Moving away from Medium

Why I'm moving away from Medium to a direct personal blog

May 16, 2020

My first post on Medium was back in 2015, when I felt like I needed a medium to share my thoughts about a contentious topic at the time. For some or the other reason, I stopped writing on Medium after a couple of posts, and instead restricted my writings primarily to Twitter. I suppose Twitter's (needle in a haystack) wisdom got to me, and I developed a great admiration for succinct text conveying a lot more information density1. Plus, tweeting required a much lesser time commitment I guess.

A pretty good platform

Now, don't get me wrong here. Even though I haven't been actively writing on Medium, I've been a fairly regular reader. My estimate of my clickthrough on their daily mails would be > 33%, which means that their content curation is quite good2. They've been pretty open about their monetisation model, so that's cool as well.

But a platform nonetheless

Over the course of time, Medium made many changes, mostly for the better, but things like removal of custom domains pointed to a direction in which Medium keeps itself in the center, and strips away everything else. Those were already beginning to feel like ceding control. Still, nothing wrong in it to be honest, but there's a certain jostle of platforms (think claps, comments, highlights etc) that takes me away from the joy of writing, and forces my attention to the reaction of it. Almost feels like I'm writing for an audience than for the joy of it. Maybe that's why I stopped writing on Medium in the first place, who knows?

Twitter is even more extreme on that spectrum, but for some reason, it's easier for me to associate the hustle of interactions with something like a tweet. But with long form writing, that hustle breaks my mind completely. It's like trying to read a book in a public space instead of the comfort of your study. The space may be empty (no claps, comments etc), but the structure still reminds you that you're in a hall.

A more personal blog

I felt like changing that. There's a joy in writing for the sake of it, and I felt like moving out of Medium will allow that better. Is it the scaffolding of a reach your audience that made Medium less personal? Feels like it, but it's difficult to say for sure, to be honest. I guess only time will tell 😄

No plans on walking away from Twitter though3. I feel like Twitter has its own place, which by definition is not a personal one. I see myself posting links from here to Twitter, when I feel like it. Let's see.