You complain but you stay.
You write about writing on Medium and you wonder why the place is the way it is. Isn't that kind of like a self fullfilling professy. You're trying to compete with thousands of other 'Here's how I got X followers in X days' folks or the people writing about how much money they made from 1 post. 'C'mon man' - Joe Biden.
Turn your perspective around.
I write on Medium as a test bed and as a free way to gain followers and subscribers. It's perfect for me because I have and had no intention of staying here from the very beginning of my latest project. I dont write about writing and I dont write about writing to make money on Medium. Eww~ gross. Sorry.
I'm greatful for Medium because I have been able to test out my content, prove that it works, and do it all for FREE. I am now on my way to migrating over to my own thing with ghost.org (in the process as we speak).
Sure I can sit here and complain, I bring X amount of traffic to Medium, literally tens of thousands to some posts through my own distribution techniques but get screwed because of their paywalls when people decide to click away or the fact they limit monetization with a ban on ads and sponsors yet they themselves do it with Knowable, I can complain but it will achieve nothing, you think talking to some dev will help? hah!
Medium is not yours, you signed up to Medium like we all did because you didn't have to build your own website or blog, you didn't have to host it and do all that and they offered discoverability, thats why you chose it, thats why most people choose it. It's point and click and voila.
Medium is a user-generated-content website that makes all of its money from people like us promoting their domain and everything within it and there are plenty of people out there, they dont care.
My advice, do your own thing. Create your own algorithm, your own blog.
As content creators who blog as opposed to making videos or audio we are lucky, we can go and write anywhere. YouTubers cant really go elsewhere, podcastsers the same. Writers? Very different.
Personally speaking, like I said at the start, I am moving to Ghost.org I get everything I get with Medium only its all mine, mwa ha ha! Sure I get no discoverability, but that is the least of my worries because I spend half my time marekting and doing my own distribution which is literally what sets successful content creators apart from the rest, Medium writers dont do that, not really anyway, they just tweak their content and strategy to get discovered on Medium, but they forget about the giant network they are in called the Internet.
Sure switching to something like Ghost means I have to pay and that is a risk, yeah OK, but I can monetize however I want, I can grow subscrubers however I want, I can do whatever I want, so its a win overall and tooting my own horn a great strategy. Test on Medium > monetize off Medium.
Stop complaining, look at your fight picture above your desk, grab your nuts and do something about it. Cheers, all the best.
