Member-only story
Medium is a Pyramid Scheme
So get off the toilet and stop wasting time
Medium is an elegant platform. I’m literally writing on it right now and I like it. Soon after publishing, actual strangers will stumble across my writing and judge it. My wordpress blog never did that.
But lately I’ve been swirling into a wormhole of wasted time. Everything I read is about Medium itself.
Medium is marketing to writers to get on Medium and then read about succeeding on Medium and then write about succeeding on Medium.
And why would I jump on this treadmill every day? The carrots on our sticks are all of the wonderfully witty writers that were here before us. They’re making good, realistic money. And they’re all so nice. Not snooty. People just like me.
I’m so close, I can feel it. Can you feel it?
Wait a second, where do I know this from?
This is a familiar feeling… the product is the customer. You know, like Soylent Green. We pay $5/month and this $5 gets distributed to the top of the pyramid, minus operating costs. If we write well and hit the right niche, we too will get a large portion of other Medium subscribers’ $5.
Well, how do we get there?
We attract paying customers, all of which are some type of writer, by writing about Medium itself and how to succeed on it. It’s a classic pyramid scheme! For those who have bought into the scheme, like me, the good stories and the good articles about things that matter become less important than climbing the structure itself.
But I’ve woken up. I’m basically Neo. And I want to learn Kung Fu, so to speak.
When I first came to Medium, my writing had become a dusty old hobby like rollerblading. I started getting back into it when I quit my job earlier this year. It came to my attention that people were making a buck on Medium. What a nice bonus.
