Medium is a poor choice for blogging
medium.com
medium.com
It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of your stuff. The next free framework that comes, which promises a clean, non-distracting view, will also (most probably) eventually add advertisements, because, well, corporations need money.
In my humble opinion, just write your Markdown files, and use one of the bajillion Static Sites Generators to create/host them, or fork a framework that already does this such as [1], copy-paste them in, and you're set.
I just need RSS and a decent data parser for the blog entries list and it'll be all set. Not recommended for you to use it, just build one, it's fun! And easy, and you'll learn a lot.
[0] https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/
[1] https://github.com/susam/texme
Or maybe objecting had the same effect it had back then as it does now: absolutely nothing.
It's like me saying "the government is corrupt!" and, any time something happens or some time has passed, "shoulda listened! ;)" -- Seems a bit masturbatory at best.
But zero ways to get people to read it. I only read his post because it's on HN. And I read Medium stuff regularly on Medium.
The chances of most people discovering some random blog? Not so much. Whereas Medium has concentrated eyeballs and knows their preferences to serve them stuff that's close to their tastes...
Perhaps someone should develop a platform that creates the same discoverability, but while allowing people to retain control of the content?
I have somewhere between seven and nine[0] articles out and my work has been translated into French, Portuguese (twice), Russian, and Uzbek.
Medium isn't a source of traffic unless you're one of the very few writers they intentionally push. People share high quality work or new ideas, and audience engagement helps too, so link to your Twitter and share your email.
[0] Since starting the site I've started writing for other publications and the audience flows back and forth between the sites, so it depends on what you think counts as an article.
You could always post on medium and on your own blog though, and post your own blog here, for example.
Most of our traffic comes from hackernews, reddit and similar. However because our blog is too niche?
Edit: just because a few people (myself included) have a negative reaction to a Medium link doesn’t change the fact that many Medium links are upvoted on HN.
EDIT: adressing your edit, do you have any evidence they wouldn't be if they weren't on medium.com?
I only remember a handful of them, one in particular that is now a regular bookmark of mine (it’s https://www.valdemarsro.dk and in Danish so likely uninteresting to most), and the one thing that the ones I remember have in common is that they are their own things.
I don’t think there is anything beneficial to being a medium blog for this exact reason. I may read your article, I may even really like it, but it takes more than one article to get me to stick around, and because every medium article looks the same I can easily end up reading more than one without noticing it.
Having a unique domain helps as much as having a unique look.
I personally rarely click on them, but I can imagine some titles can be hard to resist. That make interaction-driven recommendations, which are becoming the dominant way of content exploration, a bit of a dark pattern.
Perhaps we're only an inch away from 'article autoplay'.
Have you ever seen news sites that let you seamlessly scroll to the next article, by dynamically appending it at the bottom of the one you're reading, and updating your URL as you enter it? The ones where it's ridiculously easy to get lost, because scroll space keeps expanding (sometimes both ways) and the URL keeps changing?
Someone's gonna figure out soon that the code for loading those articles could use a recommendation engine.
I stopped doing both, though: you can't read too much for free, but more than half of the content was not worth reading (for me), except maybe for quick skimming. There definitely are articles on Medium that are gems (again, from my POV), but I hope them to be brought to me by social networks anyway.
For authors, though, Medium must be pretty valuable, bringing relevant readers, and maybe some ad revenue. It does have a discovery feature which may be not brilliantly great, but is still quite OK, especially if you have time to spend on lighter reading.
Not very high if you browse, but adequate if you get a link or two from other sources.
I wish they adopted the bandcamp model: quite a number of tracks for free per day, but you can instantly pay for the one you liked, the amount you like (above a certain minimum). This way, the articles I personally find valuable would be both easier for me to find, and paid by me higher than the slice of the common subscription funds they receive now.
Otherwise I just ignore Medium articles. Maybe it is me but most of the Medium articles I stumble upon are pure garbage.
It's not just you, a lot of them are.
Look at how many are just "python deep learning tutorial" recycled for the millionth time, but with some fundamental misunderstanding or shortcut, or they're just lifted almost verbatim from the starter example or the documentation with nothing actually meaningful added. Often there's lots of "here's how to do x in y" that somehow manages to not understand good practices at all.
I actively avoid links to Medium, even on HN.
I totally get where you're coming from, but I'm not convinced that Medium helps at all. I mean, this article was posted to Medium. Medium didn't put it in front of you. So how is Medium helping?
