I recently opened an account with Medium—the biggest publishing platform around. A well-known place to find great articles and amazing writers. Starting an account there is easy, but making money on Medium, that’s another story.
My reasons for opening the account are twofold. For one, I’m attempting to curate my “best” posts, make a collection of them, if you will. And two, I’m being a bit sneaky about dropping links that point back to our beloved platform. This being said, if at some point I can make some lunch money from Medium, I’ll celebrate the small win.
It’s not entirely clear how they calculate earnings there. They track reads, interactions, comments, and the membership fees they collect basically work as the tax to feed the reward fund. Maybe it goes without saying, but just in case: there’s no blockchain to inspect, if you will, nor code to check if any of this is true. But alas, so they claim, and hence I believe them?
However, I found myself reading an article posted by the administration at Medium. They’ve had to make important changes to how the allocation of payouts are calculated. They’ve also began cancelling spammy membership accounts, and from what I can tell, they are extremely common.
Who’da thunk that spam farms were there too? I mean—why wouldn’t there be spam farms there, right? From what I can gather, there are thousands of accounts paying their membership fee and interacting with other accounts, giving them reads and comments to help with allocation of rewards.
Their efforts look oddly familiar too.
Logic would dictate they adjust course. And they’ve also taken the time to lay down the new law for us, the mere mortals.
These rules also look strangely familiar, wouldn’t you say?
My point
I think we rob ourselves of the opportunity to feel gratitude for this place. We are tempted to focus solely on the negatives, because they do seem to be louder, but we do this forgetting there is no such thing as a perfect system.
Listen, if the most successful publishing platform in the world can’t have the hallways and their baseboards squeaky clean, then it’s probably not that healthy to focus so much on our being perfect.
As they say:
Don’t let perfect screw over great.
MenO