Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog | Hacker News Reader

Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog

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385 pointsuptown216 comments

As someone who randomly highlights words and lines when they read, I can't stand sites like Medium that display that annoying toolbar with the Twitter icon every time you highlight something. Terrible UX in my opinion.

I've observed that behavior in others but never done it myself. As someone who doesn't randomly highlight as I read, I nevertheless agree that a toolbar that appears on highlight is obnoxious for a reading-oriented site. (Meanwhile, I can appreciate Microsoft Word's similar toolbar on highlight, which is especially useful in touch and pen-oriented workflows.)

I am idly wondering about the underlying reason people do random highlighting. I assume it's just a "tick" as they say. But I wonder if it has anything—even in small part—to do with the bad contrast on a lot of sites and the fact that browsers render highlighted text with good contrast. Even on high-contrast sites like Medium, the bright background combined with dark text can be tiresome on the eye, meaning that highlighted text will invert that yielding a more comfortable white text on blue. As someone who doesn't randomly highlight text, I often intentionally highlight text to quickly and nearly-effortlessly correct bad color selections by the site's designers. If I did this more often, I could see it developing into a habit.

> But I wonder if it has anything—even in small part—to do with the bad contrast on a lot of sites and the fact that browsers render highlighted text with good contrast. Even on high-contrast sites like Medium, the bright background combined with dark text can be tiresome on the eye, meaning that highlighted text will invert that yielding a more comfortable white text on blue. As someone who doesn't randomly highlight text, I often intentionally highlight text to quickly and nearly-effortlessly correct bad color selections by the site's designers.

Mostly to ensure I keep my APM high on HackerNews.

What does your employer use as a baseline APM quota for productivity?

I remember if you were lower than 100 in WC3 you were a noob.

I’ve been doing it since ~2006. Contrast was not an issue back then, and my very young eyes wouldn’t have (and still don’t) cared.

I think maybe it was a manifestation of ADHD. Highlighting what I read helped me keep track of where I was if I got distracted (e.g. by a thought, which happens a lot). It also helps me if I get distracted or fail to parse a sentence - I can easily go back to the last known good state and restart reading.

Websites doing weird things on highlight (or preventing highlighting) piss me off to no end.

Another tick possibly due to ADD: I consistently close my browser tabs. I’ve met a lot of people who need special extensions so they can have 100+ tabs open, and that drives me absolutely nuts. If I’m done using it, I close it and if I need to come back later I google(DuckDuckGo really) it.

I do the same exact thing. It drives me crazy that I can't highlight on an article without causing either a post to twitter box or the font size changing (I'm looking at you NYT). On a random note, do you know what that special extension that allows a user to have 100+ tabs open. I have a family member that always keeps way to many tabs open (drives me nuts as well!).

I follow similar patterns to you. One big thing for me is also looking up words and phrases. One thing I hate with a few mobile apps is when attempting to select text within something like a comment it instead just tries to manipulate the comment itself.

Never diagnosed with ADD (although this diagnosis really doesn't exist much in Germany), but I do the same for the same reasons. Even the browser tabs.

My focus wanders quite a bit when doing anything in general, so I highlight text when reading webpages to help anchor my attention and forcefully keep track of where I am.

Otherwise, my eyes tend to jump around the page in a horribly ineffective attempt to speed-read and I miss a lot of details.

The reading behavior you describe is common among people who use my startup’s software, which assists visual tracking when reading. Sorry if this is taking things too far off-topic, but hopefully this is helpful for some of the people who highlight while reading on-screen.

http://www.beelinereader.com/individual

Where are the peer-reviewed studies for this?

I'm interested to see the statistics on people who found it easier to do with your app than without.

My personal result was 3% extra speed, which is decent but not too impressive. Was wondering what the average & median were.

There are several independent (but not peer-reviewed) studies, mostly done with students. In that context, reading fluency gains can be up to 100% in the course of a month. But for adult readers the max would be around 30%, with the average around 20% and the median a bit below that.

For some people, speed is the only thing they care about, and I'd agree that 3% isn't a huge bump. But for others, the primary benefit is ease of reading, especially for long periods of time. This ease benefit is subjective and therefore hard to measure (vision scientists tend to look at blink rate, but this is an imperfect proxy), but in our experience about 85% of readers find it easier with the colors. Interestingly, this varies by device size, with a more pronounced effect on smaller screens.

Your site cuts off on the right hand side on Chrome Android. There is also no margin on the sides which doesn't give me a lot faith in an app that is supposed to assist with visual guidance of reading.

Thanks for the feedback—the website was relaunched recently and although I was assured it worked on all major platforms I was only able to test with my own device. Would love to know what size your screen is, since this is likely linked to that.

I wanted to try this, but apparently your Firefox extension is not version 58 compatible at the moment.

It is not—this is something we are working on still. Sad for us too—Firefox is my daily driver! Hope to have this out in the next couple months, but it's not a simple port, unfortunately.

I personally do it just before scrolling. I'll highlight a few lines of text 2/3 down the page, then scroll until it's right at the top of the page. It's an easy way to avoid losing my place.

I've also seen people who use the highlighted block to follow their gaze, though I can't speak to the logic behind that.

In contrast to the other replies you've gotten, I think my habit of highlighting is more of a nervous tic than a conscious decision to help me read. The habit is certainly related to my tendency to play computer games that require a lot of clicking (League of Legends/Starcraft), but if memory serves correctly I've been doing it since before I started playing any games. Also, I'm the kind of person that will sit at my desk with a pen clicking and un-clicking it endlessly before I remember that other people are annoyed by that kind of behavior.

