Once upon a time I had a custom-coded blogging platform, a domain name, and a fairly frequently updated personal blog. And nobody read it. Once in a while I had a technical post that got a little attention, but it faded quickly.
I'd mention posts to friends and their response was always "what's your LJ name? I'll friend you." And then I'd tell them about my self-hosted blog and they'd look at me like I was an alien. There wasn't room in their world for a blog that didn't live on LiveJournal.
LJ added a feature to pull in an RSS feed and make it look like an LJ account. The only difference was the RSS logo next to the username instead of a photo. One of my wife's friends sucked in my feed this way and people started following me there. They also started commenting there, but their comments on LJ weren't connected to my blog's comments. People were hurt I wasn't responding to their comments because I never saw them. I had to open an LJ account just to respond to my blog's comments somewhere other than my blog.
Look, I'm active in the WordPress community. I've coded blogs in PHP, Java, and Node.js. But at the end of the day, I want people to read and engage with my content. And in 2016 that means posting on Medium. I need to go where the audience is, and Medium's social features & suggested posts make it a winner.
The biggest challenge for any long-form writer in 2016 is discoverability, assuming that you don't already have a huge audience and you do want people to read your writing.
That's why I, for example, tend to guest-post on friends' blogs with larger followings rather than posting on my own small blog.
With the near-death of RSS, vanilla blogs have almost no subscription mechanism, so you can't assume people will return to them. And people subscribe to / follow individual blogs far less often than they did circa 2002 / 2003
But Medium has bubble-up features enabling your writing to be discovered.
I'm not a huge fan of the platform, but that's why I use it from time to time.
I'd mention posts to friends and their response was always "what's your LJ name? I'll friend you." And then I'd tell them about my self-hosted blog and they'd look at me like I was an alien. There wasn't room in their world for a blog that didn't live on LiveJournal.
LJ added a feature to pull in an RSS feed and make it look like an LJ account. The only difference was the RSS logo next to the username instead of a photo. One of my wife's friends sucked in my feed this way and people started following me there. They also started commenting there, but their comments on LJ weren't connected to my blog's comments. People were hurt I wasn't responding to their comments because I never saw them. I had to open an LJ account just to respond to my blog's comments somewhere other than my blog.
Look, I'm active in the WordPress community. I've coded blogs in PHP, Java, and Node.js. But at the end of the day, I want people to read and engage with my content. And in 2016 that means posting on Medium. I need to go where the audience is, and Medium's social features & suggested posts make it a winner.