It’s Time to Admit Medium is Better Than Twitter
I had a pretty typical Twitter experience this morning. I logged on for a few minutes because I was procrastinating starting my day. Almost instantly, I was exposed to a tweet that made me mad, a tweet that made me sad, and an ad. The Twitter trifecta.
(The fourth one was a viral “humor” tweet to which the author had appended an ad to sell vibrators, and managed to be all three types simultaneously.)
So, like most times that this happens to me, I made an active decision to stop scrolling and do something I enjoyed, something productive. Like many other times, I chose a different writing platform: Medium.
Medium and Twitter don’t often get comparisons, despite being founded by some of the same people. So today, I decided to share my thoughts about why I made, and continue to make, that choice. Especially as the four top Twitter execs were fired late last night and Elon Musk let a sink* into Twitter HQ for the lols, it’s time for me to admit what I know to be true: in almost every metric, Medium is better for writing and reading than Twitter.
I want to reward good financial models.
Medium is an ad-free subscription royalty model. Twitter is an ad-full engagement model.
On Medium, I get paid when paying Medium members read and engage with my article. I also pay other writers when I read and engage with their story. I get a feeling of patronage, of supporting writers who make me think.
On Twitter, I don’t get paid at all, unless I’m able to go viral and a shady light projector company pays me $30–50 to post an ad under my viral tweet.
And then I’m contributing more ads to what is already a loud, noisy, ad-filled space. Twitter actively profits off my viral thoughts while all I get in return is poster’s brain.
I’ve always believed creators deserve to get paid for the work they do to grow a platform. For years, only YouTube and Medium agreed with me, and only Medium helped build a platform where you got paid when other people invested in you as a writer, versus selling ads on top of your content.
Twitter still doesn’t.
As a writer, I prefer getting money because people engage with my content, not because I wrote something like “she’s a ten but she sleeps all day”.
I want to reward good stories.
What goes viral on Twitter? More importantly, who controls what you see on Twitter? You certainly don’t.
I read a fascinating article in which the author shares the DNA of the tweets he sees on his feed. It turns out that out of 100 tweets he sees, 13 are ads and 56 are from strangers. Just 31 come from friends.
He also found that out of the 2,300 people he follows, he never sees tweets from 90% of them.
Images taken from Tyler Freeman’s blog post on the subject.
We know why that is, so I won’t belabor the point: Twitter wants to keep you engaged so you scroll past more ads, and the company found that cheap viral tweets get more engagement.
“[The content from people I follow] all gets drowned out by the sure-fire, dopamine-rush tweets that get thousands of likes and retweets, or the ‘Main Character’ being ratioed to oblivion by pilers on. There’s no way my friends’ deep discussions and beautiful creative posts–with their paltry dozens of likes and maybe a retweet or two–could compete,” writes Freeman.
Meanwhile, I’ll compare that with today’s Medium member newsletter. Medium’s editorial team picked eight articles on a variety of topics. Of the eight, I clicked on and read six this morning. I didn’t agree with all of them, but I found them all interesting, insightful, and well-written.
I found myself thoughtful rather than angry or gloomy. I like that.
I want to reward context.
Twitter flattens context and rewards split-second reactions.
What does that look like? Let’s say you tweet something like a random grateful thought about the life you enjoy with your partner, drinking coffee in the mornings together and spending time with one another. Nice, right? Maybe your mom will see it and give it a like.
But there’s always a small chance your tweet goes viral instead and then people get mad and accuse you of anything from smugness to classism.
Example of the kind of tweet interaction I mean. Source.
Look, my articles on Medium get taken out of context too sometimes. But when you have a full 1,000 words (or as many as you want!) to explain yourself and your thoughts — and crucially, you are speaking to an audience of people who are investing in reading those 1,000+ worded thoughts — you get a different reaction.
There’s more context — and better incentives to write something with context, rather than a self-righteous quote-tweet of a politician’s hate that succeeds in furthering that hate speech. There’s less flattening. People don’t willfully misinterpret you as often. You get to build and speak to a community of people who know and remember you, not firehosing out your thoughts to a potential audience of millions of have their own ax to grind against you for no reason.
If you want to read more about Twitter’s context-flattening effect, I found Ryan Broderick’s explanation horrifying but useful:
“Online platforms flatten the content uploaded to them, assigning engagement metrics to videos of shelled cities and fleeing civilians, prompting other users to share or comment or, worse, find their own content to add to the trending topic. The hashtag #nuclearwar is trending on Twitter right now. If you click in on it, it shows you the top content tagged #nuclearwar. If you click on one of the posts, in giant letters, Twitter asks you to ‘tweet your reply.’ What’s your take on nuclear annihilation, the bird site wonders thoughtlessly.”
There are a thousand other points I could make in praise of Medium and in opposition to Twitter.
I could point out how Twitter’s users crave to write more than tweets so much that threads became one of the dominant content forms (although individual tweets from threads can, and will, be quote-tweeted out of context to drive rage and engagement).
I could share Medium’s history of transparency with writers and readers. They do make changes, sometimes I don’t love them, but they try to explain what’s going on.
I could discuss the extremely boring relatable-content copy-paste tweets that happen when someone’s thought goes viral and inspires a flood of the exact same tweet on other accounts. (Think: “she’s a ten but she cries on her birthday every year.”)
But instead, I’ll end by saying this: As a reader, Medium keeps me better informed, better educated, happier, and entertained on my terms. As a writer, Medium rewards me for thoughtful analysis and long-term reader relationships. As a regular person on the internet, Medium contributes more benefit and less harm to my digital life than Twitter.
And I think it’s time to say it explicitly out loud: Medium is better than Twitter.
*It’s a pun. He’s “letting it sink in” by letting a sink in. Again, he did this so he could post pictures to gain internet points.
If you want to read another anti-Twitter article, check out:
This is How We Occupy Twitter
Author disclosure: I was paid a small fee to link to Capital One Shopping in the mention of YouTube above. There’s absolutely no cost to you whether you click on the link or not.