This makes sense. Years ago when I worked in fast food, I noticed that about 30 minutes into my shift, I'd constantly tap the side of the screen when taking orders because the rate of tapping necessary to keep up with people talking would keep my hand moving quickly, then during the pauses, I'd find it difficult to hold still.

It's actually not uncommon and you can probably see someone do it next time you walk into a fast food joint.

> (Meanwhile, I can appreciate Microsoft Word's similar toolbar on highlight, which is especially useful in touch and pen-oriented workflows.)

I wonder if part of that observed difference is also in how the respective toolbars are engineered?

- The medium highlight toolbar is 100% opaque and directly next to the highlight, obscuring previous words in the paragraph.

- The Word highlight toolbar has mechanics whereby it doesn't always open directly above the highlighted region, very quickly becomes transparent if you don't interact with it, and dismisses itself entirely just as quickly if you move the mouse too far away or scroll the page.

That "Mario ghost shyness" built into the Word highlight toolbar I think makes a big difference in the feel of those popups.

The Word hover toolbar was one of the innovations in office 2007 (along with the Ribbon, live preview, and contextual grammar) and it’s one of my favorite features for the reasons you specify. A truly awesome feature that does not get nearly enough attention and is missing in places like google docs.

Often, I find that I have no need to actually use the ribbon, because what I need pops up near my cursor when I select the text I want to edit.

I often use highlighting as a positional anchor, often when tired. My eyes begin to lose focus and I can end up reading the same line over-and-over again.

In some cases contrast highlighting doesn't work, particularly on macOS since it doesn't seem to change the text color on highlight. It's notoriously bad in my experience when trying to read a downvoted comment on HN. You end up with a super light text on a very pale blue, that is even harder to read.

I got into the habit in the 90's when using it to scroll the page faster. Since I was already clicking on links, my hand was on the mouse. It was a lot easier to click and drag content than to click the toolbar on the right or to move my hand to the arrow keys.

> Even on high-contrast sites like Medium, the bright background combined with dark text can be tiresome on the eye, meaning that highlighted text will invert that yielding a more comfortable white text on blue.

Agree with OP and super OP. This is exactly why I do it (highlight). Question: Is there any consensus on which combination of text color/background color is best for reading?

I read once upon a time - and can't find it now - that white or yellow text on a dark blue background was the best combination, and that's why a lot of Microsoft curses-type software uses that scheme (e.g., edit.exe).

https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/e/doseditwindow.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/D9wzGjkYvqs/maxresdefault.jpg

The contrast ratio is far more significant than the exact colors. I’d recomend using a WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) conforming contrast checking when picking colors. A 4.5:1 ratio is recomended for normal size text. Here’s a simple web based one: http://colorsafe.co/.

While this will sound snarky in a way I don't mean it to, there are people who will reflexively scream the contrast is terrible how can any of you read any of this if your colors aren't #FFF on #000 or vice-versa. I've lost count of how many times I've come across folks insisting that, say, #444 text on an #EEE background is utterly unreadable. (In fact, it's an 8.4:1 contrast ratio, and easily passes the WCAG's more stringent AAA guidelines for normal text.)

I find it funny I just randomly highlighted your comment, as I was reading about you wondering why people randomly highlight.

Highlighting the line you read last makes it easier to recover your place in the text after scrolling down.

I multitask a lot (or better, gets distracted super easily) so I mark lines to have a reference to return to. And as you say most sites have a bad highlighting color combination, so I am used now to highlight a paragraph just above where I'm at

I use it to keep track of where I am on sites like HN that have some combination of wide content, small fonts, and tight line spacing. It gives my eye something to flick back to when I'm scanning back to the start of a line.

In my case, it's something to play with. I need to fiddle with things. If my hand isn't on my mouse, I'm playing with my mouse wrist rest (basically a bean bag). If it is on my mouse, I'm clicking around randomly.

> I am idly wondering about the underlying reason people do random highlighting.

I do this because I played a lot of RTS games in my childhood. Same movement for box selecting units.

I think I started it in DOS as a way to scroll text. Highlighting/selecting text and moving the mouse to the very bottom started scrolling

I randomly highlight. It definitely didn't start as a way to scroll text; I have never been aware of the behavior you describe. It's just something you can do.

I like to find places where the beginning and end of the highlight align vertically.

the reason i do it is to make it easier to scroll. if im reading on a large desktop screen, especially if its in portrait mode, scrolling fast can make all the text seem like a blur. so instead of having to scroll slow to keep position its quicker to highlight something and then scroll until its at the top

i should really just be hitting the spacebar but you know, old habits

I do it to keep focus on a line of text, but since I also don't like the highlight, turn it off, and do it on repeat

But also its kinda fun

I'm glad there is another random highlighter out there.

Medium & kin infuriate me with the popup toolbar.

Medium and SBNation are my two worst offenders. I have custom CSS rules I install whenever I see a site do this to just hide the div they're trying to show me.

Absolutely!

The New York Times website has a similar "feature:" When the user double-clicks, the font changes size... I ended up developing an ad hoc plug-in which intercepts and suppresses the Event.

It took me ages to figure out but there is a solution to this NYT website fubar that works for me on desktop browsers.

In Chrome this appears to be due to the Times site responding to 'touch events' when the browser reports that the device is touch capable. When the device is touch capable the double-click-on-a-word is interpreted as a zoom attempt of sorts. And right-click doesn't work either. Even if the input was with a non-touch mouse (Or maybe they're assuming everybody is using a Mac Magic Mouse always).

