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I declined to renew my Medium subscription a couple days ago. I had generally stopped visiting the site ages ago. My problem is not with Medium's paywall. In p
by mumblemumble 5y ago
I declined to renew my Medium subscription a couple days ago. I had generally stopped visiting the site ages ago.
My problem is not with Medium's paywall. In principle, I'm 100% fine with being asked to pay to read something that someone else wrote. $5 per month doesn't bother me; I would gladly give even more if I felt that it was supporting the production of high-quality media. I already give many times that much to my local NPR and PBS stations.
My problem with Medium is the pay-per-read model. They have eliminated the actual ads, but left in place all of the incentive structures favoring the production of low-value clickbait articles.
That said, I don't want to harsh on writers for choosing Medium. Sure, they could use Hugo to slap together a blog. But, in order to get paid, they would probably end up needing to drop in Google ads, and end up with much the same situation that exists with Medium, only perhaps minus the access to an audience, and plus a bunch of other annoying ad network crap.
- GordonS 5y ago> They have eliminated the actual ads, but left in place all of the incentive structures favoring the production of low-value clickbait articles. This is my biggest beef with Medium - which isn't really a problem with Medium itself, but how certain "authors" are (ab)using it. It's quite often that I'll be googling for something, and end up at a Medium article - but it's 50/50 whether it's a good article, or a single paragraph of basic information that's been largely copy/pasted from somewhere else. There are lots of good articles on Medium, but the large quantity of articles that are basically SEO spam have me clicking through from Google less and less these days.