Why I Will Be Leaving This Platform

If I wanted to socialize in Facebook (or Metaverse as it’s now called), I wouldn’t waste $52/year on its clone

Ev Williams once had a great and noble vision: to create a platform that attracted readers to quality writing and didn’t run advertising. He took a chance that discerning bibliophiles would be willing to pay good money for a quality product. He was right. I was one such subscriber.

Because I wanted to be part of a community of writers who wrote better and more engaging works than I was doing, I began migrating some blog entires from my personal website to my Medium page. It worked. Other readers started following and leaving valuable feedback. I started reading Tessa Schlesinger, Dr. Mehmet Yildiz, and other veteran writers who gently but firmly guide newbies in the craft of blogging. I followed Synergy and Writers Blokke. To me, it was worth far more than a mere $52 annual fee. I mean, where can you get a top notch writing course with personal feedback from across a community of 175,000 content creators and 50 million readers for that price?

I’m not a newbie writer but I am a discerning reader and lifelong learner. I published my first short story in a high school publication in 1961 and my first hand-drawn illustration in a university publishing project in 1968, meticulously hand-setting the lead type and pulling the prints on an ancient letter press like Ben Franklin’s. I’ve earned a living in technical writing and translation for over 40 years: technical specifications, analysis, proposals, presentations, selling engineering services and managing projects; all the while worshipping at the altar of the corporate golden calf. It’s a discerning god that doesn’t pay for contentless writing. It’s the god of money.

Having become a contributor to Medium and managing to earn a modest living on this platform over the past nine months, the god of money advises that it’s no longer economic to continue here. When my monetary rewards plummeted by 80% in a single month since launch of the new business model but without any change in output on my part (minimum 2 articles per day, at least one achieving distribution per week), I just can’t ignore the writing on the wall.

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