If you disable the touch-events-api in Chrome (chrome://flags/#touch-events) then Chrome will not report that the device is touch capable. And the NYT website will respond normally to the normal mouse interactions. This has been working for me for the past year.

As for why Chrome might be claiming your input is a touch-event ... for my situation, my best guess, so far, is that this happens since the laptop has a touchpad. (My laptop doesn't have a touch-screen.) So even though I actually used an external USB mouse to interact with the browser the browser seems to report that the device is touch capable which the NYT website interprets as must-be-touch-only-always.

Firefox has a similar setting called "dom.w3c_touch_events.enabled" I believe though I haven't tried this with FF.

Hope that helps.

Finally someone else who's been peeved by the Times' web reader! What's worse is that it captures mouse drag, so that I can't highlight words: dragging to the sides is hijacked to load previous/next article. Terrible design.

Yes, this is very frustrating! I often select a word to mark my place when going off to do something else. Can you share your solution?

@mkl If you use Chrome desktop then see if my above post helps .. without the need for extensions/plugins.

Odd sidenote -- when I was growing up in the world of Mac Classics and Windows 3.1, the Mac users were the highlighters of the group. I was a Windows (okay, DOS->Windows->Linux) guy, so I didn't.

I started using OS X in around 2002 and became a highlighter. I always wondered why.

Perhaps it’s because the highlighting - being a cooler shade of blue - is less jarring and easier on the eyes.

Windows: https://www.wintools.info/images/ccp/Highlight-default.png

Mac: http://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Qu...

For me it was the reverse. I was a random highlighter since I was a kid on Windows machines, but after I bought my first Mac the behavior just kind of stopped.

I also had another habit I dropped, in part because Mac OS X never supported it, but on Windows I would middle click in the middle of the screen and position the cursor just under the, well, scroll anchor I guess I could call it, leaving the page to auto scroll at a comfortable speed while I took my hands off the mouse and just read. If I recall correctly, if I did it just right, then the page would not just auto scroll, but highlight everything along the way.

Happened to me too.

Most of us became mac users with Mac Books, and they always had an incredibly responsive touchpad.

I believe it’s enough responsive to let us express our finger tics through it. The cursor actually become an extension of the finger.

Current macOS user, but only a very recent convert, and I've been a highlighter as long as I can remember. Though I was previously a Linuxer, so maybe it's non-Windows or terminal correlated.

So interesting. I didn't know anyone did this at all until I observed a friend of mine reading something online in the early 2000s. Really curious about what percentage of web readers do this.

I'm sure the many siloed SaaS offerings with click heatmaps know, but I wonder is there an open source of such data.

I am one of these readers, and didn't realise I would do it until recently (subconsciously double clicking, on sections I am reading).

I'm glad there are others, given the (although w/ heavy selection bias) responses here on HN, there might be more than you think.

The beauty of the web is that you own the presentation tier. Anything that bothers you should beat into submission with GreaseMonkey.

Or nuclear option with NoScript to liberate yourself from these annoyances.

That'll just prevent scripting. With GreaseMonkey you can fix html and css you don't like, and have those changes made every time you visit a site.

I HATE that. Even worse are some wikis like the ROS wiki that if you click on text to highlight it, it enters edit page mode. Aghhhhh!

Fullstory tracks "rage clicks", which is a fairly noisy stat to look through, as the vast majority of these are highlighters doing their thing.

Can I ask what your goal is when highlighting? Is it based on the word or is it so you don't lose your place or what?

I only ask because I don't do it but I sometimes find it difficult to read large amounts of text on screen and I've not a quick solution to it yet. I'm curious if this would work for me.

Speaking for myself, it's completely out of my control. I highlight randomly while reading, and the highlights aren't necessarily focused on the section I'm reading. And just because I highlighted something doesn't mean I will pause and look at it. Maybe I enjoy the colored aura of highlighted text flashing and changing in my periphery. I've never seen someone in person doing it, but I've read other accounts online. And this is definitely the most I've ever thought about it.

It's interesting to read other people highlighting to keep their place. I've never thought to do that. I normally just scroll the paragraph I'm on to the top of the browser.

I can't speak for everyone, but for myself and people I've discussed this with in person, it's not intentional; it's more of a tick.

That said, I find it does come in useful for keeping track.

I do it to mark where I'm at in the post if I need to switch to something else temporarily. Makes it easier to continue from where I left of.

I know it's weird, but I actually appreciate it. Not because I find their contextual tools useful, but because it's chipping away at this annoying habit and I do it far less than I used to.

I'm curious why you think highlighting text is a bad habit. I find it useful for quickly finding my place after looking away from the screen.

It's a bad habit for me. The OP said "As someone who randomly highlights words and lines when they read" which sounded more like my own tic-like random highlighting than anything useful, like yours.

The odd thing is that I highlight lines haphazardly as well. I hate the popups on Medium because I constantly highlight text without thinking about it. At some point I noticed that it helps me keep my place as my attention bounces around. The selections seem pretty random even to me, but I'm sure there is some sort of subconscious process going on. Maybe it's the same for you? Or not. I have no idea but just thought it was kind of interesting.

I do the same thing, although I wouldn't consider it random. I use to to keep track of where I am on the page. Highlighting really helps with poorly formatted pages, where the article is too wide to comfortably read and follow onto the next line [1].

[1] https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

Firefox reader mode is doing quite a good job for that. I suppose there's Chrome extensions that do a similar thing!

Also a hyper highlighter and I loathe those websites. It makes me want to turn off Javascript.

