When I see a nice Headline on HN: "Oh cool, I would love to read that", then I look at the domain: "Oh it's on medium. Never mind then." I'd never pay for that shit show.
So you seem to be sharing a similar sentiment towards Medium than the rest of the HN readers.
(Even posting tweets to HN gets them double the attention than a random Medium post)
https://medium.com/@hoffa/hacker-news-on-bigquery-now-with-d...
i suspect probably quite a few more front pages if you include that.
Actually, I think that if you accounted only for the blog on medium.com you are ignoring all the medium blogs on custom domains, which probably have better content than the average.
I still read Medium articles when I came across articles written by people whose work I'm somewhat familiar with though.
This is it for me. If you want to write about tech, or the tech scene, and especially web tech, why can't you just build a site? I've built a few and I don't even do web development for a living so I had to teach myself some stuff.
If you are in tech, you should understand to use the right tool for the job.
While Medium is a very beautiful, well designed site, it doesn't work equally well for every kind of content out there. Technical content with code snippets are one of the least-suitable type of content for Medium.com design.
No matter how much thought is put into the design of the site, Medium's design is still designed to be a one-size-fit-all kind of product, and well, that means no matter how high quality their design is, it is still taking a somewhat "highest-common-denominator" approach to the design.
Yes, it could be difficult and a lot of work if you think you need embedded videos that autoplay and follow readers as they scroll down trying to escape that and the pop up pestering them to subscribe.
AWS is madness for personal projects. You don't seem to realize how bad you're about to be bankrupt when an article hit the front HN page. If you have a high quality picture, a gif or a video, it's game over.
I've had a couple of AWS-hosted pages make it to the HN front page.
I don't recall my S3 bill going up to any significant degree, much less bankrupting me.
S3 bandwidth is $0.023/GB at the most expensive tier. It's hard to imagine bankruptcy resulting from any text-oriented site, even if it does hit the HN home page. Maybe if you're hosting hours of HD video or something.
Also, I've never had any trouble using CDNs from an S3 page. Details?
Let's say the site is 1MB to deliver. That's nothing fancy, lots of text, css, logos, headers.
For 100k viewers, that's about 100GB of traffic, or $9 dollars.
How do you bankrupt yourself with your blog from there: By multiplying it.
1) You've got more than this single article => triple it.
2) You've got medias (picture/gif/video) that take 3MB => quadruple it.
3) My traffic stats don't account for bots/crawler => You're at the mercy of them or any dude who "ab -n 1000000 yoursite.com/logo.png"
A bill of hundreds of dollars for a personal blog might not scare a HN silicon valley engineer making $15k a month but that's much more than enough for the rest of the world. Even in western Europe, don't expect the disposable income to be much more than $100 a month.
Correct, my fault there. I was somehow looking at the wrong chart.
"Let's say the site is 1MB to deliver"
I think your estimate of the size of a typical blog post is considerably at variance with the norm. 2-3K would be more like it. Maybe 100K with logo.
The text alone of an article can easily be more than 10kB (that's about 1500 words).
3k might have been correct in 1997 for a single standalone HTML page with only text, very little text actually, and very little formatting.
100k is doable for a very minimal site.
By the way, are we talking about normal blog posts or are we talking about "sites"? What is a "site"? Wikipedia is a site. So is a page with nothing but "Hello, world" on it.
Most articles on the top of Google (outside of news) are much longer than 700 words. See there for some numbers:
https://www.snapagency.com/blog/whatll-be-the-best-length-fo...
You seriously overestimate the capabilities of a raspberry and undestimate the traffic you get.
A fluffy 500-word Medium-style article with 1-2MB of JavaScript serving no apparent purpose and 5-10MB of animated GIFs would be another story.
That sets any stupid article at a 500kB bar.
I have no doubt that a HN engineer can publish a single .txt file and force gzip-9 compression, however that's not an acceptable blog by any standard.
For a fully static fully cachable site, it's the bandwidth.
Your home connection cannot serve Gigabytes of data in a timely fashion.
nginx or varnish can do that (with more or less correct rules).
In practise, I usually disable compression everywhere and let the CDN handles it.
The CDN is configured to compress on the fly and I am very confident that CloudFlare/Akamai are doing that much better than a broken snippet of nginx settings from stack overflow.
I'm not sure if it's still like that, since I'm not using S3 for that right now.
Let me place my bet: Professional look (design, typography) + Medium brand + very little effort to publish + chance to get featured if it attracts clicks.
I think the lack of branding on Medium sites has something to do with it. People ended up lumping everything as "Medium articles", from spammy "growth-hacking" articles to well-researched, well written investigative article.
Platforms have communities that post about certain things, and less about others, and develop a reputation for doing so (and the average quality). If you post on one, your links share the reputation readers attach to it as a baseline, since readers expect it to fit in the pattern of other content they have seen on there.
Interestingly, for me Medium offering custom domains doesn't really impact this, since "people bothering to set up their own domain name" seems to be a group that's less bad in general (and exceptions get mentally tagged as such).
In some cases (like medium.com) HN should not only show the URL behind the link (e.g. 'medium.com') but also the user/author (e.g. 'medium.com/@randomuser').