#700: Medium.com
An ordinary blogging site? Or SEO hell?
Initial launch: August 15, 2012
Founder: Evan Williams
I like to blog. I’ve been blogging since the LiveJournal days. Like a lot of people on that site I mostly used it to complain about my personal life or post music lyrics. I eventually would start posting media reviews on a variety of sites like Tumblr. I like writing media reviews. Just look at my back catalogue of articles on this very account and you’ll see. I’ve written and rewritten a lot of words on this site.
A few years back I decided to make the jump from posting my media reviews on Twitter — one of my stupider ideas — to posting them on Medium instead. Medium attracted me with its simple interface and simpler setup. It seemed to be the right choice to not just continue my journey through a large collection of media but to repost my old reviews as well. This went on fine for a good few years.
But over time I started to notice something. More and more, other peoples’ blogs disappeared behind paywalls. More and more, my “for you” section had that stupid goddamn little sparkle symbol saying I had to pay up to read it. More and more, every headline I saw was something like “Best Way for a New Writer to Make Their First $200 This Month” and “No, You Don’t Have ADHD” and “KPop Demon Hunters Lacks Nuance.”
The site, and blogging in general, had slowly been taken over by something insidious: the enshittification of the internet, the gradual atomizing of a global information network that once was intended to connect people to one another but now exists to sell them shit.
You can see it in the way the internet seems to have been reduced to like eight sites. You can see it in the way Twitter is just a Nazi bar now. You can see it in the way Facebook, once a place for young people, is now where racist boomers and information thieves congregate. You can see it in how “influencer” first became a hobby, then a job, then a grueling task that barely pays the bills. You can see it in how everything is just getting slower, harder to use, the information we can get decreasing in value with every passing second. I remember when Google was just this upstart to replace AskJeeves and Dogpile, before becoming the word for searching on the internet. And now it just straight up lies to you. It’s in the way everything has been taken over by goddamn AI.
I think perhaps one of the earliest, best examples of enshittification is the way AdBlock went from a powerful new weapon in the ongoing war on internet advertising to a thoroughly compromised waste of code that didn’t even block ads properly anymore, because advertisers gave the developers a big bag of money. And now they’re advertising a “premium” version.
The internet, once a democratized space where people from all over the globe could connect and find like-minded people, is now just a glorified corporate intranet for the massive nursing home we call America. Medium dot com is just one more example of this. Every article is written for the sake of search engine optimization. The site has been taken over by people desperate to pay bills by writing meaningless crap, if they don’t just let ChatGPT do it for them. “I asked ChatGPT,” you say. “I asked Goombella, and she told me using ChatGPT is a bitch move,” I say.
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Well, I’m not having it.
You may look at the state of things and despair. Understandable. Relatable. I think we’re all owed a little time to indulge an existential crisis over just how fucking awful our world has gotten. “Birth is a curse and existence is a prison.” But sooner or later we have to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and go off and do what we can to unfuck things. Can I, just one depressed queerdo living alone in a basement apartment with the blinds closed, do much to reverse the hell on earth we live in? No. But you can be damned sure I’m not going to just comply and write meaningless pablum for clicks either. I’m getting the fuck off this sinking ship, and I’m going back to where blogging should have stayed: Blogger.
This is my last post on Medium. In retrospect, a site that was intended to allow for long-form Twitter posts was probably always destined to become SEO hell, but it didn’t have to be like this. The internet was supposed t obe good. But I knew, after fighting with tech support and having them straight up lie to me about the posting limit (it used to be 15 per 24 hour period, then it was reduced to 3, but tech support swore until they were blue in the face that it was always 3) that I was going to have to find somewhere else to go. I eventually settled on Blogger; I was already there posting shit on my boomer shooter blog (now more of a generalized retro 3D game blog) but I recently soft-launched a new blog intended to replace this one. I’ve also begun a new general purpose blog, so now you can see more posts like this one or that one I wrote last year about the election on a more frequent basis.
In short: Medium sucks, 0/10 would not recommend, fuck this site, anyone who cares about what I have to say can find me at the following locations:
June Gloom @ BSky — the only social media site I actually use regularly
Super June Gloom @ Blogger — general purpose blog
June Gloom 3D @ Blogger — boomer shooters and immersive sims, and why those labels are stupid
June Gloom 64 @ Blogger — like this blog but on Blogger
Anyway, that’s it.
