My Thoughts On Medium After 8 Years
An honest, but subjective “review” of the platform I’ve grown to love over time…
It’s just after 4AM in Dublin, on the last day of the year of our Lord, 2022, and instead of doing a review of my year, I decided to review the platform I have spent eight long years blogging on. Whether this decision stems from my vacation-induced erratic circadian rhythm, having only slept three hours last night, is beside the point. I figured, there’s nothing new I could sum up about my year. Those of ye who read me throughout 2022, know everything there is to know. My heavy investment in tech journalism, continued focus on accessibility, and renewed focus on LEGO are what defined my 8th year of blogging on Medium. It’s only fair I lean back, look back and type some long overdue thoughts about the very platform you’re reading this on.
We were a rebel bunch
Through the magic of email history, I was able to track down my exact joining date: 23rd of July 2014, 13:05 Dublin time. Through the power of timeanddate.com, that amounts to exactly 8 years, 5 months and 9 days at the time of writing. It was a very different world back then. Medium was less than two years old, and it looked exactly like this according to web.archive.org, as my memory simply can’t cope with the vastness of the web or even Medium for that matter.
Very different times. But as different the times may have been, if you read through Medium’s old “about page”, you’ll find a lot, if not all, still holds true to this day. That’s something not many platforms can boast about after 10 years of existence. Browse the web and often times all you’ll find is a bastardised version of themselves. Think Facebook, Reddit, or even Twitter and YouTube. All of them have lost something along the way, and while all have become more popular, they’ve also become a lot more disappointing.
I think the act of writing is just noble enough that it might attract sufficiently less nonsense for the platform to stay true to its original mission.
Back in 2014 and 2015 it definitely attracted a very niche category of writers. Some, like myself, were old Blogger and WordPress veterans, others were part of a new wave of curious writers pleasantly surprised by the ease of publishing Medium offered. That’s true to this day. Anyone complaining about Medium’s UX, has not lived through the pain of the alternatives. I say this as a blogger and software engineer with a strong UX and entrepreneurial bone; when it comes to publishing, Medium is killing it.
If there is an Apple of online publishing, that’s Medium.
It felt premium in 2014, it felt premium in 2016 when I posted my very first article, and it feels just as premium in 2022. The topics were just as diverse back then as they are today, though, I will admit, there was a lot less marketing-style writing, vitriol was barely a thing, and it was still probably most favoured by the tech community. Half the articles on tech and coding were already finding a home on Medium. We had Hackernoon, one of the best tech publications Medium ever had, but since closed its doors and created its own corner of the web, one I was excited about, but ultimately left with disappointment. Wasn’t as good as Medium, and to this day, it still isn’t. Sorry, David. 🙇♂️
There was no concept of being paid for your writing. We wrote because we liked writing, because it was a reliable platform to host our stories on and came with a built-in audience.
I cannot understate the power of built-in audience. It’s something you have to experience, to believe.
My very first article that I published 2 years later, still has zero likes, and read-time over its lifetime of nearly 7 years, has been a whopping 9 minutes! I didn’t care. Still don’t. I wrote it for myself, really, so that later I could go back and follow my own documentation. I knew if I wrote it in some Word file, it’d be lost by next year, publishing it felt like the smarter move. It was. I went back to that page a good few times afterwards.
Then everything changed…
It took another 6 months to “get noticed”. On the 18th of January 2017, I posted an article called “Coding Has Become Pop Culture”. Medium notified me later that night that my article ended up on their home-page due to its popularity. That was the first time I understood the power of virality. Over 10K views in January alone.
Then on the 21st of January, David Smooke — owner and editor of Hackernoon — reached out wanting to feature my article in their publication. My manager, Ken, at work sent the article out to all of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s engineering department. I didn’t ask him, he just liked it so much, he thought it was worth sharing. Our VP of engineering, Tony, called it out in his presentation the week after, in the boardroom. Within days, my article had over 500 recommends — as that’s what we had before claps — and that was a big deal for someone like me. By the 26th, my email was blowing up with notifications. Back then, I still had notifications on for everything. If I did that today, I’d exhaust my Gmail quota in a single month! January 2017 was a good month.
With the taste of popularity on the platform, you’d assume I’d jump at the opportunity of putting my articles behind the membership paywall, a new feature introduced that pissed many writers off enough to jump ship. I cautiously stayed, and even became a Medium Founding Member back in March 2017 for the first time. That’s what we were called back then. But I paid to read, not to write, and I was very clear about that. I still agree with every thought expressed in that years-old article.
You win some, you lose some. Ultimately, the readers and writers who stayed after 2017, were the ones who made Medium big. Glad to be among them.
Metamorphosis
As much as I loved Medium in the early days, seeing its transformation is in itself transformative. It hasn’t always done everything right, and some decisions definitely tested many writers’ patience, but somehow in a span of 8 years, I can only say it has got better. Considerably better.
The occasional glitches, of course, remain, as with all software running on the web. Some of the UX decisions were and still sometimes are painful changes, some of which do leave wounds and scars to nurse for months. What I get recommended is still questionable to some extent, but I also know that thanks to unscrupulous writers who tag articles with irrelevant tags. Like, come on, Tim Denning, second top writer in tech? In what world?!? 🤣 There’s also far too much man-hating and political vitriol on the platform, but I realise, as an open publishing platform, this is what you get, the good, and the bad. The good news is, blocking and muting works like a charm!
It took me another 5 years to go behind the paywall. By then, all the bonuses were gone, the Tim Dennings and Zulie Ranes of the world have cashed in big, but we also got humbler voices like Barack Obama who is still one of the less than 100 writers I follow on this platform. I would also love to see Casey Neistat come back. Add that to my — fill in the year — wish-list.
Being behind the paywall certainly opened up another level of Medium that was lesser known to me. The crazy side-hustle aspect of it, only became apparent once I started writing more regularly. It wasn’t a crazy side-hustle for me, still isn’t, but it became painfully obvious just how many people are trying to make it big and do it fast on a platform that was never really meant for that. The sad reality hit me, that some of 2017’s criticism was actually fair. Paying writers did end up attracting a higher than desirable number of shady characters who game the system as much as they can for an extra buck.
But maybe that’s the cost of having a popular platform. Let it attract everyone, and allow natural selection to do its job.
Tomorrow’s tune…
What’s going to happen in the new year, and all subsequent new years, is hard to tell. Compared to Ev Williams, Tony Stubblebine certainly wants things to happen differently enough that it matters. I, for one, can’t say I felt Ev’s leadership was lacking, but I’m also not against change, as long as it’s not just for the sake of change.
I said it before and will say it again, the overall trajectory of Medium has been positive. It got us reading, it got us writing, and some of us a bit of extra cash in the bank. I can’t think of another platform that combines all three of these undeniable positives, and does so as effortlessly as Medium.
What’s next for Medium, is tomorrow’s tune, but in a big way, I think it’s up to us, writers, what that future looks like.
Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe and/or become a member for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.
