With YouTube censorship and demonetization, Facebook policing, and many other scary things happening on social media giants. I have been looking for alternative ways to connect myself to the digital communities.

My Brief History of Social Media

I have been an active online community for over seven years, Facebook was among the biggest platform that I enjoyed using and interacting with people from all walks of life.

It is human nature to express their feelings and thoughts about things, I am among many people who think alternatively, and I enjoy expressing what I think to see what other people would say about it.

Then Youtube was the second platform that I enjoyed sharing my content. for some reason I never really got used to Twitter and I am still struggling with it up to this moment.

You won't think it could happen to you until it does.

The Ripper Touched down.

It first started with Facebook, I originally joined Facebook with my full name, I published all of my information on facebook, they asked me about my mother, where was I born, where do I live, which school I graduated from, my favorite movies and the list goes on. At first, it was just a harmless thing. Because of my interaction with people, I gained a lot of friends, I never really cared if I've known someone in person, I accepted anyone who asked me for friendship.

Little did I know the internet could be a wild place, one day someone hacked my account, I had my credit card information, all my life was published online, even my physical address. From that moment I decided not to publish personal information online, so I delete my Facebook account altogether and open another one with a pen name.

Then Facebook police came along as I was using Facebook, they asked me to give them my government ID because they wanted everyone on Facebook to use their real names, so I got locked out for four years, I had my Facebook page of 50k followers, and other pages that I could not access. So I stayed out of the internet for a while, Until I gave in to decide giving them my government ID so they can unlock my profile.

Now on Facebook, when you post something, even your own friends won't see what you posted, you have to pay Facebook for your page followers to see what you posted.

I Like Writing

I am not a professional writer, but I enjoy writing, not because I like typing, but It is a good way to express myself. After a long haul of searching and hosting my own Wordpress sites Medium came along.

I had my Medium account for a while but I never decided to write on medium full time. It was not until recently that I decided to give it a try. I wanted to find a blockchain content management system or blockchain blog system, but never found anything that fits my needs. I saw Steemit, but there was just something off about it.

Everyone wants Food on their Table

You see while I'd like to earn something out of my writing, I just don't like to flash my readers with ads, they can be annoying, but there was no other way.

I tried Ghost but for a cheapo and less techy like me, I got frustrated and broke even before I finish my second post because they want you to pay over $20/month.

I have been hosting my websites but it gets tired over time because I am not writing every day sometimes I can go for months without writing.

I have an account with Hubpages, but honestly, just the look at it makes sucks the creativity out of you, it is another Ads and Affiliate site.

So Medium was the perfect fit for me.

The Devil I knew Came Back to Haunt Me

After working on medium for less than a month, I started to see some really scary things, so here I have listed a few things.

1. Problems with the distribution of content, I believe we can all agreed that as a writer when you put a lot of hard work into your articles, you deserve a good reward, a lot of writers sign up on Medium because of exposure, they want the World to read their content. But little did I know that this is not the case, your contents have to be curated in order to be distributed, otherwise, you are out of luck. What bugs me is who curates the curator? and sometimes I have specific topics that I choose their tags to read, but it keeps on suggesting/recommending different topics that I have no intention of reading.
2. The payment comes only from subscribers. Medium doesn’t care about the number of visitors you bring outside of the platform or referrals, I mean if I share my content on social media, then someone decides to join and subscribe because of my hard work, shouldn’t I get credited for that? Shouldn't you get credited? Does Hive.blog pays for external traffic? I published one of my articles a while ago, which brought a lot of traffic from google, bing, yahoo, and duck duck go, but it doesn’t generate any income at all because the readers are not medium subscribers. I know other sites like vocal.media pays for this, I tried it, but it is just not as friendly, takes decades to publish your articles, and once you publish you can’t edit unless you send a request.
3. Medium can suspend your account without notice. Here is what really makes me think twice about Medium. I saw one of the articles about someone's account and publication suspension. This made me nervous, what did she do? of course, she got her account back, but it makes you wonder, if that could happen to an average person like her, who doesn’t publish anything out of this world, would it not happen to you too? After reading her review, I went ahead and learn how to download my medium content & information.
4. Medium only uses Stripe account for payment, I haven’t had any problems with getting payments from medium so far, but I saw one of the writers on one of the Facebook groups asking about his stripe account being frozen, the fact that stripe.com only works on 17 countries and if you are out of the zone, you don’t have any other ways to get paid by medium unless you find a way around it. And it is not just one person, there are plenty of people especially from non-English speaking countries.

What is the conclusion?

I am pointing some things out, that makes me uncomfortable and insecure about my content, what if I wake up one day to find out my account is suspended?

I think it is time to bring back power and ownership to people. This is why I joined Hiveonboard because I believe it has a lot of room for improvement, while I can sleep at night not worrying about the curators hiding behind the keyboard.