It gets worse, actually. People often, accidentally, click on the pen icon after highlight some text and end up highlighting that text permanently for all readers. And you, as the writer of the post, have no ability to remove that highlighting.

I would add that it has a terrible commenting navigation system.

"I did not want to post this snippet on Twitter ffs".

I know exactly what you are talking about, drives me and others insane - but I can't help it.

I actually created an account on Medium only in the hopes of finding an option to disable this horrible feature, needless to say I was disappointed!

I do that too. It also kind of makes the "popular highlights" or whatever it is kind of meaningless.

I thought I was just me that had this inexplicable habit. Glad to hear I'm not the only one.

And so easy to solve. Just add a "do not show again" option. That's it.

Am a big fan of highlighting myself, btw http://diigo.com is great for keeping the highlights (p.s. happy paid user).

Everytime there's a new "cool" blogging platform - people do this and then 2 years later, they write a blog post like the above one.

Own your own blog!

Funnily enough, an hour or so ago I was trying to track down a Python blog I used to enjoy and went on a "This blog has moved merry-go-round...

http://sayspy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/moving-this-blog-to-med... https://medium.com/coder-who-says-py/i-have-moved-over-to-sv... https://nothingbutsnark.svbtle.com/moving-the-blog-to-silvrb... And eventually to https://snarky.ca

Even snarky.ca has moved, from Silvrback to Ghost!

https://snarky.ca/why-i-changed-my-blogging-platform-to-ghos...

You actually can run a Ghost blog on your own server: https://docs.ghost.org/v1/docs/hosting

That author has a coding blog.. he might as well switch to something real like https://gohugo.io.

Wow this is a great example.

Fortunately none of those services have gone out of business yet so you could track it down.

For these cases the internet archive is great. or archive.is in case robots.txt blocked off archive.org

It was worth tracking down too, he writes some great articles.

Haha this is awesome, although I do not understand why would anyone do this. Just buy a domain for $5-$10 and point it anywhere you want.

After tinkering with so many blogging platforms and blog generators - from Jekyll and Pelican to Ghost and Hugo - I decided to shutdown the blog part because I realised last year I did more of the tinkering with my blog than actual blogging.

Now I just point my domain to a 4 page website which talks about me in as brief as possible and there's a contact page if someone wants to get in touch with me. It's pure HTML and very simple with extremely little bit of 'handmade' JS and CSS. Hosted on github. No markdown, no front matter. Black and dark grey text on white background.

I really like it now. And if I ever start blogging again I will look for some engine that gives me a very simple way to manage posts, generate links, tags, post archive etc and I might actually want to write posts in plain HTML.

It's not even hard to roll your own system. I blogged about it here a while back. https://deusdatsolutions.com/#kiss_blogging

Six-ish hours.Doing something totally new.

I think Medium is good for those bloggers just starting out, but yeah host your blog and just syndicate to Medium to build traffic. Even better if you can get picked up by an existing publication -- I saw a dramatic increase in reads.

This guy had an established audience so Medium didn't help him much.

I'm currently setting up my blog and I didn't even hesitate to host it myself. Companies like Medium come and go (e.g. Geocities, Xanga, Myspace, Posterous), but your dot com is yours as long as you keep paying the domain fee. Guys like Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood are probably very happy they've kept their presence on their own dot coms over the last decade.

Wow! I never really thought of Medium in the same realm as Xanga or Livejournal but you're absolutely right. It's crazy to think that people are moving to it. LiveJournal and Xanga were always kind of a stepping stone back in the day. You had your blog on their first then it started getting a lot of traffic and you moved it to your own domain. It's crazy to see the opposite happening now adays with Medium!

The big difference is that you can point your own custom domain at Medium, and if you want to leave, you can move your posts to your own site and maintain the canonical url structure.

They stopped offering that.

I hate Medium and I wouldn't let them be my primary distribution method for content but I would dual post. Is there a reason why you wouldn't just xpost from your blog to Medium?

SEO mostly I guess. Like medium already has a very high page rank or domain authority, so the medium's post comes first in search results.

Also, Google probably considers having duplicate content as plagiarism and your blog might rank low. The alternative may be post on your blog first, then post on medium in a couple days.

Medium allows you to setup canonical links. According to Google, that means the original post will be ranked highly when more than one instance of the same content is identified. Or does it play out differently in practice?

Would love to see actual data or even anecdotal examples of what happens when people crosspost to Medium and properly setup canonical links.

The problem I've seen is that canonical links aren't always effective -- I've seen sites get published for duplicate content even when they're used. There's horror stories posted in Google's forums; hate to become one.

What platform are you using to host it yourself?

Medium is one example of something that went from “nice” to “annoying” very quickly. (LinkedIn and Meetup are other examples.) Then it gets “improved” and customers just want to leave.

I don’t know who these people are that just can’t help themselves, stomping all over something that was nice the way it was. And it means we need to desperately revisit open platforms, since you should always have the option of forking from the pre-shark-jumping point.

If there's any site that has absolutely no need to nag me to log in before reading, it's Medium. Yet every time I visit, they pop up and say "You've read XX articles, time to make this official". Why? Why? What benefit do I get from signing in unless I'm writing a blog?

It's annoying when Quora does it, but at least Quora is a question and answers site. It's designed for a back and forth and user interaction. Stack Exchange proves you don't need to make people log in for that, but whatever. Quora does it. But Medium is not a chat site. It's not a forum. It's not Q&A. It's a blog site. I'm not writing a blog, I'm just trying to read.

Stop asking me to make an account.

The worst thing is that their sign-in cookies expire with a higher frequency than their tracking of how many articles you've read. I keep signing in to my medium account, which I created because they kept bugging me to, only to be prompted to create an account again next time I make the mistake of visiting their stupid site.

