We Need To Talk About The Actual Medium.com Writing Experience
In where I talk about copyright and distribution pitfalls, the paywall, “exposure” and scratch the surface of the mess that is Medium.
Medium, is, in fact, such a mess that it’s earnestly hard to choose where to even start. The massively unfair advantage it gives to already long-established platforms — not even individual authors, entire platforms that effectively make up Medium’s own competition — such as The Atlantic or Jeff Fucking Bezos that can use their clout to dominate the front page and drown out actual individuals? Is it that when individuals actually do make it to the front page it’s for endless Trump fluff, random clickbait, COVID-baiting (on both sides) or someone completely and totally incapable of anything of substance whatsoever (no, seriously, read his shit. He draws you in with the super-serious clickbait title and then baits-and-switches with “look at how fucked America is, let’s have a laff, ‘mate”. I swear to God, go look for yourself, if you can spare the free clicks)? The fact that these add up to make Medium look like any other clickbait-factory on the face of the Earth, destroying much of its unique creator-centric appeal and livability in the first place? Or that Medium’s ability to deliver real actual news has been permanently compromised by this?
Let’s start with the one thing that actually affects you the most — no, not how brushing a banana three times a day might help protect you from getting COVID from your estranged uncle who lives 1,300 miles away, or how Trump will use this one weird trick to overturn the election results in the middle of March 2021 now.
It’s about what you own verses what Medium owns.
Medium went through a big Terms of Service update last September. Let’s see what it says right under “Rights and Ownership”:
You retain your rights to any content you submit, post or display on or through the Services.
Ok, that seems to check out.
Unless otherwise agreed in writing, by submitting, posting, or displaying content on or through the Services, you grant Medium a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid, and sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your content in all media formats and distribution methods now known or later developed on the Services.
…ummmm….
Medium needs this license because you own your content and Medium therefore can’t display it across its various surfaces (i.e., mobile, web) without your permission.
…ummmmmmmm…
This type of license also is needed to distribute your content across our Services. For example, you post a story on Medium. It is reproduced as versions on both our website and app, and distributed to multiple places within Medium, such as the homepage or reading lists. A modification might be that we show a snippet of your work (and not the full post) in a preview, with attribution to you. A derivative work might be a list of top authors or quotes on Medium that uses portions of your content, again with full attribution. This license applies to our Services only, and does not grant us any permissions outside of our Services.
…ummmmmmmmmm….
Yeah let’s unpack all this.
What Medium is really saying is: you own all the rights to anything you publish on Medium. And then immediately contradict that for the next several paragraphs.
It’s right there in (mostly) plain language: Medium is arbitrarily taking all the rights to distribute, reproduce, modify, remix or create entirely new works from anything you display on Medium. By them taking away total control of these rights, you now therefore have no rights.
You’ve effectively surrendered ownership of anything you display on Medium to Medium. Fuck the bullshit line about “you retain your rights to any content submitted to Medium”, without the ability to determine how your work is displayed, distributed or remixed/recreated (beyond what is commonly accepted under “Fair Use” doctrine) you no longer have rights, control or effective ownership over such content.
And believe me, this goes far and above “Fair Use”. How do I know? Because Medium is making money off it. Also, what effectively amounts to an iron-grip control over its distribution.
Oh yeah, that’s not true, you’re thinking. It’s the responsibility of the creator to distribute that content.
…yeah, to distribute a link with “Medium” right there in the URL, so that people can log on to Medium in order to view your “distributed” content, provided that they’ve literally paid their way in.
See the issue now?
Let me repeat: Medium owns all your content on Medium.
And notice that I didn’t say “posts” or “articles”. I mean, literally, all of your content. Including your user name and profile picture.
Don’t believe me? It’s right there, again in plain writing:
…and display your content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your content in all media formats and distribution methods now known or later developed on the Services.
Is all this perfectly legal? It absolutely is! Is this unethical? …it may surprise you, especially given all this bluster so far, but I’d be willing to debate if it really is all that unethical. After all, this is really no different whatsoever from most websites in practice, from random forums to Reddit to the comments section of a YouTube video. Or for that matter, Medium’s old Terms of Service. And in practice it’s not a big issue on content ownership since, like most such websites, Medium does indeed exercise fair practices when it comes to display or remix/creation of spun-off content of anything you post on Medium.
But where it does matter is distribution, particularly the clunky way Medium insists on in order to justify and feed its own paywall. It’s the worst of both worlds: you’re stuck with your own self-promotion as if you were running your own blog, website or YouTube channel, but you don’t get any of the 100% ownership, 100% profits-come-to-you model that running a truly independent website, blog, or channel would bring you. The Medium juggernaut just sits back and scoops up the profits.
In a way, it kind of reminds me of Non-Fungible Tokens. Now sure, it’s not like Medium could outright “steal” your work and distribute it as they see fit, for however it benefits themselves (although in legal theory they could come close and suffer no penalty whatsoever)but if anything it’s the exact opposite problem: Medium is “curating” your work, very carefully, in a single place, and it’s your job to distribute all that work.
