A Letter to My Followers

The one where I bid you goodbye.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

Hello my Medium friends,

How are you? I hope you’re surviving this year okay. I hope the things I’ve written have been of help, or at least of interest, to some of you. Today, I’m writing to let you know that I’ll be taking a break from Medium.

If you’d like to keep in touch, you can subscribe to get my updates via email (I think it’ll automatically put a link at the bottom of this essay) and I’ll add you to my personal mailing list from there. I might get a Substack one of these days. I’ll email you if I do. If you want to keep supporting my work, I have Patreon as well.

This is not to say that I’ll never return to Medium. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone. I just know I need a break.

This is why:

First, I’m getting grossed-out by this platform. I share the frustrations of other writers about Medium, concerns about its direction and its hunger for us to keep “referring” new members to it in order to get paid. I don’t want to be the bait for another tech company to gorge its shareholders, and Medium feels less like a publishing platform than another manic, gamified social network exploiting its content creators for profit. I don’t like social networks. I don’t like that creating content and marketing yourself as a brand…