Hello everyone.
Since I first launched my personal blog back in 2010, a fair amount has changed — circumstances, experiences, workload — and all of it has shaped how I write, when I write, and frankly whether I write at all. I used to be firmly in the camp of “everyone should publish on their own personal blog.” Then, in 2015, I made what felt like a bold decision at the time and moved the whole thing to Medium, which I was genuinely enthusiastic about.
See: Goodbye WordPress… Hello Medium! (in Turkish)
The reasoning was straightforward enough. At that point in my life, I didn’t want to think about technical maintenance while trying to write. I just wanted to focus on the content itself, save time, and hopefully keep my motivation for blogging alive. Medium seemed to offer exactly that — a platform built entirely around writing, with clean typography, a minimal interface, and a genuinely pleasant user experience. So I converted my personal site into a basic contact page and shifted all my writing over there.
The U-turn
If personal branding isn’t a priority for you, not having to deal with technical details really does make life easier. Platforms like Medium serve a genuine purpose. So what brought me back?
Honestly, it wasn’t one thing. It was several things accumulating over time.
Medium’s decision to pay quality writers through its Partner Programme — fine in principle, though I’ll be honest, I don’t believe for a second it was primarily about the writers. The knock-on effect of that shift was that anyone outside the programme started getting pushed towards a paywall. Then came reports of content being moderated in ways that raised eyebrows, and a broader shift in how Medium treated communities built around free content. Questions started stacking up.
The freeCodeCamp situation is probably the best example of what I mean. freeCodeCamp is a non-profit whose entire mission is teaching people to code for free, and their experience with Medium was frankly infuriating.
freeCodeCamp was single-handedly sending Medium 5% of its traffic. Medium’s response was to push them behind a paywall. When freeCodeCamp said no, Medium tried to buy them outright. When that failed too, they sent in the lawyers.
All of these things, taken together, pushed me back towards having my own space — hence the U-turn.
Yes, running a self-hosted blog comes with its own technical overhead. That’s a real trade-off. But at the end of the day, everything I write lives on land that belongs to me.
The content is mine. The paywall decisions are mine. The algorithm is mine…