…that they’re carefully “curating” in a single place, that they’re making very hard to disturb or even enter.
Yeah.
So let’s run down the issues here:
— In theory, Medium has in practice more ownership of your work than you do.
— This justifies them “curating” all of your work behind a paywall in order to incentivize readers to pay into access.
— It’s your job to distribute your own work, but part of that “distribution” process is convincing readers to buy into that paywall access.
— You’re just some rando trying to convince such readers that this isn’t just your personal blog and that you’re actually a “legitimate journalist” and it’s actually worth literally buying into.
You can see the problem too, right?
So What’s The Solution?
…there isn’t one. Nada. Zilch. Bupkiss. At least as far as “solving” these problems on Medium is concerned. It’s very clear that this is the direction they believe will maximize profits on their end.
What I can offer are workarounds, alternatives and just some general advice.
What if I Want to Stay on Medium?
…I would be very, very careful about what I post on here.
…So Ok, What Should or Shouldn’t I be Posting/Writing on Medium then?
First let’s go over what I strongly recommend you shouldn’t be posting.
No originally creative works, for starters. This means no art, no poems, no short stories/flash fiction, certainly not full-length novels (though I don’t know who would anyway) and I’d even shy away from personal blog posts.
The reasons are twofold: one, that ownership issue, and you really should maintain total control of any creative works you’re passionate about and how they’re distributed. A related issue is “First Publication Rights”. That’s a very important thing, and whenever you publish anything on Medium or any other site, you’re surrendering those First Publication Rights by default, no matter what the Terms of Service says.
Second, it’s that distribution thing. I’d consider a subissue of that first point and “First Publication Rights,” really. If you think it’s worth sharing with, then people need to have fundamental access to it. If you think it’s so good people need to be willing to pay for access, then consider more traditional routes of publication such as zines, agency representation or websites or organizations that specialize in that thing, as they will not only have more fair payment terms but will be more willing to actually help you distribute and promote the work.
So what should you be actually writing on Medium then?
— Topical news items
Being topical, these have too short a “shelf life” to really warrant trying everything you can do to fully protect your rights anyway, and distribution and monetization should be a top priority. Also being topical, they can be pretty short too, so a relatively minimum investment of your time. Furthermore, their topical nature and newsworthiness makes them more palatable and likely to have people want to click on them, whether they’ve bought into the paywall or not. It’s somewhat easy to present yourself as a credible, legitimate journalist, especially if you know what you’re doing. Moreover, and perhaps paradoxically, the paywall-distribution blockage is less of an issue because everyone is writing about it anyway, so the amount of additional exposure you’d get if you were writing it for another source wouldn’t be much more anyway, so might as well stick to a model that promises some form of payout, eventually.
— Topical Op/Ed
Again, being topical, everything above applies here too. Maybe someone wouldn’t be so impressed with the prospect of seeing “your unique take” on a hot political or cultural topic, but then again, maybe someone will. And again, unlike a free Blogspot the Medium model at least promises some form of payout, eventually.
— Something That is of Such Issue, You Need to Spread the Word Out NOW
There’s an issue that you really need to let as many people know about as possible. Maybe you want to warn fellow Boomers of the dangers of this new trend Millennials and Gen Z’ers/Whatever The Fuck We’re Going to Call Them Now are doing, like trying to sniff car exhaust to get high, or something. Maybe you have a scientific piece about how wearing 13 layers of this one type of facemask protects you from COVID better than wearing 13 layers of that other type of facemask, or on trends like how only one million people got infected today instead of one million and one. Or maybe you want to talk about how great a candidate up for election or reelection is because they’re running on the platform that COVID is just a vast conspiracy to get the U.S. to sign the Paris Climate Agreement again, which in turn is just a conspiracy to shield the fact that the Earth is indeed actually flat, and that God has been Joaquin Phoenix all along, and also something about jobs. Or maybe you just want to do a topical or relevant product or pop culture review, like maybe how suddenly deciding to film a movie in the middle of a mass-quarantine under extremely creatively compromised circumstances and drawing criticism about flaunting such privilege during such circumstances might not be the best idea ever hit upon. You need to get that word out fast, and if nothing else, clunky distribution system and paywall or not, Medium is at least there, so you can start writing and “publishing” now instead of trying to set up your own website or find another distribution platform.
You may have noticed a common theme here:
— time sensitive
— of extremely low or nil value once that time sensitivity has expired
— at least Medium is there, right now
So yeah, that’s what I’d recommend you’d publish on Medium.
Ok Great, But What About Non-Crappy Advice?
Now you’re talking actual alternatives to Medium. Here you go. I’m going to be ultra-lazy and not commit plagiarism here, so you can just read that link for a decent list.
So there. Write stuff you absolutely don’t really care about on Medium, and try to find an alternative. Now you’re informed, have fun.
