Open Letter: Writers, Medium is Your Abusive, Tyrannical Lover
Let me explain, and maybe you’ll survive to tell your story.
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Alternative titles
Medium is Costing Writers A Lot of Money
Medium is Minimizing Your Reach
Medium is Trying to Break the Internet
Medium is Building a Walled Garden, Trapping Your Content
Medium Wants You to Think They are the Only One That Can Help You
Medium isn’t Enough for Maximizing Your Content Distribution
Medium is Holding Back Writers on its Platform
Medium is Trapping Your Content Behind its Walls
The Opportunity Cost of Writing on Medium is Growing
Okay, that’s enough for now. I think you get the point …
Like any good tyrant, Medium wants you to believe they are the only one that can fulfill your every desire. Like any good abusive lover, Medium wants to keep you closed out from the rest of the world.
With those zingers out of my head and onto this canvas, let’s proceed.
Like any sensible person, you believe they mean well, but their actions can be fatal; if you’re wondering how, you’re reading the right article today, but you’ll need to stay for awhile to get the full picture. In the end, my hope is to help you survive this relationship you’ve entered even if we can’t help your partner course correct.
Defining the World
Medium’s actions are costing you distribution and revenue. In other words, Medium’s actions are costing you a larger audience and the potential money you could make from that audience.
Let’s all be honest with ourselves: for the vast majority of writers, Medium is an alright way to make enough money to pay off some costs of living, such as your phone or gas bill. However, the platform’s monetization platform, so far, likely won’t help you cover a significant portion of rent. Most writers in the Medium Partner Program don’t even earn $100 a month.
With that said, if they aren’t paying you a significant amount of money, they shouldn’t be restricting the reach of your content; they shouldn’t be limiting your distribution as they actively are.
Before we get into this very long story, let me paint the state of our world.
If you already understand the state of our world, who you and I are as well as our motivations, then you can skip this section.
If you want to encourage Medium to stop being bad, let them know by tagging them in a comment with your thoughts below. You can tag them with “@MediumStaff”. Judging by their rapidly declining Glassdoor reviews, they should currently have their hands full with trying to fix their internal culture, so we could be waiting for a long time.
Who Am I?
I’m a software engineer, educator, and entrepreneur. If you’ve heard of Smedian, ManyStories, Signal, TopPubs, or, the wrapper for all of those, Penname, I’m their lone creator; I developed them line by line mostly as a labor of love and learning; I’ve been losing thousands of dollars on these for years now, but it’s been worth it because thousands of writers and organizations around the internet have benefited from the existence of these platforms.
You may also be aware that I used to earn $142,000 per year writing for Medium, but I’ve since moved on to making much more money and impact for another platform.
If I’m giving you whiplash, hold on tight, we have a long way to go …
I love Medium. That’s why I invested in the company and am now an owner of tens of thousands of shares of A Medium Corporation. I even published my first book on the platform during college winter break.
Medium is an amazing company (or, at the very least, it once was), and I hope they change their mind and actually return to their roots of trying to maximize the success of writers. I know many of the Medium staff follow me and occasionally engage with my stories, so I hope they see this and revert their bad actions.
Who Are You?
You’re probably one of the tens of thousands of people who write here on Medium everyday. You also may be a reader, and that’s fine because this concerns you, too.
If I’m lucky, you’re a member of the Medium staff hoping to learn what Medium is doing wrong and how you can help the team do better. If I’m unlucky, you’re a member of the new Medium staff that thinks I can be bullied by your corporate lawyers; we both know that didn’t go well for you the first time around, so just join your teammate in the former group and do better.
If these walls allow signal to escape, you may even be a journalist looking for the next big drama on a growing Silicon Valley startup. I can’t say that you won’t find that here.
There’s also a chance you’re a competitor of Medium, and you’re here to learn what not to do when you grow large enough to believe you can screw over your suppliers with impunity.
Lastly, you may be another platform that tries to help writers reach a larger audience, and you’re here to learn how Medium’s actions have put that to an abrupt halt.
With all of that set, let’s get into why you’re here.
Background
On November 14, 2020, I published an article on Medium called “Medium is Actively Acting Against the Best Interests and Desires of Writers”. As explained then, the goal of that article was to garner interest for the long story I wanted to share with Medium writers about how Medium is limiting their distribution and earnings potential:
I have a long story to tell but I want to know if Medium writers care enough about their loss revenue and distribution due to the direct actions of Medium’s product, brand and legal teams.
That story garnered 5.3k claps from over 230 writers with just 2.4k views before I temporarily unlisted it, so it’s clear writers are growing highly suspicious of their lover.
