Goodbye Medium

There's virtually no content in this blog post...except for a link to a blog post by someone else about the purported topic of this post.

In reality, this post is just a wrapper for that post, with some self-promotion ("you’ll also see Kent’s approach to ensuring that he leaves no URL behind, thanks to making smart use Netlify’s redirects API and serverless functions.")

The original blog post is here: https://kentcdodds.com/blog/goodbye-medium

Someone might want to update that link to the real post:

https://kentcdodds.com/blog/goodbye-medium

He's leaving for the reasons that you'd expect. It's a good read, though not at all surprising.

I made the same decision, but with Wordpress instead of Medium. I briefly considered using Medium, but having to use a WYSIWYG editor on a site that nags people for money before showing my content was something I couldn't support.

Being able to write my posts in Markdown, test them locally with Docker Compose and deploy with CI via Travis onto a domain that I own with SSL certificates that I own is a MASSIVE win.

Medium is good for marketing but not much else. If your goal is to get eyeballs then Medium is a decent option. I've had several posts which got more views than had I self hosted by getting posts featured in publications. Had I not been featured in the publications then I wouldn't have been any better off by posting on Medium.

I doubt Medium will continue to be a good option for content marketing but it's good for the moment.

I would definitely not post anything on medium that has more personal or long term value.

Different tools for different jobs.

Medium has become a terrible reading experience especially if you are logged out. I don't like seeing a pop up asking me to create an account every time I click a link to a blog post hosted on Medium.

Aside from the annoying popups, another issue for me is that medium is profiting by monetizing your content. Blogs aren't hard to host with gitlab or github pages (gitlab and hugo is especially nice, in my opinion), among a ton of other options where you aren't subjected to this.

The web is full of warnings for people not to tie their freely available content to a third-party platform (Facebook Pages, LinkedIn Articles, Medium, etc).

Medium, like other online social hang outs, is great to be known. It's like showing your face at a cocktail party and network around — but you make the sale, the long chat, the deep connection, outside of the cocktail party.

Building my blog using Webflow, was thinking of using Medium as a distribution channel.

Anyone else here had similar ideas?