Three years ago we embraced an exciting new publishing platform called Medium. It felt like a new start for a writing community, and we benefitted immensely from the boost in reach and readership those early days brought. But alas it was not to last.
When we moved over, Medium was all about attracting big blogs and other publishers. This was going to be a new space for a new time where publishers could find a home. And it was. For a while.
These days Medium is focused on their membership offering, though. Trying to aggregate writing from many sources and sell a broad subscription on top of that. And it’s a neat model, and it’s wonderful to see Medium try something different. But it’s not for us, and it’s not for Signal v Noise.
Writing for us is not a business, in any direct sense of the word. We write because we have something to say, not to make money off page views, advertisements, or subscriptions. If some readers end up signing up for Basecamp, that’s great. But if they just like to read and not buy, that’s also great.
Beyond that, though, we’ve grown ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet. Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.
That doesn’t mean we regret our time at Medium. Being on Medium helped propel some of our best writing to a whole new audience. But these days there’s less of a “what Medium is doing for us”, and a whole lot more of “what we’re doing for Medium”. It was a good time while it lasted, but good times are gone.
So now we’re back on the indie trail. The new blog is powered by our friends at WordPress, and the new amazing design is courtesy of our in-house designer Adam Stoddard.
Thanks to the fact that we kept our own domain when we moved to Medium, all the articles and links still work. The pieces have simply swapped the Medium styling for our own look. (Although, sad to say, Medium didn’t let us export the comments, so those are gone 😢).
With the new take, we’re also trying to bring more of a classic SvN style back to the site. Not just big, marque pieces, but lots of smaller observations, quotes, links, and other posts as well. In fact, the intention is to lessen our dependency on Twitter too, and simply turn Signal v Noise into the independent home for all our thoughts and ideas — big or small.
To that effect, we’ve setup a new mailing list for Signal v Noise that you might like. All the posts of the week bundled up in a single digest delivered on Mondays. And of course there’s an RSS feed as well. It’s not like we’re going off Twitter, but Twitter won’t be necessary for you to follow our thinking any more.
So there it is. In this, our twentieth year of Signal v Noise, we’re returning to our roots. Looking snazzy. As eager as ever to share our strong opinions and thoughts on design, business, and tech.
Thanks for reading!
Signal v Noise exits Medium was originally published in Signal v. Noise on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
