Why I Abandoned Medium

The year was 2015…

  • Justin Trudeau, at 44, took leadership in Canada
  • Myanmar held its first free election in 25 years
  • Gay marriage was legalised across the US
  • Tesla announced the ‘Powerwall home battery’
  • Space X launched the first reusable rocket into orbit and recovered it
  • Taylor Swift pulled her music from Spotify, whilst the Beatles added theirs…..
  • Medium, just 3 years old, was a little known website allowing people to create their own blogs in a simple, yet elegant fashion.

I was enticed to Medium by the elegance and simplicity of the tools they provided, with ease and speed to create content. The consistency in style across the site was (and still is), in my view, good design.

Though well-versed with technology, since having 2 young children, my free time is precious and no longer filled by spending time working out how to get things running. With the awesome Synology Diskstation, gone are my days maintaining Linux servers, with the exception of having moved my e-mail to a Raspberry Pi with the guidance of this great blog by Sam Hobbs.

As the reader may note, to date, my output in blogging has been rather sparse. In some part, I think the way in which Medium developed has been a small, contributing factor. Like any business and service where you provide the content, you are the product and Medium has sadly become more and more irritating over time with its direction towards paywall content.

I am not alone with this view…

In fact, it was Ed’s tweet here, which helped drive me to action this move (thanks Ed!).

The Black Hole

Another thing I dislike about Medium is its attempts to make itself ‘sticky’ with psychology-based techniques, similar to likes in Facebook. When someone reads a blog post, it messages you with the number of people who both looked at and read your content.

Medium e-mails you with content they think may interest you. They track all links you click on and as soon as you’ve spent time on their website, follows up with more e-mails suggesting other things to read. Whilst it may not sound bad, I reiterate that having had children, I value my time so much more. The ‘just one more’ desire to click another link creates a small high, produced by dopamine in your body, which makes you want more and in extreme cases, leads to addiction.

I can recommend reading “Indistractable” by Nir Eyal, which may help you realise just how much social-based services such as Facebook, Instagram and Medium steals your time - time that could be much better spent doing something else.

If you want to maintain a balance and not abandon social media completely, Eyal recommends setting aside specific scheduled time for doing this.

For me, leaving Facebook was rather easy, though I still maintain an account for friends to contact me, I no longer spend any time posting, scrolling, or thumbing through what other people post on social media, with the exception of Twitter where my focus is based around following trends within the domain of my work; that being macOS security.

After reaslising my time was better spent reading actual books and doing this instead of browsing Facebook, the next step was to turn off notifications and badges; the little number showing how many unread messages you have, which is there to satisfy your internal desire for that ‘just one more’ feeling.

For many, the presence of badges like these are uncomfortable and in the words of Matthew Syed, in his book “Bounce”, motivation can be described as ‘the removal of discomfort’; in this case, creating a desire to clear the badge.

Turning off notifications and badges worked well for me; since upgrading my iPad Mini due to its low 16Gb capacity, I have never downloaded these social media apps to my new device, which I use more than any other for consuming media.

I have an avid interest in Psychology and by changing my habits to read books instead of falling victim to the dopamine craving produced by ‘sticky’ sites, the large number of books and valuable content I have consumed in exchange, is worthy of another blog post for a recommended reading list.

The Switch

In order to switch my blog away from Medium, I needed an alternative. As metioned above, my affection with Synology Diskstation for the “it just works” and easy maintenance made it an obvious choice to host myself.

For the same reasons as I now try to avoid social media sites, I don’t want to be distracted by number of readers or hits on my site and static content is what I’m producing, without need for any reader interaction. If you want to comment on anything I write, then Twitter is the best place to get in-touch.

For the static content, I’ve chosen Hugo to create markdown, which is then used to generate the web pages that I upload to the Diskstation. There wasn’t any evaluation for choosing Hugo beyond asking a friend what they’d choose. After converting my posts on Medium to Hugo, I was content that it was up to the job.

Whilst HTTPS may be seem unnecessary for static content, it really should become the default these days and the Diskstation has it covered with an integration with Let’s Encrypt. Add a certificate and renewal is automatically taken care of.

Conclusion ( TL:DR )

  • Medium’s direction to paywall content isn’t something I want my blog to be associated with
  • Medium’s methods to make their site ‘sticky’ makes me uncomfortable and my time is better spent elsewhere.
  • Moving my blog away from Medium ensures my content does not contribute to that ‘stickiness’ and black hole that sucks away other people’s time.
  • A new start will hopefully encourage me to blog more!

I’ve you’ve made it this far then thanks for reading and I hope you’ve found it more entertaining than endlessly scrolling through your usual social media of choice.

Whether you like my post or not, feel free to let me know what you think, via Twitter.