Can we all stop using Medium now?

Also consider their automatic video encoding / re-encoding / resizing; I think there's services (e.g. Amazon Elastic Transcoder) that can do that for you, but that would require some development time of your own.

Is there a single video format supported by all browsers yet?

There's a deeper thing going on here that should be mentioned because it applies in so many places: the platform is the enemy.

That is, once you create a platform to do X, the purpose of the platform becomes "get people to use the platform to do X", not X. They sound like the same thing but they are not.

An example: Facebook, I guess, is all about sharing things with your friends. But over time it quickly morphed into an engine that was only concerned about how many people would spend their time on their site sharing and consuming things, not about sharing. So people "shared" by posting memes from other places. They shared by copying crap and fake articles. They "shared" by playing dumb and addictive games for hours at a time, asking anybody they could find to help them milk a fake cow or something.

If you cared about sharing, you might think about a wise investment in time, both for the sharer and the folks consuming what was being shared. But if you think about whatever you could pass off as sharing, then you might think about virality, demographics, psychology, and so forth. Worse yet, you'd probably do whatever you could to prevent people from talking about real sharing. After all, that would be a huge hit to your site's metrics. It might even involve an existential crisis.

Likewise Medium cared about blogging and publishing, but only in terms they had predefined and could control. As they started looking at their numbers, they started refining their definitions.

The same thing is happening everywhere, for instance YouTube. YT couldn't care less about average folks making creative content to share, even though that's the schtick. What they really care about is reliable non-offensive video content being regularly produced and consumed by the most numbers of people that they can sell ads to.

I'm not saying that any of these platforms are evil or ran by bad people. My point is that by defining a platform and business model that's widely-adopted, you end up preventing any sort of change, quality improvement, or re-imagining what the important drivers are for that platform. I can change what I consider to be high-quality video to create, share and consume ten times a day. YouTube cannot. Same goes for Medium and text content. The platform, the idea of fixing quality attributes for complex things into code, is the natural enemy of serious consideration and evaluation of the thing the platform supposedly supports.

I really hope people do. Medium is awful and getting awfuller as time passes.

> The host or platform shouldn't affect your ranking/SEO this much.

This is true for medium, but not universally true. It's pretty reasonable to rank an article in a well known credible publication than a random blog, as there is likely some editorial quality checks in the publication. However, with medium, there is no editorial check, they just know how to game the system better than a casual blogger.

>When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play?

At the moment authors wanted to get paid. When did somebody else's writing became a free for all?

If, as you say, that [Medium] is where "all your favourite content lives" (which means you appreciate the content), then it's troubling that you don't want to pay for it.

>Just so we are clear. Medium takes your content, rolls it up into a pretty SEO friendly package for themselves and sells it. Oh, and turns us all into seals waiting for someone to throw us a fish in the process. If you are lucky, you might even get a cut. You know. Like the sort of cut artists get on Spotify. Profit share I think the cool kids call it. So why is everyone still publishing on it? For what? More eyeballs? More attention? More reach?

All of the above. More eyeballs. More reach. More attention. A primed audience looking to read something. And also some authors make decent-ish money (far more than Spotify) on Medium. So there's that.

>Please. It’s 2019. Learn to market yourself and your content. Quit being lazy waiting for Medium to do it for you. OWN YOUR PLATFORM.

Yeah, and how does that work for you? We've only read your blog because it was picked by an aggregator (HN).