I’ve been on the Internet for years. The openness of the whole environment was refreshing. Want to find out something obscure or highly technical, you could head over to a university website and find an article, or over to a vendors site to get details on something you were looking for..
Then came web-rings and blogs. A webring was a simple “next page” link on a site that would take users from one persons page to another, usually the pages had a common theme (a hobby, an interest, etc). Later there were blogs (like this WordPress site) that were more dynamic. You could write multiple pages on varying topics, or you could work with others to share access and create a source of information about your topics.
This wasn’t free, but many of us kept our sites up out of the love for the art we were discussing, or out of the feeling of providing back to the wider world. For times when sites got too big to support by one persons budget, there were advertisers who would trade some of the blog page real estate to host adds in return for a small bit of money back to the owner of the site. And for some sites, they turned to user supported options so that people who paid a small periodic fee could in turn get access to other articles earlier, or possibly in-depth that weren’t public. Many newspapers have turned to this – the general public gets the first paragraph of a story, but subscribers could get the entire article and additional features.
But over time the increase of the web as a “social medium” platform took root. After a while, the need to drive more and more eyeballs to a website took on a more “closed off” approach. I’m sure there are many more that I are out there, but the one that finally got to me and made me say “enough is enough” is the website “Medium.com“.
They are a hosted blogging site and that’s nice. They also have good search-engine-optimization features so a well written article gets found easily on Google and other search engines. Many times when I’m searching for some additional information on a news topic, I will come across something hosted on a Medium.com page and click the link. Or at least only up to a threshold of free posts per month then you have to wait until the next month. Or you can sign up for a monthly subscription to access more articles.
All that is good and I will not begrudge them for collecting a fee to offset their designers and staff who keep the website running smoothly, as well as the curation of articles they are performing. But I can’t justify spending another $5 a month on yet another blogging site.
And something about the whole “pay to see anything” mentality seems to be antithetical to what really makes the Internet ‘work’, and honestly what was the groundwork that permitted sites such as Medium, Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. to thrive. It feels like all the good works that were poured into the initial Internet (open networking standards, operating systems, email, web servers and browsers) and kept free all this time are being clear-cut by these new digital locusts.
But they aren’t listening. Instead they are using the subscription fees to lock more and more content behind their closed doors. If this continues, we’ll have an entire Internet made up of toll roads and not the wide-open digital universe we have today.
If you agree, please take some time and remove yourself from the Medium website. It’s very easy – under your profile, the very bottom option is “delete from Medium”. I don’t need their constant barrage of articles that don’t provide back to the greater good, at least not without a fee and tracking to better serve up my time and attention to their article writers for another piece of fluff.
