Medium is great for humanity, because it acts like a Trojan horse in our smartphones. Smartphones are destroying our attention span.
Short clips, streams of blurbs and pictures are replacing books. In this environment, Medium is providing an alternative to all of that digital candy.
Medium posts aren’t a replacement for a book. Most of us write our posts taking into account the short attention span of online readers.
In either case, Medium posts are much better than most of the digital candy in your pocket. It requires you to stay focused on a piece of content for a few minutes.
Medium is great for readers, because it provides readers with a steady stream of brilliant posts and the opportunity to interact with the writers and other readers.
Medium is great for bloggers, because it provides them with a large audience of readers. Personal blogs have a difficult time building an audience. This has always been the case.
With the introduction of smartphones and apps, the number of blog readers is shrinking even more. In this age, Medium is like an oasis for bloggers.
Medium Stats Teach You Lessons
Once you publish a sufficient amount of posts, you have a decent set of stats. You can use those stats to learn your lessons on blogging and to improve your craft.
Interaction with Readers
The opportunity to interact with the readers is great for the writers. I’ve been blessed with a steady stream of responses to my posts and I’m grateful for that. That feedback is critical for any content provider.
- Comments indicate that your content is resonating with people.
- Your readers give you a direction by telling you what they like about your posts.
- Your readers give you new ideas to write about.
That discussion is valuable for the readers as well. They are able to influence the writers with their feedback. They can ask questions and receive answers. As a result, everybody wins.
Medium Is My Single Source of Traffic
It’s a risk for a blogger to depend on a single source of traffic. When I take into account all the benefits above, I’m willing to take that risk. As a blogger, I’m fine with using Medium as the single source of traffic to my website.
Medium Is Great for Discussions
If you read my post called Is Commenting on Medium a Reliable Strategy to Grow the Audience of Your Blog?, you might think that I changed my mind. I didn’t.
Commenting is great to interact with other writers. It’s just not an efficient way to grow your audience. Actually, I might have found why it isn’t.
A Point of Improvement for Medium
Commenting might not work, because Medium is suppressing some comments. They are probably trying to minimize spam comments this way and it works. Spam is almost non-existent on Medium.
I understand that Medium is hiding some comments, but there’s room for improvement in how Medium processes comments.
Medium Notifications Are Less Than Optimal
As a writer, I expect to receive an email for every comment I receive. That is not the case at the moment. I found that out after finding old comments by chance.
I received some decent comments written by new members. I didn’t receive an email about them. I wasn’t able to clap for them or respond to them. As a result, those comments remained hidden.
New Member Responses Are Not Notified to the Writers
How would you feel about Medium, if you signed up just to comment a post, took your time to write a decent comment, and then, your comment remained hidden and you didn’t receive a response from the writer?
Would you keep using Medium? I believe this practice hurts the new user acquisition number of Medium.
A Better Way to Display Notifications to Writers
You might say that it’s my responsibility to check my notifications and find all of those comments. Unfortunately, with the dozens of notifications I receive every day, Medium’s notifications are useless to me.
In order for them to be useful to me, they have to satisfy the following requirements.
- They need to be accessible on a separate page of their own like Facebook.
- I should be able to mark them as read. Now, once they are displayed on the screen, they are marked as read.
Medium iOS App Has the Best Notification Settings
Luckily, I found a workaround to this problem. In the iOS app, there are three options for push notifications for responses.
- Off
- Tailored for you
- Everyone
The default is “tailored for you” and I chose “everyone.” I’ll see how this works out. I’d really like to see the “everyone” option for email notifications.
I’d like to receive an email for every response receive. That would make the task of processing responses much easier. In the meantime, if I missed a comment of you, I apologize.
Conclusion
Medium benefits bloggers, readers, and humanity in different ways. As a writer, I appreciate it so much that I use it as the exclusive source of my traffic.
There is one update I’d like to see on Medium though. That is to receive an email for every response that my posts receive.
I also suggest that Medium handles new user comments with care. Otherwise, they might lose some of those users forever.
Your Turn
If you know a tool that processes Medium notifications and creates to do lists out of them, please let me know in the comments.
Burak BilginSoftware developer with a Ph.D. and 15 years of experience. I write daily on personal development and life lessons. Sign up to my email newsletter to receive a weekly overview of my latest content on personal development and life lessons.