Newsletter
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In which I shift my approach to publishing and express some disappointment
Back to the blog
Some years back, I switched my primary publishing platform from my blog, DarwinianInterlude, over to Medium. That hasn’t totally worked out.
I’m shifting back, inspired by Cory Doctorow's explanation in On Media Enshittification (pt 1) that all his writing starts with short blog posts that bump up against each other and ultimately coalesce into longer articles. I’ve been doing something similar, but it’s all happened behind the curtain with the longer articles emerging every other month or so from a motley collection of partially written stories, Google docs, LucidChart sketches, and lists of research links.
I like Cory’s approach better.
Blog posts feel like they can be more exploratory, shorter, tentative, and aimed at gaining some feedback that can help mature longer works.
My blog is DarwinianInterlude. You can get an email when I publish by using the Subscribe box in the upper right corner. (The most recent post is Awe Shucks. I’ll add a teaser below.) Occasionally I’ll reference some of those posts here and maybe even add a few to my local Table of Contents.
WTF?
A second contributing factor to the switch is that I have been unable to port my blog subscribers over to Medium with a high enough level of success to make me comfortable using Medium as my primary platform.
I’ve got a dozen or so of my core that just never could be ported to Subscribers. This reached an apothesis of irritation this week when my friend, John, and I tried to get him added as a Subber. I imported him (as I had done 2 or 3 times in the past) and he added himself as a Subber (as he had 2 or 3 times in the past).
The result: failure all around with no error message of any sort to either of us!
Reporting this to Medium resulted in the following response. This is arguably the worst bug report response I’ve ever gotten, and I was an IT guy for 30 years and saw a lot of weak responses.
Hi Alan,
Thank you for bringing this to our attention!
We’ve filed the issue with our development team and will get to it as priority allows. If and when it is…
