Why I left Medium Writing Platform?


There are numerous reasons why a writer should not be using Medium for a long period of time.

Scalability

The story started as the number of published articles and article drafts count increased. There is no way to search the in between the articles other than manually going through all the pages. As someone who likes to start a new article with every new idea that comes up to my mind, searching between hundreds of drafts started to overwhelm me when I returned back to finish my writings. Also, I had talked to the support team and waited over 1.5 years to get a simple search mechanism but no progress has been made on this problem.

Writer Support

Over time, I felt like almost there exist no extra care for the writers on the platform but for just the readers. Even though new features come along in a couple of months, almost no extra tool has been added over the 18 months I have used the Medium platform as a writer.

User Experience

The other problematic part of Medium is its rude notification system. As I the number of subscribers increased because of my software architecture related articles, over time I started to feel shy to publish on any other topic other than the software architecture.

The reason behind this is that the moment I publish a new article, Medium emails all of my subscribers and shows mobile notifications. The worst part is the missing support to specify who is my audience on an article or whether I would like to show this article on my profile or not.

There exists a few methods to hide articles. But, they hide the article altogether even from the search engines. After a few dozens of articles were published with strong courage, I started to keep the articles as drafts not to be rude to my subscribers. After the number of drafts reached over 500, I had to first transition to OneNote because of concerns relating to productivity.

Categorization of Drafts or Articles

There is no such thing as the categorization of the drafts and articles.

Limited Number of Publications

One can only own 7 publications. For a multi-dimensional writing experience, it is quite a low number of publications to own.

Publication Creation Requires Payment

Last but not least, users no more have the ability to create publications for free. While this is not a problem for the main account, it is problematic when you have multiple accounts.

Lack of Tools

As an extra point, there are almost no extra tools we can use to help increase our writing experience on Medium. The build-in article stats and third-party add-ons are quite limited and do not help much either.


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