One of these free blogging platforms is called Medium , which describes itself as “a better place to read and write things that matter.” The design is minimalist, the typography is great, and most importantly, the content is high quality.
It also encourages collaboration with a unique commenting system, called “Notes ” on Medium, which allows other users to focus on a particular piece of content in an article and leave comments about it.
But what is it really like to write on Medium? An russian virtual mobile number insightful article I recently read was Why I Left Medium by Kenneth Reitz.
The draw
Reitz cited the following reasons for switching his blog to Medium.
Great typography
Foster collaboration
Force photos for each post
Responsive design
Yes, it certainly has great typography. Just look at a post on Medium. It's very easy to read, on any device (this is where responsive design comes into play).
I'm not sure why forcing photos into every post would be considered a good thing. It seems more like a burden to have to find a relevant, copyrighted photo to attach to every single one of your posts.
I thought we were focusing on writing.
The disadvantages
Ultimately, Reitz left Medium in favor of a self-hosted WordPress blog due to some of Medium's limitations.
Does not allow embedding content
Without analysis or reference data
No custom domains
No custom URLs or slugs
All you can do is keep writing, and have your articles hosted on Medium.com. And repeat. And that's it.
You do more than just write
The problem with Medium is that you will most likely be doing more than “just writing” on your blog.
You embed stuff. Tweets, YouTube videos, Instagram photos, SlideShare presentations. WordPress makes it easy .
You check your stats. You see what content is popular and what isn’t, and you adapt your future content strategy based on that data. Whether it’s through Google Analytics, Woopra, Jetpack (if you use WordPress), or literally any other analytics service.
You have an identity. You have a domain name that represents your name, your business, and/or your organization. When your URLs are structured like it's pretty hard to stand out.
Speaking of URLs, does “9e53ca408c48” accurately reflect the content of that URL? Unlikely. WordPress makes it easy to craft your URLs in a meaningful (and SEO-friendly) way.
What I mean is that when you host a WordPress site, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it.
Conclusion
The only really unique/innovative feature I see on Medium is its notes feature (as opposed to traditional blog comments), which supposedly encourages “collaboration” between other writers. Time will tell how well it works.
Design-wise, everything else from the smooth responsive design to the super-clean typography can be replicated with a solid, responsive WordPress blogging theme.
I love minimalism and simplicity as much as the next person, but I think “restrictivism” would be a more appropriate word when it comes to Medium and all of its limitations.
I'm not knocking Medium. On the contrary, I think it's a very good service with very good people behind it. Personally I would never use it, but I'm quite a proponent of self-hosting your own websites for (what I hope are) obvious reasons.
Sure, if all you want to do is write and not worry about anything else, Medium would be perfect for you. But chances are, “just writing” isn’t going to cut it.