Hey guys!
I’ve recently decided to get more into blogging for a variety of reasons, including that I wanted to do something a bit more creative than web application development, and that I wanted to reconnect with my literary side, since I used to enjoy writing prose and even poetry in the past, but I had stopped after becoming busy with my software development career
I have been a Medium user since around 2018 or so, and the site pulled me in because it made writing and publishing smooth and accessible. It also made reading other people’s work quite easy and enjoyable, and the idea of a sort of social network specifically for writers really spoke to me, and still does. Even more to Medium’s advantage, it seems that there was a sizeable audience of tech people like developers, UX people, cloud specialists, and the like, so it felt like a smart career move to post there
The user experience got a lot worse
One of the most apparent changes over the years was the UX degraded significantly. One of the main changes I’m thinking of is that Medium used to have it so that even if you weren’t a paying member, you could read an allotted amount members-only stories a month; This was a smart move, as gave users a fairly enticing, meaningful preview of the perks of being a member
Nowadays, however, this well thought out system has been replaced with a more abrupt, intrusive call to action to purchase a membership. I was told by my readers that one of the recent stories I had posted appeared to be displaying normally for about half of the reading time, then was abruptly covered by a paywall, telling them to buy a Medium membership if they wanted to finish reading the article. I understand that Medium are a business with a profit motive, but I feel that this kind of move is more than enough to push away readers, which in turn, leads to writers like me who create the site’s content to question why they are still publishing their work on this site. Medium did not do a good job of informing writers of this change, as I had no idea that this was the case until a friend told me, and it reflects poorly on me as a writer to put something behind a paywall that I didn’t really know existed
Another mark against Medium from the writer’s perspective is that Medium doesn’t do that much to promote your work within the site. In one of my articles that I had published to the platform earlier, out of the 1.6K views I had received on that article, only 5 or 6 percent of the views were actually from within Medium itself. As I had been on Medium for several years, and was a paying customer. I expected at least a double-digit percentage of my actual reach to come from the platform I was actually publishing to in the first place
Lack of quality control
What I mean by this is that Medium will let people publish very short pieces that don’t go very in-depth as members-only stories. This was a bit less of an issue when you could still read three members-only stories a month, but it was always odd to think I was “spending” one of my free stories on an article with an enticing title, only for the actual article to be very short and uninformative
No customizability, even on the paid plan
This point is relatively minor, but there isn’t much in the way of the ability to customize the look and feel of your page
This didn’t really even occur to me much until I started posting to WordPress, where I can use a whole bunch of different themes, and an RSS feed and email subscription service are provided out of the box; while Medium only offers the email subscription service if you create a publication, which, confusingly enough, is a separate thing from your main Medium profile
One thing that I’m especially enjoying about WordPress, aside from the plethora of themes and other goodies, is that I can have a creative outlet also that makes me a bit of income via ads on my articles. Also, since WordPress has been the backbone of a big chunk of the Internet for a long time, I’m confident they won’t slap a paywall in front of my work anytime soon!
Thanks for reading this article! If a few of the points in my article resonated with you, please subscribe so you can receive future articles via email. I’m currently posting new stuff every day! 🙂
