Over the now several years of daily blogging, I have switched back and forth between various blogging platforms including Medium, Posthaven, and WordPress. While imperfect, the current setup I have is writing all of my content on WordPress, which then automatically publishes to my Medium account.
When I think about “choosing where to write,” I weigh several different factors. First, I think about my single biggest priority which is hitting publish. I need a place where it is easy and reliable to dump my thoughts and have them show up somewhere when I hit publish.
Not all publishing UX is created equal, and I have definitely wavered as to where to prioritize this item.
For a while, in my mind, Medium was leagues ahead of other platforms in terms of “how easy it is to go from starting to write to hitting publish.” It was simply a better writing experience. Now, though, with WordPress’ release of Guttenberg, the experience is a lot more similar. I would still say that the media experience on Medium is better but that is probably my bias as thousands and thousands of writers use WordPress each and every day.
Another priority for me is that my content lasts forever and that I own it. This is the primary reason I switched from Medium to Posthaven and now Posthaven to WordPress. I want WordPress to be my home base because I most believe that it will be around in 100 years. I am not sure that I can say the same about Medium, especially given recent turbulence in the media and uncertainty about its long term strategic road map.
Nonetheless, I still value the ability to cross publish my posts onto Medium. In fact, tens of thousands of people find me via Medium each and every month and I would be amiss in saying that the platform has not provided me with tremendous growth and learning.
My current setup works, but as I mentioned, it is very imperfect. I cannot schedule posts to automatically cross publish to Medium…This is frustrating as I try to sometimes get ahead of my content stream. Another problem is that uploading multi-media can be a pain here on WordPress.
Everything aside, there are no excuses as I still find a way to hit publish (go to the gym) each and every day.