The issue with Quora, on the other hand, is they want access to one of your accounts - like Gmail - in order to log you in. Nope.

They have big colorful [Continue with Gmail] and [Continue with Facebook] buttons, but there's a link below that to create an account via any email address.

> Why? What benefit do I get from signing in unless I'm writing a blog?

Recommendations. If you create an account, Medium sends daily/weekly articles based on your preferences.

Yes. I didn’t appreciate that email spam. It took me several weeks to figure out how to get out of their digest emails without missing out on the one blog that I cared about.

The adage “You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain” feels especially true in software.

It's been intriguing but disappointing watching Medium transition from a site that cared a lot about enhancing the readability of the average blog, to a site that cared a lot about forcing sticky engagement. I understand why they did it ($$$), but I long for the days when there were no popups, no fixed bottom bars saying "download the app" etc.

It's easy to take medium's appearance for granted now, but when they launched, their implementation was game changing. Much of the improvement in blog readability, especially in the SaaS space, feels like it can be attributed to learning from and emulating the (longstanding) typographical principles Medium put forward.

I sometimes wonder about this in the larger context of companies as a whole.

If a company has one product, and that product is released and "done", then from a purely logical standpoint, why do they still need to retain employees (other than Support probably)? There are plenty of reasons to keep people on of course, but at some level it's kind of a "default" thing to do.

Because if they lay people off it's bad press, and if they say they're in maintenance mode people will think the company is failing and both of those things aren't great for user adoption.

You grow until you fail, and then another competitor takes over. That's what disruption means.

Yep, that's how it works, and that's "by default." Not saying that's wrong, it's just interesting. It's not just for "disruptive" companies either.

If the company is venture funded, growth is the imperative. VCs aren't looking for margins, they are looking for massive growth that leads to big multiples. Hence the imperative to lean into the wind.

It's not that uncommon to sell the product (with or without the company title) and fire the employees when they reach that point.

While I agree Medium is going through some growing pains trying to figure out a business model, I'm a bit surprised _nobody_ on this forum is coming to their defense. I personally enjoy Medium. I don't misattribute content to Medium itself. In fact, one of the things I like most about it is that I can easily find new people to "follow" (in general and their writing).

I also do post on Medium. One of the things I like most there is that comments are "first-class" posts on Medium. This is truly novel. It makes a bunch of blog posts into an interwoven globalized conversation. Certainly, that can't be done with a static site generator.

I'll certainly begin publishing to my own domain and importing rel canonical-style from now on, since there are many good points made here. But I tend to think that, while Blogger and GeoCities were simply brokers of content, Medium does quite a bit more.

Those people are CEOs trying to figure out how to become profitable by providing a free service.

I remember once someone who posted their blog and it was just a listing of markdown files in a github repository. Not even a jekyllyzed version... just a folder with date prefixed markdown and rst files.

I have to say it hit me and I was like... damn I should just do that. Forget all this blogging platforms and getting caught up in look and feel. Just write text files.

Even with Jekyll (and its variants) I got caught up on making it potentially look nice but this person just said ... f-it... let google and github figure out how to organize the content.

You might be interested to know that this is how blogs got their start. For reference, see .plan files [0].

[0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/plan-file.html

See also: John Carmack's plan file updates. https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive

I've come to the conclusion that all the design stuff is a waste of time. In most cases, it doesn't impress me on other sites, and if someone cares, they can use Reader View or Pocket or something like that. Unless you are good enough to create a design that makes folks say wow, there is no benefit at all from doing so.

One of the most popular German blogs, fefe's blog, only has pure html. It's perfect for testing things because it is so fast.

https://blog.fefe.de/

or http://danluu.com/

This is only slightly similar, but Ive played around with hexo to acheive a HTML only driven blog based on github hosted markdown files. Once setup and secured it is pretty much just me writing and publishing text files. https://hexo.io/ It seems to be very popular in Japan as most guides I read were google-translated Japanese blogs.

I just took a look around for self hosted blogs and found PostLeaf pretty slick and only has what is required without UI bloat.

Now I'm intrigued as to what that looked like. Was he using github.io or did you have to just click through the Github source code browser? Also was he really writing some of the posts in ReStructuredText, or was that a converted output?

Oh I’m sorry I missed your question earlier. It was straight to github. I think he/she had some readme for some basic instructions/about.

His stats for Medium views vs own-host views are the exact opposite of my experience. Everything I've ever written on Medium has way more views than anything I've ever published elsewhere, and we find the same happening for clients who make the switch too. We tend to recommend publishing on Medium to clients these days, both for the traffic and the inbound link SEO bonus.

There's tons wrong with Medium, but it still feels like a better option than a self-hosted system that nobody ever discovers.

> Everything I've ever written on Medium has way more views than anything I've ever published elsewhere

I guess if you're an author, it makes sense to use Medium to find an audience.

But if you're a company, how relevant are those views? Are the people reading your articles a quality audience? Or just random Medium visitors? Does 1000 views equal to even 500 visits to your website? Or to 10 sales?

I think the reading experience is pretty good on Medium: you can easily browse content via topic. But I think the content is more memorable than the author. I never know who wrote a piece on Medium because 1) most blogs look the same 2) the author's name is not really prominent.

So I wonder what's the cost of that increase in views? Would you rather have a tiny blog with 100 visitors a month who follow you closely? Or 5,000 views from random readers who might not remember you the next day?

