Why I don’t write on Medium
Medium is super popular nowadays. Too popular in fact; anyone’s lousy “self-help” post, and even blatantly incorrect posts, can get thousands of claps.
Medium is also super annoying. Lots of people hate Medium, for various reasons: content quality (see also the Responses to the clickbait post linked above), pay-walled premium content, focus on the content (instead of the author), slimy business tactics (they extorted a charity), technical reasons, and so on.
I share their feelings, and in addition, here are some more reasons of my own, as to why I don’t publish on Medium (except occasionally as a way to link to my own website):
Medium treats comments and posts (stories) the same
This is simply nuts. Comments are NOT stories.
If you look at your stories, and you’ve left any comments on other people’s stories, you’ll see those comments as any other story.
Navigating through a comment thread is horrible. You click the “X response(s)” link under a comment, which takes you to a completely new page, where you may see another “X response(s)”, which takes you to another new page etc. By then you’ve lost most of the context. This is patently stupid. One-story-per-page makes sense, one comment per page does not, because comments are short and are threaded. Who designed this crap? No other commenting system is this awkward. Why Medium didn’t learn from Disqus (which is precisely in the business of article comments), or at least Facebook threads — beats me. As a result, most Medium articles have very poor comment engagement compared to Disqus or any normal threaded commenting system.
You can’t link to sections of an article
If you want to link to a heading in a Medium article, you can’t.
No advanced formatting
No nested bullet lists.
No footnotes.
No tables.
No syntax highlight for code (unless you’re willing to put up with some ugly workarounds). Medium’s help clearly says they don’t support syntax highlight.
If you’re not a software developer, you won’t care, but here’s something weird: there are extremely easy ways for Medium to add syntax highlighting capabilities, using free and open source libraries like this one. It really should not take more than an hour (including testing and whatnot) to add this functionality. Yet Medium chose not to. Why? 🤷
Where to blog instead
It’s actually pretty easy to take back control of your content and formatting. Open source publishing platforms like Ghost are free, or if you don’t want to host one yourself, you can use their online offering. Ghost even looks a lot like Medium.
If you’re a coder, there’s a specialized blogging platform called Dev.to.
If you want to read more of my articles, head over to my website.
