What are your thoughts on joining a platform like Medium?

Does anyone blog or guest blog on a platform like Medium? If not, what are your thoughts on it?

 

I've been a member for about 9 months now, and I've been pleasantly surprised by it.

It has a lot of faults, let's cover those first.

1) their default font for monospace text -- courier -- is set to too light a font-weight, and their editor oft mangles code particularly in terms of indentation. It is to this end a LOT of people use third party code sources that they have provided support for. I'm not just talking codepen, but also things like GIST embeds.

2) The front end is an accessibility violation in terms of serif fonts on screen media (though they use large enough a font-size to mitigate that slightly), and more importantly most of their functionality being "JavaScript only". They are lucky in that their industry, product, and audience is unlikely to be treated the way retail, public utilities, medical, banking, and government are, as their interface choices WOULD land them in legal trouble otherwise.

3) The interface -- particularly the header controls -- changes willy-nilly based on what page you're on. The site logo switches sides, the "you have messages" button doesn't appear on your own "personal" pages so you have to navigate to someone else's or the main page to get your messages (hurr-durrz), some pages don't give you the menu for your user account, etc, etc. The editor is also a bit wonky and takes a lot of getting used to.

4) Replies to articles are treated as articles in their own right, but cannot be monetized. If you're reply is big enough and detailed enough to warrant an article, make it separate from the reply and backlink to it in the reply.

5) It's hard to filter topics you don't give a flying F*** about. I'm there for web development topics, I don't want to have the main page telling me how to "please my man" like a 1970's issue of Vogue, or psuedo-science scam artist "health" bullshit like "Science Says These 5 Foods Will Help You Burn Fat Efficiently". It's a "all topics are welcome" site that does little to let you isolate your interests. Plan accordingly.

6) You have to pay to post or to read more than three articles a month.

7) lack of customization. You can add a header image, and screw around with the colours a little, and choose fonts from a VERY small list, but overall the amount of changes you can make is barely worthy of mention.

Now, that said, it has a number of advantages.

1) It's only 5 bucks a month.

2) Around three crappy articles can pay off at least that, one really good article can make four times that it's first month. An AMAZING article once you're established and have followers can pay out in the hundreds.

For example:

Crappy article: https://deathshadow.medium.com/dont-reinvent-the-wheel-and-other-web-developer-cop-outs-ed9dc4d6c9e3

Good Article: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/cs...ses-are-fast-theyre-lying-to-you-827ff7d15203

Amazing - My Top Earner: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/http-2-push-fact-fiction-placebo-746cee7e3bdf

That article of mine about HTTP2 Push? It has made me more money since it was published than I've made in the past DECADE with adsense!

It's almost like they have a real revenue plan via subscriptions, instead of a pretend wishful thinking one in the form of advertising.

3) there are "publications" that you can submit your articles to. Doing so to established pubs with lots of followers AND getting accepted by them can drive some good traffic and therefor pay out better. Some publications will suggest edits which is fine, but beware some publications may make edits without asking. If you care about that, ask for clarification of if that's their policy or not when they try to solicit you. If your writing style is good and unique, beware that the publications will come to you asking for you to print with them -- and you can only do one article per publication.

I know I just made that sound more negative than it is, but trust me it's a good thing once you get the hang of dealing with them.

4) Reach. Between being an established site, the internal "publications", and the somewhat semantic markup (not complete, but more acceptable than turdpress' trash)

5) Proper integration of codepen, GIST, and many other code sources. All you have to do is paste in the URI and it does the rest. This includes letting users run your pens inside the article.

6) It has per-article in-built image hosting. Controls over image placement is a bit wonky, but you get used to it. Admittedly, one can also get used to banging your head against the wall!.

7) Lack of customization leads to consistent reading experience. Whilst sure the UI can be inconsistent, across all article pages the consistency of layout pays off. Nobody can screw with things so badly you get lost from writer to writer.

8) Built in aggregate. The home page lists articles of all topics by age and popularity across all writers. Whilst as I said this can suck as you get articles on topics you don't care about, it also means you can oft reach people you might otherwise wouldn't. People pull up the page for all articles tagged "javaScript" you get listed amongst your peers. I've found this actually tends to have more meaningful "reach" than trying to compete on search engines.

9) The paywall is a filter. It tends to keep out spammers you'd have to manage with a conventional blog if you allow comments. It filters out a lot of trolls unwilling to pay to say nothing more than "wah wah, is not" (Like some folks 'round these parts), and in general keeps out the "Twitter generation TLDR nose breathers". It's a site for people who actually want to read and don't scream "Aaah, wall of text" like the illiterate dipshits who flake out over anything longer than 144 characters.

Whilst it has issues and I was highly skeptical, for the most part it's been a good experience that I've actually made money on. It's been far better an experience than conventional blogging, or forums. That it has helped me stay afloat during my continued decline of health was a welcome shock. Honestly the way things have been going of late, I'd be eating nothing but Ramen if not for my writings on medium. I'm not sure what the cut is or how they divvy up the money, but it really does seem to blow what advertisers pay for similar traffic levels out of the water; it's almost like going back in time 20 years in terms of payout per visit. Again, almost as if they have a legitimate revenue scheme instead of the noodle-doodle wishful thinking predatory "but advertising can pay for everything"

In case anyone is interested, my medium page:
https://deathshadow.medium.com