The Challenge of Blog Vs. Medium

Sometimes I’ll have an idea for a goofy blog entry…and it blows up into an entire Medium article.

Other times, Medium posts get “demoted” here to my blog after I’ve hacked away at them and tried to edit them into something coherent, to no avail.

That’s the hierarchy in my head. I think of my site as “lesser” than Medium most days. I started this site as a backup storage place for articles, and so I could upload mic tests for my many headset reviews.

I experimented with putting my reviews here for a while, and that did “help” my numbers…but the small income I can generate on Medium really helps me to keep doing this. My personal donate button dramatically lost the fight against Medium membership subscriptions as far as total revenue, and I never really wanted to operate two different paywalls.

So now I’m in this awkward place where, when I have a story idea, I have to rank it in my head against a non-existent rubric to try and determine its objective “worth.” Is this idea worth putting in front of paid Medium members? Is it more of a free Medium post? Or is it better for my personal web site?

That p word might actually be the key. Going forward, I should probably try to make this site more of a place for personal rambles like this one, and more about the supplemental behind-the-scenes process stuff. I’ve said this before, but it’s tough to actually deliver on process posts because I’m busy doing the actual process when I should be writing them.

And also, I’ll keep doing those all-important microphone tests…even though I think they’re less useful now than they’ve ever been.

Gaming headset mics are much better than they used to be, just in general. Even on the low end. It used to be rather dire in any product under/around $50, but then the $60 Astro A10 came out with a broadcast-quality microphone and suddenly everything shifted. Now, even most of the cheaper headsets have an okay microphone.

I always feel a little bit silly these days recording microphone tests just to say “here’s another great microphone.” That’s a good problem to have though, and I’m glad the gaming peripheral industry is shifting in a positive direction on the whole.

If you’re following me here and on Medium, I’m about to go write a follow-up piece on the Kraken Pro X, my current favorite budget gaming headset, and probably the best one to come out since that Astro model. It seems like people, at least in my social sphere, are really sleeping on it, and that’s frustrating!