I realized Medium is really great about surfacing content, but it removes the face of it. It neutralizes all content to basically be author-agnostic. It’s like Walmart or Amazon in that you can buy from thousands of different brands, but you rarely actually know what brand you’re buying…you just know “I got it from Amazon.”
Same with content on Medium. Sure, you can see who the author is or what publication it’s on, but ultimately your takeaway is “I read this article on Medium”, and that’s not what I wanted. I wanted to get back to people saying “I read this article on Baremetrics”.
Baremetrics is still going to use Medium, but only to mirror the posts from their company blog after a two-week delay.
I’m not a fan of Medium-the-platform, because I’m not a fan of forfeiting design and content control to a company that (a) treats every article the same and (b) has yet to show they can turn a profit. Maybe that’s me being a snob who knows how to run his own site and there are lots of people who just want a simple place to write and publish, but I’d argue that — today — self-publishing a blog is a weekend project for most, and the benefits of owning your content outweigh whatever fleeting readership Medium might send your way.
Regardless the platform, you should own the domain and design of your words. Medium as a second-hand distribution network or social graph is fine, but I think people who are all-in on Medium without a backup plan are nuts.