Medium Is A Ponzi Scheme In An Echo Chamber

This morning I got my Medium earnings report for the month of October, a month in which I increased my reads by about one thousand percent and spent forty hours researching and writing articles that I thought might be more popular based on past stats. Despite this I earned less than three dollars. About a third of the maximum I have earned in any given month since I started writing here. Somehow I worked harder, improved my readership and earned even less. On top of that, most of my reads came from my own promotional work elsewhere in social media. I was drawing new readers to this platform, which I guess draws absolutely no appreciation whatsoever.

Here is how Medium describes how it pays:

“Currently, Partner Program writers are paid every month based on how members engage with stories. Some factors include reading time (how long members spend reading a story) and applause (how much members clap). Each member’s $5/month subscription is distributed proportionally to the stories that the individual member engaged with that month. So if someone engaged with 10 stories in a given month, their monthly subscription would be distributed to those authors only.”

I mean, I cannot even afford to pay the $5 to be a member. Even if I spend a full work week writing the kinds of articles that have been popular in the past, I earn about half of what a membership costs. So how is anyone earning enough to make this worthwhile?

The answer is, they cannot be. Perhaps there are a few writers who pander so grotesquely to social outrage that they soak up everyone else’s membership fees, but there is no way most of us are seeing any gain from participating at Medium.

There is no income coming from outside of the membership fees to pay member writers, and I assume about every member is also a writer. This is how ponzi schemes work. This is Amway for writing.

Meanwhile you can bet your ass that the Medium executives are making money, filling their pockets by managing an army of writers working for less than third world wages. And the most deliciously ironic part is how much of the writing here is supposed progressive ideology. The truth of the matter is it is a vanity project for middle class privileged mainstream liberals propping up their egos by recycling the low hanging fruit of outrage commentary to each other.

Well fuck you, Medium. I am one of those people living in the poverty zone that your financially stable authors like to pay lip service to. I did not contribute as a hobby, or to boost my name and ego. I did it to turn what I love doing into something I could get paid for, in hopes of staving off a minimum wage service job that makes me want to surrender to the void. What I got was less than third world wages, and an even stronger desire to give up entirely on this shit world. So fuck you, Medium. Yeah, you didn’t owe me anything. You are not the worlds biggest problem, not even close. But you give false hope and remind us that we are all doomed to wage slavery for as long as psychopathy exists, while sharing progressive messages that entail values you do not seem to operate by.

Fuck you — goodbye.