Why Is it So Hard to Get People to Sign Up for Medium?

It all starts with becoming a member

We’ve had our first stretch of cold weather here in the snow-covered north. The temperature read -10 as I headed out to drop off my kids at school. We arrived to discover a line of cars just sitting in the drop-off lane. I don’t know why people do this. They show up, park their car, and sit there as if nobody else needs to come to school that day. The behavior of other human beings can make me very angry at times.

What’s going on in those cars? Do they throw their kids in the minivan without any shoes, and they have to spend 10 minutes in the drop-off lane putting on snow pants, gloves, and boots? Normally I just drop off my daughter at the end of the line and she walks to the school, but it was -10. So, I decided to drive up in the other lane all the way to the front of the line.

Of course, the second I pulled to a stop, everyone who had been sitting there with their motors idling as if they had all the time in the world suddenly decided they needed to go. It took my daughter all of fifteen seconds to jump out of the car and head to the school (after a quick hug), and then I was off. Zero inconvenience to anyone, and yet I felt the psychic stares of disapproval.

Maybe they were all angry that I’d circumvented their sociopathic need to make me wait. I recently listened to the audiobook ‘The Sociopath Next Door.’ The book reveals that 1 in 25 people is a sociopath. When you consider the jerks you meet in life and how they’ll bend over backwards to make your life miserable, that number seems about right. Even worse, they seem compelled to grab positions of power. Sometimes that’s being a teacher or a CEO or a president, and sometimes it’s just making kids wait in the cold at the drop-off lane when it’s -10.

Arghhh!

Good stuff

Okay, end rant. A lot of good stuff has happened recently so let’s get to that. First, my daughter won all her basketball games this weekend. She was the top scorer in 2 out of three games, and was only 2 points behind the leader in the third. I’ve been really enjoying kid’s basketball.

My eldest daughter had her piano recital canceled which makes me sad, but the school pulled some strings and allowed her to take Spanish 3 as a Freshman. Observing my children navigate the minefield that is America’s public education system is great fodder for future articles. I’m starting to be hopeful that there is a way to get a good education for almost no money, but it requires the diligent oversight of a committed mentor.

Finally, the Packers beat the Cowboys. I often say that I don’t know why watching football relaxes me, but there is a shortage of things that relax me, so I’m not going to question it. Plus, I like seeing the billionaire owner of the Cowboys get beat because billionaires believe they should be able to buy anything they want. It’s nice for them to get a little lesson in humility.

Finally, one of my writer friends came for a visit and finally expressed a desire to get on Medium. I’ve been hounding him about this for two years, so it’s nice that he’s finally coming around.

Get on Medium already!

I’ve had some chats with other writers about why it’s so difficult to get people to go on Medium. I suspect it’s because the internet is filled with frauds and most people are conditioned to believe that Medium just can’t be as good as we say it is.

In the modern writing market, writers need to be very mindful about the platforms they use. You might know Justin Cox as the editor of the Writing Cooperative. He recently wrote a very good post about the importance of platforms. Justin has a better eye for the tech side of this whole writing thing than I do. He recently abandoned Substack, and had some completely legitimate reasons for doing so. I like this idea of writers going back to operating their own platforms. There once was a wonderful age when the internet was new and writers could create inexpensive blogs and generate a quality following in a relatively short amount of time.

Then came the era of awful social media platforms. When people started getting all their information from feeds rather than search engines, those feeds ended up seizing too much power to determine what people would read. Justin Mentioned that he went on Facebook recently and saw that it was all sponsored posts.

You signed up to Facebook to see pictures of your grandkids, but instead you end up with a white supremacist shouting at you for 26 hours a day. Why are people still tolerating that?

Leave social media behind… seriously

Perhaps the best part about Medium is that it has allowed me to pretty much leave the toxicity of Facebook behind. Occasionally, I log in just to share a story to a group, but I’m not on there more than a couple times a week.

I spend more time on Twitter (it’s the stupidest thing in the world to rebrand it from Twitter... I mean, come on), but there’s a reason a sociopathic billionaire bought the platform. He wants to censor the information people have access to. It really is as simple as that.

Some say that Medium is missing out by being the only platform that’s not out there constantly touting its achievements. To be honest, when I first started writing there, the question, “What even is Medium?” often ran through my mind.

The answer is that Medium is whatever you want it to be. I hit 40k followers last week (that little tidbit belonged in my “good news” section) and I feel good about the writing niche I’ve settled into. What and how I write has evolved considerably over the years, and that’s part of the fun. What most impresses me is the quality of the audience that you’ll find on the platform. It’s one of the few corners of the internet that allows you to be seen and which takes a “hands off” approach.

It’s no different than any other membership

For those of you who are looking to get started with Medium, I suggest that you simply sign up for an account and have a look around for a while. I get that people are rightfully cautious about handing over their credit card information or their banking information, but you don’t have to do that right away. Just sign up, get a username, and get your hands on the tools.

Signing up for a membership to Medium is no different than signing up for a Netflix or Amazon Prime account. A credit card number does provide you certain protections (I tend to use them instead of debit cards for that reason).

Get your membership account and use the platform until it gains your trust. You can read and comment on stories and see what you’re getting into.

Later on, you might want to consider the partner program. This is how you get paid on Medium. If you’re a writer, I absolutely recommend that you join the partner program. However, you shouldn’t even consider it until you’ve spent some time on the platform and it has gained your trust.

The platform is whatever you want it to be

There’s nothing in the rules of Medium that prohibit you from using the platform in the way you wished your social media would work. If you just want to send out a newsletter to your family, you could absolutely do that with Medium. Remember that the information would be accessible to the public, but that’s also the case with social media. The difference between Medium and Facebook is that if people sign up to receive your emails, they would actually get them from Medium.

I realize that most of the people who read this newsletter are already on Medium, but I was wondering how many of you have had trouble convincing other writers to join? I believe that part of the problem is that we have a tendency to jump to step 20, and we forget steps 1-5. Rather than talk about how it’s possible to earn $1,000 a month (and it is), tell your writer friends about the benefits of simply signing up.

There are a lot of great stories on Medium, and it helps pry you away from the toxic propaganda machine social media has become. Get back to basics. Get an account! Good luck getting some new members onboard!