Medium Sucks

The more I use Medium (to blog) the more I am confused by it - I initially (and tentatively) started blogging on there only a week or two ago following a lot of community hubbub about it being the next great place to blog, and hey, it's founded by some guys from Twitter so it has to be good, right?

• It's a nice interface - Everyone likes a lovely clean interface and that's what they've created, props to them for that! But technology alone does not make a product
• Content discovery blows - It seems like the only content I can discover is heavily recommended articles that seem to have been sitting around for a week or so. I haven't yet discovered a "new" feed - and they seem to have channels/collections but from the front-page they're hard to navigate to.
• Cliques exist - There are little circles of authors that seem to recommend each others content, this is bound to happen and is happenning. This is just alienating new bloggers and making them feel like the last unpopular kid on the bench.
• Stats are too coarse - There are one or two lovely graphs but it just doesn't give me the depth of knowledge I'd like to know about my audience - even Google Analytics only just makes the bar.
• Things that matter - I've done my fair share of reading on Medium and I have to say, it's full of garbage - not things that matter. There's a lot of noise and the only way to tune it out is to scroll all the way to the bottom of the homepage and start looking in collections, lame.
• What happens when they monetize - I've been thinking about how I would monetize Medium - and it seems pretty obvious:

• 1. Build a free/nice platform.
• 2. Pay some influential bloggers to blog on it.
• 3. Build up a lot of readers/popularity (because advertisers will pay for eye balls)
• 4. Get other popular bloggers to blog for free
• 5. Wait for a head of steam to be built up
• 6. PROFIT!

With regards to the sixth step, there seem to be two routes I keep coming back to.

• Method One: They follow an Outbrain type model and companies pay for their syndicated content.
• Method Two: They slap ads on.

In either of those two situations do you think the blogger is going to see much of that revenue? And even if they do, remember that it is a curated, centrally edited blogging site - Medium can pull the strings and popularity of whatever articles they want in whichever direction they choose. I can't help but feel this is a really bad idea for bloggers and article writers alike. There is really no cost in building your own blog and serving your own readers/community and it is a lot better for the blogger (and the bloggers reputation) to build that community themselves rather than be lost in the noise of a curated blogging platform, decentralization is a good thing.

For the reader, Medium is as equally bad as it is for the blogger. Whilst there is a lot of praise for the nice and clean UI there is no substitute for good content, and on Medium, you're only getting a sliver of what good content the internet has to offer.

I find Medium analogous to an Art Gallery for bloggers, there's only so much space on the walls for content and if you can't garner a herd mentality around your work then it may as well be thrown in the trash.

If I was Medium - I'd take a totally hands-off approach to curating - I'd start using a meritocratic process to approve/reject posts, limit the homepage to just the top five trending articles, and introduce more content-discovery options earlier in the UX. If I was going to monetize, I would put ads on there and I would syndicate content too, and I would introduce an 80/20 split of the revenue generated (80% to the blogger) since good content is what will drive and grow the platform.

But hey, what does the last unpopular kid on the bench know.