Can we all please stop using Medium now?

Medium is cancer. A trojan horse. It’s Facebook. But for blogging. A walled garden behind which all your favourite content lives, and yet you are forced to login via their shitty UI, or worse still pay for access.

When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play?

I’ll tell you when. When we all got greedy looking for the attention our blogs used to get until social media came along. Or when we got greedy looking for coinage off the onetruecontentsource™. If you enjoy reading on the web chances are you’ve been forced to login to Medium at some point in the last week.

Have any of you noticed the dark UI patterns. I bet you did. I’m guessing you noticed smart programmers / designers / internet celebs tweeting about how shit it is. Maybe someone you respect continually pointed out their accessibility failures. Maybe you nodded your head in agreement. Maybe you even retweeted it. Go you.

Just so we are clear. Medium takes your content, rolls it up into a pretty SEO friendly package for themselves and sells it. Oh, and turns us all into seals waiting for someone to throw us a fish in the process. If you are lucky, you might even get a cut. You know. Like the sort of cut artists get on Spotify. Profit share I think the cool kids call it.

So why is everyone still publishing on it? For what? More eyeballs? More attention? More reach?

Balls to that. If only one of you read this I’ll be happy. At least I own my own platform and I’m not being controlled by some monolithic publishing giant that can do whatever they want and sell whatever advertising they please ON YOUR HARD WORK.

Please. It’s 2019. Learn to market yourself and your content. Quit being lazy waiting for Medium to do it for you. OWN YOUR PLATFORM.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the mini publications that we all jump for fucking joy over being published on. How’s about no. How’s about we starting taking responsibility for the absolute decimation of the traditional web.

You know. That old internet that used to be open and free.