Playgrounds
![It’s not you, it’s me. [Detail]](/assets/playgrounds.png)
Paul Jarvis bids farewell to Medium. As he puts it, It’s not you, it’s me. Jarvis states:
I’ve realised that I don’t want to keep playing in other people’s playgrounds. I’d rather focus on and foster my own.
While you’ve helped me grow my audience (I have more followers here than on Twitter or my own mailing list), growth isn’t my only metric for measuring what I do and how much it supports me.
Jarvis is just one of a series of writers that, as we ease into a new year, are revisiting the platforms that they embrace (or eschew), rediscovering the spirit of the open web and focusing their efforts on their own plots. (Homesteading, not sharecropping.)
Yes, Medium has benefits, and – as Jarvis acknowledges - Medium has helped him grow his audience, however, the quid pro quo is that Jarvis is driving (his) traffic elsewhere.
There’s always a trade off.
It’s interesting how many writers (and content gatherers) are following suit. There’s clearly something in the air, and that something is a desire to retake ownership of content, removing it from walled gardens and returning it to the open web. A good thing, in my opinion.