I mean yes, I would not click on any article hosted on medium. And it is not just because of incessant login popup that many correctly noted. It is also because I feel if any individual / company can not host their articles and blogs on their own platform they are not worth reading. I dislike their reasoning on at least two counts:
1) It is too much work: In world of static site publishing and easy cloud hosting it is not too much work for technically competent person to host their own content if they have something worthwhile to say.
2) Not our core competency: Many companies or teams who say this sounds to me management style BS. If hosting few articles in your domain is beyond their competency then I can't really trust whatever cloud, big data, distributed, serverless computing they are talking about.
I'm really torn about this because I don't think dealing with domains and web publishing is a good litmus test for who has something worthwhile to say. That said, I can't ignore the signal when it comes to tech-focused writing. For broader subjects though, I don't think tech-knowhow is better gatekeeper than traditional book or magazine publishing provided.
Ultimately I think lowering the barrier for publishing is a good thing, but that comes with an inherent cost on quality and the incentives just aren't there for businesses / brands to solve this. The backstop for me is personal reputation. Individuals can maintain integrity and principles, businesses cannot (except as a function of stable individual leadership). Therefore, I believe platforms which orient towards scalability and anonymous algorithms will be a race to the bottom (eg. Medium, TikTok), and platforms which orient around the individual (eg. Substack) will at least have a chance at representing quality (monetization, scalability, VC-pressure concerns notwithstanding).
I don’t get your reasoning. I have hosted my own static site for years, but I wrote primarily on Medium today because I can get paid that way. You cannot make a living writing blogs on a static site.
Medium significantly improves your reach and access to statistics to understand readers better. Until Medium came around I had clue I could ever make a living as writer.
A lot of us use Medium because it has solved a problem long plaguing the internet: How do you get paid for creating content?
I know myself that so don’t want to sign up to one dozen places for subscription. That would be the problem hosting your own site. Few people want to have 10 different subscriptions. With medium one subscription gives access to a lot of writers.
It’s interesting that you draw the line specifically at the software serving the post. Should the individual/company own the hardware also? The OS running on the server?
I don't think the parent is making a point about ownership, but rather publishing. He's saying that in 2022, if you're not competent to publish yourself, it creates doubts about what you have to say about high technology.
I think it’s just the branding awareness that is suspect.
You can host a WordPress site on blog.yourcompany.com for an amount that rounds to $0, and it will probably satisfy most people who dislike Medium and other aggregators.
Or you can roll your own of course, but the extra geek cred you will get for it is minimal. Not saying don’t do it, I’ve done it more than once, but do it for the doing.
1) It is too much work: In world of static site publishing and easy cloud hosting it is not too much work for technically competent person to host their own content if they have something worthwhile to say.
2) Not our core competency: Many companies or teams who say this sounds to me management style BS. If hosting few articles in your domain is beyond their competency then I can't really trust whatever cloud, big data, distributed, serverless computing they are talking about.