Death of Medium?
How to send off your users in one gigantic step. Oh Brother where are you thou?
You may have read the news about the change in the way stories are going to be managed in collections.
This is NOT a good news for writers despite all the nice Xmas wrap put around the box.
Recap: Collections are a way to increase your visibility in Medium, that is how they are (were?) presented. Within Medium it’s the only way, apart the search, as there is no real “news-feed” as in many social media. One of its key innovations was the possibility to be in multiple collection, very important in cross-topic stories:
Anyone can create a collection about anything, and authors can submit relevant stories to as many collections as they’d like. For example, here’s a collection of crazy stories. Submitting stories to collections gives more opportunity for discovery and building one idea off of another.
That is how it was sold by Medium: a terrific opportunity to multiply your readers. That is why I joined medium compared to other blogging platform. That is my (very) positive experience in medium.
Now it’s no more. The Black death sickle plunged on creativity & visibility: you can only be in one collections.
So far the only happy reactions I read are from collections editors who were supposedly drowning among free submission.
This is NOT a good reason. You do not cut a key service to users because editors cannot handle their success (hey, if you got lot of submissions is because you have success, did you realized?). You improve your service instead:
- by adding editors,
- by putting out standards for submissions,
- by improving the tagging system (only 3 tags?) and extending to stories to improve matches.
- by creating a role of mentoring, perhaps?
- by introducing (keeping) open or closed collections
- by cleaning duplicated collections (although duplication is hard to define, it’s not just about a title)
- …. anything else but penalizing writers.
You have many ways to handle free submission, but limiting stories to pertain to only one collection is wrong in many ways.
Where Medium is going to?
I already got some doubts on what would be the business model able to sustain it. Such a free service for and no ads cannot last long; not speaking about the fact that Medium heavily invested in payed editors to boost content and collections. And twitter is paying this incertitude already.
So where to take the money from?
With this move of cutting collection I can only figure out that Medium is turning into an online publisher, where writers will be subject to editors will. How long before you introduce premiums accounts? Or Curators asking for fee to publish stories?
Please tell me I am wrong.
Do you realize the consequences?
- Small collections with unique point of view will soon disappear because not palatable to writers
- Monopolistic behaviors from big editors will rise.
- Big collections will be MORE overwhelmed than before because the only way to increase audience.
- Many writers will just turn (again) to other platforms to seek visibility
- … and so on
I don’t like to play Cassandra, but this is far to easy to predict.
Why are you doing this?
Why as a writer should I invest more of my time if I see my chances to be read sensibly reduced and in no way differentiated to other blogs platform?
Why you give up one very competitive and innovative factor you sold to us, the writers, when we joined?
I don’t buy it. I felt freedom to fly in Medium, now my wings are wrapped. Time to fly over.
Post Publishing note: today 11 June 2014 seems the feature has been implemented. I understand my writing are not so important for Medium so it is likely that this will be my last post here. And it is also likely that as soon as I decide for alternatives I will remove my posts.
Did you liked this story? I look forward your comments, tips, suggestions, tweets (@fabiozib), linked readings, feedback… any sign of life ;)
I will do my best to reply to everyone.
