I pitched an article to an online magazine, about UBI. They said they ran one too recently, so I figured I'd self publish. I could have put it on my site, read by zero people, but I figured a medium.com URL would get farther wherever I submitted it.
I was right, but not only that, the Medium twitter account tweeted my article, and Medium asked if they could edit it and make an audio version.
Many interesting things came of this signal boosting. People started emailing me from weird places, like economics professors and government researchers, including one guy at the World Bank. I was invited into a secret slack that I'm still part of today (unfortunately most of the good internet is going the way of non-public places, but that's another topic). The net result of one article they boosted has been meeting a lot of people who are now my friends, two years on. Kind of amazing in retrospect. Medium's boosting also allowed me to gather enough Twitter followers to feel like its a useful platform, in a sense unlocking "my own" audience.
None of this would have happened if I self hosted. About these issues of canonical URL, why would I care? If I self hosted almost no one would have read it. I am more interested in reading and writing than I am in canonical URLs or a small bar on my screen. I suppose its unfortunate if it annoys 90% of my readers, but that's a lot better than no readers.
So thanks Medium.
(my only nit is that their editors changed some of my language to be more snarky, so I would not let them edit again)
That sounds like a great outcome, but it's predicated on having been hand selected by Medium to share your specific story. 99% of posts won't get that same treatment. Would your outcomes have been similar without that boost? That is, just by posting on Medium, would you have achieved a reasonable level of reach otherwise?
We cannot know of course, there is no Twin Earth where Taylor Swift is president, nobody likes pizza, and I or Medium had done things differently. I can only ponder the odds of my personal blog becoming popular vs a story on Medium becoming popular. Both may be very small, but it should be clear that the odds are still greater in the Medium route.
Tags allow visibility to people perusing topics on Medium, or getting emails about those topics. The SEO boost is clearly greater, and Medium is unlikely to go down if a flood of traffic arrives. And the possibility of "editors pick/best of" etc is obviously greater, since it exists at all. And besides, since I am not famous, leveraging a famous domain lends enough credibility for more people at the margins to read what I wish to say.
So my particular outcome aside, I think it good advice for any internet rando, including myself, to leverage the power of such a platform while the benefits seem nonzero. Though I understand people's reservations (such as this article!), they seem overstated or else to ignore completely the clear advantages, even if they are only potential advantages.
Saving this. So many people follow the "happy path" when talking about UBI and never mention the what ifs or the hard decisions we'd have to make if it was implemented to prevent gaming (such as, "sorry you spent it all on drugs this month? You don't get any more, including money for food.").
I pitched an article to an online magazine, about UBI. They said they ran one too recently, so I figured I'd self publish. I could have put it on my site, read by zero people, but I figured a medium.com URL would get farther wherever I submitted it.
I was right, but not only that, the Medium twitter account tweeted my article, and Medium asked if they could edit it and make an audio version.
Many interesting things came of this signal boosting. People started emailing me from weird places, like economics professors and government researchers, including one guy at the World Bank. I was invited into a secret slack that I'm still part of today (unfortunately most of the good internet is going the way of non-public places, but that's another topic). The net result of one article they boosted has been meeting a lot of people who are now my friends, two years on. Kind of amazing in retrospect. Medium's boosting also allowed me to gather enough Twitter followers to feel like its a useful platform, in a sense unlocking "my own" audience.
None of this would have happened if I self hosted. About these issues of canonical URL, why would I care? If I self hosted almost no one would have read it. I am more interested in reading and writing than I am in canonical URLs or a small bar on my screen. I suppose its unfortunate if it annoys 90% of my readers, but that's a lot better than no readers.
So thanks Medium.
(my only nit is that their editors changed some of my language to be more snarky, so I would not let them edit again)