The Trouble With Platforms

There is a specific, quiet crisis that all writers face when it comes to publishing their work. Assuming, for a moment, that the “work” in question is written for that grand, universe-like entity known as the World Wide Web, a writer must choose where to deposit their hard-crafted prose. They need to find a spot where it will, with any luck, reach the wandering souls who would undoubtedly enjoy tales of derring-do, mystery, intrigue, and the occasional essay on how to write.

Making that choice usually involves agonising over one digital platform or another. Or, alternatively, opting for a solo effort—launching a tiny, self-hosted vessel to drift silently in the cold darkness of digital space.

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee was busy developing HTTP, HTML, and the world’s first web browser, he almost certainly did not realise he was spawning a digital ecosystem that would eventually contain upwards of 600 million blogs, generating close to 7.5 million new posts every single day.

Sir Tim originally invented the Web to solve a very specific, local problem: his colleagues at CERN were struggling to share information scattered across different, mutually hostile computers that simply refused to talk to one another. To remedy this, Sir Tim created a way to seamlessly link data across the internet, allowing information to bypass the digital tribalism. It was a system so elegant that the computers could only glance at each other, nod, and mutter: “Fair play. Good effort.”

Crucially, the Web was designed to make human collaboration easier by letting people jump from one related idea to another, regardless of which physical machine housed the data—and entirely without predicting that we would eventually use this miracle of engineering to watch endless, looping videos of domestic pets falling off sofas.

Naturally, humans did what humans always do when handed a brilliant tool: they overpopulated it. Following in the footsteps of Justin Hall’s pioneering online diary in 1994, and the coining of the term “weblog” (mercifully shortened to “blog” a few years later), we have continued to create blogs at an alarming, near-infinite rate, covering every conceivable subject known to humanity, and several that probably belong to an uncharted sector of the galaxy.

For writers, however, a minor glitch has emerged in this global matrix. That glitch can be summarised in a single, plaintive question: Where are all the readers?

We know they exist. They must do. But their presence is remarkably similar to Dark Energy—the mysterious force that makes up roughly 68% of the physical universe. In the scientific community, the word “dark” is merely a polite, expensive way of saying: “We have absolutely no idea what this is.” We know only that it is completely invisible, entirely transparent, and fills every inch of empty space.

It is helpful here to contrast this with Dark Matter—the cosmic glue that, along with its good friend gravity, pulls galaxies together. Dark matter has actual weight, and in our digital metaphor, represents our blogs: dense, heavy accumulations of effort sitting silently in the dark.

Meanwhile, the readers are the Dark Energy. They are not a solid “thing” you can point to, but a smooth, uniform pressure inherent to the very fabric of the internet. They are out there in their millions, keeping the whole system expanding, yet remaining completely invisible to our statistics dashboard.

Which brings us to the great platform debate.

To write on Medium or Substack is to inhabit the Observable Universe. These platforms operate within a rigidly defined, single cosmic horizon. You do not own the underlying fabric of spacetime; you simply rent a specific coordinate within it. The physical laws of this universe—the algorithms, the monetisation rules, the design constraints—are entirely predetermined by an external, corporate deity whose whims function as your local gravity.

Launching a self-hosted blog, on the other hand, is an exercise in Standard Gravitational Clustering. You begin with a cold, completely empty patch of space. There is no built-in inflationary push. To draw life toward you, you must slowly accumulate local mass through a complex, tedious dark art known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), gradually pulling a readership into your gravity well over vast, geological epochs.

And that is the ultimate trouble with platforms. Whether you choose the cozy, pre-fabricated cage of a corporate ecosystem, or the terrifying, infinite freedom of your own empty void, the readers will remain out there—vast, invisible, and pulling the universe apart.

You will still spend your Tuesday evenings staring at a completely flat line on your analytics chart, comforting yourself with the thought that while your page views are currently registering a solid zero, you are, at least, highly popular in the unobservable sectors of the cosmos.