Recently I noticed some quite respectable developers like Kent C. Dodds (Goodbye Medium) and Dan Abramov (Why My New Blog Isn’t on Medium) left Medium, the blogging platform. The reasons they state on their goodbye posts are:
- Some of my Medium articles unexpectedly got behind a paywall (this doesn’t actually happen, but it’s an understandable misunderstanding 🤔)
- My views on some topics have changed. (I also took the opportunity to leave behind some old posts that aren’t really applicable to me anymore).
- I want to dogfood React. (This is a fantastic place for me to play around with React in a safe environment where it’s a huge deal if I break stuff).
- I like to have full control over the experience. (This is a big one for me!)
- It’s open to the collaboration. (My blog is open source and every article has a link where you can contribute fixes!)
Really, I have to sign in to continue reading other users articles and content? There is also another popup that says something like “You read a lot, we like that….” and it blocks the articles from reading. Well yes, this is a “paywall”, forcing users to do specific actions in order to read other users content is definitely a paywall. I’d prefer old school banners here and there other than blocking me up from continue reading articles.
I’m not a blogger that posts every now and then, I tend to post once in a couple of months, but I do have my own blog and create some posts when I feel to. The reason I never joined a platform like Medium (or Blogger etc.) is because I hate the idea of centralized content. Don’t get me wrong, such platforms provide tools, audience and ready solutions that people can use to host their blogs and content, but I believe that “I” as a developer can create my own blog and control my own content, in any way that I believe that suits my needs, from using a CMS like Joomla, Wordpress etc. or creating my own blog platform using Yii, Laravel, VueJS, ReactJS etc.
If you are a developer, it would be great challenge to create your own blog site and at the end you’ll have full control of everything and not handing your content to third party companies. You can search and find very good blog creating tutorials. I created this blog following Chuck’s Heintzelman Laravel 5.1 Beauty a couple of years ago.