started writing on Medium. I published a few pieces, and they got virtually no traction. I felt like I was wasting my time and eventually quit writing altogether.
It's a shame. Medium is a great platform with a lot of potentials. But for me, it just didn't feel worth it anymore. If I put my time and energy into writing, I want to know that someone will read and appreciate it. Otherwise, what's the point?
6. It Feels Like Tiktok.
I came to Medium to write. To share my stories and insights with the world. But it feels like all anyone cares about here is building their brands. It's all about finding new ways to game the system, to get more eyeballs on your work.
I'm not going to play that game anymore. I'm not going to promote myself, so I can stand out in a sea of noise. I'm done with this.
I'm done with the self-promotion, the incessant navel-gazing, the posturing. I'm done with the platform encouraging people to write for the algorithm instead of their audience.
I'm done with a platform that puts more value on content designed to go viral than on thoughtful and well-crafted content. I'm done with a platform more interested in pageviews than quality.
7. The Algorithm Changes Are Frustrating.
The algorithm that Medium uses to curate content has changed. In the past, Medium would surface the best articles from across the platform regardless of who published them. Now, the algorithm seems to prioritize articles from users with a large following or from publications with a lot of engagement. This has led to a decline in the quality of articles being surfaced, as many good articles are buried beneath a sea of low-quality content.
It was frustrating to put so much effort into writing only to have my work constantly devalued by the algorithm. Ultimately, I decided it was no longer worth my time and energy to keep writing on Medium.
Conclusion
So, after careful consideration, I have decided to quit Medium. This was not an easy decision, but these reasons are, I believe, enough to leave the platform.
I'm sorry that I won't be writing on Medium anymore. I hope you understand my decision and will continue to follow my work here on DEV with the awesome people. I appreciate your support!
Cover Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay.
Top comments (15)
Medium is not a good platform. They are implementing something similar to YouTube and similar platforms where certain contents are seen before others; they also shadow ban people based on subjective things and God forbid you write about anything that the US government doesn't want you to write. You will get shadow banned. No one will see your articles, but they still let you write to waste your time.
is there a way to know if you are in a shadow ban?
I used to write and post articles and stories for so many years (since the 56k modems).
Back in the days, when you wrote an article or a post, your posts would have been viewed/replied to almost instantly regardless of what kind of controversial topics you post or ask (unlike now). Freedom of speech at that time was real and all the silly "Terms of service" didn't exist or they existed but they didn't dictate what you could write and not write and the admins used to be fairer.
This has changed at a certain period of time following certain incidents in the US (won't dive into politics). Not sure when but definitely it's been a steady process for the past 5 years or so. I'd argue they planned for this 10 years ago.
Imagine you're on a platform of 2+ billion subscribers, if not more. There is absolutely no excuse that you have ZERO views no matter how much the topic you wrote is not interesting to the public. What is the probability of your posts getting zero views over a huge number of subscribers?
Medium.com according to websitestatistics.com, is the 136th most visited site on the internet. I do not know the number of subscribers or views they got; but let's say 400 million for example. If we take localization into the formula, why your post doesn't show up at all or shows zero views?
I made an interesting experiment on Medium.com. I wrote one article about a common and non-controversial topic. It got a decent amount of views. Then, I wrote a controversial topic that would be deemed maybe not welcomed by US politicians. After that something interesting happened.
I got 0 Views for the entire year on the controversial topic and all the subsequent articles I wrote even the ones that didn't contain anything controversial. Then, i wrote an email directly to Medium.com asking them about their algorithms and what determines if something gets views or not. Their response was "No response". They went totally silent on my email and didn't provide any information which proves that there is manipulation.
On YouTube, you often find YouTubers complaining of why their content gain a lot of traffic for example on Facebook but no traffic on YouTube even though both platforms are considered giants in social media.
The problem with shadow banning is that they silently cancel you and turn off anything you want to say or write about without any warnings or explanations OR, they will use an irrelevant excuse if they decide to go with official way and say that you violated "The abstract vague term" and in 9/10 cases, they never back down on their decisions.
