Not Another Success Guide for Medium Writing
Medium has a long way to go in order to be considered as an unbiased publishing platform
After having asked and answered many questions in ResearchGate for seven years I decided to write in Medium, just for a change and because I realized that so many years of voluntary work were enough for the moment.
I knew its existence from a website which mentioned a 17M reads article about Coronavirus on early March 2020. The article was written by a self-declared billionaire who had claimed later that he wrote it by its own in half an hour, just a joke I guess for all of us who have been writing many years around the World websites.
Since my scientific background was directly relative to the so called “sigmoid curves”, which have an S-shape form, I decided to study deeper the COVID-19 spread by using the cumulative data sets available form John Hopkins University online. After working hard and creating my own graphics, I posted the first story but, despite my efforts, it was “Not distributed in topics”.
Then a saga of Medium-guides began to rise in front of me.
Since my first day in Medium I have received 426 emails, some of them are for just confirming my registration while the majority of them are suggesting me to read articles. I am presenting here just two main categories of such articles, since they have been approved by Medium itself, although they violate its rules.
How to earn money by rewriting Medium help pages
When I was searching for answering questions about the way Medium wants an article to have been written, if you want to have a chance to be curated and distributed in topics, I had always been finding articles from an author — who I am not going to mention here — that were just a re-writing of the Medium guides for authors.
I didn’t give any attention for the moment, however when I read the Medium rules, I realized that those articles were violating many of them and specifically the one which states that “Posting duplicate content, whether from a single account or across multiple accounts” is prohibited. Additionally those posts violated another rule, that of “No clickbait”, since almost in every single paragraph such a “clickbait” was present for another author’s Medium article about “help”!
It is not necessary to read Medium help pages by using the eyes of another person since such a slight modification will not give you any additional value and it is not ethical to re-write already written rules, just for receiving traffic and revenue from the beginners. After all, it is supposed that you have the ability to read the author guides of whatever website you are using and that is a daily routine now, especially after the recent General Data Protection Regulation.
How to write a story every day by following a given template
Then I found a story which was promising you to be curated and distributed in topics if you just follow a specific text flow template. Cliches that did not actually help you and — guess what — they were also violating Medium rules, this time the one which says that “No meta — no stories written about Medium” are not allowed and another one which prohibited “Use or re-use content templates with slight modifications across multiple posts and accounts”.
After all, if such a guide tends to be a successful one, then Medium’s quality will tend to Tartarus, ie its value tends to zero, since neither the screening algorithm or the “team of curators” was able to recognize such a garbage collection.
Follow my way, it is the safest path to failure!
There are many other advises for success here in Medium and I am not going to present them all, because then I’ll support their reason of existence: to make money from beginners or disappointed users.
The problem is not that there exist such guides, the problem is that Medium algorithms or even worse “the team of curators” promotes those guides towards the emails of members. It is at least a clear self violating process:
- Medium announces pompously its list of rules
- Medium self violates those rules by curating and sending articles which clearly violate the rules
So it is a ludicrous situation, at least. Or somebody could argue that it is a totally non transparent process, since:
- Real rules for choosing an article to be curated are not published
- When an article is being rejected, even if you ask for, no reason for rejection is given to you
- Articleς that clearly violates many publishing rules have been curated and distributed in topics
- There exists a clear political position against Trump: articles that blame Trump have more possibilities to be curated, even if they do not pass other quality checks
Medium has a long way to go in order to be considered as an unbiased publishing platform.
So, please, don’t read the stories that promise you a success in Medium!
Instead, write your own stories, follow the technical guides and don’t worry, some day they will be distributed in topics …
