Medium is a pretty cool service. It lets people publish content to a network of free-hosted blogs. Then people can use that content on Medium’s website. Many of the articles are free to read but most pieces are locked behind a paywall.

With a staggering 153 million monthly visits as of July 2021, it is easier to drive traffic from Medium to your main blog or money site and get a more regular readership or conversion. But Medium is not without its limitations.

1️⃣ Medium a Private Company

It is privately held. Medium is funded by a venture capital that looks to boost the company's revenue. The venture fund takes a cut from each paying member who wants to read paywalled articles.

This model generates a ton of passive income for the investors. They are not necessarily looking for new users but rather a recurring paying members.

But with the venture fund comes the unique downside of the system. Medium has the power to quickly change things up or even completely shut down the platform. So when the management decides to implement change to a major part of Medium, you are screwed!

If you want to have a successful blog on Medium, you are expected to build a big audience and write a ton of articles in order to bring in money —all within the confines of Medium's Terms of Service.

Although they do allow users to monetize publications and personal pages, it is mandatory to explicitly disclose any affiliated links if you're doing content marketing and/or publishing sponsored posts, else risk your account being suspended.

As such, while they let you work with their service, you don't have any control over your success. At least that’s the perception.

2️⃣ Basic Publishing Editor

The amazing thing about having access to the HTML code is the ability to customize your web pages. This is particularly important for anyone working on content marketing and advertising a certain product or services where special banners are required with your unique tracking code attached to them.

Medium's post editor is a barebone WYSIWYG layout. While it does the job done quite well, it falls short when optimizing for a webpage under the hood. It doesn't offer an option to toggle between basic and advanced editing formats.

So if the goal is to embed some cool and shiny lead magnet, whatever you want, on your page without letting the readers leave the site, you're out of luck.

3️⃣ Threat of Censorship

Users have become slaves to Medium's centralized authority. In order to publish content, one must adhere to Medium's policy and community guidelines just like as you would with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

This ensures that if users violated any of these rules, they would have their accounts get disabled. It's a nightmare and a reminder of the censorship issues the big tech currently facing. In the absence of a platform's transparent resolution approach and equal treatment regardless of political inclination, censorship or favoritism has always been a danger.

Policing and editorializing content is basically telling the public what they are allowed to say and see. Now, if Medium is controlling its own content platform, then why would you be compelled to check with it in order to post? At this point in history, mainstream social networks cease to be a domain of public discourse.

The only way to protect yourself is by abiding with Medium's own arbitrary standards that cannot be questioned and an ambiguous system of judgment that cannot be challenged. This is exactly why the need for decentralized replacements is such a big deal.

4️⃣ Payment Gateway Limited to Stripe

If you've spent some time looking around at Medium, you'd notice there are plenty of users in countries as far away as Indonesia, the Philippines, and India.

For these countries, Medium is an incredible outlet to voice their opinions to a global audience as it provides an ideal means for writers to “freely” express their views and perspectives without having to learn the technical dickery required in setting up and maintaining a self-hosted blog.

Medium is run by an elite team of engineers and web developers that spend their days making the website as functional and good as humanly possible.

However, Medium isn’t always the easiest platform to use for writers looking to make a living.

As it turns out, many of them don’t have access to a credit card and if they do, may still find themselves unable to participate. That’s because Medium's partner program exclusively uses Stripe, a payment processor that is locked to processing charges from customers in selected counties.

Stripe is a third-party payment solution, which has enabled online merchants to accept and send payments from/to the general public in some parts of the world without actually needing to have a banking relationship. A mediator of a sort, kind of similar to what PayPal does. Although they're not technically the same you but get the idea.

Medium does not offer direct bank transfers or PayPal to compensate premium members. That's why there is no money to be made for authors in many territories unsupported by Stripe. Whether or not Medium is deliberately doing this on purpose is a story that needs to be told.