Twitter's case is just the tip of the iceberg, most of those tech giants are operating in a similar scheme and seems like they actually have secret agreements together that would be considered illegal if we speak about Anti-Trust laws.
To answer your question, if you suddenly have zero traffic on a large platform, then it means they shadow banned you. When they got sued in court over such practice, they will defend themselves by saying that it's their company policies and in order for the public not to see their true nature, they will say at worst "It was an accident".
The whole thing is being managed by humans, not robots. They do use bots and robots to help them detect content that they don't want world to hear but overall, the whole thing is a scam and today have led finally to the inevitable suppression of freedom of speech in 1st world countries (ironically, 2nd and 3rd world citizens were canceled with the argument that they don't respect freedom of speech).
I couldn't agree more with the sentiments expressed here. There are so many reasons not to write on Medium, and you have done a great job of highlighting most of them. I would like to extend this list by adding seven more reasons not to write on the platform in a separate article. Thanks for sharing your thoughts! That was insightful as heck.
I like Medium but probably before was better. Anywhay Medium is just one blog posting source, I doubt that there are a lot of writers making EXCLUSIVELY for Medium without reposting to other sources. Anyway the next question - what is the alternative? It is great to tell what do you choose for the future.
Good question. For me, it's Dev mainly because of its editor. But, I am planning to write about this topic in a future article.
Dev quite good but it means you only deal with "special theme" topics. Sure thing nobody wants here topics about food or history or your vacation time. If you are looking to consider also to get some advantages in SEO for example for your sources promotion dev is more strongly imho
I quit Medium about 5 years ago. I only wanted specific technical content but was barraged by alt social posts. I commented on some of them which got me banned. That in retrospect was the best favor they provided me. Medium is totally worthless to me.
Totally agree. Thanks for sharing your story!
There are many reasons not to publish on medium, and be careful when cross-posting existing content on medium. Their canonical URL options are hidden in advanced settings and some people report that doesn't work as (un)intended and will still put the medium version as top source in search engine results.
The IndieWeb (independent web) movement promotes the idea to own our content, which means to first publish on our own blogs / websites instead of or before cross-posting in social media. Personally, I did not manage to follow the IndieWeb philosophy consistently yet, but I do have a blog, and I prefer communities like DEV.to that try to build an inclusive community without gatekeeping like StackOverflow or Wikipedia, monetization and deceptive algorithms like medium, or simply made unusable by too much advertising like 90% of anything currently online.
Thanks for sharing your experience and pointing out different aspects about medium, which is still trying to capitalize their popularity and reputation despite a decline and decreased usability especially when it comes to technological content.
Hey @ingosteinke, thanks for sharing your thoughts with everyone. It's really helpful to have someone else's perspective on things, and I'm sure your insights will be valuable to many people. Keep up the good work!
In fact, there are nearly a quadrillion reasons not to write on Medium, and I am going to extend this list by adding seven more reasons not to write on the platform in a separate article.
I hadn't heard of this website before, but I'm glad you shared it. It seems exactly like what I've been looking for all these years. However, I find that articles written in a similar style to Wikipedia can be quite boring. They feel like they were written by people who lack emotion or personality. Nonetheless, thank you for mentioning this platform.
Totally agree.
Anytime.
Yup!
I never found medium appealing to write for and I only read articles there when suggested after a google search.
Dev gives me a way better feeling of how to present my content, how to connect and engage with others 💜
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about Medium. I’ve only recently start writing on the platform but haven’t really fallen in love with it. I think you make a great point about the quality of writing being mediocre (at best) and it’s difficult to find good articles and interact with others. I haven’t officially left Medium but I am looking around to see what else out there.
Anytime! I hope that you will settle on abandoning Medium.
Unfortunately, #2 and partially #7 applies to dev.to as well.
#2: My feed is flooded with entry-level content despite having my experience set to 5 in settings and several tags having -1000 weight. And I can't really use the top X sections because of #7.
#7: it's mostly JavaScript and front-end that gets prioritized. I understand why, but I don't like it.
At this point, I guess it's just a curse for any platform that is popular and don't have a specific set of rules for the content. It's inclusive for new people, but I remember how it was when dev.to was not that popular and the quality of my feed and articles was much higher.