Blogging and Medium
During the early days of the pandemic I wrote for at least one days every day. I was blogging the pandemic experience from my point of view. More recently I have kept up another blogging streak. This time I am reaching day 274 as I write this blog post.
Developing a Writing Habit
I mention this because when Medium was first created I liked the idea of a website where we could share writing daily, but at the same time I blogged irregularly and didn’t have a voice. As a result I created an account but never used it. Things have changed now. Now I have written for 274 days in a row. Writing has become part of my daily routine. I was toying between the idea of Substack and Medium but I prefer Medium for the reason that I dislike the idea of sending an e-mail that will be ignored. I subscribe to newsletters but almost never read them. Usually I go through them when working on Inbox zero. E-mails stroke the ego of the writer, but they’re just noise.
No Obligation to Read
In contrast Medium posts are more volatile. They appear in our timelines but we are under no obligation to click through and read them. This is better. Most of what we write has little value but the act of writing, in and of itself has value. It is by writing that we develop the habit of thinking, not just 140 characters, or even 1000 characters, but for an ever growing stream of conscience.
Practicing with VIM
For a while I was using Day One to write my blog posts but the software kept crashing on me so I dumped it for VIM. What I like about VIM is that it’s minimal. I get to practice writing Markdown whilst at the same time practicing with VIM. Vim is a powerful tool that is worth getting familiar with.
The Decline of Social Media and the Increase in Attention
As I write this I read a post about people no longer reading. I read every single day. I read both from a kindle before going to sleep, but also from Audible during my daily walks or runs. Remember that if you don’t have to read in one format, you can always read with another one.
The same was said of blogging. “I don’t have time to blog because I’m distracted by social media”. That was true before. During the pandemic something changed. Social Media emptied of conversations and people we would desire to meet in person, either because we wanted to self-isolate, or because we grew tired of seeing others ignore COVID lockdowns. That’s why I quit Facebook and Instagram. I was tired of feeling more lonely, rather than less lonely.
The Silver Lining
By becoming less sticky Social Media freed us to do other things. It freed us to study, to read, to write, and to work on projects again. For wishful thinkers the pandemic is over. For others, like me, the habits that helped me cope with solitude are still valid now. Now that I have a writing habit that is consistent, I can share blog posts, rather than tweets, toots or notes, depending on wheither you’re on Twitter, Mastodon, Firefish, other Fediverse instances, Threadiverse, or other.
Online Communities
Remember, before Social Media took over online conversations we had social networks. Bloggers are part of a social network. Medium is a social Network. The Fediverse is a social network. Social networks are centered around human being communicating by electronic means. The problem with Corporate Social Media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram TikTok, Threds and others, is that they use algorithms to control the conversation, rather than chronology. Mastodon and the Fediverse are chronological social networks, like the real world. where conversations take place in real time, where algorithms don’t manufacture conflict.
A Personal Blog First, Medium Second
Sharecropping between Medium and a Personal Blog is the reason for which I didn’t want to post to Medium. I’d rather have my own blog, that I write for, daily, and then share on Medium. I have had my own website since 1996. I left Facebook because I felt they benefited more from me wasting my time, than I got.
User ROI
Since 2007 or so I said that Social Media companies spent so much time thinking about ROI for brands, PR firms and corporations that they forgot about ROI for the user. This is demonstrated beautifully by the Threads situation. It picked up one hundred million users within days, but lost four fifths of them within a week or two. Threads forgot about the ROI that users got out of being on their app. I loved the idea of Substack Notes until I saw that it was a popularity contest. My enthusiasm for Substack lasted for minutes.
Medium
As I mentioned above I like Medium because we can read or ignore what people write, without having to mark things as read. We can also read articles on the site or app, when we’re on the app, rather than working through e-mails. I like the idea of revenue sharing but I don’t like that some content is paywalled. I feel that this removes from the user experience. There are two issues with the Paywall:
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We need to pay to finish articles
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By paying to read articles our content has to have much more traffic to break even.
And Finally
Medium doesn’t have to be a mirror of my blog. It can highlight the better content, the content I feel is worthy of being shared more broadly. Now i the time to start a new experiment.
