Opinion: Medium vs WordPress

Medium is a new online publishing platform. It was created by Obvious Corp, the people behind Blogger (which played a huge part in early-2000s blogging). Their next project was Odeo (not so famous) and Twitter – well, we all know Twitter. The promise of Medium.com is simple. Write and it gets published. Just that. I’ve switched from self-hosted WordPress to Medium. Why? Just have a look.

This is how I write on WordPress:

This is how I write on Medium:

Kinda trippy, right? On Medium writing is old school like that. You write on a piece of paper and hand it over to a reader.

WordPress can run anything (corporate sites, newspapers, NGOs — I’ve implemented it for all of the above) but that also makes it a bit like taking a DSLR everywhere. Yes it takes awesome images but you just don’t want to carry it all the time. Medium, in that sense, is like a good point and shoot, or camera phone. It’s in your pocket, so to speak, so you just use it more.

Which is another thing. Medium technically isn’t in my pocket, because they don’t have an app and they’ve disabled mobile writing. They’ve focused completely on the desktop writing experience instead of trying to be everything to everyone. This is something out of the Twitter playbook — limit options to enable creativity. Because sometimes options can be paralyzing. Sometimes your canvas needs to end for you to start painting.

Bien sur, with WordPress I owned my stuff (in the physical server sense), my design, could customize whatever, trick it out, make it fly, it was fun. Back when I had time and interest in that. Now I don’t fancy myself a web designer so much and I’d rather just write.