I left Medium

#blog #thoughts

February 1, 2026

I left Medium for my own blog, bringing the three chunky posts I have on there with me. It has been a while since I’ve posted there, partly due to my busy schedules. What’s more pertinent are my sentiments towards Medium.

Content quality has nosedived; thanks algorithms

AI slop and clickbait: the two most prominent appearances on my feed. These contain the most uninspired, sophomoric “Only senior engineers can answer these Python questions” or “I rewrote my backend in Rust and they laid off my team”.

Yes, there’s a time and a place for that sort of content (maybe: slop is still slop) but it has since become cancerous. It is made worse when search engines prefer these “posts” over high signal-to-noise ratio articles.

There’s no returning from this, I think. People are chasing a metric on Medium. It’s plain to see. Goodhart’s law is so prevalent here. Newcomers and young professionals cutting their teeth may find it appealing. However, it has jaded me, and I want out.

I can’t recommend Hacker News enough for the latest hits. I’ll happily point people there.

Article paywall ethics

This has increasingly rubbed me the wrong way. When I started writing on Medium back in 2018, I felt good about sharing free information. I got notoriety there with readers commenting and having a discussion about my posts. I got what I came for; it felt good.

More recently, all I see are soft-locked “You must be signed in” articles, essentially creating a lottery that the Medium house wins by getting you to sign up. You get either a disappointment or a morsel of cranial refreshment. Not enough to leave a stern comment of disapproval. Not great.

Medium needs to do better. They need to sustain the server costs, they need to pay authors; I get it. But can it come in a form that is less ugly and not to the distaste of their readers?

I don’t want to track my readers

Nor do I want a third-party doing it. I was once a huge believer in analytics to drive your content up to the front page. Looking back, at what cost did it fulfill its objective? Early on, I spent so much time tracking site visits, demographics, browser stats; perverse in its manifestation. I’m still not ranked high up.

Medium sends me — week after week — long lists of recommended reads. Posts that rank high on a machine prediction that cranked its floating point weights to data mined from a 1-dimensional slice of my internet presence. Data that, then, gets passed around to the highest bidder. It doesn’t sit right with me.

I respect myself and I respect my readers. I intend to share, no cloak and dagger, and not at the expense of those who benefit from my work. Your privacy is yours.

Going home

I’ve long wanted to have this blog since there are quirks on SaaS that, no matter how sophisticated, has built-in restrictions. Owning this feels like I am uncaged. Between me, this Hugo-generated static site, the VM it’s hosted on, and you, there’s no middle man. Also, writing in markdown in my IDE is just so liberating.

I found a place I can call home for my writing and my code. It’s so refereshing to clear the thicket of the overgrown old site. The feeling of starting anew, rewriting HTML templates, wrestling with CSS by hand, trying new tools; it feels like the old web days.

This blog is one I can be proud of. AI helped with the structuring of the CSS and HTML but the content, that’s me. The ideas, that’s me.

Welcome to my new home!