You’ve probably come across the website called Medium. All kinds of people and organizations have used Medium to publish their articles. It feels a bit like a huge blog, with a variety of interesting, and sometimes famous, people posting articles. It all seemed just so wonderful.

Until it wasn’t wonderful anymore. Suddenly Medium put up a paywall thing, and it won’t let readers view more than five articles until they sign up. And now Medium has removed a feature, without a whole lot of notice. Niemanlab.org explains: Medium abruptly cancels the membership programs of its 21 remaining subscription publisher partners.

The thing about using somebody else’s “free” service to publish your stuff is that you are not in control of your own content, or how it is handled. It seems that this lesson is one that people on the internet keep forgetting, and having to re-learn. Now many are realizing that Medium is not a benevolent charity, and that their business model involves making money from the content you provide for free.

There is a lot to be said for publishing your own content on your own website.