Update: I disavow this post. Left up for reference sake.
Medium for a long time was my preferred publication platform. It offers a beautiful interface, simple interaction features, and the ability to be featured in a variety of ways to extend your reach. I have to give the creators of Medium support for designing what is arguably one of the best reading and writing platforms on the internet. However, they fall victim to the same fundamental flaw as other proprietary platforms, and that is that they tend to silo your content. Once you have placed your content in the control of another platform you are now, at least in part, subject to their whims and vagaries. For example, it used to be possible to set Medium up with your own custom domain, that feature has now been deprecated.
Giving Medium the benefit of the doubt, they are one of the best silos on the internet. Thanks to them several of my articles on various cryptocurrencies projects got thousands more views than they likely would have otherwise, so it is a little bit hard for me to complain about them. However, even the best silo is still a silo and perhaps more insidious for being so tempting. However, the reason Medium still has incredible value even after you “leave” is that they allow themselves to become a syndication platform for your content.
Since Medium has a need for content to be available on the platform they made the very prudent decision of making it easy to import posts from other locations (like this one will be) and share them on Medium. The benefits of this are a canonical link that boosts your own site SEO, improved visibility, and the ability to have your article in a Medium publication. This let’s you profit from most of the benefits of Medium and maintain control of your content.