I used to cross-post everything I wrote to Medium, because I thought it was a good reader acquisition strategy. But posting on Medium doesn't automatically get you readership -- you still have to go find readers and rely on them sharing stuff on traditional sites like HN/Reddit/Twitter/Facebook. And none of that sharing process requires your content to be on Medium.
For all of the effort I put into formatting articles well, and making sure that I matched popular writing styles, and adapting things, a post I put on Medium will get <20 readers over the course of a week.
In contrast, I had one good post get traction on HN, and on average my self-hosted blog now gets more visitors than that per day. So now I don't even bother cross-posting, because I don't see how Medium helps me get content picked up on other social sites.
Medium has a ton of recirc features that drive page views within the ecosystem. That is the entire reason why Ev started Medium, it wasn't about giving people better typography or whatever.
The reason the product is kind of messed up is because they made some financing decisions that may have not been correct in retrospect, so now they've had to go back and try to retroactively design the product to match their capital structure. But it's not like they wouldn't have had tons of other problems if they were bootstrapped, the reality is there just aren't any good financing options for consumer web startups right now.
It does through emails and their homepage, which is one major reason people publish on Medium despite the downsides
But in practice, is Medium currently helping people build audiences in a significant way? My experience suggests no. It was easier for me to do that with a self-hosted site.
I'm not sure exactly why this is -- maybe it's that Medium's discovery algorithms take into account correlations between existing readers, so if you don't already have a bunch of readers you'll never get picked up. Maybe Medium is just super crowded, so the odds of you getting recommended over someone who's already popular are low.
All I know is that my readers are return viewers (which self hosting helps a lot with) and people coming from Hackernews, Reddit, Facebook, or curated link aggregators. I don't personally see any data that suggests Medium is driving any traffic to my content. And at this point, universally across the board, my self hosted blog performs better than my Medium blog.
I'm sure that varies from publisher to publisher, but I think it's simplistic to say that Medium by default drives traffic. I suspect that for small sites it's a lot more complicated.
I actually don't think Medium ever helped people build audiences in a significant way, with relatively few exceptions: Medium has always been structured to build an audience first for Medium and second for "publications" hosted on Medium. But it's never been particularly good at building audiences for individual authors.
While I'm aware this is anecdotal, there appears to be very little correlation between the number of followers one has and the number of views any given article gets: you can have several hundred followers and have some articles that get thousands of views (usually because they were included in someone else's publication or linked from somewhere else on the web), and others that get maybe a couple dozen views.
> I don't personally see any data that suggests Medium is driving any traffic to my content.
It is not. Readers that start on Medium by and large stay on Medium.
Yes, Medium takes into account who you follow and what subjects you've liked, which is one reason Medium article collections like HackerNoon exist.
I feel Medium is for writers who don't take the time and effort necessary to self market their own content, which is not easy for many people. The platform is just like everything else in life. Are you willing to make concessions for its benefits? I don't see anything wrong with it as long as people are aware of the price of the Faustian deals they make in exchange for a little magic. The same applies to Alexa, Facebook, Waze, etc...
Maybe this is the problem. I'm sure as a professional writer you need to keep up with reader interests (rather than setting up to do the blog equivalent of Finnegan's Wake), but you don't want to be too interchangeable either.
It's like you had to decide each month from each cake you want to eat (there's an infinite row of cakes) and you vie for the huge ones -- together with countless other people, so you get really small crumbs. Go for a smaller cake and you may get actual slices with frosting and all.
Medium put it in fronts of tons of other people though -- someone of which posted it here.
And I discover posts on Medium alone every day.
Plus, Medium posts don't feel like a wasteland -- they have a healthy number of comments.
About 80-90% are from users with a large following on Medium.com, and many of those are also 'online influencers' with decent sized Twitter/YouTube/LinkedIn/whatever fanbases as well.
Oh, and forget it if your story isn't a paid story. About 90+% of Medium's promoted stories are members only stories now, with the home page I got just now literally having every single story outside of the 'popular on Medium' column being a paid one.
If you're not charging for the story and don't have a pre existing fanbase, at best you've got the end of article suggestions and latest stories link to rely on and the latter has about twenty pages of mediocre stories for every good one.
Like on many platforms now, it seems the popular just get more popular, and the rest battle for the scraps or the off chance they'll break out.
Getting other people to read your post is as difficult as getting other people to read other people's content - you post it where you frequent, and if people like it, they'll reshare it. Building a larger audience requires work, and any attempt at cheating that is unsustainable at scale.