While other platforms work hard and do whatever they can to maximize both the revenue and distribution of content on their platform and around the internet, Medium’s team has been in correspondence with me and made it clear that they are deliberately acting against the best interests of writers in a desperate play for the maximization of their “brand”.
Medium’s platform is broken. It’s broken in too many places. Fortunately, they have over 100 software engineers and designers to solve these problems. Unfortunately, they have diverted their attention from best serving the writers and readers on their platform to try their best to prevent other platforms from picking up their natural slack.
In more plain words, Medium has bugs that they should be focussed on fixing, missing features that could benefit writers and readers, and a monetization structure that still needs proving. Instead, they have chosen to try to prevent writers and their potential readers from benefiting from the inherent benefits of the rest of the internet.
Medium’s Critical Bugs
Medium’s notifications system is broken. The little bell in the top right corner shows you the number of new notifications you have, but, when you click it, only some or none show.
Medium’s highlighter is broken. When you highlight text in the Medium app, the app rewrites the remainder of the article to repeat the text you highlighted instead of showing the contents the writer intended for their reader.
Medium still doesn’t know what it wants to do with publications on the platform. Medium still hasn’t determined how best to compensate writers.
Oh by the way, Medium won’t let me change my original survey article from unlisted to public. I built this unlisting feature, so I know it used to work, and probably still does in most cases. It just doesn’t work for this article 🤔
If you look close enough, you’ll find more non-insignificant problems that should be focussed on. Let’s dive into what Medium is doing instead.
Medium’s Anti-Writer Actions
Instead of focussing on making Medium better for writers and the writers’ readers, Medium is doing the exact opposite. In order for you to understand how Medium is hurting writers and their readers, you must first understand how the open internet is supposed to operate.
Against the Internet
The internet was built to be a web of information. Users are supposed to be able to access websites around the internet freely. The protocols that we all use to build websites largely ensure those goals are achieved. However, if a website developer tries hard enough, they can make it extremely difficult for other parts of the internet to access their content. In effect, they build a wall around their part of the internet and whoever is inside; if they provide some value to their population, we call them a walled garden. Although it may sound pretty, walled gardens are rarely, if ever, good for their inhabitants or the rest of society.
Medium is building a walled garden.
On the internet, there are these things called iframes. Iframes enable web developers to display contents of another website on their own without being able to manipulate said content. Saying that Medium understands the value of iframes to the internet and its users is an understatement because Medium owns one of the greatest benefactors and beneficiaries of iframes.
In 2016, while I was interning as a software engineer at Medium, building the publications stories dashboard you see today, Medium brilliantly purchased Embedly:
Medium has acquired Embedly, the provider of technology enabling both publishers and consumers to share content across the web …
Embedly had previously raised $700,000 in equity funding, with investments coming from Salesforce Ventures, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Venture51, Social Leverage, Lowercase Capital, Betaworks, Adam Schwartz, Chris Sacca, and Howard Lindzon. — VentureBeat’s Ken Yeung
Iframes are simple: Website A includes a single line of HTML to display an entire page of Website B. If someone wanted to display an Medium article, as a totally random example, they would do something like this:
<iframe src="https://medium.com/writers-guild/i-used-to-earn-142-000-per-year-writing-for-medium-then-i-quit-c983ae1714e1"/>And just like that, that entire article at the provided URL in src would show, be embedded in their website. However, the iframe prevents the developer of the foreign website from manipulating the contents of the embedded website. Nothing is being stolen because the embedded website runs entirely in its own context as normal within the other website that embeds it. It’s like magic. This is the foundation that Medium’s Embedly is built it. Actually, let’s take it even further: 90% of the value Embedly provides is achieved by this foundational tool of the open internet.
When you see a YouTube video embedded in an article, that’s an iframe. A tweet? Iframe. Some code snippet? Also an iframe. Those forms that you used to see on Medium asking for you email so the writer of the article you just enjoyed could build a closer relationship with you outside of Medium in order to send you more content you might be interested in? That was also achieved thanks to the power of iframes. Medium’s Embedly, along with its competitors, helps make it easier and more dependable in exchange for a pretty penny.
You may be wondering what happened to those forms. Would it surprised you if I told you Medium made them disappear before even providing a standard solution for writers to connect with their readers outside of Medium? Then Medium caved and gave writers a way to send newsletters to their readers, but they still wouldn’t let writers export the emails of their readers. Finally, because Substacks and others were eating up market share, Medium gave in and allowed writers to export the email of their readers.
But, although related, this isn’t the story I planned to write today.
Now that you know what iframes are and how they are generally used, what if I told you there were countless platforms out there using iframes to help distribute your articles around the internet completely for free?
There were … until Medium decided iframes were bad … when they’re not the one in control via their Embedly platform.
