Why I canceled my Medium Subscription (and what fluff and click-bait have to do with it)

You might have noticed that my blog posts are often short and straightforward; I try to answer your question in the first minute of your reading time. This isn’t the case everywhere on the internet, especially not at Medium.

SEO best practices require you as a writer to repeat your main question, usually the title, as much as possible. The result is a lot of blogposts where the first five paragraphs are useless. I sometimes even skip the first paragraphs because I know I’m not going to find the answer in it. 

After having a Medium Subscription for about two months, I noticed I read a lot, but did not learn a lot. Most of what’s written there is fluff , it feels like writing for SEO instead of your users.  

Fluff: “entertainment or writing perceived as trivial or superficial. Make something appear fuller [than it actually is]”. 

Dictionary

From a UX perspective, this is besides, somewhat annoying, not user-friendly. So minimalism doesn’t only count for design, but also the copy. Like Dieter Rams put it: “Less, but better.” (‘Less is more’ came later). 

In the defense of the good writers out there on Medium: there is plenty of good content as well, which I will miss. Yet is feels like 80% of what I read makes a great promise with its click-bait title, and fails to deliver.

My next step and advice for you, is to discover more independent, lesser known blogpost, and read more books.

Byebye mainstream news providers.