Medium has a complicated and confused relationship with . There rules :
- (To) advertise or participate in bounty campaigns, pump and dumps, reviewing for reward, or other forms of brigading or inauthentic activity is strictly prohibited.
During the crypto winter Medium content in and crypto has been significantly curtailed. This has occurred for any number of reasons, including Hacker Noon hijacking the space and writers along with it, and the decline of ’s price that’s resulted in fewer ICOs.
Moreover, the problem of , fraud and airdrops and bounty programs that turn young investors into bots is a form of fake traffic that’s a seriously problem for the credibility of these projects.
This has meant Medium is no longer a great place for startups to hijack traffic to help kick-start their projects. At a time when Facebook, Google and Twitter banned ICO & crypto Ads, Medium took a more strict stance regarding this sort of content.
Medium’s algo is easily able to tell if claps (an absurd number of standing ovations of 50 claps) are truly just fake traffic. Claps are just one signal, and if the read ratio, comments and time on site don’t align, it’s obviously just a bounty/airdrop/positive network effect abuse. (basically a scam).
For legal reasons Medium as business needed to take a stance against these young entrepreneurs, engineers and their sometimes anarchistic stance on the fundamental reality and failure of capitalism and the future of money.
Medium in the process, alienated a lot of startups and crypto writers and readers. Crypto in 2017 and 2018 was some of the most content around on Medium. I’d argue in 2019 it’s barely hard to notice it at all.
Crypto influencers are silent or have entirely disappeared. startups are getting just a trickle of traffic and won’t ever really be curated since they don’t live within the MPP and suffer from a dreadful amount of self-promotion that’s also a form of spam.
Coincidentally Bakkt, or don’t seem to suffer from these limitations. This basically means brands like Bakkt (whom Microsoft is a partner) is paying substantial Ads to get this This essentially hijacks Medium’s entire proposition to create a more fair ecosystem that’s more ICO gimmick resistant and less prone to fraud. You know like, less dangerous to these young maverick investors prone to believing what they see online.
Without better public blockchains are still prone to collusion, ICOs are still prone to fraud and low success rates and misinformation abounds on the actual data around so called up-and-coming solutions like , , XRP and even the fate of ICOs or STOs themselves.
By keeping closer with Silicon Valley’s status-quo Medium has essentially helped the manifestation of an age and era of private stablecoins that will make corporations and banks ever richer (compared to the people and Middle Class).
Meanwhile by clamping down on crypto fraud and fake traffic on Medium itself, Medium has alienated an entire cohort of young men that used to check Medium for that Hacker Noon like content that they are aligned with.
I’m sure there are business reasons and perhaps even legal pressure why Medium had to do this, but the result is a very unsatisfactory crypto and experience as readers now in 2019.
- Medium used to be one of the main platforms for blockchain startups to build a brand and a story, this is no longer true in 2019.
- Hosting a bounty program or airdrops on Medium content is now an idiotic strategy. This is because only your own investors or participants will even see the content. (It’s basically flagged as spam by Medium’s system).
- Crypto PR and the crypto cycle due to Medium’s decline has even a greater monopoly and the pump-and-dump and pay-to-play culture of crypto.
Medium essentially chose what side of the fence it rests upon, and not surprisingly it chose with its Silicon Valley friends instead of the decentralization movement of GenZ and young Millennial crypto enthusiasts. Taking this with a grain of salt, but it essentially impacts the future of all content on Medium from mid 2019 onwards.
I now recommend startups to host their own blog in addition to having a presence on publishing platforms such as Medium.
Medium’s pivot behind the paywall has essentially helped to kill off the monetization models of some startups. When Medium refused to create a top writer’s tag in anything but , the writing was on the wall. No top writer’s tag exist for , , or even for .
Medium was once a place for entrepreneurs, designers, startup employees, creatives, crafters and free thinkers. I’d argue in 2019 this is likely no lnger the case. Medium has unintentionally failed startups and writers in a significant way.
They have essentially created a great thing with the MPP that pays an army of freelance writer (Gig-economy like wages) far less than minimum wage in a walled garden. A walled garden design that’s essentially helped kill crypto as yet another feature of the crypto winter.
Published at Mon, 08 Apr 2019 18:14:35 +0000
