I Cancelled The Medium Membership Because I feel like I am being scammed.
By: Tony Yeung
Tags: Brand Strategy, Business, Social Media, Medium, Writing

I have used Medium since 2012 when it started. I thought it was a great idea from Ev Williams because I could explain my idea more than 140 characters.

Sadly, there are numbers of things to show that Medium does not care its loyal users, included me. The new paid member only section just looks like a scam.

Here are some of my Medium experiences that are really disappointed me.

2012: Collection Issues

At the time when I joined, Medium looks like an article version of Pinterest. I could share the same article at different collections (now it is called publications).

However, such sharing practice caused serious issues.

One of the major issues was to create the duplicate contents, and the search engines, such as Google, might consider the contents as spam. The practice also raised the content ownership issue. It’s great to share good contents to different people in order to submit the story at the different collections, but it could be confusing when the story was duplicated in the different collections.

Medium noticed the issue and changed the policies that each story can only be in one publication in order to avoid duplicate contents. Also the writers have more power to control their contents.

There are other solutions to solve the duplicate contents. However, they chose a bad yet easy solution to fix the problem. I ended up getting many complains from the writers who sent me email regarding submitting their story to my collections.

The change was chaos for the users with a number of popular collections at the time. I received over 100 emails every day about the issues of my collections, and the issue was not from me. I wish I could solve it, but I couldn’t. I replied all these people’s email and said:

Medium will fix the issues soon. Medium is a great platform for sharing your idea. At this time, it has many errors because the team has been improving the platform. Please be patient.

All these complaints went to my personal email inbox, and it lasted few months, but I needed to take extra time without getting paid for telling the angry writers be patience.

“Am I really deserved all the complaints?” I asked myself a few times. Medium Staff would not know how much works I did to manage my collections, but Medium Engineering could easily change and kill my collections.

My collections or publications are all zombies or deadpoles.

2013–2015: Partnership For Revenes, Medium’s Handpicks

During 2013–2015, a number of big companies joined Medium to promote their business. Influenced writers from inc. magazine, Washington Post, joined Medium, and many well-known people also joined Medium to share their story. Medium paid lots of attention to them and recommended, shared, also every single contents from them to everyone to boost the traffic for them.

However, Medium staff just ignored the loyal users’ content and rarely helped this group of users to share their contents. How the bloody hell do we know what these staffs like to read? Their interest of reading could have a certain level of biases. To be honest, I barely read those Medium’s Handpick because I am not interested in those topics, but it doesn’t mean that they are not great. In the similar way, Medium’s staffs may not be interested in my contents but it does not mean my contents are not great.

Even the system suggested me to read based on my interest is problematic. In order to suggest the audience to read the story, the system would firstly look at the number of recommendation. Most of the time, these suggestion readings from the system have already over 50 recommendations. For most of the freelancing writers, it is almost impossible to have that many recommendations for their contents. At worse, all those influence writers, Larry Kim, Jason Fried, Arianna Huffington, etc can easily promote their story because they either work for a well-known media companies, run a successful company, or have a big group of followers on their social media platforms. Once when they share their contents or links to these high-traffic websites or their social media platforms, there are plenty of people click it and read them. And the system or Medium Staff would pick them first.

I am really pissed off. Medium, seems to me, becomes a platform to help all these well-known people to promote their contents.

There were so many great contents from many writers, but their contents end up going to the shithole where nobody cared or visited.

As I own a few publications, I have been trying to help these writers to promote their contents. However, the result is not great.

Because of all these policies on Medium, I started to pay less attention to Medium during this time of period. I decided to have full control of my contents at my website instead of only publish on Medium.

2016–2017: Member-Only Stories

At the end of 2016, Ev Williams introduced the membership and member-only stories. He asked everyone to join the membership for $5 per month.

At first, the membership got my attention to Medium again. The idea is great because it could keep the website ad-free. However, it is not that good at all.

After I pay the membership, the UI is confusing. First, how does the system determine which contents show more and less (i.e. the contents have bigger cards at each section)? We have no clue.

Second, the UI design seems to force people to click the bigger cards than the smaller cards. The bigger cards could have preview images while the smaller cards only have the text previews. Content is the king; the story with images would get more attention than the story without any image. That is really unfair to the good writers.

Third, the users cannot click the recommend button at the new feed anymore. We have to click the website and read the contents and click the recommendation.

Fourth, I don’t like the morning, afternoon, evening edition. I am a nightowl. I like to read at the evening before going to bed instead of reading in the morning. What if I miss the morning edition and it have something I like to read? What if there is nothing I like in the evening edition but I have time to read? I can’t go back to read the previous editions.

Fifth, the problem of the members-only stories is bad. As a loyal user who has used Medium since 2012, I didn’t get any chance to publish my contents in member-only section at the first place. Instead, I only received the few marketing emails from Medium of which asking every user to apply the Medium Partner Program and asking for every to join the paid member. The email was genius, it told you how good and high-quality of contents I published on Medium, and I exclusively received the invitation to join the writer reward program. Once when I joined, there is no exact timeframe to tell me how long it would take for the decision. The endless waiting seriously turned me off.

Sixth, the members-only stories section are not even ready yet. All the member-only stories need to be sent out from email but not showing up on Medium. When I received the email, none of these member-only stories got my attention. Instead, I was very angry and felt like this is a scam. I immediately went to my account and cancelled my membership by the end of April 2017.

Last Words

Sorry Medium, Medium Staff, Medium Engineering, and Ev Williams. The Medium idea is great, but for 4 years, Medium has released many disappointments. The loyal users or customers are very important to every brand. They are the one who support the brand. When you don’t treat the loyal users well, it is your lost. I cancelled my membership. I feel like I am being scammed. I don’t think I will join again.