Against the interests of its writers
Have you watched Netflix’s How to Become a Tyrant? If not, I give you permission to stop reading here and watch the first few episodes because it’ll help you understand Medium’s actions. Also, feel free to read up on the psychological warfare of abusive relationships.
Medium is going to war, and they’ve clearly stated to me and anyone who will listen that their actions are primarily in the interests of their brand — that is regardless of how it effects writers.
Medium Shuts Down Avenues of Distribution for Writers
There are platforms around the internet that enable others to display any website, article in an iframe and share a link to it with their network. In return, the person sharing the link may get some benefits, such as being able to share a small dismissible banner to their own website in the bottom right corner.
The author of the article being shared gets free marketing, readers discover new content and writers, and the promoter of the article gets a little bit of relevant real estate to promote their own website to a reader who may be interested. If the reader is not interested, they can simply close the banner.
What’s more? Thanks to how iframes work, as we explored above, the article at hand cannot be manipulated in any way by the promoter. The banner is shown on the promoter’s website, not actually in the content of the article. This is only a win win for everyone involved.
Unfortunately, thanks to Medium’s actions, these platforms no longer work with Medium articles; they work with articles published just about anywhere else around the internet, including Medium’s competitors.
ManyStories, my own platform, uses iframes to achieve a similar goal for writers and readers.
Defending Writers on ManyStories from Medium’s Attacks
I built and run ManyStories.com, a platform that aims to help writers around the internet, regardless of where they choose to publish, share their stories and reacher a wider audience without doing the promotional work on their own. It leverages iframes to achieve this; I mean, it used to. That was until Medium caught on and, like any good tyrant, decided it was in their best interest to shut down anything that would go against their goal of convincing their subjects (writers) that only Medium could fulfill their every needs.
After Medium tried to send their lawyers after me and my platform, in 2020, I refused to speak with them. In response, they tried to control me by sending a friendly member of their staff to convince me to do what they wanted. I told the friendly member no and suggested what they could do to attempt to stop me and other platforms from embedding Medium articles in our websites via iframes.
Of course, I knew they would try what I told them, so I already had a plan for getting around it. Once they did exactly what I told them to do, the chess match was on. I immediately circumvented their naive action and sent them this email on May 23, 2020. My goal was to offer them a dignified out. This is the first 95% of the email:
For a few months, my first solution to the move I gave Medium to use against me worked. I was hoping Medium’s team would backoff after my swift defeat of their maneuver and my essay to them in that email explaining how the war would play out if they continued down their path. They didn’t.
If I was just any ole person from the internet, they would have been right to believe they could win this war. But I learned about internet networks and protocols from the guy who led the development of concurrency in the Java programming language. I was confident because I knew every move Medium could make and exactly how to get around each one. They should have known this since they hired me as a software engineer before I graduated college.
Despite all of that, Medium chose war. They did not exit with dignity, so we continued on. They did everything I explained in the email to their team, and I responded exactly as I said I would.
By November 14, 2020, when I wrote my survey article, the iframe ManyStories used to display the articles that writers shared on the platform from anywhere on the internet, including their own blog (Wordpress, Vocal, Substack, self hosted) and Medium, in its original form no would no longer work for Medium articles because Medium took the actions I expected them to and I responded in kind in order to serve the writers who wanted to reach more readers outside of and beyond Medium. ManyStories lived on, including for articles published on Medium.
Medium is Relentless — July 2021
Eight months after that email. I had Medium’s team of engineers, tasked with preventing ManyStories from helping Medium writers reach more readers outside of Medium, beat for a long time.
Half a year had gone by since they made their last attack against the open internet and writers on their own platform. Half a year had past since I showed them I wasn’t backing down.
Then came July 2021, this month. One day, I went to read an article published on Medium and shared on ManyStories by the author. The article only loaded the first section of the page. I knew immediately that Medium had done something silly. To confirm, I checked one of my own articles that I published on Medium and shared on ManyStories. It was the same partially loaded article.
It’d be bad enough enough if it didn’t affect the reader’s experience here on Medium, but it does exactly that:
As you can see there: Medium is actively breaking the user experience of their site, where you trust them with your content and your readers, just to stop me and other platforms from showing your stories to more readers elsewhere via iframes. Remember, Medium owns a company, Embedly that leverages iframes to embed other websites on Medium and around the web, so Medium has no problem using iframes when they are the ones benefiting (financially) from it.
That black banner you’re seeing at the bottom as I scroll down while the page loads is the footer of the page. Yes’ it’s the footer, which shows you that Medium is going to great lengths to only partially load an article’s content on the initial render so that other platforms can’t get the entire page. As a result, the reader also doesn’t get the entire story at first; they get an ugly black banner flashing around while they have to wait for the full article to load.
