Leaving Medium
Recently I quit my Medium Membership. I tried Medium because I liked the Idea of having something that could replace my timehungry habit of watching youtube videos about things I like with reading about those things. The concept in itself mostly works, but I really dont get warmed up to the algorithm medium uses to serve you its content. Maybe its because when reading something you are more engaged with the content than when you just watch a video of something that makes me question the quality of the content Im shown or the algorithm is just not as perfected as googles. In the end I dont like the stories Im shown. The storys that I read are often about some AI stuff, which I have some curiosity in but do not want to hear about day in and out. It seems like the algorithm thinks that I dont want to read anything else because I clicked on some AI adjacent article out of curiosity once or twice.
Even if until now this may sound as if everything were bad there are very good articles on Medium. One of my favourite Writers on there is Alex Rowe who reviews video games and sometimes some gaming hardware he bought for himself. His articles are absolutely great, witty and always add new things to the discourse about the game that you didnt really hear until you read Alexs article about said game or thing.
A long time he was the main reason I kept my Medium subscription and I probably passed about 90% of what was suggested otherwise to me by the platform, but in the end I couldnt justify paying monthly for a platform if its basically just one writer that I want to read.
There are two sad things about this. One is that because of Mediums closed nature and because of Mediums ease of use for Writers Alex doesnt really write elsewhere where I could read his stuff and the second thing is that on Medium there most likely are many more Writers as talented as Alex Rowe that I just didnt get to read because the algorithm just showed me the same AI drama over and over again instead.
Of course thats a pity.
At the same time Medium isnt the typical evil internet company that is so trendy to hate on right now and there are valid arguments for its closed structure like the ability for writers to get paid for good writing. It is just that I would rather support one writer that I found on the free web and write than spend a monthly fee for some big overhead structure without knowing how much of my money actually gets transferred to the writers I would want the money to go to. I think however that by contributing directly to writers I like I would be part of a very small Minority as most open source projects, even ones of gigantic proportions like Blender have shown, see only a miniscule fraction of users contribute back by donating. I would be naive to think it would be any different when it comes to paying the writers you read even there maybe are some differences in spending habits between different target audiences.
Maybe Ill come back in a month or so, because all in all Medium hasnt been the worst experience, but at the moment Im just oversaturated with articles I dont like. And when Im back Ill have a backlog of articles to read from the writers I enjoy.