I’ve been running an experiment with my last few longer-form pieces of crossposting them to Medium. I’ve done it on the occasional, ad-hoc basis when I write something that I feel needs to reach an audience outside of my circle. This includes the expanded, and revised version of “A View From Inside the Welfare System”, which went viral. I’ve also written at least one piece, explicitly for Medium, “Geek Culture and its Discontents”. So far, it’s not had much of an impact, but it might also be too early to tell.

But why Medium? I’ve been, and remain skeptical of Medium as a platform, and I’m not the only one. Ownership of my words is important, even if I’m making a sum total of six bucks a month from them. (If you want to change that, you can become a subscriber here.) I’d be happy making nothing, if I knew I was reaching people, but I’m sometimes not even sure of that. It’s a tough time to be putting words on the Internet.

So, instead of trying to branch out into other media—because that worked out so well last time—cross-posting seems to be the best of the options. No matter what happens to medium, my writing will remain at this URL until EMPs wipe out all technology. Yet, I also exist on the largest platform for long-form writing. My name, profile, photo, are all out there, hopefully to be discovered. Maybe they’ll follow the links back to the source and start clicking around. Plus, Medium makes it a lot easier to share things. I’m not willing to install tracking scripts for Facebook and Twitter just for the sake of a few clicks—though I am willing to set up a Facebook page for my writing.

The goal of crossposting to Medium is to, I suppose, re-capture the lightning in a bottle moment of the most successful independent writing I’ve ever done: the aforementioned “A View From Inside the Welfare System.” It was not only a Medium Editor’s Pick, but made it to the front page of MetaFilter, which made me super-happy. The only thing I didn’t like is that nothing long-term came of it. I had nothing else to say about my time working for the Welfare Office, and it was off my usual—for lack of a better word—beat, anyway.

I just wish Medium’s WordPress plugin was more effective. It seems that scheduled posts and anything published through the WordPress API doesn’t get sent to Medium. This sucks, as I like to line stuff up ahead of time for publishing. At least tagging posts works, though I’ve never used the post tagging feature in WordPress since I relaunched the current version of Sanspoint six years ago. Perhaps the Medium folks will see this and fix it. Or, perhaps I’ll give up on this experiment after a few more weeks, and then I stop worrying about it. In the meantime, like and share, I suppose.