A Medium Rant.

More like a small, really.

I took a long break from medium before coming back these past few weeks. The break was for a lot of reasons — many of the changes felt, well…not very thought out, and there was a lot of confusion about how exactly payment was going to work. The rest was mostly stupid interpersonal stuff, but it soured me on coming back here. I didn’t feel like I belonged. It didn’t feel safe.

But I’m back, I suppose, for now, and while the payment format seems to have figured itself out, I have to say that I’m disappointed by how the community that used to exist seems to have disappeared. Now, I feel certain that a fair amount of this stems from just not being here for so long. But at the same time, I think the idea of divying up your monthly five dollars between writers makes you far more choosey about how much and how you interact with posts.

This isn’t inherently a bad thing — for sure, anything that makes us more discriminating as readers can’t be. But I do wonder if it creates a situation that actually limits interaction, and therefore the sense of community that used to prevail here?

I don’t know.

Then there’s the clapping thing. I get it, I really do. Obviously something that touches something raw and burning in your heart deserves, by whatever metric, “more” than something that elicits a brief chuckle but is largely forgotten. But…am I really gonna sit there and click fifty times to give someone fifty claps? I certainly think a bit longer before I do and am less likely to. Cuz I’m lazy as shit, really. But isn’t this a potential limiting factor as well?

I’m completely comfortable if the answer to all this is simply that I’ve not been around and that I need to adjust to this new format. But I’m also wondering, for the people who have stuck around through these changes, what’s your opinion? Is it as different as it feels? Better? Worse?