Tony Apologize But When It Comes To Money Medium is Not on Our Side

Business is business, customer first, we are more like vendors

Thanks to Kainos for sharing his feelings on how they feel about the current experience of Medium.

Screenshot of Kainos’s comment on John Pearce 🌻’s article

And the second part. This is a very honest review of the experience of a writer here.

Screenshot of Kainos’s comment on John Pearce 🌻’s article

Before we go into Tony’s reply, I want to thank Kainos again for sharing their insight as a long-time user of the platform.

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Whatever group that Medium mentions is hurting from this tweak is hurting the community we are in and around us.

Here is what Tony replied.

Screenshot of Tony’s comment on John Pearce 🌻’s article

When it comes to money, we are on the reader’s side.

We have to address that a writer is a reader as well but we are only made up of less than 5% of Medium, if that is what Tony is referring to the 5%.

First, he goes out saying Medium is on the writer’s side in many ways but we are unsure if there is a different class of writer, i.e. lower earners and normal earners.

He is here to ask us to accept what we see on the screen.

What was a bit confusing to me was the line that says:

We care about giving you great tools and a healthy community.

What tools?

Of what has happened, the only tool we receive from the writer side is the pub’s ability to feature stories but that comes once a week.

All other updates were geared towards the reader’s experience.

How about some real 2025 metrics that can really see what is happening behind the scenes of our audience?

Is that too much to ask for or are we really not paying them enough?

Well, we have cut by 70% or so since the year started, that is over 100K a month should be enough to put some line of code and chart up for every writer to use and look at as a real tool that gives insights for growth.

Unless growth on Medium is forbidden for the average writer?

And what does a healthy community mean to Medium, the ones that don't interact with one another or get their earnings decreased when they become more like a real community?

Maybe, Medium does not like us talking to each other but Medium has no message system, is this tool happening on Medium?

Great tools and community are made of the writers and readers who spend time interacting with one another even when they know their words matter more than the few pennies they send out to their friends and fellow writers.

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Medium business model

The bigger issue with Medium's unable to manage a duo member account feature is that it doesn’t understand its own partner program.

A writer is a reader and a reader is a writer.

The success of Medium is built upon this duo status membership.

There isn’t a perfect way but when everyone can see an imbalance where writers are taking all the hits that does make anyone want to ask questions on how they want to go forward and if Medium not appreciating their work anymore.

The community says yes but the earnings say no you need to get more new reader or do whatever you can to break out with any kind of great tool that can’t even tell their audience from day to day or month to month.

From a business standpoint that is the right thing to do.

As Medium adjusts, anyone who wants to stay needs to do the same.

Medium is spinning out the writers who can’t adapt.

There will always be another vendor but the customer will only trust you once.

Don’t take my word for it, go figure it out in the comments.

Thanks for Reading

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This story was originally published on [Medium] and is cross-posted here for a wider audience.

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Thanks again for reading