🆚 Why Hive Is Better for Publishing Than Medium

Blockchain projects like Hive have been pioneering the way when it comes to how we fuse cryptocurrency and social media into the mix.

Being a blogger or artist who wants to earn money from their efforts doesn't have to be as hard as it is today. Using the decentralized peer-to-peer economic model of Hive, one can monetize their online presence by posting and curating content for their followers.

This is a decentralized token system based on public blockchain technology similar to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. What it actually means is that, unlike its competitors, Hive makes it possible for users to publish content for free and monetize it using its native cryptocurrency.

The system incentivizes authors to write quality content (although quality is debatable). The more you post, the more chances you can get paid via direct tips or upvotes.

An upvote or like (👍) is a way for stakeholders to decide which posts are worthy of getting rewarded. However, the rewards of posting on Hive can be distributed across the entire network, not just to your posts.

⛓ Decentralized Community

There are no caps on the number of shares or upvotes you can get. Although some users may come into disagreement with the amount of rewards certain users get resulting in downvotes, it's still all up to the community to decide without relying on a central authority.

The overall experience is similar in some ways but the reward mechanism of publishing on many Hive blogging interfaces is not the same as publishing on Medium.

Unlike Medium, Hive doesn't require you to build an audience before you can start making money. Even with zero followers, you could still earn more than those content creators who have a thousand or so. Vote weight matters most over quantity. Though a certain number of upvotes is still important for getting people to read your content.

💎 Tokenized Economy

As a token-based payment and reward system, Hive enables content creators to accept tips directly from their readers or anyone on any Hive-supported platforms. These payments are paid in Hive and Hive Backed Dollars (Hive’s native cryptocurrencies), rather than in fiat currency.

It does not necessarily require the creation of a full website. Once you create an account, start publishing, and comment, you will receive upvotes and direct payments as you gain traction. Even a meme can get you rewarded and received the corresponding amount on a fixed system-generated schedule.

There is no minimum threshold. Rather, payouts are scheduled after seven days from the day the post was published, and payments are sent directly to your wallet automatically without you lifting a finger. Yes, it’s dead simple.

That's why it is called a blockchain-based social media network. By utilizing blockchain technology, the platform has many benefits over traditional social media. Below is a short informational video published on 3speak TV, a video-focused application built on top of Hive blockchain.

💭 Final Thoughts:

There are many alternatives to Medium. Many apps claim to offer a similar solution but none of them have taken off or worked out.

Hive is an efficient solution for authors looking to gain exposure. Since it's built on groundbreaking blockchain technology, it is by design the closest thing we have to a permissionless and censorship-resistant virtual community.

There are no central servers to breach and your funds are only accessible to you using a secure private key, not a single government in the world can freeze your wallet.

The keys prevent anyone—even Hive creators themselves—from restricting user accounts and spending funds they don't own. This is why it is imperative to ditch centralized platforms like Medium and jump to something that gives you full control and freedom.

What's more, Hive has no fees at all because it's based on unique tokenomics that fuels the Hive engine to keep going. Anyone can send or transfer funds to any Hive wallet free of charge with a near-instant final settlement.

It’s also a great and novel choice for creators who want to make money without requiring you to spend thousands of hours building an audience. But if you have a large following, you are almost guaranteed to get something at the end of your post on Hive. The platform gives you a rare opportunity to start making money from your words on the internet within hours or minutes.

📝 Shut Up and Sign Me Up

There are several ways to sign up and create a Hive account. Your account name is a unique identifier on the blockchain which also serves as your wallet address. It is a one-stop solution and has multiple keys with different access permission. Think of it as your Google account by which you can unlock all of Google products (Gmail, Docs, Photos, Drive, etc). But this time it's like Google on steroids.

You can sign up and choose your preferred registration providers here.

🗒 One Final Note:

Your Hive account name or wallet address is immutable and permanent. Meaning, you are unable to modify or change it once it has been created. So make sure you are happy with your chosen username before you hit the final account creation button.