Why I left Medium

I've been posting here on Vocal for almost 5 years. It feels like time has flown, and I could never be more grateful to be able to publish and monetize my scribbles and thoughts here.

But, what if I told you that my journey as a blogger did not start here? You're right, my very first (serious) blogging platform was Medium. I first discovered it in 2021, some months before Vocal, and I started publishing my first articles there through their Partner Program.

However, after a few months, I have decided to completely switch to Vocal, as well as other platforms like Substack, and I'll tell you all my reason in this article. Before getting to the reasons, I want to clarify that I have not logged in to Medium in a while, so some features might have changed.

Their paywalling criteria felt limiting

By entering the Partner Program, you get to monetize your articles. In this case, your article can be visible only to people who have the Premium version of Medium, whereas the other users can only see the title and cover image.

As someone with zero readership and who was just starting out, it felt incredibly limiting. How am I supposed to get readers if the articles cannot be read by everyone? How am I supposed to get some sort of revenue if I do not paywall them?

At the time, I was not aware of how affiliations and pledging worked, so having a platform that allowed monetization while leaving the content accessible to anyone was crucial, and Vocal proved to be the right one.

Another valid platform in this sense is Substack, where you also have multiple monetization options, and you can also paywall your articles in smaller amounts to grab your readers'attention.

Their monetization guidelines were too vague

If you're posting on Vocal, you're probably familiar with their guidelines about payments. While the amount you get per read is fairly low, I appreciated that said amount was stated clearly, because on Medium I have struggled a lot to understand how much I would be getting per read.

Sometimes I would get a lot of reads but very little money, and sometimes the opposite. We are talking about cents, nothing groundbreaking, but the whole situation made it hard for me to set goals and analyze what was actually working among my posts.

Their liking system also made everything worse. On Medium, you do not have regular likes, but you can "applaud" a post, and you can do it more than once. This means that your post can get 100 applauses from a couple readers alone, so it's not easy to understand how many people actually read your posts by looking at the applauses alone.

This complaint might sound superficial, but if you're a blogger one of your main success indicators is the number of people who read your story. If you're unable to decipher that and the way it affects your revenue streams, it will be harder to plan the future direction of your blog.

Two problematic tendencies related to content

When I left Medium, I also did so because I was discouraged because I thought my content was not in the "right niche" for the platform. Can you guess what the most popular niche was?

Exactly, it was the whole "how to get rich" niche, declined in different undertones - how to make money on Medium, how to get rich using AI, how to get rich using an ebook, you name it.

By creating the communities, Vocal was more encouraging, because it showed that you can write in your preferred niche(s) and there is going to be someone willing to read you, even if you do not write about getting rich quick schemes.

The cherry on top: I was attacked by trumpies in a comment section completely unprompted, the same trumpies that now claim that they are being "censored" on Medium for spewing their hateful content. The fuckfaces are the victims of censorship, but they had no issue attacking a person stating a simple fact that can be read on any possible news outlet out there.

Among the other negative reviews, some mention accounts that deliberately steal content from other account or articles written entirely with ChatGPT that none bothers to remove or sanction, because there is no content moderation whatsoever. Getting back to trumpies for a moment, how heinous can your content be if you manage to get banned from such a laxe platform?

Either way, with Vocal my experience was the exact opposite: love it or hate it, the moderation team proved to me multiple times that they make an effort to check what's being published, by asking questions on my content, by taking it longer than usual to approve an article, et cetera.

On Substack, such moderation does not really exist, but on the platform there is also a strong anti-AI community, as the website has been recently earning a reputation as the ultimate "anti-brainrot" community, so using AI and stealing content is not well-received.

These were the reasons why I left Medium back then in favor of Vocal and Substack. If you're planning to start out on Medium, I hope my criticism and experience was helpful, but obviously consider all the pros and the cons that work for you first and read about other points of view as well!

I hope you enjoyed this shorter piece, towards the beginning of March I'll be posting a longer piece, so if you're interested subscribe to stay updated!

Have you tried Medium? Did it work for you? Let me know in the comments below!