Goodbye, Medium

Why I am leaving Medium after five years of self-publishing

My last article wasn’t considered good enough to be curated into any topic category, despite being viewed over 20,000 times and having over 5,000 applause. It even included cover art that was an incredible illustration inspired by and created just for the article by a very talented illustrator. Would you like to know why it wasn’t curated? I did. The answer is Medium wants to prevent writers from earning money in any way but through a paywall.

As you know, we have our publicly available Curation Guidelines, so always make sure you are writing with those in mind. Your story was not chosen for additional distribution because it violates one or more of the guidelines: Patreon/crowdfund links and affiliate links. Even posts that meet the minimum criteria may not be selected for additional distribution. Curators are looking for the absolute best quality posts, which is inherently subjective. We understand it can be a mysterious process. We are working on improving our feedback channels, but at this time we are unable to provide editing or advice on why a story was not chosen.

Patreon provides a stable monthly income to writers like me by enabling fans of my writing to directly support and enable my writing. Medium wishes to force writers to use their paywall, which provides an irregular, undependable source of income that can vary greatly month to month. Medium is therefore promoting economic insecurity for their own benefit.

I have been publishing here since my first article in 2014. Every single article I’ve ever written has included a link to my Patreon, including all five of my articles that have been curated. I have been welcomed and interviewed inside of Medium HQ before. The Basic Income topic exists here in large part because of all of my articles with hundreds of thousands of views which have popularized Medium as a place for articles about basic income.

I am incredibly disappointed to see that in 2019 Medium has grown into a company that wants to limit the ways in which self-published writers earn money by limiting full readership potential to those who only earn money through their paywall, and not through Patreon or a combination of other sources.

Writers need dependable income and paywall income is not dependable. It also encourages low quality click-bait content. Ad-driven income for a single article fades away. Subscription-based income is far more stable. Medium knows that, which is why they switched to a subscription model themselves. Medium wants what’s good for them and bad for writers, and because of that, this is the last thing I will ever publish to Medium. I will never publish here again and I welcome other writers to leave too, especially my fellow Patreon creators, who may not even know why their content they are working so hard to create is not being curated.

I am voluntarily giving up an audience here of over 26,000 readers, but because I have a monthly basic income, I have the freedom and economic security to walk away from this relationship. I will start over from scratch and build up a new readership base elsewhere.

For all 26,000 of my Medium followers, if you would like to continue reading my articles, whenever and wherever I post them, please subscribe to my newly launched news flash to get email alerts. Thank you.