I Unsubscribed…
Yes, Medium. I think I’m slowly ghosting from this platform.
Today, I did a thing. I hit the “unsubscribe” button on my Medium digest email.
I don’t know why I did it. Maybe it’s the fact that the stories don’t ever feel that relevant to me anymore?
Maybe it’s the recent murmurings I’ve heard online about Medium pandering to the big publications and the already-established writers?
Maybe it’s because most of the titles of the articles I see are re-hashed titles of articles I’ve already read. (Advice for writers can only go so far before it starts becoming repetitive. Side note: the best advice I ever had was to stop reading about writing and go write.)
I’m not really sure what Medium is anymore. I think it’s a place where lots of people are struggling to be heard, but where some people are getting some money for their work. It’s a place where some people are discovered, yes, but it’s also a place that makes others feel huge amounts of frustration (after putting in huge amounts of work).
It has the usual (superficial) clap/like/popularity thing going on and there are groups of people who cross-promote each others’ work by reading and clapping in return for reads and claps. I realised eventually that this just feels really weird, to me.
There are even Medium “gurus” now. I discovered this recently. I guess they teach you how to get more likes and more followers and more money from the locked articles?
I think my heart is not really in it anymore. I’ll continue to click on “friend links” and come to Medium to read fiction or poetry from people I’ve come to admire but the rest? I feel relieved to be letting it go.
So, goodbye Medium digest. Sayonara Medium suggestions. This little writer is freeing herself from that information. I’ll still be here, of course, but I’m letting go of the mothership to float off into space a little more on my own.
