Blogger vs Medium
My first story on Medium was posted in 2014 about working at Red Lobster. Medium was still in its infancy and it seemed to be the barebones kind of blogging platform I wanted to post stuff on. It goes without saying Medium has changed a lot in the past 5 years and it no longer feels like home to me as far as personal blogs go. I have 26 "stories" published on there, and I plan to keep them there as opposed to deleting them.
Lots of celebrities started to choose Medium as the go-to blogging platform. Jeff Bezos used it to explain the whole blackmail scandal, and Obama used it to address the nation (much like how trump prefers micro-blogging on twitter to project his voice). A lot of e-sports players used it to address team drama. Medium also introduced a paywall to their curated content which is definitely interesting in some cases and actually warrants a payment to some writers given the amount of research that went into one of those kinds of posts, but after toying with it for a while it's not for me.
Blogger feels more home-y. The editor is definitely as stripped down as an online text editor can get. Why blog at all? It seems like most people prefer twitter anyway. Twitter definitely gets more words underneath more eyeballs (because of retweets and likes and algorithms yadda yadda), but that's not the goal with a personal blog. A personal blog is special place on the internet where people can come in and enter if they so choose. It's not forced on other people. It's not on a timeline. It's not a game of getting the most retweets or likes. It's not 240 characters. Twitter is feeling more and more like a clusterfuck of politics and memes, which is great in its own right because the internet is the wild west of information, but that's not the context I want my personal content in. I can use it to be funny, I think, but anything deeper than surface level stuff warrants its own place.
This obscurity also gives way to being more vocal about topics I wouldn't otherwise write about. Hopefully making the switch will make me write more blog entries.
Lots of celebrities started to choose Medium as the go-to blogging platform. Jeff Bezos used it to explain the whole blackmail scandal, and Obama used it to address the nation (much like how trump prefers micro-blogging on twitter to project his voice). A lot of e-sports players used it to address team drama. Medium also introduced a paywall to their curated content which is definitely interesting in some cases and actually warrants a payment to some writers given the amount of research that went into one of those kinds of posts, but after toying with it for a while it's not for me.
Blogger feels more home-y. The editor is definitely as stripped down as an online text editor can get. Why blog at all? It seems like most people prefer twitter anyway. Twitter definitely gets more words underneath more eyeballs (because of retweets and likes and algorithms yadda yadda), but that's not the goal with a personal blog. A personal blog is special place on the internet where people can come in and enter if they so choose. It's not forced on other people. It's not on a timeline. It's not a game of getting the most retweets or likes. It's not 240 characters. Twitter is feeling more and more like a clusterfuck of politics and memes, which is great in its own right because the internet is the wild west of information, but that's not the context I want my personal content in. I can use it to be funny, I think, but anything deeper than surface level stuff warrants its own place.
This obscurity also gives way to being more vocal about topics I wouldn't otherwise write about. Hopefully making the switch will make me write more blog entries.