Having used Medium for a short while, here are my views on what I don’t like about the site. Since it’s a good practice to list the pros of a thing before you list the cons of it, I’ve already written a post explaining what I like about Medium. Sort of.
Now here’s the things I don’t like.
- Most posts are not really that great despite the shiny packaging. That’s not really Medium’s fault, but they do inflate the promoting by curating whatever shitty articles that their partner blogs/sites write.
- The free post limit is insanely low. I get that Medium wants to solve the monetisation problem but this just feels a bit too stifling. If they want to keep it this way, they should find a way to make sure that their curated articles are damn good and worth the loss of a free read. That way more people would feel compelled to subscribe
- Feels too social network-y in the sense that people who have a lot of followers get 1000+ claps on even the stupidest of articles they write.
- The rot that set in at LinkedIn is also beginning to set in on Medium as well. It remains to be seen how Medium deals with this issue, if at all.
- There’s too much of an emphasis on membership. It’s their company and they can do what they want. But if it was up to me I’d just relax it a little bit.
- Little to no promotion for non-partners/independent writers. It could just be me, but I’ve not seen a single non-partner blog on Medium’s front page yet. For me and several others, blogging is a way of expression. Not a means to an end or a way to gain online clout. Maybe someone can’t/won’t be a partner, but does that mean you shouldn’t promote stuff worth reading from non-partners? I can understand not wanting to lose out on marketing revenue, but Medium supposedly has its own team of human curators who pick and choose content. How hard can it be to pick a post that’s worth reading and isn’t promoting a competing product/platform?
Despite all of this, I think Medium is still better than most blogging platforms. I feel like Medium’s membership focus is a trade off in a spectrum with paywalls on one end and Wordpress.com’s spammy ad-filled experience on the other.
