I’ve moved to Substack.
Well, I did that a few years ago, actually.
I was so excited to join Medium after writing enthusiastically and regularly, and with no expectation of remuneration, since 2008 on Blogger — bless it (I still do, actually. I find its refusal to modernise at odds with the rest of my corner of the creative world, but comforting).
As seems maddeningly inevitable on ‘platforms’ of all types, it changed.It was modern and fresh from the outset, offering up a wide and rich assortment of topics both within and outwith the section of the Venn diagram I inhabit, it a unique, smart haven for long-form writing and reading with a criteria and fair and reasonable quality threshold (if memory serves, I think I even had to apply and ‘be accepted’ into the Medium Partner Programme).
I began to watch from the corner of one eyeball as more anfd more of these article titles began to appear:
– and it crept toward to a distressingly repetitive slurry pit of AI bros, articles of ambiguous origin (human? bot?) yelling in an oddly staccato voice about its “9 and a half ways to make money using AI”, or listing the 13 side hustles I can do while sitting at the beach, peddling the bullshit of passive income hard, or yelling some bland listicle about what we’re all doing wrong (laziness, trying too hard, not trying hard enough, existing…)
I’m not sure at who, to be honest, and the shouty caps at the start of every headline word hurt my head and sound like something repellant and opinionated.
I’ve tried to curate my feed a little better, but I still can’t shake the feeling of discomfort. So rather than keep bumping up against all that (Any platoform we join is not to be merely ‘survived’, after all) I’m putting my energy into my 4-year-old Substack. I’ll still be adding articles here but I’ve got subscribers — paid ones, too. The occasional fiver aside, it’s nice there. Not ‘nice’ as in safe, or devoid of challenging topics, or because everyone’s like me or thinks like me — no; it’s just, GOOD.
Come and see me there, if you’d like to.
