I remember a while ago when all of us run a personal blog on the Internet. And I mean personal, not hosted on some side platform or an addition to their website. I mean personal.
Companies and individuals are now using Medium platforms to host and support all their articles, essays and case studies. I understand the drawing and can even list the positive elements:
- Under the Medium brand there is already a large community.
- Promoting your own work and following others is easy.
- The platform can be set up and implemented relatively easily.
Unfortunately, this has had a very severe impact on the blogging community - nobody controls their own blogs. It was an interesting and fun experience for me when I found a new blog:
- How did they choose to design the page ?
- What typefaces did they choose to use ?
- What are they using as back-end ?
- How do it look and feel on your mobile phone ?
These personalized self-hosted blogs have inspired other developers to build their own or tweak current blogs. In some ways this was a small factor when we pushed what we can do further and further on the web as developers went on to compete with each other.
I also think this inspired people to write better content instead of choosing clickbait garbage to get “featured” or boosted promotion on the main blogging platform, but I don’t think that’s the worst thing to come from this mass migration to a single blogging platform.
I’m not sure if it is the intention of Medium, but I personally believe that it is awful either way. The personality of most design and development blogs has been completely removed from them. All blogs look the same now.
Perhaps I was just a salty developer, with a narrow, pessimistic perspective about where our bloggers seem to lead – or perhaps I have only higher standards.