In May when I sold the domain that used to house this blog, I considered moving everything over to Medium.com. It would have been a lot of work. I decided against the move.
I got some good comments here plus I had this nagging concern that no matter how much I liked Medium as a user, they could always change the rules and screw me over at their whim.
Here we are 4 months later and as a user, I no longer like Medium nearly as much as I once did. In their effort to make money, the algorithm is filling my feed with paid article recommendations. These recommendations no longer match the types of articles that I was reading in the first half of the year.
I used to open the app and read articles about Javascript, new technologies, and a few Spanish-language articles. Whenever I completed an article that I felt to be well-written and informative, I would follow the author.
Today, my feed is full of click-bait titles on topics I have zero interest in reading. These are all articles for those that have paid memberships.
Writers that I follow often do not show up in my feed and I need to perform multiple clicks to discover if any new articles have been written by them. Usually, I forget to look. So the cool writer I found in January or February is now a faded memory, even though I follow them. For business reasons, Medium chooses to hide them from my feed.
Pay to Play?
I’m not opposed to paying for a service that improves upon the free model. For Medium, I was in a wait-and-see mode. What I saw was a lot of writers made their content pay-only to earn revenue. Good writers and a lot of mediocre writers looking to get paid.
Medium had a moment. They were a format that signaled quality. If they still have it, it is fading. Medium continues to experiment and try different things, so maybe my concerns will be addressed over time. Or maybe they won’t.
I’ll Still Be Blogging Old-School
Even though I followed the proper procedures on Google Webmaster for transferring a domain, I lost a tremendous amount of traffic to this blog when I moved from the “.com” to the “.org”.
The 3-month page view average prior to the move was 33,000 a month. The 3-months since the move, that has dropped to just 6,000 a month. If you see an article written by some SEO hack saying you won’t lose traffic if you use the transfer procedure on Google Webmaster, they are wrong.
Even though my audience has dropped by 80%, it is still better for me to run a blog than trust that Medium will show my content on their feed to people that choose to follow me.
