There have been dozens of articles coming out over the past several years detailing how Medium is no longer a great home for the aspiring writer/blogger (largest of reasons is due to their paywall). I fully agree with this.
I used to be an occasional blogger, but had some okay traffic (a few posts took off), but definitely not a name for myself where I could take people with me to my own site. What I liked about Medium was their discoverability, shifting to my blog I believe will lose that discoverability.
Are there other platforms or other ways to get organic readership?
I think the main issue now that is really flooding out creative writing as well as other types of creator communities (I make music for film @ruffandtuffrecordings - a new account mind you) is that everyone is grinding individually than creating partnerships. While everyone is quitting their jobs to become a creator, they are finding they have to do every aspect a corporations would normally hire for and then quickly burning out after a deep investment in time and gear.
It's probably better to partner with people who share your subject matter interest and to form a team of people and then start a dedicated web site that you use social media as a pointer thereto... That way your content also is not under risk of immediate loss in most cases if you pay your bills on time.
That being said, where to go also probably depends most on your intended subject matter.
If that's the future, I can expect a split between the tech savvy using niche text interfaces that have served us well for decades, and the polished ultra-capitalistic corporate vast majority of the internet using video to create viral sub-minute """content""".
I hope you are wrong with the idea that TikTok clones will become the future "credibility minded social platforms" because it sounds dystopian form of idiocracy. Not everything can be reduced to quick-acting 30 seconds short videos.
(Of note: I am very aware of the incredible publicity TikTok is having on this forum, being touted as the future of the internet that we should just embrace.)
Tiktok also encourages parroting information, and that leads to corruption of information. They really need to create more niches than the one channel they're runing to thrive.
But imagine a TikTok UI on something like Ted Talks, where you could scroll through a variety of speeches until you land on the one you want... Or even Netflix implementing that for movies, or YouTube for music videos. It would finally create a new way of finding new things quickly. There is great benefits to TikTok's method when done properly. The question is whether or not creators will be properly paid or not...
For news I'd probably rather scroll through well composed story intros to find what I want to hear more about than to watch an entire show these days to be honest. Once I find something I like then I can give it more attention. I used to wait through commercial breaks just to hear vital news, now it's much easier to just go to CNN and get pelted by pop-up ads on mobile... hah.
For the discoverability: every social network can help to drive visitors to your posts.
It's crazy how today a lot of effort are put on decentralizing finance meanwhile the simplest activities (like blogging) are being strongly centralized.
I should disclaim that I haven’t personally proven this out, but it’s advice I’ve often seen and what I plan on doing myself.
Personally I have a static site, and when I make a new post it automatically goes out to Mastodon and Medium as well as a couple of "RSS aggregators" (like https://diff.blog/), as well as a dedicated subreddit as my "comments section". Then depending on the content I will often publish to dev.to (which automatically imports from RSS so it is mostly deleting the <style> block that it doesn't understand and hitting publish) and maybe Hacker News or Lobste.rs (although that is basically never, I generally prefer for others to share if they like the post).
But that is my over-complicated setup. At the end of the day I think what matters is own your content. Ideally with a feed on a domain that you control then spread elsewhere as it makes sense.
No one has seemed to have suggested any alternatives, except for [HackerNoon](https://hackernoon.com). Surely there’s something else? Medium can’t have that large of a stranglehold to the point of a monopoly. (If I’m wrong, then this is a biz opportunity.)
If you self-host, you're fully* in charge
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* - where by "fully", I mean you haven't violated the hosting providers ToS, and/or your DNS provider's ToS
Mirror will create an nft of your writing and proxy it to the web2 world.
This means your writing will be owned by your wallet. Mirror cannot take it down and people can support you by buying your writing nft as a collective item.
All this without needing a paywall. The content always remain public.
I think if you solve the two with separate tools you might get better options. For example for a nice blogging platform, you can try gonevis.com or blogger.com then promote posts on places like reddit/HN/Twitter, etc.
A major issue I see with online blogging is the glut of tech and computing content drowning out everything else. The barrier to entry for self-hosted content also means most self-hosted content is tech oriented.
If I must read a Medium article I do so in Firefox's reader mode, but usually the friction/irritation just drives me to click close on the tab and move on to something less offensive.