Saying Goodbye to Medium January 21, 2019

I've been writing blog posts about programming and game development since 2011. Every few years I change my platform. I've used Wordpress, Ghost, and most recently Medium. Today I am saying goodbye to Medium. I'm leaving for two key reasons — poor reader experience and lack of control. You're now reading a simple static webpage. I went this route for control, simplicity, and speed. Reader Experience Medium launched with a wonderful reader experience. Over time it has slowly declined.

Second: John Gruber There's banners on top. Banners on bottom. Social sidecrap on the left. Desperate pleas to install the mobile app. There's also a tracking policy pop-up I've dismissed a million times. John Gruber complained years ago. There's a Chrome extension called Make Medium Readable Again. It's all so damn obnoxious. Control I write technical blog posts. I crave more features than Medium is capable of. Here are a few of the things I can do that Medium can't. Interactive Visualizations In The Unbalanced Design of Super Smash Brothers I used d3.js to create interactive visualizations. On Medium these awesome displays were reduced to boring screenshots. It was a travesty. Super Smash Brothers Melee - Power Rankings

In part three of my Smash Brothers series I created a bespoke display with custom SVG. Super Smash Brothers Melee — Tier List

Custom Video Medium supports embeds such as YouTube and gfycat. They're clunky and laggy. YouTube downloads over half a megabyte of javascript alone! Medium won't autoplay videos. Gfycat compresses the hell out of content. Aspect ratio control is limited. There's no efficient way to display a series of short, high-quality clips. The following video of a haptic glove is from my portfolio. It's self-hosted and uses a vanilla <video> tag. No fancy javascript required.

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