I understand that medium is not absolutely necessary and ideally we would have an open source tool that is easy to deploy. In the meanwhile, I use medium quite a bit.
When we use medium, we tell our audience we don't care if they get bombarded with bad UX, like subscription popups. And we tell our accessibility activist audience that we don't want them to read us at all.
I immediately nope out of medium articles. I black list medium on my search engines. And I criticize medium authors on HN instead of reading their articles. This is all with the hope of bringing back more accessible old school blogs.
If I wrote a blog in 2024, I would use a free GitHub Pages site, and use a markdown based blog generator. This distributes my message for free, without attacking my audience's attention with sign up screens.
Yeah. Medium did help to consolidate searching for blogs, but it also vastly increased the extremely low effort, and encourages bringing hot garbage takes to the spotlight.
I have yet to find a technical writer on medium that isn’t basically musing about what they learned that day in boot camp, or just regurgitating some stupidity they just read about how “FP is totally actually extremely performant if you just squint really really hard while lying about numbers!”
The bar for “good” on medium is already so insanely low that I question their move here.
I understand that medium is not absolutely necessary and ideally we would have an open source tool that is easy to deploy. In the meanwhile, I use medium quite a bit.