On Feb 11 2018, I decided to take my 286 articles from my website at skeptikai.com, and move them over to Medium. Over six years of writing, and it was about time to get off that site (my site) for good. In this, my 287th Skeptikai article, I explain what led me to this decision, and why I’ll probably probably never look back.
This might seem like an ad for Medium, but I have no affiliation to Medium whatsoever — other than the fact that I now use it, because I think it’s the right choice for me. Here is my reasoning:
Medium is free
This is one of the main things. I ended up spending almost $200 a year for something that almost never brought in revenue (because I routinely refused advertisers who wanted to hawk their garbage services/products on my website). To be clear, in 2018 alone — when I wasn’t even active whatsoever—I had 3 more people contact me to put advertisements on my website; so I could’ve been paid. But I’m one of those schmucks who likes being principled rather than rich. Such a cliche I know, it makes me sick.
I Kinda Hate Wordpress
There’s a lot to like about Wordpress, but at the end of the day, it was always somewhat of an annoying platform for me. Aside from its many shortcomings, the main issue I had with it is that so many times since 2014, I have struggled just to log into my website. This constantly frustrated me and dissuaded me countless times to write more articles. I wonder how many more articles there could have been if I did not have to deal with such nonsense. It’s like a painter having limited access to their paintbrushes at totally random times. I think the only reason I stayed on the platform for so long is because migrating was such a hassle (not the migration itself, but looking for an alternative platform, doing lots of research, etc.). Needless to say, 2018 is the last year I will pay for my Skeptikai website.
Wordpress Has Lots of Hackers
Something I didn’t know (until it was way too late) was that apparently Wordpress is like a delicate little flower. A flower that can be hacked into by really annoying people who look for vulnerabilities in plugins and such… Apparently if you don’t update your plugins constantly, you risk being hacked.
So after maybe more than a year or so of total inactivity on my blog, I contacted my hosting provider (GoDaddy) about this. I spoke to a woman who calmly explained what the situation was. When I finally asked her what I could do about it, she told me about some $300 option she could provide, where someone goes in and gets rid of the issues for me. When I asked if there was no other option, she said “Yep!” very happily. I asked her if I could migrate my website’s XML to another platform and she said “Nope!” with the same kind of ecstatic tone that pissed me off the first time. She told me that there could be a virus inside there. Spoiler alert: She’s full of it.
About half a year later, I called them again and a man answered the phone and he was much more helpful. He said that the $300 option is an emergency 30-minute solution (if you’re a big e-commerce website or something, this would make sense), whereas a 12-hour solution would be half the price (Thanks for letting me know, lady…). Regardless, I merely asked if there was anything I could do to access my dashboard, and apparently there was not. I am therefore losing all of my unpublished articles (of which I probably had over 50) and all the stats related to my blog. But I think rather than clinging onto “what could’ve been,” it’s more valuable that I have all of my content on Medium. So I just gave up on everything else. Why spend hundreds of dollars to fix and maintain a website when Medium will do it all for free?
Medium Looks Pretty Cool
One of the things that struck me about Medium is how few choices there are for customization. On one hand it’s not great to have limited customization options, but on the other hand, the fact that the whole website is essentially streamlined in this way makes it really easy to consume such publications. Regular Medium readers know exactly where to go. Furthermore, the few choices they have are all actually quite good, and I like the fact that different blogs use different choices. It’s nice to give that unique sense of style.
I’m also not happy that a lot of my photos aren’t working (and captions to photos are broken), and I am way too lazy to go through almost 300 articles to check and fix them (I did for about 30). But the fact that the main photo in most of my articles actually does work is great. The secondary pictures usually aren’t as important to me. The text editor Medium developed is a bit strange to me, but I am getting used to it. It is incredibly simplistic, which I can of course see the appeal of. Again, you lose customization, but increase ease of use, which is a hard thing to argue against. So I am liking it a lot so far.
The Bottom Line
I’m really happy that the transition to Medium has been relatively simple, and that I don’t have to worry about losing money every year for producing free content like I was before. The fact that Medium even has opportunities to earn money through writing original content is a major bonus as well.
If Medium was around when I had started Skeptikai, I probably would have written on here from the start. With more and more companies switching over, I feel like I’m in good hands. Now I can focus on doing the one thing I wanted to do with my blog in the first place, without all the nonsense that comes along with Wordpress: blogging.