From the article [emphasis mine]:

> On top of that, the amount of views a given article would get ultimately weren’t that impressive. At least not much/any more than our own blog (given we’d already built up a nice readership).

That's a crucial point made as a side remark. They had already done the hard work of building audience for their own hosted blog, to the level of getting around 10k views on posts already. So, this was about the author hoping for even bigger numbers and perhaps visibility to new audience. Which apparently didn't happen to any significant level.

The best practice (and what Baremetrics is doing) is to do both. Post your content first to your own domain and then later import it with the Medium article import tool.

The double content can be a hard negative hit on SEO, even with canonical links (it's not perfect).

Can stats reported by medium be trusted ? Is there a way to cross-verify their stats ?

"more views" is relative, too -- the Baremetrics blog had been around quite a while and already was pulling in good traffic, so I could see why their new Medium blog wasn't quickly matching their old traffic.

FWIW I've seen similar with my own blog. Posts that get 500 views/day on my site have a total Medium view count of under 2k, ever. I also sorta suspect that Medium doesn't promote the "Imported" articles as much as Medium-native ones (Imported articles set Canonical URL to your original blog post so you get the SEO juice).

Title: "Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog"

Closing paragraph:

>"Going forward, we are still going to publish to Medium, ...

A better title might have been "Why we are now using both our own blog AND Medium. I'm guessing that's a less click-baity title though.

I rarely click on links when I see the source as medium.com. The quality of content there feels too much like blogspot back in the day.

Same. Quality issues aside, the experience of trying to read content on mediums miserable.

Their insistence on taking up an outsized proportion of screen real estate for a header and footer promoting medium.com is beyond obnoxious.

A platform for consuming content should not distract the reader from concentrating that content.

Also if I like a blog I'll bookmark it and check back. I do not need to sign up to "never miss a story from _____."

Yep, nailed it. For those of us who still read despite all that, here's the browser extension you've been looking for (Make Medium Readable Again): https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA

Ha, this is great. Thanks for sharing.

I've said for a while now that they called it medium because it wasn't "well done."

HEH - gonna steal this one and reuse it over and over as if I were the clever one who came up with it around the water cooler. Like the small medium at large

What do you feel about custom "publications" that happen to use Medium? For example, hackernoon.com and codeburst.io are pretty popular around here and they just take Medium articles they find and add them to their publication.

For me, the Medium name is hurting the credibility with anyone who would publish there. I'm more likely to give my attention to someone with a static site, even if it is a boring old template. (I'm thinking of doing the same for myself).

As for Hackernoon I would be more likely to read their content off-medium. However, I do feel like I see them too often on HN, which means I now actively filter them out when deciding what to read. They are a little overexposed here.

This article has the same conclusion I came to...use Medium to syndicate[0] content, not originate content.

Medium is still very useful to get content to readers that would otherwise not visit your website.

Articles I wrote that were picked up by a "publisher" on Medium get way more views than anything on my own domain.

To put some real numbers on it, one article I wrote this month got 92 hits on my personal website[1] but 429 hits on hackernoon[2].

That makes me motivated to write because people will actually read it :)

[0]: https://medium.com/p/import

[1]: https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2018-01-01-es6-pr...

[2]: https://hackernoon.com/es6-proxy-and-localization-c1269bbc0a...

> ultimately your takeaway is “I read this article on Medium”, and that’s not what I wanted. I wanted to get back to people saying “I read this article on Baremetrics”.

Is that what you'd be getting back to though, or would it be "I read this article on some blog I found on Google" (or didn't find, since—as he says—Medium is excellent at surfacing content).

He says his traffic has slumped since the Medium switch; it may be causal, or not.

I run a small blogging platform (https://blot.im) and get a steady stream of Medium-apostates who've made this realization. Medium is a deeply flawed product and is not designed in the best interests of its writers or its readers. I recommend The Billionaire's Typewriter by Matthew Butterick if you're interested in why this is so:

https://practicaltypography.com/billionaires-typewriter.html

Medium's trendy design can be enticing but I'd try to steer people towards a platform over which they have control.

I'm getting a 404 here: https://blot.im/guides

Oops, I was working on the documentation earlier today. Will fix those broken links tomorrow. Thanks for letting me know!

> They’ve been fumbling left and right trying to figure out how to make Medium sustainable, and I’m just not convinced they’ll always do what’s best for us and our business.

This is the risk of becoming dependent on any outside service or company for your critical business activities.

SaaS services make your life easier... until they stop working the way you want, go out of business, get acquired and shuttered, etc. etc.

Pick and choose wisely. And always have a backup plan!

Medium seems to hate mobile users - always putting up a non-closable popup.

They want you to use the Medium app

I've been meaning to blog more, and currently I have 2 posts on Medium. Part of the problem is the work it takes to make a solid post. But mostly, as Fred Wilson points out, it is the lack of control. Want to add a small image customly placed? Can't do it. Want to provide your non-logged in readers an experience where an annoying interstitial doesn't appear every time they visit? Can't do it.

I have thought about syndication, and I'm glad to learn here about the import tool.

Edit: Incidentally, where is Dustin Curtis? There is opportunity here. Own your blog and make it social. Must be a way.

>I realized Medium is really great about surfacing content, but it removes the face of it. It neutralizes all content to basically be author-agnostic. It’s like Walmart or Amazon in that you can buy from thousands of different brands, but you rarely actually know what brand you’re buying…you just know “I got it from Amazon.”

Medium has pretty much always pushed the stance that they're the "face" of the blogs on the site. You're not hosting your blog on Medium, you're writing for Medium. Heck, their "our story" section says right at the top:

>Medium taps into the brains of the world’s most insightful writers, thinkers, and storytellers to bring you the smartest takes on topics that matter. So whatever your interest, you can always find fresh thinking and unique perspectives.

