Lately I've been getting more and more annoyed by the way Medium decides to do things. Some time ago they decided to make everything premium, so after reading 5 stories you'd be greeted with something like:

While this sucks, it's not uncommon for "premium" content to be paywalled. My problem with this setup is that I do not consider my content "premium" at all.

I'm not saying that I think my posts are bad, but rather that I want everyone to be able to take an unobstructed stroll through my list of posts and read whatever they like, any amount of times they like. All without asking for a single penny.

Medium however, does not care about anything that is "free" or "open" at all. Seeing as every time I open one of my stories on Medium, the following message appears at the top:

"Only you can see this message"

At first, I tried to close the popup. But of course, I should have known that it would not be that simple, seeing as they are trying to get me to make my stories paid so they can benefit too.

Medium really seems to want authors to read this message I guess. Since after reloading the page, the message re-appears, every. single. time. After trying to ignore it for a while, this popup started getting under my skin. I decided to learn some more and found one barely two-line paragraph of text that caught my eye:

Stories that are not part of the paywall will only be distributed to your followers, and are not eligible to earn money.

So just because I do not want to make my stories part of a paywall, they aren't shared to anyone except my followers? Hmmn... :man-facepalming:

Time for a change

Being fed up with Medium tripping over its own ego, it is time for a change. Having my own website now means that I am no longer bound by some platform that forces or annoys me to do their bidding, refusing to share my stories otherwise.

I enjoyed what Medium stood for in the past, but in the present it has become just another casual pay-2-view website.

This is why I decided to unsub from Medium. The content that exists there will stay and all new content that I post here will have a link shared on Medium for those who follow me.

Enjoy reading ad-, tracker-, and subscription-free on my website, forever.

Sidney Liebrand

👋