Why I've stopped Writing on HubPages

 

I started writing on HubPages over a decade ago when I was still in high school and college. I wanted to find a way to create passive income, and at the time HubPages was one of the best options that I knew about. 

I started writing on Hubpages about two years before I started this blog. While this blog has hung around, with me occasionally throwing content at it, I've started working on two books and on Medium.

Over the last decade, I've found a lucrative career, but I still write online. Maybe not as much as I use to, but I rarely write on HubPages anymore.

I opened HubPages today for the first time in a while, to write a low effort article to create a backlink to a recent article that I published elsewhere. I immediately recognized why I had stopped writing on HubPages.

It wasn't problems with payouts or dwindling traffic to my articles. The user experience (UX) of creating an article on HubPages is just awful.

What's Wrong with HubPage's UX?

I'm not a UX expert, but I am a professional QA Engineer for software development teams. This means that I regularly provide UX testing for new products.

Here are the first problems that I noticed:

1. You need to know everything about your article before you start writing it

I'm not a professional writer, and a lot of my bad writing habits I can actually trace back to using HubPages.

Now when I write, I start with an idea or create a draft with the title and maybe a few bullet points. Maybe I'll write that article that day, or maybe it will sit in my drafts for six months before I write it. Either way, most articles rarely end up the way I expected at the beginning.

When creating an article on HubPages, I need to already have the title, and subjects planned out. Those two can be the hardest pieces if I just have an idea for an article.

Even though those things can be changed, there seems to be some sort of external force that makes me feel like I have to keep the article focused on the original goal, instead of letting it naturally evolve.

2. The antiquated article editor is exhausting to use

I write mostly on Medium these days, which uses a natural feeling text editor. It doesn't allow quite as much control over exactly how the article looks, but it makes it so much easier to just write.

On HubPages, I need to know how I plan to break the article down. Saving one section to open a different section, or moving a paragraph from one section to another takes so many clicks where cut + paste would have worked.

3. The text, photo, and polls modules take too many clicks and are buggy

It feels like there's a learning curve to learning how to write on HubPages, and at least some of that curve is learning how to work with the tools.

For instance, you see those bolded lines above? If the line above is bolded, and you use the keyboard shortcut to return the next line to unbolded, then an extra line is added. It's not a huge problem, but there's a number of similar small bugs.

Try to add more than a few gadgets and rearrange them on a fully written article. It's not fun.

Changing my web browser or the OS of my laptop doesn't seem to matter. It may fix one or two, but it doesn't fix enough to make writing on HubPages enjoyable.

4. I don't need all of the gadgets.

HubPages has a lot of integrations that are nice, but many articles were better because I included a poll or map widget? Not many.

However, writer's are heavily suggested to use as many of the integrations (that make sense) for their article as possible. In the past, the usage of the widgets seemed to affect the internal HubPage's score of my articles. This made it feel like I was being punished for not using them.

I've stopped writing on HubPages.

Mostly. I'm not closing my account, but I am removing and reworking old articles that no longer receives traffic with the network.

If you follow me on HubPages, you may see some familiar articles here. Don't worry, I'm just moving a few articles over as I work on getting this blog going, for real this time.