[drcross]

Can someone fill me in here please, how did medium become the place for these sorts of posts when self hosted wordpress, ghost, Squarespace, wix and just basic HTML were created so that you can host a text blog running on a server you control from wherever you want? How did medium take hold and why?

[ken]

Medium was originally a great experience for the reader. No interstitials, no ads, no unrelated photos, no pleading to "follow" or "become a member". Just your text, nicely formatted.

Compare a simple article, across the years:

2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20141201191740/https://medium.co...

2019: https://medium.com/@fields/now-its-about-the-things-that-you...

Once they started achieving critical mass, like every other free-to-use webpage, they loaded it full of crap.

[mycall]

Maybe that was a bad example or my ad-blockers are working really well, but the 2019 edition only has ads at the bottom for me which is easily ignorable.

[thrower123]

Medium offered expanded reach. A lot of people used to cross-post their personal blog on Medium; some comparisons I've seen showed nearly 10x more views from the Medium post.