Why Leaving Medium Was the Best Thing For My Writing
And why I’m back
When my earnings on Medium suddenly dropped after the change in their distribution policies at the Fall of 2022, I blamed it on myself.
Was my writing not good enough? Was it boring? Off-putting? Was I boring or off-putting? Did I not engage enough with my readers? Did they get tired of the topics I chose to write about? After poking around Medium and talking to fellow writers who had the same experience, I realized it was none of those (at least not all of those).
Then it hit me: my writing and my earnings (and my self-esteem) were in the hands of an algorithm, and not a good one at that.
The same algorithm now fed my reading page with poorly-written clickbait content instead of quality writing. So I stopped reading Medium. Then I stopped posting.
That’s when the good things started happening.
Background story
A former journalist and then a screenwriter, I started writing on Medium in 2020, after my daughter was born, and my first couple of pieces went viral (a serious case of beginner’s luck). Having collected hundreds of comments and a few thousand dollars in commission in just 30 days, I was encouraged to keep going.
