wordsmith.social/jonbeckett

Late last year I signed up for the “partner programme” at Medium. If you've not heard of Medium, or it's partner programme, I'll quickly explain.

Medium is an online publishing platform where anybody can publish writing either under their own name, or within a “publication”. Anybody can create a publication, and invite others to submit work to it (those that run publications are essentially editors). The partner programme involves a monthly subscription fee – which works in concert with a pay-wall.

If you're in the partner programme, you can choose to put your writing behind the pay-wall – meaning people without paid accounts cannot read your stories. If somebody with a paid account reads your story, and more importantly likes it, or gives feedback, you earn a small part of their subscription fee.

It sounds great doesn't it – a community where the wealth is shared among the authors. I thought so for months. I poured my heart and soul into writing thoughtful stories about information technology, psychology, sociology, mindfulness, and whatever other subjects came to mind. I experimented, explored, and began earning money.

At some point Medium introduced a form of introduction kick-back – where if you convince somebody to sign up for a paid account, you earn a percentage of any money their writing earns. Again, it sounds great.

Here's my problem with the Medium partner programme, and why I will be reverting to a free account in the new year: the audience for articles behind the paywall are other authors in the partner programme – whose interest in your writing is predicated almost entirely by attracting attention to their own content.

It's all remarkably incestuous – with authors grifting each other in a recursive race to the bottom. Huge swathes of content are posted each day advising what to write, how to write, and how to market in pursuit of the greatest return. The entire platform has turned into a sausage machine that eats its own output.

The journey hasn't been entirely without value. Before the first-party publications were torn down by those atop the Medium pyramid, professional editors oversaw article submissions to popular publications. Access to tens of thousands of readers could only be acquired by meeting stringent style, grammar and punctuation requirements. Grammarly became my friend, and I learned the many and various common mistakes in my own writing.

I'm lucky. Writing is not my primary source of income. It never was. I don't rely on the monetary return from my words. For me it was always an experiment. I suppose in some ways I was flattered by the idea of people paying to read my words, but when those readers failed to become a community of any sort, I realised the true nature of the platform.