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Why People Write on Medium

I just saw this post on UpThemes about migrat­ing your con­tent from Medi­um to Word­Press. Now, I know that they’re just try­ing to sell their themes, but their com­pre­hen­sion of why peo­ple write on Medi­um is com­plete­ly wrong.

Before I get into why they’re fun­da­men­tal­ly wrong,1 I’ll go ahead and say that their rea­sons why you might not want to be pub­lish­ing on Medi­um, are sound. I’m all for own­ing your con­tent. How­ev­er, they’re also telling you that you can have every­thing you have on Medi­um with Word­Press, which is a lie.

Peo­ple don’t write on Medi­um just because the read­ing expe­ri­ence is beau­ti­ful; the writ­ing expe­ri­ence is too. Word­Press con­tin­ues to descend into more and more clut­ter, mak­ing writ­ing with it cum­ber­some and a bur­den. Sites like Medi­um give the writer the abil­i­ty to focus on writ­ing and pub­lish­ing, where­as Word­Press does not.

Per­son­al­ly, it’s the biggest rea­son I moved over to Jekyll. Yet the aver­age per­son doesn’t know how to cre­ate a Jekyll site, much less get it on to a serv­er. You could go with some­thing like Ghost, but then you need to know Node.js.

If your goal is to write, have a great read­ing and writ­ing expe­ri­ence, own your con­tent, and get your site set­up quick­ly, you solu­tion is def­i­nite­ly not Word­Press. In fact, you’re attached to anoth­er object by an inclined plane, wrapped heli­cal­ly around an axis,2 because it doesn’t exist.


  1. And I promise that’s not even the point of this post. 
  2. The Big Bang The­o­ry way of say­ing screwed.