Brother Can You Spare a Follower?
From Medium Hero to Medium Zero
These are most likely my last days on Medium before they kick me out. I’ll no longer be a “partner” writing and writing for a few dollars a month. Which of course is far below minimum wage for providing quality content. Of course, I do in part blame myself. I didn’t even know I was a top writer in Black Lives Matter until Medium told me. I should have done more. We live in an age of self-promotion, which isn’t my forte, and I haven’t figured out to join some Medium forums or “magazines” to get more views. But Silicon Valley stands behind it all, not just one company.
So, I’ll try to raise some followers; if you can spare a click, see below.
I really tried to make an honest effort at quality writing, and I thank those readers who gave thoughtful comments. But Medium has changed its mind about me, or rather, Silicon Valley has. In just two months. It turns out that even trying for quality isn’t profitable for the Valley, where writers are paid less than fraction of a cent per word, far below market value.
I started last January with good hopes in 2021. There really wasn’t a neutral platform for aspiring ‘normal’ writers trying to engage ‘real’ readers directly outside the confines of established media, even on the internet. I poked around the internet and didn’t just want to be a commentator.
Twitter, Reddit, YouTube comments, various news sites — all these seemed to me as very short form jabs, places where knee jerk reactions happened to headline. They pay nothing and feed on outrage. On Medium it’s different I feel: flame wars of a minor kind could and do occur. But it encourages longer sustained thought, what I now know to be a 3–5-minute read, or slightly longer, 7–12 minute.
Sustained writing and reading takes some thought, structure, cognitive commitment beyond a mere reaction, which fizzles out after a few sentences. Thoughts must concentrate around a theme, ideas must tack into a narrative, concrete reflections and examples call out to tie lofty abstract ideas more to earth. It takes effort to drum up the myriad skills writing demands, to establish a self, to find new voices. The ‘cognitive load’ is more serious than commentating. Thus, many responses on Medium are fairer than elsewhere, are by writers who go through this writing process, understand the struggle, and tend toward thoughtful comments and responses.
Thus, when I searched for a place to write in longer former and read directly from people striving to write the same, I really could only find Medium. There’s commenting on one extreme, and professional magazine writing on the other. I liked the challenge of writing on the platform and was motivated by earning a few dollars. And I mean just a few — five or ten. But that was enough to sustain my excitement and keep it going.
That’s all changed because of the blow I’ve been dealt. I chalk it up to the continue pressure Silicon Valley companies have to dispense of values and aspirations that drove them and to monetize content, even other people’s content created for them. I don’t blame it on Medium. They are the one to hold out if anything in all the media companies starting up.
Facebook is the main model and master to monetization getting others to make free content: a master of taking pictures and snippets from users and turning it into billions of profits per quarter, acting as a channel that moves content given to them but not providing their own. Quora emulates this, moving a bit toward Medium in having long responses to questions asked by users, not staff. It pays nothing for responses though and only a pittance for generating questions. Maybe Medium should allow small ads at the bottom of articles and split the profit with readers. I’m not sure how I feel about that idea, as I like the current model, but I do understand the pressure of growth.
That’s why I am offering something like ads: I just learned I will be kicked off Medium for not getting 100 followers in March. I write for pleasure, to explore new ideas, and don’t make a living off it. It is sad to see Medium kick people out under their new policy, the second change I see occurring.
Companies that provide long form writing by subscription with intense pressure to grow cannot meet unlimited growth expectations. The venerable New Yorker Magazine has 1.2 million subscribers, probably less than Medium. Unlimited growth expectation can be done only by short snippets of super charged emotions like rage, outrage, cute children’s photos, pictures of vacations and posed plates of food. While I enjoy short clips of cute cats and babbling two-year-olds in one minute YouTube shorts, those are not main meals, more like sorbet to clean the palette between main dishes.
So, after a year, it seems like I ran out the clock. I didn’t have enough time. I was trying to develop a portfolio and not just post for headlines and crafty clickbait. I haven’t been aggressive at all in building followers yet. I think a year is just not enough time.
It’s funny, because just at the end of the year, I kid you not, I got an email from Medium congratulating me on being a top writer on Black Lives Matter. I was pleasantly shocked. But from that email to this new in February one telling me I’ll be kicked out of the Partner Program, I was vastly disappointed. In them, not myself. I just wished they’d hold that line. They seemed to be so non-Silicon Valley.
But the intensity of being in San Francisco where they are headquartered may have pressured them to monetize at a great rate at expense of their values. That is the hard fact about Silicon Valley and not a negative criticism. Remember Google: Do No Evil. Maybe you didn’t even know that was their original tagline.
Here’s what Medium wrote me back in December that was inspiring: “Bren Kelly, you’re a top writer in the topic of BlackLivesMatter.
Your writing is popular with readers — keep up the good work! The BlackLivesMatter topic page and your profile will now highlight you as a top writer, as well.” It’s true, I just looked at the bottom of my profile and they added this tag.
From December to February, the darkness of a second COVID winter apparently hit them along with their neighbors like Apple and Facebook experiencing stratospheric stock valuations ($2.6 Trillion on Apple — really?). I’m lucky for now to have a decent living; I can sustain my morals and values. I wish more for others just starting out to get more of a chance.
