Thank you, Dr. Yildiz, as always your comments are thoughtful and even-handed. This is what I can share about my experience. Regardless of the platform there are two ingredients to success on it as a creator. One is persistence in continually producing content of sufficient quality to get people to have interest in what you create. The second and far more important ingredient is how much the platform allows discoverability of creators.
That's my term for it, "discoverability," and it is the combination of the business model of the platform and the algorithms it uses in its feeds and search functions. No matter how high-quality and engagement of content one creates, one will get nowhere if the platform doesn't have open discoverability. I've been active online for decades, since one could use Netscape and Lycos. I've dabbled in most platforms and the discoverability issue is the main reality that has always jumped out at me.
Twitter, before Musk bought it, was great for discoverability. It's business model was to let other people see each other and interact with each other. Musk bought it to silence voices and opinions he didn't like, and he changed the algorithms and removed search functionality so that now, unless you are a Muskovite, your comments will not be seen by people who aren't already looking for you. Facebook users have been throttled for years by Zuck's pay-to-play model. The Twitter alternatives, Spoutible, Threads, and BlueSky each have horridly poor algorithms that make it difficult for anyone to be seen; Threads being the worst (Zuck's platform).
Medium was good at discoverability until the sea change in the algorithm last August. Like many others, my views went way down, and now pretty much the only people who see my articles are those who are subscribed to the e-mails. Even Followers are now largely excluded from discoverability. A creator here can now have 10,000 Followers and expect their article to get 100 views.
As for Substack, the problem here again is discoverability. I know because I used to subscribe to colleagues I knew on Substack. Each newsletter is a silo one can't easily see beyond. Go to the home page and the feed shows me only those to whom I'm subscribed. As a creator, unless one has other platforms to drive people to your Substack account, you're just dispatching articles into the ether. Sure, endorsements from other Substack creators can help, but that's the discoverability problem. No one knows you unless they already know you. And monetization? Forget about it unless you're a celebrity elsewhere.
Sadly, Medium, for all its flaws and the hostility of those who run it, remains the only viable option for creators of serious contents..
