Recycled Content on Medium

Is it the Fault of the Site, its Users, or Both?

I’ve been following Medium on Twitter ever since I first heard about it almost two years ago. For most of that time my interaction with this site has been clicking on a link headline that caught my attention, giving it a read, and maybe clicking around Medium a little more to see how the site was coming along, interested in its growth and potential.

When I happened to log in recently for the first time in a long time I found I was finally able to post and was quite pleased. In addition to having an outlet to share things that might not be an ideal fit for my own site, I took this as an opportunity to start paying more attention to what’s being published on Medium by others, and have begun reading over it daily.

Being sick of the mass dumbing down the Internet has experienced over the last few years at the hands of sites like Buzzfeed, Huffpo, and the Gawker properties, the chance to explore a new space that is meant to be a marketplace for ideas was most warmly welcome. After all, I’m not the ‘typical’ Medium user, so the potential to learn new things seems almost infinite.

But I’m not getting anything here I don’t already get elsewhere.

For instance, yesterday I clicked on the headline to this post on the Atlantic’s site. It didn’t take me long to realize I’d already read it on Medium a few days prior. It seems to have disappeared from Medium now, leading me to believe that Atlantic editor Alexis Madrigal was using Medium as little more than a scratch pad during time away from the office when he wrote it here.

Also recently I was delighted to find a Medium piece about The Wire written by a fellow Baltimorean, but was significantly less excited to see the same piece surface in my RSS feed five days later on a local site called What Weekly. I believe the author is technically within his rights to cross post, so long as What Weekly’s editors realize they’re getting secondhand content, but as a reader it again seems shabby to me to read articles on the web with no indication that they appear at other sites. The same writer also cross-posted another piece between Medium and What Weekly on September 9 and 26.

This is only slightly more onerous than the (somewhat) better practice of writing at Medium and then cross-posting an excerpt and link at another site. Examples of this can be found in some of Medium’s top ten most popular posts from last month like Coming Out as Biracial, part of which also appeared (and drove clicks) in the Huffington Post Black Voices section and Why You Should Have a Messy Desk, which also appeared in part on its author’s organizational blog.