Goodbye Medium, Hello Ghost

When I first started writing my articles in Medium I was astonished by how easy it was to set up, how it was free to use for individual writers, and how friendly the articles looked. Being to new to the article-writing world, this is everything I had ever asked for.

The Idea

The name of my blog was Netcord, it was a crazy brainstorming idea I had. I got the idea of Netcord because I wanted to read about Discord, I wanted to find articles about it that would inspire me to write scripts for my YouTube channel-which was based around Discord content.

But here is really why I decided to start Netcord.

The Boring Discord Articles Market

I was astonished to find how boring the market of Discord-related articles on the internet is. I can point to any Discord related article by any popular publication and I already know what it is going to mention. How MEE6 is the best bot for literally everything, and the biggest bots. Every "x bots" list is going to contain

I get why they do this, it's a loophole. Publications want their articles to succeed so they mention the most popular bots across the entire platform. And these same articles are now founded by a plethora of new Discord users and it morphs their opinion into thinking that these are the only good bots on Discord. Increasing the bots' user base exponentially.

I have nothing against the big-player Discord bots. They are doing super well, and many have even established themselves as a Company. The bots do what their supposed to. It's good.

Here's where my problem starts:

Growing a Discord bot is nowhere like growing a YouTube channel. There's no "algorithm" that can promote your Discord bots to other people. In fact, Discord has no official "bots" library you can submit your bot to.

If you really want your Discord bot to grow, you have 3 ways: word of mouth, SEO, public opinion.

To grow a bot through word of mouth, you would need to have a unique original, and interesting idea. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) you need to make sure people find your bot first while searching for a bot in a particular category. Which, again, with the over-saturated market, is really hard to do. There are public bot libraries you can submit your bot to like Topgg, to get searchability for your bot.

With all these, I think we all know how hard it can be to develop and grow a general-purpose Discord bot.

And finally, public opinion. As we all know it, the media controls your opinion about anything. Unfortunately, we are a part of this. We are forming your opinion on these topics. Except, we do it differently because we put our reach to good use. We only publish the truth, we do not turn to greed as a way to make more money because we believe every Discord bot, every Discord Server, every Graphic Designer, deserves a chance.

We are attempting to make a difference. We may not succeed in reaching the majority but to those we do, thank you for being here.

This was the reason I started Netcord. In an attempt to provide quality to readers on the internet that like reading about or want to read about Discord content.

We did better than expected! With around 10,000 views every month, it was a surprise to see so many people interested in such an idea.

We expanded

Back to the topic of this article. We moved to Ghost. Both Medium and Ghost are excellent platforms with their own merits and demerits. However, with our expansion, medium had a few limitations we couldn't oversee.

And Ghost, being completely free but having to self-host was a pain for someone like me. I learned a lot of things about development that I wouldn't have learned if not for this migration. DigitalOcean, our hosting service was a smooth experience.

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Welcome to a new Netcord. This is our home now, and we cannot wait to share our upcoming articles with you. Thank you for your recent support, it has been a stunning experience getting to manage this community. Of course, thank you to the team who've helped me side by side with everything. You all rock!