PLAGIARISM | SCROLL CHURNING | INTEGRITY

Medium War Casualties

Will you be caught in the crossfire?

Photo by jean wimmerlin on Unsplash

Disclaimer: this article discusses the use of blogging techniques and tactics that contravene Medium’s terms and conditions. The following is meant neither as endorsement nor encouragement of these practices but a description of their effect on the Medium community.

There’s a war going on all around us. The war is on and about this platform. It is playing out in sweeping ways that may take out whole publications and all their writers in tow.

This battle started on the basis of plagiarism and has morphed into a debate about how some publications game their writers’ posts for maximum revenue.

The plagiarism debate isn’t about some obscure Japanese website like ICHI.pro, either. It’s about what’s happening on Medium with some sizable publications.

The whistleblowers say that the revenue hackers are pilfering money from the platform thereby denying income to writers creating genuine content for expression first and money second. They assert that these strategies are turning the platform into a pyramid scheme where social media style gamesmanship and exploitation of the paywall, not writing, are incentivized and rewarded. Unchecked, they say this will…