Why I’m Leaving Medium

TL;DR: My blog and thoughts are moving to nselby.github.io

When Medium came out, I remember thinking, “Wow, that’s really beautiful and easy to use!” And I wondered how I could become a part of it.

I’ve had a couple of stories that were very popular here — some with more than 50,000 reads — but I have noticed that the, oh, God… the medium is beginning to overtake the message.

Like Twitter as it became popular, Medium seems to have become about numbers of followers and numbers of readers, and I think that affects negatively what I am trying to talk about, which is pretty serious stuff. I find myself trying to tweak headlines to grab more readers, almost at the zero-sum expense of better readers. Readers who consider this to be actionable intelligence or those who consider it to be a catalyst for discussion and collaboration.

This is especially true because Medium’s conversation mechanism and comments are so universally poor. The whole point of my writing here is to establish a corpus of published thoughts on law enforcement data and technology, but also to engage in conversations and collaborative discussion. I can’t do that when it is so hard for people to, “Like” (or “Recommend”) the post.

So I’m moving to my own blog, on Github.