Personal Reflection

Why Does Writing About Writing Kill The Creative Ecosystem?

Or: Teach a man to write 5 times a week and feed yourself for a lifetime.

I always enjoyed Medium. I published my first article here in 2013, back when it was a tiny little place. That piece was very dramatic and, in fact, about my sad teenage breakup but that’s not the main point. I’ve said it to affirm you that I‘m a long-time user of this platform’. Mostly reading, lately writing as well.

And boy oh boy, did I scream like a kid who got an Xbox on Christmas when Medium introduced their brand new Medium Partner Program to the world. Because now thousands of great writers should populate Medium to bring even more insightful writings and smart thoughts to our writing bay, right?

Well…both yes and no. It definitely worked but in time things started to change, and those changes weren’t always great. Let me give a quick retrospective of how it all evolved from the start of the MPP to the present day.

EARLY DAYS

The rush of the new talents during the first wave was huge. Old school writers who already established their own audience also benefited from those new monetization possibilities. In fact, they benefited the most. Which is quite reasonable because they were here ‘before it was cool’.

Everything was nice, the audience base was growing exponentially, variety and quality of the content increased a lot. Of course, I speak from my personal perspective but I think that most of the people who were there from ‘before the money came’ times will agree.