Medium - Letting it go

My relationship with Medium has been up and down1. Early on, I wrote a few things and posted them there, long before they began monetizing, and frankly, it wasn’t really an audience growing system. Yes, I know that some of the early contributors hit it big, and when monetization happened, they got rewarded.

But I never found a constituency there, so I went back to blogging (and now writing this and my other ‘stack). I never really cared that much about going viral, this is just an outlet to pour my thoughts into.

That is a roundabout way to broach the subject of my paying for a membership. A SciFi author who writes many pieces on the intersection of politics, modernity, tech issues, and life, Cory Doctorow, was publishing great themes on Medium, and I wanted to get around the paywall.

Last Thanksgiving, there was a $20 for a full year subscription to Medium, so I pushed the “buy” button.

Over the next year I have come to discover:

• The notifications I used to get for Cory’s articles (as a free subscriber) pretty much disappeared. Instead I got random notifications for shit I wasn’t interested in
• There is a population of prolific writers, people who publish 3 or more articles a day that are thin gruel, and just gum up the feed.
• The algorithms seem to do a real shitty job of extracting my preferences from what I click on.
• So damn many of the creators on the site are just so click-bait-ey that the cringe is off the chart. Just a very low signal to noise ratio
• Many creators just change their views as public opinion. I was following someone who was a total Musk/Tesla stan, and then when Musk started going batshit insane, he totally switched to bashing Tesla

In short, as the year went on, I drifted away from checking it, and as the year was ending, and I got the notification that it was going to renew, it was a no brainer to take the steps to cancel.

And nothing of value was lost.