Earlier this year I started cross-posting from this blog to Facebook and Medium. I'm no longer doing that.

Here's why.

First, if you put the two of them together, you'd have a great blogging surface. Medium handles linking, styles and titles. No podcasts, but that's the fourth item on the list for a reason. Most of my posts don't have podcasts attached. If there was one must-have feature I could live without that's the one (though giving up podcasting is giving up a huge win in interop). And Facebook handles updates, so if I make a change to a post after initially publishing it, those changes percolate to the Facebook version. So if you add the two together you get pretty close to the ideal.

But Facebook doesn't do links, styling, titles or podcasts. And Medium doesn't do updates.

I gave both a good shot, but the tradeoffs just aren't worth it.

It's true more people read my full posts on Facebook than click the link to read it on my blog. By a pretty wide margin. But the limits are confusing my writing. My reason for writing is not just engagement, but also to get mind-to-mind connections. And my mind is confused when I write for this hybrid medium, and my blog suffers. I suffer. I'm more confused, and that's not a good thing. 

And Medium is published-and-done. I end up either manually updating the posts, or I put up with incomplete or inaccurate writing on Medium. It might be worth it to maintain two versions manually, if I was getting engagement on Medium, but there are very few comments or readers there. I think I've given it fair shot of most of a year. If it hasn't started happening yet, I figure it isn't going to happen. 

I'm back to posting links on Facebook, as I do on Twitter. And I'm thinking about posting links to Medium, so people who have been reading me there have a way of knowing when I've written a new post.

If either of them change the way they work, I'll take another look.