Why My New Blog Isn’t on Medium

I’ve started a new coding blog in December: Overreacted.

overreacted.io

People often ask why I moved off Medium. Doesn’t it have a better distribution than a personal blog? I’ll answer this question here. My reasons are simple:

1. Some of my Medium articles unexpectedly got behind a paywall*. I’m not sure what happened and whether that’s still the case. But I didn’t do it myself, and that caused a blow to my confidence in Medium as a platform. I respect their need to monetize, but it felt wrong when done retroactively.
   (* Folks from Medium reached out, and it appears that I confused one popup with another. In either case, I’m not the only one confused.)
2. My views on some topics have changed. I could continue blogging here but it feels a bit embarrassing to see my old writing just one scroll away. On the other hand, I don’t feel comfortable editing or deleting the old articles. I wanted to start from a clean slate, and this was my way to do it.
3. I want to dogfood React. Just like we heavily use React at Facebook, I’d like to use it more personally. My new blog is built with React. Before you bring out the “blogs don’t need React” pitchfork, consider that in my case using it improves the reader experience. Thanks to Gatsby, my blog works 100% without JavaScript, loads with a lightning speed, and the client-side JS enhances that experience with prefetching and seamless transitions.
4. I like to have full control over the experience. I like to have a corner of the internet where I can add silly details — such as rendering cups of coffee as a reading time approximation or offering to switch between dark and light themes. In the age of social media and homogeneous pages, it’s fun.
5. It’s open to the collaboration. My blog is open source. I started getting pull requests from community with fixes to RSS, code highlighting, SEO, and accessibility. What’s more, the React community added the support for translations and started writing them! Overreacted is almost fully translated to French, and one article has translations into 19 languages.

It feels good to have my own corner of the internet for the first time.

Even though Medium offers me a huge audience and a better distribution story, I don’t plan to write new articles on Medium.

See you on Overreacted.