At the mercy of the algorithm

What’s happening, Medium?

Author’s Medium stats for November.

We’ve been informed that the platform will start rewarding external traffic in November, so I was expecting my earnings to improve, since many of my stories have been accessed externally.

However, as you can see from my stats this month (and I don’t think it’s a coincidence), my stats have dropped, and so have my earnings.

I’m not massively affected by this, as I do have a full-time job that I don’t plan to quit, but, as many writers have warned, we are at the mercy of Medium’s algorithm.

There’s no guarantee that what worked in the past will work today.

I have been writing on Medium for six years now, and there have been ups and downs. There have been months when I had no time to write, or when I didn't write, because I don’t really write just to produce content.

As I mostly speak from experience, when it comes to relationships, I prefer to write when I feel the need to clear my head or when something interesting happens that others could learn from.

But even so, during the months when I didn’t write as much and produced on average one to three stories, my old ones still performed to the point that I earned more than one hundred bucks, so this gig was satisfying.

With AI so easily accessible today, the platform’s activity turned into a witch hunt to detect what's AI-assisted and what is genuine, authentic writing, missing the whole point of the platform: to share stories.

So maybe this drop is because of my AI-assisted writing, which helps me polish my stories, the algorithm, or people simply losing interest in what I have to say. I don’t know. But what I see is that, once in a while, writers face the challenge of no longer being “loved” by the algorithm, so they either investigate ways to get back on track or lose interest in writing altogether.

In this light, I cannot help but wonder about those writers who were once on the “wave” and decided to leave their jobs to become full-time writers. They are probably struggling the most today. Poor souls.

Medium, for me, will always be the home for my darkest secrets, the platform where I can vent, confess, and feel safe doing it. It’s the place where I feel I belong to a community, and this is more important than the temporary monetary rewards I get for my writing.

I don’t intend to leave Medium any time soon, but please, for the love of God, make this algorithm a little more transparent.