Why I switched from Steemit to Medium
The journey to find the right blogging platform
If you’re a writer on Medium, there’s a pretty good chance that, like me, you ended up here after dabbling on some other blogging platform. Before I discovered Medium last month, I was posting my writing on Steemit.
If you haven’t heard of Steemit before, I recommend checking it out. It’s a content platform that has been getting a lot of attention recently due to the fact that it’s built on blockchain technology and has the added incentive that you can earn money in the form of a cryptocurrency called Steem.
Each user can earn Steem for posting articles and comments. The amount you earn is calculated according to upvotes you get from other users, and depends on the Steem wealth of the people who upvoted you. People who have amassed more Steem have a greater voting weight and therefore have more power to reward the people they upvote (it’s more complicated than that simplified explanation, but that’s the general gist). Other connected sites interact with Steemit such as DTube (for videos) DLive (for live streaming), Steepshot (for images) and many more.
Blogging is a very personal thing. No matter what you’re writing about, you end up baring a tiny bit of your soul in each and every post you write.
With that in mind, it naturally follows that each blogger has specific preferences about where they prefer to post their writing. The platform that you choose has a huge effect, not only on how your posts look and feel, but also on the process of writing itself.
Aeons ago, in a previous life, I tried blogging on Wordpress. It was a great platform for a first attempt. There are plenty of themes and controls to play about it. I dabbled for ages, safe in the knowledge that almost no-one would see my posts.
Because what’s missing with Wordpress is an audience. The interaction and follow features are far less developed. You might get a few random likes here and there from other Wordpress users, but I always suspected that those people were simply pressing the “like” button without even reading the post. And it’s no good expecting people to organically come across your posts because Google tends to rank free blogging sites like Wordpress devastatingly low in search results. Unless you already have a big following of people interested in your writing and who share the posts on social media, it’s hard to imagine anyone discovering your words.
When I discovered Steemit, that was one of the big differences. I posted my introductory piece, and immediately got upvotes and comments from people welcoming me to the platform and commenting on what I’d written. It was like a revelation. Interaction and community! THIS was what blogging was about.
Suddenly I was motivated to write more than I ever had before. I formed connections with people and looked forward to their posts so that I could comment and interact with them, just as I looked forward to their comments on my posts. The chance of earning cryptocurrency was, of course, another factor, but I tried not to let the financial factor overshadow what was most important to me — the writing journey.
One of the really great things about Steemit is the positive attitude and energy hanging around the site, exuded in abundance by so many users.
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies offer a new, decentralised way of thinking about the world economy. People are excited about what it all could mean for the future and that comes across in the way that they write and interact on the platform.
Aside from learning about cryptocurrencies, Steemit is also a great place to learn about life in other parts of the world. I read stories from people who were living the kind of lives that I’ve never even thought about. It makes a huge difference to read posts written by REAL people who are living REAL lives, compared to the over-dramatised, over-romanticised stories that might appear in newspapers or other types of media. Steemit encourages all kinds of writing, so many people just write about their day or post photos or videos from their life.
Yes, I know, it’s beginning to sound a bit like Facebook, but the difference is that you can read everything posted by everybody, and therefore branch out of your personal filter bubble and learn something new.
So if Steemit is so great, why am I here?
Although there are plenty of reasons that Steemit is a wonderful community, I found that it wasn’t the right place for me and my writing ambitions. Although I’d love to sing the praises of Medium (and I probably will at some point), the focus of this article is more about what I found lacking in Steemit as a blogging platform.
1. It’s hard to find anything
So the first thing you do when starting on a new platform is to look for people to follow and articles to read.
Oh my god, attempting to search Steemit is a horrible experience. Actually, it doesn’t even have an internal search function. You have to use Google to search the site. With millions of articles being posted each day, and the low-ranking thing I mentioned before, you can imagine how well that works for finding relevant and up-to-date content (hint: not very well).
You can search according to tags, but then the posts are organised according to what’s trending under that tag. And the posts that are trending are usually authored by the people with the most influence on the platform, not necessarily by the best writers.
2. Huge amounts of poor quality content
Added to the problem of searching is the fact that you have to wade through oceans of terrible or plagiarised posts to find anything at all.
Although there are rules about plagiarism, and plenty of people (and bots) work hard to eliminate the posts and users that violate them, the lure of cryptocurrency is too great. It’s possible to earn a lot of money by creating thousands of accounts and having them all upvote one another’s content. As you can imagine, plenty of people take advantage of that.
