So Now I’m Here

For the past decade and a half I’ve been publishing on a variety of platforms. Livejournal. Tumblr (a bunch of different times). A long lasting WordPress instantiation (and a few that weren’t so long lasting), plus some offline places where I reflect on more personal things and some online places that died relatively fast or of ignominious ends (remember Posterous?).¹

The Experience of Online Publishing

Each of the online platforms I’ve previously used have seen me experiment with different aspects of self-publishing. From spreading my content all over the Internet I’ve learned about a few things about what matters to me:

1. Publishing platforms need to emphasize the importance of user interfaces and user experiences.
2. Platforms need to appreciate that if they aren’t seen trustworthy then fewer people will publish using them.
3. In some cases, companies that are offering online platforms need to help users make at least some tweaks to the publishing environment so that they can personalize the space to their content.
4. Publishing platforms need to consider how to help users develop and foster a positive community that is inviting to new users and readers.

I’ve ultimately grown disenchanted with each of the major and minor writing platforms I’ve used over the years for one reason or another:

• Livejournal (that social network of yore) was a product of its time in every sense. The user interface was crude, if serviceable. The community finding aspects were pretty decent for its time. But innovation slowed and being sold to a Russian company raised pretty serous questions about censorship arose. (I went from Livejournal to WordPress, where a lot of my content has lived ever since.)
• Tumblr remains, at least as I’ve experienced it, a burning garbage fire of user interface issues. I’ve gone back several times over the past six or seven years and it never seems to have really improved from its basic state. The sale to Yahoo! – a company that can’t secure itself from toddlers, it seems – makes that a space less than inviting to add content to: will it be there tomorrow? And if so, who will be in charge of losing users’ logins, passwords, security questions, and content next?
• While I use WordPress on a regular basis, and one installation has held my professional work for a decade, I don’t want yet another platform I have to secure from third-parties. The functionality is great but maintenance is something I want to do less of, not more.

But, if I’m being entirely honest, only part of the problem of finding outlets for my creative instincts has to do with the different platforms. A bigger problem is directly tied to me.

Professional Appropriation of Creativity

My professional job involves a lot of writing. The majority of the writing that I’ve done for ‘myself’ over the past decade has generally linked my public and professional personas. To my chagrin, most of the public places I’ve written have ultimately been appropriated by, and arguably undermined by, that public-professional persona.²

The result is that I really haven’t had (or maintained) a good place to place my creative outputs that extend beyond my professional work. Things that are about different pieces of technology I’m using and why, what I think about different photos that I’ve taken over the years, or comments on politics, reflections on poignant books or articles I’ve come across, as well as other things that catch my fancy. Sure there are microblogging sites but I want something more substantive and meaty and long-lasting than 140 characters.

If I thought I could write more personal, non-professional, pieces on the website that bears my own name I probably would. But that doesn’t feel like a real option for me: doing so would overlap my professional and personal lives more than I’m comfortable with, while also running the risk of weakening the professional ‘value’ I’ve build up in that long-lasting website.

So, Now I’m Here.

Medium has terrific typography and the people who routinely write here that I follow tend to be doing interesting and involving work. The topics are diverse. The publishing process seems pretty solid and made with the user in mind. And I already know a lot of people who are writing here, which definitely helps to make this a more inviting writing space.

So while my professional work is going to remain stovepiped in my long lasting WordPress blog, I think I’m going to see what it’s like to use Medium as a place for my own work. Things that are less serious. Things that just don’t really belong in my other writing environments. Things that are personal but not so personal that they have to be kept from public eye entirely.

NOTE: This was initially published on Medium in early 2017.