I got around this on ManyStories, but, clearly, Medium hasn’t gotten around it on Medium. The result? Medium damages the trust between you and your readers.
I Have Grit
When Medium offered me the full-time job following my internship in 2016, the then CTO credited the achievement in part to my grit. He’s still someone I admire, but, unfortunately, he’s no longer with the team.
What a long way we’ve come since then. Some reading this might naively think my actions are that of an ungrateful person. “Medium gave this kid his first job … straight out of college! He should be more grateful.”
What most people fail to realize is employment goes both ways. Hiring me was surely a benefit to me, but the team knew that congratulations were also in order for them for landing me, a young, skilled software engineer with potential to become highly skilled over time. I proved to be valuable since I was promoted with a 29% raise within a year of starting. Unfortunately, the team forgot that I had these skills and grit.
Also very unfortunate is the company forgetting what the CEO wrote in that offer letter:
Medium is based on the belief that sharing ideas and experiences moves humanity forward. We’ve only scratched the surface of what the Internet can do for this cause. We believe that enabling more people to share important ideas, stories, and knowledge with the world in better ways is a long-term and worthwhile project.
Now the team is working hard to prevent writers from sharing their own articles they’ve published on Medium on other sites such as ManyStories and the ones that provide free marketing via iframe embeds. All of this despite the company owning Embedly. What that says to me is the company is now more concerned with accumulating and controlling important ideas, stories, and knowledge rather than helping proliferate them around the internet — where humanity connects best when left open.
ManyStories Will Keep Serving Medium Writers Even Though Medium Doesn’t Want That
In response to Medium’s July 2021 action, I’ve found a way around it. It’s not pretty for now, but I just needed to quickly fix the problem to continue serving Medium writers the same way ManyStories serves writers from hundreds of other websites around the internet.
I’ve kept ManyStories in beta for a couple years now while I work out the kinks and learn how to best serve the thousands of writers that choose to share their stories on the platform everyday. The waitlist is still growing, but we admit more writers every few weeks. Thanks to everyone (especially Casey Botticello) who has written a review about it so far and trusting me with your content.
The Effect on Writers
Let’s all be honest with ourselves: for most writers, Medium is an alright way to make enough money to pay off some costs of living, such as your phone or gas bill. However, the platform’s monetization platform, so far, likely won’t help you cover a significant portion of rent.
With that said, given that Medium isn’t paying you a significant amount of money, they shouldn’t be restricting the reach of your content; they shouldn’t be limiting your distribution as they actively are.
What Medium has done is quite genius if you think about it. It may actually be straight out of the handbook of becoming a tyrant.
They’ve lured thousands of writers into their walled garden, given them some incentives to stay awhile longer, paid a minority of them good amount of money to give the majority something to aspire to as well as show Medium can be a nice tyrant, changed the copyright policies, and prevented writers from benefiting from their stories being embedded in other websites around the otherwise open internet.
As a result, while still getting paid little in Medium’s Partner Program, they get less distribution around the internet from people who are not themselves and their mom, and their opportunity cost of publishing on Medium grows because they have less avenues of reaching and attracting more readers.
What You Need to Do as a Writer
While taking a few minutes to give my hunting fingers a break from pecking this article, I came across this article from Jordan Mendiola: My Top Article Was Uncurated, and I’m Pissed.
That title and Jordan’s final thoughts couldn’t be beat for opening this section of the article:
You Must Build & Maintain Your Own Platform
The world wide web of the internet is supposed to be an open home for everyone. You’re supposed to have your own little plot of land in the web but welcome in anyone who wants to check out what you have going on. You’re supposed to have control of your plot.
That’s why I built ManyStories. As a writer myself, I wanted to be able to publish anywhere but share all my stories in one place for readers to discover and engage with me. If readers want to learn more about me, they can always venture to my plot of land on the internet. If I ever want to stop publishing in one place, such as Medium, and publish on another, such as WordPress, I could do that without losing my readers. ManyStories enables that and will strive to more closely achieve that for writers. But you need to have your own plot.
You need to also publish on your own blog, where you have full control. Nobody can stop you from having your stories beneficially embedded on another website because you fully control it.
You can try these writing platforms that don’t wall in your content and try to control it:
- WordPress
- Ghost
That doesn’t mean stop publishing on Medium. Again, I believe in Medium and have a vested interest in its success, so I want this relationship to work out for you. However, don’t believe them when they say they are the only ones that can fulfill your every needs. Tyrants and abusive lovers never actually believe that themselves.
P.S. Shadow banning is real. However, this is not an accusation of such against Medium.
P.S.S.S. I wrote and published this in one sitting today (as usual). I’ll polish later, but feel free to help me out if you see a typo.
