Medium (Online Publishing Platform)

Information from The State of Sarkhan Official Records

Welcome to Medium: The Wordsmithing Sweatshop of the Creator Economy

🏢 ScamCom Disclaimer: The information provided on ScamCom is for educational purposes only. We cannot guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the content. Proceed with caution and contact authorities if you believe you've been scammed. The article about ScamCom does not endorse any specific products, services, or individuals.

All characters, names, and incidents portrayed in this satirical production are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual capitalist hellscapes, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Maybe.

So you’ve got a story to tell. A voice yearning to be heard. A perspective so sharp it could slice through the algorithmic sludge of the internet like a katana through gelatinous influencers. You fire up Medium, the once-glorious publishing playground for thinkers, dreamers, and unpaid intellectuals.

And you write.

Then… you make 32 cents.

Congratulations. You’ve just been inducted into Medium: the Wordsmithing Sweatshop of the Creator Economy™.

The Illusion of Medium: A Platform or a Pipe Dream?

Once upon a time, Medium promised to be the land where writers could thrive. The paywall model seemed like the holy grail—a utopia where you could make money from your thoughts without selling your soul to clickbait. People were pulling in $1K, $2K, sometimes more each month from doing what they loved: writing. Imagine that.

Now? Unless you’re part of the select few who figured out how to hack the “Algorithm Deity” by rewriting the same feel-good hustle-post with a few tweaks every week, you're making less than someone folding burritos at Chipotle. No benefits. No guac. Just emotional burnout and 3-digit view counts from bots and doom-scrolling subscribers.

The Medium Partner Program has evolved into a monetization model so tightly gated, it makes iOS look like open source. After a few free reads, everything is locked behind a paywall—and no one’s sticking around unless you’re writing some variation of:

  • “10 Lessons I Learned While Meditating on a Volcano”
  • “How Quitting My 6-Figure Job to Become a Digital Nomad Made Me Spiritually Superior”
  • “I Woke Up at 4 AM Every Day and Became God”

And while the bar to entry for writing is gloriously low, the bar to get paid sits somewhere below the Marianas Trench.

Medium is now laser-focused on paid subscriber growth, thanks to investors breathing down their necks harder than the IRS on a crypto trader in 2021. Writers? They’re just the organic content fodder meant to lure in more paying readers. It’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet where the chefs get paid in leftover croutons.

The new motto seems to be: “We gate content like The New York Times, but pay like Fiverr in 2009.”

Your creativity—your blood, sweat, and very likely unpaid therapy bills—gets monetized into a pittance. A viral piece might net you a few hundred bucks. Everything else? Maybe 17 cents and a pat on the back from your mom.

Writing on Medium is now comparable to being an unpaid intern in your own intellectual factory. Except now you have the privilege of working for exposure… in a walled garden that doesn’t even guarantee exposure.

Enter the AI Dystopia (Or Salvation?)

Medium touts itself as a No-AI platform, which means it’s trying to double down on “real human writing.” Great! Except for the part where artificial intelligence is improving so fast, it’s only a matter of time before your raw, typo-laden soul-dump is indistinguishable from a perfectly optimized ChatGPT essay on “10 Habits of Highly Underpaid Writers.”

And soon, readers might not even care. If it sounds good, it is good. Was it written by a soul-crushed millennial with a liberal arts degree and debt? Or a glorified text prediction machine? Who knows! Who cares! Click. Read. Scroll. Repeat.

But sure, fight for your authenticity. Meanwhile, the algorithm will favor the guy who SEO-optimized “how to get rich on Medium” for the 40th time this week.

Don’t Build Your House on Rented Land

If you’re writing for SEO, for branding, or to actually get paid what your brain is worth, Medium is not the long-term strategy. It’s the sandbox where you learn to build castles before realizing the tide is just the content team experimenting with your revenue stream again.

Yes, Medium is still a good training ground. A launchpad. A writer’s gym. But don’t fool yourself: you’re not building a career here. You’re just leasing space in someone else’s factory.

The $5 Paywall: Hope Tax in Disguise

Ah yes, the infamous $5/month Medium membership. On the surface, it seems harmless—innocent, even. "Invest in yourself," they say. "Support the community," they whisper while cashing your subscription fee and tossing you 42 cents in revenue for your 2,000-word magnum opus.

But here’s the truth: paywalling your content while also paying Medium is basically renting your own prison cell and expecting a royalty check for decorating it.

Let’s break this down. You’re forking over $5 a month to gate your content behind a paywall that Medium controls. That means:

  • Casual readers can’t access it unless they’re also paying.
  • Organic growth dies on the vine unless you're lucky enough to get boosted by their mysterious algorithm.
  • And you’re now both customer and laborer for a company that pays you less than a broke street magician’s tip jar.

But hey—maybe you’re thinking, “Well, $5 a month isn’t much!”

Hold up, comrade. In some parts of the world, $5 is the price of a latte. But in others, $5 is someone’s entire day of labor—picking produce, driving rickshaws, assembling your smartphone for the free world’s convenience. So when Medium asks the masses to fork that over just to read your musings about productivity hacks or your existential rant about quitting tech, they’re asking for a premium most people simply can’t afford.

Medium's model depends on the fantasy that millions of readers will pay monthly just to read random bloggers’ semi-diary entries. But that’s not how the real world works. If you're living in an economy where five dollars a month isn't pocket change, you're not likely to toss it into a platform that reads like LinkedIn and Reddit had a baby raised on self-help books and tech layoffs.

So while you’re hoping your paywalled content will attract paid subscribers and convert into meaningful income, what you’re really doing is gambling your time and talent on a model built to benefit the platform—not the creator.

It's the digital equivalent of buying a lottery ticket where the jackpot is just getting retweeted by a Medium staff writer.

In Conclusion: Welcome to the Grind

So here you are. A writer. A thinker. A digital proletariat in the platform publishing revolution. Writing pieces worth thousands in value, for pennies on the Medium dollar.

Maybe your piece will go viral. Maybe it’ll rot in obscurity. Either way, you just spent four hours writing for what might be less than minimum wage. Meanwhile, Medium uses that to juice their sub numbers for another VC deck.

Welcome to Medium. Welcome to your Wordsmithing Sweatshop.

Retrieved from "https://sarkhan.wiki/index.php?title=Medium_(Online_Publishing_Platform)&oldid=12564"