Moving On from the Medium Scene : My Dramatic Departure
It’s been bugging me for a while now and I was forced to make a choice, which was based on multiple thoughts and ideas, I’m not sure if the choices I made were right or wrong, good or bad, ethical or unethical but I’m sure about one thing, I’m not gonna pay a penny to learn security therefore won’t ask you to pay either.
Since the launch of Medium.com, it has been a great place to learn new stuff, regardless of the streams or fields, professional or personal, everything was present here and the library was kept evolving to better to greater content. It was all good, but like everything else in life, it was also a good phase which had to end inevitably.
It all started with a team of developers pushing the enter button on their computer in 2016, sending the new medium updates to production environment, making the new version available to every person on the internet.
The update contained a key feature of “publications” with which writers can write members-only posts, ultimately monetizing the article and blog post. This was intentionally intertwined with the publication.
Publications can force readers to only read the entire post if they have medium paid plan, which later on gives money to publications and the writers, Which is pretty good for people who do medium writing as a full time work, but that’s not it, along with this update, a not so subtle update was also pushed to the medium algorithm, now only the member-only content is selected to show on the free reads feed, which is not bad but in the real world situation this also pushes the free content to the bad sector and hard to reach the free audience.
Ultimately, if one wants to promote his/her free content, then they have to publish it through a publication and in most cases these publications make it member-only.
I faced the same situation and coped with it, but with another algorithm update, now 90% of the best publications make the posts member-only, which in my perspective is not something a hacker or security person should tolerate. I, as a student of The Art of Internet Security, didn’t pay a penny to learn from some of the best in the industry and accumulate a good amount of knowledge, and I can’t ask others to pay to do the same.
Along with all this, the level of Analytics that medium provides is pretty intensive and expressive, and one can fall into this trap of attention, so did I, Which just increases your screen time and takes a significant amount of time in your daily life.
I had found a solution to get rid of this trap and get a free hand on what and How I want to share something, ultimately the solution came in the form of Github Pages.
To be able to push the content in a presentable format on Github Pages, it required building a Static Website, which is a bit hard work, but there’s a powerful framework to achieve Dynamic application level of features and consistency with Jekyll, which in a way is also a good learning experience.
After gaining some understanding of Jekyll, I developed an application. Now, my uncensored content is available on mr23r0.github.io. I invite you all to explore my GitHub pages for insights into security issues and concepts, along with exclusive content.
