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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Fad/coolness factor. As a result, the quality of Medium articles is highly variable, which is a source of personal frustration.

I published my anti-Product Hunt post there to get a sense of Medium's system nowadays: https://medium.com/@minimaxir/the-questions-on-transparency-...

It's nothing special. Yes, it looks pretty, but if every blog looks the same, then no blog is special. Regardless, there is not as much control as my Jekyll blog, anyways, which I need.

Also, the commenting system is hilariously bad to the point of it being a dark pattern: you have to click on each comment to reply or see who even liked each comment. You also have to click a comment to see any replies to the comment, and this nests infinitely. To see a comment 3 levels deep, you need to visit 4 different, slow-loading pages.

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I would also go with the Fad/Coolness factor. And if that is why you are posting stuff there you are going to have a really bad time in a few years when it isn't so cool anymore. Been around long enough to see this happen many times before. In six months or six years Medium will just be that place where some people post, but all of the 'cool kids' are posting over on the new platform 'A' because it is incrementally better. If you are really lucky Medium will end up like Blogger with a perfectly okay reputation and is actually still getting improvements, if your unlucky in two years you will have one months to manually scrape any stuff you want before the site is shutdown.

The same can be said of so many things. Most brands are not great forever. Remember when having a [insert email provider] email address was a thing? How about storing your photos on [insert service here]? And don't forget about [video upload site] or [source control site]. If you have the time to migrate from one service to the next go right ahead and play the game every few years.

How many more years do you think it will be before you will feel silly that you have code still on SourceForge? How about HotMail, GeoCities, MySpace, or AIM? What about GitHub, Picasa, Gmail, Twitter, or Facebook? Or dare I say even HackerNews?

if your unlucky in two years you will have one months to manually scrape any stuff you want before the site is shutdown.

You can download your Medium content with a single click.

Remember when having a [insert email provider] email address was a thing? ... And don't forget about [video upload site] or [source control site]. If you have the time to migrate from one service to the next go right ahead and play the game every few years.

Gmail, YouTube, Github. If they all gave you the same access to your content as Medium, and one of them were to disappear tomorrow, you will have had to "play the game" once every nine years on average per service. I doubt your worst-case definition of "every few years" is a common one.

If you are really lucky Medium will end up like Blogger with a perfectly okay reputation and is actually still getting improvements

You should disclose that you blog at Blogger. It doesn't help me personally make sense of the rest of your comment, but it might be relevant to others.

Yup I have a blog on Blogger, it isn't the best, it isn't the worst. It is a lot better than other services that I have used in the past that eventually died off. I am really there only because I was there yesterday, but like others I also have been thinking of moving, but haven't done anything yet. I do want to give thanks to Google for buying them and letting them just get better over time rather then every few months trying to figure out a growth monetization strategy that ultimately would kill it.

You might be right, perhaps it isn't every few years, but if a service only lasts on average 9 years, but you have n services how often will you be forced to migrate something? I feel like I don't have too much, but once or twice a year I have to migrate some data (free and what I pay for) and while when I was younger and had lots of free time it was fun to be forced to migrate to the shiny new thing, now it is just time I would like to not have to waste for what will ultimately (usually) be very little improvement to the core offering.

I've noticed that too, now that my posts are mirrored to Medium. It's a lot of work to read comments.

I've read that Google will penalize a site with identical content elsewhere on the web. Is that still the case? I could see why you wouldn't care either way, just curious.

their commenting system is absolutely horrible.

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