Medium is Quietly Quitting Me

And no one can tell me why

Kerala Taylor
6 min readOct 18, 2022

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Photo by Robert Kneschke, Canva.

I don’t want to leave Medium, but Medium seems to be leaving me.

The worst part is, no one can tell me why. It’s like dating that person who makes you feel on top of the world and then suddenly drops off without warning. For a while, they might still answer your calls, but you can tell, they’re just not that into you anymore.

Maybe you miss the attention, but mostly, you just want to know: WTF happened??!!

For the first six months of 2022, I was a Medium Golden Child. I’d been writing one story a week on the platform for a little over a year. In the process, I’d gained a few thousand fans and I’d seen a handful of stories attain that elusive viral status. Other stories had been featured by Medium editors, one had been published in Human Parts, and I was picking up claps from some of Medium’s Big Names.

All in all, things were going pretty well. Much better, in fact, than I had anticipated. With a 20-year career in digital content marketing, I know a thing or two about writing online, and I’m well aware of how hard it is to break through the noise.

I was just a frazzled working mom with no social media following who had lived the prior decade in the shadows. I had some things to say. I wanted to be heard. Without a doubt, Medium enabled me to reach far more readers in a shorter period of time than I ever could have if I’d started my own blog.

It was often two steps forward, one step back. One story would amass 2,000 views and the next one 200. It’s no surprise to me that the Internet can be fickle, that stories of consistent quality with consistently compelling titles can attract varying levels of attention. But I also know that consistency over time is how you gain momentum.

It was in January 2022, a little over a year after I’d started on the platform, that I truly started to feel that momentum. While a handful of pieces over the next six months would barely see the light of day, with no rhyme or reason that I could discern, I finally arrived at a place where I felt I could put out a story and feel reasonably confident that people were going to find it.

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Kerala Taylor

Award-winning writer. Interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. Subscribe: https://keralataylor.substack.com