Why I’m making the switch from Medium to SteemIt

I love blogging. It’s one of the most valuable, and often underappreciated, features the Internet offers. The confluence of freely accessible publishing platforms and visibility to a wide network of readers gives everyone the opportunity to share their voice, form a more compelling argument and enhance their learning in the process.

The pervasive spread of digital has already had a seismic impact on the media industry. The first wave of disruption post-dot com boom helped break the monopoly on the printed word held by traditional, often behemothic media and publishing houses. This disruption has compounded with the continual evolution of channels through which ideas and opinions can be shared, from early blogging platforms like Blogger and Typepad, through to more sophisticated sites like Wordpress.com and Medium.

Such sites are without doubt attractive to writers. They’re easy to setup and make it easy to engage a wide audience through their in-built content discovery mechanisms. Never forget, however, that when you build your content home on platforms governed by a fundamentally profit-seeking central party, you play by their rules and are subject to their whims.

I believe that the next wave of disruption will be the eradication of the central authority that still exists in these online publishing platforms, towards a decentralised and censorship resistant paradigm that incentivises and rewards creatives for the work they produce. Only then will social journalism be truly democratised.

I started using Medium earlier this year as a platform for sharing articles I’d written on the flourishing and endlessly fascinating world of crypto. I’d long used the site to enjoy posts from a range of fascinating minds, found through the personalised digest I receive in my inbox each day. Setting up an account, this was my opportunity to share the findings of countless hours of research I’d done into ICOs and other emergent projects.

I was overawed with the reception my articles were receiving on Medium. With each post I was getting more views, more claps and more subscribers. I even won a prize for an article I published on strategies for crypto trading. The effortless virality of the site made me want to publish more, putting weekends aside for crafting new posts.

Then they suspended my account.

The exact reason why they suspended it, I don’t know. They gave me a vague response via email that contained a copy and paste of their T&Cs. My understanding is that the mentions of specific crypto projects in my articles triggered their red flags. Nothing I’d written was sponsored, yet they saw it as a breach of their rules.

While it’s frustrating to have hours of work rendered invisible due to overreach by the site’s administrators or algorithms, I see it as an opportunity. It’s a chance for me to start again and use SteemIt as my publishing platform of choice.

Why is this important? Well, for me it’s about walking the walk. In my articles and interviews I talk about crypto and the necessity for us to move beyond concept to real-world deployment if we’re ever to hit mainstream adoption. The best way to move towards this reality, I feel, is to actively participate in the tokenised economy.

From now on, where there’s a product or service I use that has a decentralised alternative I’m going to make the switch. That may mean using Brave rather than Chrome. DNN rather than Google News. Ethlance over UpWork. Possibly even Peepeth over Twitter (though weaning myself away from crypto twitter would require a long transition).

As a starting point I’m going to bring some of the work I did on Medium over to this platform, then I intend to start writing more regular project reviews and opinion pieces. And even if Medium does unsuspend my account, I won’t go crawling back.

Viva la revolución.

Image credit: Pixabay