Curation accounts didn’t solve it for me either. I never seemed to share the curator’s opinion about what was good or interesting content, and got frustrated with my consequently clogged feed.
3. Posts stop earning cryptocurrency after 7 days
Unlike other platform, where you can receive votes or acclaim for articles for as long as they exist, content on Steemit loses most of its relevance after a 7-day period. After that time, upvotes have no effect.
This is frustrating if you’ve put a lot of time into writing an evergreen-type article or story. As a writer, I’m interested in the idea of creating scaleable content (create once, benefit forever), so this aspect of Steemit was very frustrating for me.
4. After 7 days, you cannot edit or delete your post
Never mind the obvious problems with spotting typos long after you’ve posted something… I like to write serialised fiction, and it was exasperating that I couldn’t edit older episodes in a series.
For example, I would normally go back to edit an old episode in order to add links to the newer episodes. Or I might want to update my contact info or call-to-action links.
Furthermore, if at some point, I wish to export my stories to my own website, there will be an eternal problem of duplication because the content on Steemit cannot be deleted.
5. Not many serious writers
Most people on Steemit are there to earn money, to explore the possibilities of blockchain and to make connections with other people who share those interests. After my initial enthusiasm for the platform itself, I found myself wanting to meet more people who shared my interest in the craft of writing. However they were hard to find and sadly I didn’t click well with the few active writing communities that I found there.
It was also kind of weird knowing that each person I connected with might have been commenting on my post for the sake of the money that they could earn for doing so.
Is the engagement worth less because of the financial incentive?
I couldn’t answer that question.
But it does bring me on to my next point…
6. The cryptocurrency factor is misleading
There’s no denying that it’s exciting to see a dollar sign at the bottom of your post. But the amount shown there is misleading.
In the first place, the amount of currency earned by a post is divided between the author and the people who voted (yes, you earn money back just for voting on other people’s posts), so the authors don’t get the whole amount shown.
Secondly, the amount of money on a post usually declines over the 7-day period that the post is active. This is partly because the value of Steem cryptocurrency fluctuates. It’s also partly because people who vote for your post usually go and vote on other posts afterwards. This dilutes their voting power, so that each post receives less. There are probably other, more complicated, reasons too.
Thirdly, at the end of the 7 days, you can claim the money from your post so that it gets added into your Steemit wallet. But then what do you have? Not real money. It’s cryptocurrency. In order to use it in the real world, you have to go through a complicated process of transferring it through an exchange and paying the fees to do so.
And then there’s always the temptation to simply keep it in your account, because the more wealth you have on Steemit, to more powerful your votes are on the platform.
So actually what you end up at the end of the process is:
- No actual money,
- A slightly more powerful Steemit account
- A burning desire to “earn” more on your next post.
It’s no wonder that people get addicted to Steemit.
7. It’s too time-consuming to edit posts
Some people complain about Medium’s simple editor. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the editor. It’s so quick and easy to use, and I know for sure that my posts will always look great. They’ll look professional. They’ll look consistent.
On Steemit, you have the option to use markdown, an HTML editor or a weird thing that’s kind of a mixture of the two. It always took me ages to get the posts looking right. Honestly I was discouraged from posting because of how long that editing process always took me. Of course, it got faster as time went on. I ended up with template HTML code that I could copy and paste into the editor, but still it felt like the checking and tweaking went on forever.
I want my posts to look good, but I’m not interested enough in the visual or technical aspects to take pleasure in time spent on that. I’d rather be writing.
In conclusion
I learned a lot from writing on Steemit. One of the most important things I learned was how to engage with other writers.
When you’ve spent time on a platform where you get “paid” for commenting on other people’s posts, you develop your skills when it comes to reading other people’s posts and coming up with meaningful things to say in response. It seems weird that you would have to learn how to do that, but it’s true. One aspect of that is simply the realisation of how nice it is when you receive such comments yourself. I think that using Steemit made me a better blog-platform-user.
Of course, all the writing I did there helped too, but…
when it comes to my writing journey, Medium is already working far better for me.
I’m sorry for all the Steemians that I’ll be leaving behind, but on the other hand, in these days of social media, switching to another platform doesn’t necessarily mean goodbye forever!
Thanks for reading! I also write fiction and introspective articles. Follow my writing on Twitter, Facebook, or sign up for my mailing list to get a biweekly wrap-up delivered to your inbox.
