Is it worth it to cross-post on Medium in 2021?
Tags: meta, writing, watercooler, healthydebate
Published: 2021-05-18 18:01:39

Maybe, sometimes.


## The writing

- 👍🏼 Copy-pasting from DEV basically works
- 🤔 Except when you use DEV liquid tags, but that's understandable
- 👎🏻👎🏻 But Medium still does not support code snippets in 2021 and that's super lame. Instead of your article being a single source of truth, you have your article plus ten outside gist
- 🤔 Remember to use the option **Customize Canonical Link** to an URL on your personal website
- 😃 Don't have a personal website yet? The wonderful people at DEV/forem have partnered with Stackbit. I use it for https://jmfayard.dev/ with great joy. See https://dev.to/connecting-with-stackbit
- 👎🏻👎🏻 Medium uses a [Dark Design Pattern](https://www.darkpatterns.org/) to hide the **Customize Canonical Link** option. It's hidden in a submenu **....**, then the 10th entry called **More settings**, then you have to scroll completely to the bottom, wait it's still hidden behind **Advanced Settings**, then it's still hidden behind a checkbox, and only then do you find **Customize Canonical Link**. 

## The paywall

- 👎🏻 As a reader, I hate the Medium Paywall

- 🤔 But that would be OK if it actually gives writers sustainable income. There is a paywall to access the Financial Times articles, and it segregates between users who don't want to pay and hate it, and users who get lots of value from the FT and pay. And that's OK.

- 👍🏼 And sometimes, you get real money on Medium. My article [“What’s Your Current Salary?” Is a Red Flag That You Don’t Want to Work There](https://betterprogramming.pub/what-is-your-current-salary-is-a-red-flag-that-you-dont-want-to-work-there-8a4f19a91bf) got 21K view and I earned with it $923.36 to this day

- 🤔 But wait, there is a catch, it happened only once, and I have basically given up retrying

- 👎🏻 And that's because on Medium, **Publications have all the power**. If you publish on your own name, unless you are a celebrity, which I assume lots of my readers are, you will get few views and peanuts in terms of dollar

- 🤔 Isn't that normal if we follow the analogy of the FT paywall? Well no, let's be real here, Medium publications will not play the role of improving your writing the way a professional editor with a set of rules would. It's just one or few guys (probably not lots of women) who earn lots of followers

- 👎🏻 But actually publications don't earn the followers either, they just rent it to Medium. My friend at https://blog.kotlin-academy.com/ would like to move away from Medium, but it's only possible if you don't care about loosing all your readers. 

-  👎🏻 And I really disliked the experience of submitting to publications. You put lots of work in your content, you click submit, a random number of days later you get a message "*Thank you, but I will pass on this one*".

- 😃 On the other hand, if the publication owner is a friend, I would cross post to his publication.

- 🤔 I'm not sure readers get a ton of value from the content behind the paywall anyway. For example, my article [*What's Your Current Salary* is available freely on DEV](https://dev.to/jmfayard/what-is-your-current-salary-is-a-red-flag-that-you-don-t-want-to-work-here-3aji), and intentionally so.

- 👎🏻👎🏻 Medium uses another [Dark Design Pattern](https://www.darkpatterns.org/) to confuse people into using the paywall whether they want it or not. I have just published an article today under my company account https://medium.zenika.com/15-command-line-tools-which-spark-joy-in-your-terminal-ec420d770bcc It's part of the paywall, not because we chose to because even after following the help page, neither my colleague in charge of the publication nor I can find how to deactivate it.

## Summary

Cross-posting to Medium can be interesting for reach and sometimes for money, but there are big cons as well.

In general, it's not an enjoyable experience.

If you work at Medium, I think you should protest the lack of code snippets and even more against the dark patterns designed to screw the writers.