A Manager’s Honest Review of Medium
The good, the bad, and the ugly of Medium.
A post like this is always coming from a corporate professional like me who is used to solving case studies to find what’s going right and what’s not. Thanks to the exposure to different roles and geographies, I realized that the best time to evaluate the reforms in a function is soon after joining that function. A little more time into it, and most of the lacunae become a blind spot. Later, you just stop seeing them. So before I soak myself completely into the way Medium works, I thought of penning down a review of the platform.
Before joining Medium, I researched the best platform available to the writers to share their content. Clearly, Medium occupies the pole position if we go by the majority of the online feedback. Invariably, while trying to find a piece of advice on the internet, it is the Medium’s and Quora’s posts waiting for you top of the list. Credit is to the founders and contributors of Medium to have made it one of the best.
However, Medium is still highly underutilized and underexplored. Therefore, I still rate it to be very early in its evolution and far from maturity. The slow growth of the platform does come as a concern, and its patrons also do not appear to be delighted enough, hinting it risks getting killed by something better in the future.
One post is not sufficient to include everything. So, I will touch upon only one aspect from each of the three- ‘the good,’ ‘the bad,’ and ‘the ugly.’ Here we go:
The Good: With quantity, it’s always difficult to maintain quality. Let’s take Quora as an example. It started as a platform in the Q&A format. It later became the place to entertain as well. Then came the trolls, spammers, and people trying to catch attention with uncensored stuff. Quora sank like a ship. The good content has been overwhelmed by the junk. Serious users have either stopped visiting the app or uninstalled it.
On the other hand, Medium has kept the platform's objective alive. It is mainly thanks to the membership fee more than any other reason, no matter what the founders think. Medium’s ship is still controlled by high-quality writers and not the porn-posting attention seekers.
The Bad: Everything comes with a downside, the membership fee too. While it has ensured the quality of the content, it has made the platform a very static one. What we have on the platform is just a group of writers and wannabe ones reading each other’s content. The outside world has been cut off with the free five-article limit per month. Consequently, the content is very predictable and monotonous. To get more views, people end up writing about the same stuff over and over again.
If I were the founder, I would have expected Medium to be the go-to place for a wide range of topics by now after so many years of existence. The outside world wants to read about movie reviews, travel advice, food, lifestyle, automobiles, and whatnot, but the membership fee ensures that the demand remains unmet by Medium.
My 50 cent advice to mitigate this problem is to open up Medium to the world to read for free and keep the platform paid for the contributors to maintain quality.
The Ugly: Now, come to the aspect that makes me feel discriminated as a contributor. There is no other way to feel about the Medium Partner Program. Yes, we are very much in the 21st century, with the world seamlessly connected with the internet. Yet, we have a major platform that conveniently leaves out a large share of humanity (in fact, a large share of English-speaking humanity as well) because apparently, it can’t find a solution (LOL). The only plausible reason I see beyond the obvious is to keep the platform limited to the people of a select few nationalities. If that’s the case, then Medium will surely perish against a truly universal platform someday.
Medium has done well to be what it is today. But, doing well is not enough. The first and foremost issue that it has to tackle is its lack of evolution. Anything that doesn’t evolve gets extinct. Second, it needs to shift the platform from being writer-centric to reader-centric. Third, it should pay heed to its existing base of members; almost everyone is somewhat resentful. Fourth, it should come out of its clique mindset and think big, think universal.
Most importantly, it should learn to let loose and let the market forces do their work. Quora didn’t fail because of evolution; it only failed to cope with evolution.
What about solutions, you may ask?
I don’t do it for free (wink).
