Why the Doom of Platforms Like Medium May Be an Eternity Away
Based on my experience with platforms like Medium, Quora and Twitter.
Lately, how Medium is changing for good has been the talk of the town. But there is something more exciting.
And that is, people like CEO Tony are being biased against a female writer, Jessica Wildfire, and mean to call her “under-informed” and “divisive.”
Many people support Jessica by telling her how they continue to pay Medium a subscription fee just to read her. That’s awesome.
I haven’t read a lot of her articles. And that’s why I don’t want to take sides here. I am sure there must have been some misunderstandings and it is all a short-term problem.
In case you want to read more: You can read Jessica’s original article, Isiah McCall’s article how he comprehends the whole situation, and this newsletter issue of xo Linda by Linda Caroll.
When I was scrolling through the comments section, I came across a comment that concluded how Medium is in ruins. How it is no longer what it used to be.
Now, this is what I come across a lot of times. Comments like this rarely convince me. No, I am not a blind optimist. I’m not an eternal optimist either.
Rather, it comes from the experience of having used a couple more writing platforms.
The story is going on
Believe it or not, there is a story that’s not necessarily the truth that’s always going on. It’s not always a bad thing per se.
It may seem counterintuitive, but this is what makes us humans. We present our own opinions. There’s no right or wrong until there is. But there is a lot of time to throw our understanding and prophecies out in the open.
Before the truth is ultimately revealed.
Some of them are good, others bad. Some of them are positive, others negative.
Out of hundreds of darts shot, a couple of them hits the bull’s eye and that is what we amplify. “Look, I said it’s going to happen.”
This is what keeps the narrative going. Things don't change as fast as we would like them to. But sometimes they change so much we don’t feel at home. Now that’s social media.
Doom is not coming, change is
Let me explain.
On Twitter, people are fed up with the same copy-pasted format of threads in which you dump a list of useful resources and that’s it.
On Quora, veterans are complaining about how the platform has changed. But not for the better. Now, it’s too informal and the quality of answers has gone down exponentially.
I don’t know about Instagram, but because even the apparent queens of the platform, Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian, are criticising it, we can assume a lot of people are not happy about the change either.
So where does one go? Is the doom of all the platforms coming all at once?
No, the doom is not coming, the change is. This is the very reason I am not convinced by a lot of Medium-is-already-dead articles.
It’s not doom, it’s change. But if things don’t change according to us, we call the latter doom.
I am saying this from a personal experience as well. I used to believe a lot of things are dead. I used to criticise a lot of things for how they are.
But after some introspection, I found out that’s predominantly because either I don’t like how things/situations are or never want them to be true.
The same is true for platforms.
Doom is inevitable, agreed. But doom doesn’t come every time we think we don’t want this to change or don’t quite fit the equation.
