What I decided with Medium…

I love reading content on Medium. I get the daily email from them with posts from people I follow, and I love that.

So, I tried Medium last June. My original hypothesis was that I would post different things on this blog vs. my Medium page. I knew this would be a short-term solution as no one wants to read things in different places, so telling my friends to check both my blog and Medium was too much to ask. But I wanted to see if Medium might be a place to move my blog over entirely.

But that was never going to happen, because you never want to “farm on someone else’s land.” That’s an expression that was used a lot during 2010-2011, when people were creating entire businesses on the Facebook platform. The problem is, if you create something that can only live on someone else’s platform, you are creating a gigantic risk that one day, you can’t be on their platform any longer. Maybe they change the way they operate, or they close down, but as soon as you can’t run on their platform anymore, you’re toast.

After deciding to keep my own blog, many people I know told me to just post the same thing in both places. I thought that sounded crazy, but after Googling it a bit I found that a lot of people do that. I tried it a few times but it felt a little, I don’t know, dishonest? Anyway, it wasn’t for me.

So for the time being, as much as I love some things about Medium as a content creation platform, I’m going to stick to using it strictly as a way to read great content. And I’ll continue to post here, on my blog, which I control and have built up a nice audience.

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