Well, yeah, but a post on a self-hosted blog can be posted to HN just as easily as a post on Medium can. And it's not like having "(medium.com)" next to the submission is going to drive upvotes any more than having "(yourdomain.xyz)" would. (For me it actually has the opposite effect; there's so much empty "thought-leader" drivel posted at Medium that seeing that domain next to an HN submission makes me less likely to click through.)
So I guess the question becomes: does Medium function well enough as an aggregator of its own content to make posting there worth the tradeoffs? Does it drive enough traffic from other Medium readers to your own Medium posts to justify giving up everything you have to give up to use the platform? (That's the theory behind Medium, of course, but what I'm wondering is how well it actually works in practice.)
I observe, Medium posts are now the equivalent of most TED talks.
Most are useless but the rare good ones make it hard to write the platform off as a self-promotional junk delivery mechanism.
Exactly, the platform isn't an indicator of quality. In the long term, how could such a platform be?
Maybe what we need for blogs isn’t a platform, where authors come on and content is hosted centrally; but an aggregator, where each author self hosts but content is still discoverable by a wider audience.
A good example of this would be Apple news.
Your memory is very, very different from mine. I remember Medium being heavily criticized by (sorry, lack of a better term) "tech nerds" for stuff like the article brings up when it first came out. People complained about it not working when Javascript was disabled and bloat for a text website, load times, etc., all sorts of stuff. People said they refused to visit Medium. In fact, it was so negative I'm a bit surprised it got as popular as it did with tech blogs.
>Now, we need all kinds of tricks, add-ons and blocks to just read five-minute posts during our commute.
Only "tech nerds" care about those sorts of things. Joe User reads Medium just fine without any tricks, add-ons and blocks.
PS: For more ready-to-fork (open source) themes for GitHub pages, see the Dr Jekyll Themes directory / listing (200+ and counting) @ http://drjekyllthemes.github.io
It still needs some more slimming down, and small aesthetic changes would be welcome, but here it goes.
Currently trawling your archive
I'm a terrible writer, but, there's only one way to get better! I really, really like your own blog, too :)
It's the same with OSX, often praised but at some point the UX got so bad that you'd have to install system updates through their music player iTunes.
But in their early days, their praise was well earned. I was a designer with a focus on typography at the time, and medium's defaults were an order of magnitude better than any other non-custom publishing platform at the time.
Big, readable serifs, intentionally constrained column widths (and corresponding line length), and lots of attention to the details and best practices that ease the pain of reading things on the web. They're cluttered now, but they were intentionally uncluttered then, which isn't exactly typographic but is worth a lot in terms of cognitive burden.
To the extent that this is table-stakes now, and no longer a differentiating factor, medium is mostly to blame IMO. They showed that doing web type the way typographers told you to got slam dunk results. Everyone copied their style and the web is vastly more readable for it.
So while they lived long enough to become the villain, there's some gratefulness due to their former selves as well.
----
I personally do things the way you've described (markdown > jekyll > GH pages), but I think medium's value prop now is ease of distribution. You get bolted onto the homepage and other people's articles as part of a graph of other people's work, and writers find that valuable.
It's 2018 and there's still no standardized format for a blog's complete content (text, images, comments/credentials for comment provider) that we could use to move quickly from one site/setup to another. It would be nice to just get all Tweets even into Hyde or whatever.
Is this only a thing for phones? I never use my phone for web browsing, but I use my web browser. All I have on that is uBlock Origin and I have always found Medium pages completely clean and pleasant to look at with no clutter or ads.
Instead I recommend people buy a domain, create a DigitalOcean account, have DigitalOcean manage it for them, and then create a single $10/month Droplet with their one-click deployment of Ghost. Now you have your markdown files and a self-hosted, beautiful blog.
That being said I am a "power user", so I use Hugo and Netlify, but there are deeper requirements to make that work. I would love to see a one-click deployment of a Netlify based blog.
Does anyone else understand that probably 99% of Medium traffic (both reader and writer) don't even understand those words and would have no idea even where to begin? Most of them probably had trouble just signing up on Medium and already forgot their passwords.
This is where Medium wins. It looks ok, makes posts look professional, and doesn't give any choices. You don't have to choose a theme, or setup anything. Signup (or even, login with twitter/facebook) and just write. Done.
You can't possibly hope that any writer on Medium is ready or interested in a static site generator.
Also, no infrastructure headaches either.
For the average person (including me), going to www.staticsite.com, entering an email and password, and then starting is the way it happens. If that is not a quick, painless, and obvious process, then the vast majority of people won't do it.
