Publish on Medium and get ignored

Dear medium.com,

It must be Ev Williams’ very own words that describe you as:

“A place where the measure of success isn’t page views, but viewpoints.
Where the quality of the idea matters, not the author’s qualifications.”

But this is a lie. A half-truth at best. And I will tell you why.

With this article I recently became a first time author on Medium. It has in fact been a rather pleasant experience to draft and publish it. However, the mechanisms of creating attention on Medium are flawed and I feel obliged to point out the pitfalls to you. I am sure I am not the first person to do this―and of course my reasons are not disinterested. But you should recognise and address the problems, if you care about your suggested ‘empowering forces.’

This is my story:

1. Right after having published my article I received an e-mail from elizabeth tobey. Elizabeth thanked me for my story, advised me on how to level it up (BTW while simultaneously discouraging me by displaying an imaginary stats screen shot of an article with 10,519 Views & 284 Recs) and prompted me to keep on writing. All well and good. However, it would be nice if the reply address to your Head of Community Engagement’s message were not noreply@medium.com. And also, if when I point this out to yourfriends@medium.com, I’d actually hear back from my new friends;
2. I’ve chosen Medium on recommendation of a colleague and due to the opportunity of bringing things out to the world with―as it appears―few obstacles blocking the way. But I am unlikely to become a regular author. Although as an academic writing is part of my job, there is little room both, in terms of themes and time to do more popular writing. However, if I don’t write regularly, the chances are zero that my occasional articles will be recognised by anyone. My article to date has been read mainly by people whom I’ve contacted directly: academics. Although they (might) have liked it, most have not bothered pressing the R-E-C-O-M-M-E-N-D button. Most don’t have a Medium or Twitter account anyway, disabling them from doing it much as they want to. Besides, my hope was to move beyond my original audience through Medium, but I think my chances of succeeding at this were slim to non-existent in the first place;
3. I, as many people outside the USA and especially in Germany, don’t use Twitter. I also don’t plan to create an account in the near future. Facebook in turn I use for private matters only and very little at that. And even if I did use Twitter or Facebook more intensely, a supposedly small-scale network of followers or virtual friends wouldn’t fundamentally change the situation I described in 2. Thus, Twitter and Medium have driven the democratisation of publishing and the expression of opinions, but they have also created new gatekeepers. The new gatekeepers are those that ‘naturally’ have a lot of authority due to their position in society or their experience in popular writing and the wide number of followers that result therefrom;
4. If someone doesn’t fall into either of the two categories, their articles will be ignored. One way of avoiding this, you suggest, is using tags. Fair enough. The trouble with my particular article on “Brexit, Trump and further political extremism” is that I consciously didn’t choose these buzzwords, since I argue they represent an undue reduction of complexity. For the same reason I have used some correspondingly unsensational tags, such as “US elections” versus “Donald Trump” (with a far wider reach). In short, I had read but was consciously disregarding the advice given for example by Tiffany Sun on catchy headlines―including the use of swear words, referring to sex, or proclaiming a specific number of easy solutions to our present problems (preferably 3 I guess, or 10 for the more complex ones)―or the information on popular tags by Ivana Kitanovic or that by Jessica Wang on their best use;
5. Another downside of my humble first contribution as regards mass appeal is its length. With a 17 MINUTES read indicated above the article, I assume even the most interested readers were scared off. Thousands of academics must have said this before, but: I couldn’t make it any shorter. However, I really mean it and not for my inability to put things short. It is the breadth of material my article tries to reconcile that its value is based on. Abandoning this breadth would have meant abandoning its very purpose;
6. If we take all the above together: any article similar to mine will attract 50 readers at the very best, and most likely none that the author didn’t know previously. In consequence such an article will never become an editor’s pick or be featured in one of your major publications―no matter how high the article’s quality;
7. and finally. Maybe I am already too old or tech-illiterate in my early 30s. But I couldn’t quite decipher how anyone, if interested in the subjects my article relates to, could get a good overview of such articles available on Medium. In other words: find an article outside the algorithm by which you choose to inform (or not inform) readers of new contributions. In the first few days I couldn’t find my very own. Not even with Google’s help, whom I always thought to instantly know everything about anything in the web. To me Medium is more of a maze of thoughts than a repository of knowledge, opinion and experience.

In a nutshell: I could just as well have written my first article up in a Word document and sent it via e-mail to a group of colleagues and friends and I would have been no worse off.

What you could do to improve this:

• Provide some better, that is more transparent, way for users to learn what is available on Medium and might be interesting to them, based on their own choice and not only your recommendations;
• Make it easier for people to like and share articles without being on Medium, Twitter or Facebook (oh yes, such people exist). I realise this is against your own interest and that one has to moderate participation on your platform in some way. But there must be alternatives complementary to the present solution;
• Perform an editorial screening and include ‘unpopular’ articles for potential featuring. In the system described above popularity is not necessarily a good indicator of high quality and some high quality work might deserve more popularity.

Otherwise Medium will be all about mo’exposure and mo’money (Kira Hug), hearts and minimal effort (nothing new or original required) (Larry Kim), people luring readers into their newsletter (Simon Owens), writing viral content―fast (Neal Samudre), and mentions (Joe Polastre)―and not about the power of ideas and viewpoints.

I guess I will have to live with the fact that I won’t be loved and admired by many for my first article on Medium. But it would be a source of consolation, if in principle this were possible as a first time or irregular author, who is not virtually omnipresent―based on the strength of the arguments made rather than anything else.

Many thanks if you’ve read up to hear and gradually more so, if you choose to respond or even act on this.

Best wishes,

Gorgi

I hope you’ve realised that I’m polemicizing (slightly so). And now all:
Recommend — recommend — recommend!