That's pretty clearly "Medium has great content", not "look at these excellent bloggers". They're a curator / reading platform, intentionally emphasizing the value you get from Medium itself.

Given that stance, loss of brand identity seems like a pretty natural outcome.

I recently decided to move from Svtble elsewhere. I looked at medium briefly but wasn't super thrilled. I ended up with using Hugo and hosting it with Netlify.

Pushing to GitHub publishes my blog , it looks pretty nice and I have total control over it.

And most importantly, as the author notes, it's "my blog", hosted on my site with links to hire me.

Definitely way more enjoyable, and as a result I blog a lot more.

> We’ll publish new content two weeks later to Medium (so the initial publishing of the content is able to get solidified as the primary source from an SEO standpoint).

Hrm interesting, but if it's the same content, won't Google rank the copy Medium very poorly?

The general term for what Baremetrics is doing is called "content syndication" which is the fancy buzzword term for putting all your content on your own blog/domain first and then copying/importing it to other sites.

What makes Google not flip out and de-rank your content for duplication is two things:

1. There is a specific rel=canonical tag that sites can add into their headers pointing at the URL of the source article.

Medium's import tool (which is hidden at https://medium.com/p/import ) will add this header to the articles you import with it, pointing them back to your blog and not hurting you and maybe helping your SEO.

2. There is a notion of timeliness - that if you post on your blog first, wait for Google to index your content there and then post to a place where there isn't a rel=canonical option (like Quora, Tumblr, etc.)

If you're trying to convince someone else that they shouldn't put all their eggs in the Medium basket, point them to this article which is the "nuke it from orbit" article on the subject:

https://sendcheckit.com/blog/why-you-should-put-your-content...

The problem is that rel=canonical isn't always effective. So you can still get the SEO hit. Esp. if Google reads which site posted first what wrong (it happens)

When you import, you can choose a canonical source. So in Google's eyes, you're viewing it on Medium, but the "credit" goes to the original source.

How Google ranks the Medium post doesn't really matter in this case as that's not the point of it. Posting on Medium is about distribution to Medium readers.

It depends on how you move it over to Medium. If you just did a copy and paste, then it would obviously be marked as duplicated content. If you choose to import it from the URL of your Blog, then Medium will add a canonical link to the original article and Google will know which is the original document.

The less we patronize organizations that serve their own good as opposed to the general good, the better.

Medium took something wonderful -- elegant, self-service blog hosting -- and ruined it.

I don't understand why anyone posts on Medium. If you are an individual, a github blog is easy to set up and completely free. If you are a business, I don't understand relinquishing control and diminishing your brand. Whenever I visit Medium it asks me to create an account, which is mildly annoying. Id' be worried Medium will increase the annoyances to a point you'd have no choice but to move elsewhere, which is a hassle.

For people or businesses that don't have enough reach Medium is a reasonable tradeoff to get more reach on their network.

Medium works great as an amplifier and as an aggregator. It can get you additional traffic for your blog, product or site. But yeah, own your own content.

I'm reading and re-reading the first sentence with the words "has becoming". And I'm totally stumped if that is proper or not, my mind says "is becoming". Certainly a new usage to me, but I'm not convinced its actually incorrect.

Haha, sorry, I've still got a bit of flu fog. Fixed. :P

Along a similar note... anyone have suggestions on tooling to publish from markdown files with yml front matter to a github site? I took the time to convert my blog to a more generic format, but got lazy on building tooling.

Use the default GitHub site generator, Jekyll

https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-as-a-static-si...

Hugo plus Netlify is perfect. Did that recently. Pushing to GitHub deploys.

There's a link to the source in the footer: https://rcoh.me

If you call this tooling, I have developed an Emacs app that allows blogging in native Org mode, leaving out the interpretation of meta-data to happen automatically (the package does the parsing). It's designed to generate Markdown files + front-matter in TOML or YAML for Hugo (https://gohugo.io).

The package is ox-hugo: https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/

In fact, that site is dog-fooding ox-hugo.. I simply commit the Org files, and Org --ox-hugo--> Markdown --hugo--> HTML conversion happens on Netlify, and that site gets updated.

Github repo: https://github.com/kaushalmodi/ox-hugo/

I recently moved my blog from Tumblr to Hugo (static site generator), and I've had a great experience with it.

My posts exist in a repository in the content/posts folder as markdown files. When I push to master, it kicks off a CircleCI build that generates all the HTML and pushes that to the gh-pages branch of the same repo.

Repo: https://github.com/seangransee/blog Final result: http://blog.seangransee.com

I use [Haunt](http://haunt.dthompson.us/) for that (because it's written in Guile Scheme). It supports markdown files in the Commonmark variant.

Github also supports Jekyll directly.

i use octopress for exactly this (based off of Jekyll). It's a great way to publish, very simple, cheap, but still has some nice bells & whistles

All great reasons to leave. We really need to consider who's getting enriched when we put crucial parts of our businesses on certain platforms, and in Medium's case, it seems like they absorb most of the value (I always cringe when people say "check out my Medium post").

I've kept a personal blog on Write.as for the past few years, and while it's still not self-hosting, I can at least get my data out, have a custom domain and syndicate to Medium when I'm really fiending for those claps (hint: I'm usually not).

Viewing Medium as a content discovery / syndication tool instead of a blogging platform is pretty insightful. Now I have a reason to use Medium, where I previously did not.

