In my introductory post I mentioned I was a blogger on Medium for a time. I liked it over there. It was a nice little community & platform similar to WordPress but meant exclusively for blogging.
In my humble opinion, Medium is dead and has been for a while. The last article I wrote on there was 4 years ago. Sometimes I ask myself: Why did I stop?
Wait, Medium is Dead?
From my perspective, Medium abandoned it’s community. It’s writers. And everyone, basically.
I still remember when I first heard about it. Medium: A pay-walled community for bloggers and writers. WordPress had been around for probably a decade or more by the time Medium showed up. Did we really need a new blogging platform?
But Medium was different. The GUI was minimal, the community was lively, and the platform was fresh. They introduced new ideas for engagement, such as “applauds” instead of favorites or bookmarks. They syndicated content and even my posts showed up on their front-page. Neat!
But then whomever was in charge just kinda walked away. They made it even more paywall-y and limited posts even for writers like me who didn’t make their writings a premium offer. Given that much of my traffic came from my YouTube channel, that ended it for me.
Now, it seems like all that is left is politics and world news. Which is unsurprising, really.
Egee’s Medium Publications
I was proud of my little following on Medium. I wrote about 55 posts between my personal blog and my publications. About 30 of them are public, the rest being unlisted or drafts in various states.
My first big post was this one about switching back to .NET from Ruby (haha). It got over 100 claps and I was really pleased about it.
I followed it up with a topic about why I don’t use Windows and both the post and the video blew up! Another success.
When I created the DistroDelves publication, I spent a long time trying to customize it to fit my vision for the show. And that was my first major problem: there’s no customization.
If you’re a blogger on Medium, you are, in reality, a blogger for Medium. And honestly, that’s really cool! I think that makes it a really great platform for part-time or even professional-level bloggers that write content daily. But I want my own brand or label which I release content under.
After Medium
Once I realized I outgrew Medium, I tried my hand at a custom Jekyll blog. It’s long gone now but it was a lot of work to set up properly. Too much work it seems as I never finished it and eventually scrapped it. I talk about why I bounced back to WordPress in this post.
Many years later, here I am at the keyboard blogging. This time, with my own brand and platform!
This is Egee.io: My Creative House! I do lots of things, including but not limited to blogging.
Medium Egee is dead. Long Live WordPress Egee!
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