I have stopped reading anything in Medium because I cannot save the page for offline reading using the Evernote Webclip browser extension.

I encountered this problem on iOS where you have no control. On Firefox I managed to solve it with a lot of effort of scrolling to get the images to load and carefully selecting how to clip the page. It kind of works.

It did more to make me re-assess why I’m paying for Evernote than make me avoid Medium.

I agree with this a lot. I barely take note of the author or their site when I read stuff on Medium. So it makes a lot of sense if you want people to read the stuff you write but it seems to make much less sense from a marketing perspective assuming that I'm not alone in the way I use it. Though from the article that seems to not be the case.

My wish: much more developers use github issues for blogging.

Github pages, sure. But Github issues? How/why would you blog through that?

I've been doing it for a while (https://github.com/SSYGEN/blog) and it works fine. It has markdown support and a commenting system, which is basically everything I need. Although it has its limitations depending on what kind of blogging you're doing, so it doesn't work for everyone.

Using GH issues for a blog doesn't seem like it could really work for most people. While you can get comments and discussions which is cool, GH isn't a great way to read long form content IMO. Plus if you want any time of analytics how can you find views/reads/etc. On side note you're current tutorial looks very neat, I've never used LUA so I'm going to try and follow along.

That's brilliant.

Please don’t do this. It’s bad enough with the number of repos that de facto use github issues as documentation.

That’s a great suggestion for commenting on blogs!

ewwwwww

Why on earth would you want to blog on github?!

Much like blogger before it, people are starting to figure out it's best to have your own digital home on the internet.

Medium echoes Blogger today, the downturn is coming.

I have been waiting for a post like this for a while. Thanks for sharing.

I'm thinking of building a blogging API as a Service (kind of like moltin but for blogging instead of ecommerce).

Would anyone be interested in that?

Would contentful be a similar idea?

Medium is banned in China.

And Egypt! Why, beats me though

I applaud that. Medium makes it far harder to get a glimpse of the actual source of the article. Take this post, for example, HN lists (baremetrics.com) as the source. If it had been published on Medium it would have listed (medium.com) which is irrelevant.

> Medium makes it far harder to get a glimpse of the actual source of the article

This is even more worse when it comes to pinterest and the source of the image. Seeing stuff like "image source: pinterest" in articles is disgusting.

Even worse: "Source: Google Images"

Twitter does this too , when I want the link of the gif I can't get it. So I end up with a link to the twitter post

Plus if you want to see the image from search, you'll often get an obtrusive pop-up asking you to sign up.

Exactly. Medium does what's best for Medium (which is reasonable). I want to do what's best for our business.

They stated in the article that they stopped pointing the custom domain blog.baremetrics.com to Medium, if they didn't do that and posted this on Medium then the domain would still show as baremetrics.com on HN.

While true at the time, Medium no longer offers custom domains at all.

https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005579728-Custo...

They possibly found that lots of people using a custom domain were switching away from them, and they wanted to make that harder.

What on earth are they thinking??

No shit??? I started my Medium blog last year and have a custom domain. Why do you suppose they are getting rid of their best feature? Who the hell is going to want to host their blog on someone else's domain??? WTF?

>Who the hell is going to want to host their blog on someone else's domain

You mean like all those folks who blog on Blogger.com addresses?

wow i had no idea they did this! this was one of the reasons Basecamp felt able to move over. Now, if you haven't done it already, you can't. It's all medium.com's content.

Damn! Why did they stop?

Wow, it’s almost as if making free content for another company to capitalize on is not the brightest idea.

Yea, I'm evaluating options to get off of medium also (I dislike the interface and I don't know how claps will make me money if at all). Right now I am evaluating https://zarf.co which allows you to put a paywall to your blog posts.

It's an interesting idea, but I think most people who publish on Medium are interested in self-promotion, rather than a direct cash payout. It would be lovely if writers could make a decent amount of money publishing to a small audience of dedicated followers who will pay, but the evidence is that advertising makes more money than direct payments.

You may want to look at Patreon and patron-only posts.

Why don't you blog on your own domain?

>Right now I am evaluating https://zarf.co which allows you to put a paywall to your blog posts.

Seems like a pretty effective way to drive down readership.

Good on them. Medium is Tumblr for people who are a bit too mature for purple hair and Steven Universe. The social currency earned through Medium can't be reliably exchanged for anything that matters.

I literally have no idea what you are banging on about; Medium appears to be a simple blogging site, and that's about the extent of it. I think you've probably just projected any other attributes you perceive.

Both Medium and Tumblr are simple blogging sites the way the popular kids' table at the cafeteria is a simple table. Both have a secondary function as markets for whuffie among a certain crowd, and it's that function which distinguishes them from other blog platforms. That's what I was getting at.

Spot on re: currency exchange.

I used to run my own blog, but I became disillusioned with the direction HTML/CSS/JavaScript was taking. I lost confidence that my content would continue to be readable in future browsers. I know I could have customised a solution that perfectly preserved the content, but it would have been a lot of work, plus ongoing maintenance.

Now I have a Medium blog and I export articles to PDF for safekeeping. Dead easy.

Why not just stick with basic HTML and CSS? Isn't it likely that Medium will fall out of favor faster? There are many static site generators out there that perform just fine for blogs, and are not hard to use.

You can also use Wordpress to address this issue, and still have self-hosting.

> I became disillusioned with the direction HTML/CSS/JavaScript was taking. I lost confidence that my content would continue to be readable in future browsers.

Can you tell us why you feel this way? Any current browser can display websites that are 20 years old just fine.

You really don't need anything fancy to display static content.

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