Medium got going because it was like that (I think—maybe it is still like that).
I don't think the author (or the people writing those comments) are claiming that medium is going to go bankrupt vs static sites.
Most people commenting here probably could set up a static site if they wanted, and the author simply hopes people use something else.
Of course medium is gonna continue to thrive on people who think it's the best option, but this is a plea for people who can and know how to do better.
Ease of publishing, I imagine, attracted more general purpose writers spewing out more general purpose content. More writers (general purpose or niche regardless) is good for Medium.
However, to a sensitive niche reader (like me), this looks like a marked decline in quality and Medium is not a great choice to get my content anymore.
This is probably good for Medium in the short run. I think its fast headed towards becoming a platform for pseudo intellectual, shallow content that attracts wannabe readers and writers. I am sure there are more of this kind than readers/writers who know their sh*t and value their time.
Medium made a choice, and so have I.
A blog is a text file on a screen. There's really no need to do it on a proprietary system, you can literally upload a text file to your own host, but if you can't be bothered, somewhere like GitHub Pages.
You want an image? Here's a tag: <img>
If the idea is that it doesn't look pretty enough - well, a Medium blog doesn't look like anything at all because I've closed it after closing the first three popups.
Here is a link to my own personal blog: https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/blog.txt
You're reading this comment right now on a site that gets it right.
You want an image? Here's a tag: <img>"
Don't be surprised if someone has this "idea" soon and makes a killing with it. A lot of people seem to get tired with the current stream of "innovation" that makes the web slower and more complex.
Let's change the world. You can find my contact details in my bio[1, 2, 3].
[1] please note that by e-mailing me you are agreeing to my privacy policy which states that all e-mails may be read by me
[2] your IP address will be logged and tracked by both your ISP and Hacker News when you click the link to my bio
[3] [modal] this isn't actually anything, I just wanted to put something in your face [ yes ] [ yes ]
[4] alert('ha! gotcha! there's another one!')
edit: [5] would you like to sign up to my newsletter? [ no ] (there isn't one)
That's how Google design used to be but is not anymore.
Pow, you have a choice about how wide the lines are.
I have a 40in monitor, a 13in monitor, and a 7in monitor.
It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page.
On the 40in screen it would be asinine for me to maximise it, for example.
It's completely unsurprising to me that I can resize the window into a state where the website becomes silly. I just don't do that.
Resizing a window is trivial, it's not that you can't, it's that you won't.
edit: Obviously I know what responsive design is. I'm on Hacker News. The author hasn't done it (probably because they have better things to do), you have a trivial option to work around it.
The contrast to be drawn is with a site like Medium that deliberately goes out of its' way to be annoying and harder to use for some vague profitability goal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design
This concept is popular for more than 10 years now. Many websites do it with something as simple as
article { max-width: 60em }
Take Twitter for web. Reduce the browser to something like 60% or 70% of the screen width. The <div><p>...</p></div> elements containing the tweets are chopped off on the right side. It disrupts my reading experience due to minor resizing. This is most of the web today.
> Resizing a window is trivial, it's not that you can't, it's that you won't.
That's true. I don't want to be resizing my browser up and down for every good and bad website.
max-width: a bunch of ems;Responsive design is a thing, yes, but ultimately on a desktop computer you're always going to be able to choose a browser size that breaks a site.
Apart from calibrating the room lighting and monitor brightness, one can still have a dark background for the body but not for the wrapper that has max-size on it.
E.g. http://camendesign.com/ here you would have white that burns your eyes if it was done without max-size, as is it's much better. [edit: just noticed that blog actually doesn't use max-size, it doesn't shrink; but it easily could]
> Responsive design is a thing, yes, but ultimately on a desktop computer you're always going to be able to choose a browser size that breaks a site.
Only if you make it too small.
It's interesting though because I hit Ctrl-+ before I even realised I was doing it.
I guess I just don't see this stuff as being a big deal. It feels like a normal manual adjustment, like if I was pouring coffee and I have to make sure I aim to not spill it over the edge of the cup, or something.
Oh well. I guess we agree to disagree.
> Just get a smaller house.
---
> Hey, we are going to launch our product in a country that doesn't speak English but we don't have i18n ready.
> Just ask the users to use Google translate.
And you wonder why we can't have nice things.
Also, obligatory link: https://thebestmotherfucking.website
That said I am not defending current state of Medium.
Also this format works great with the browser's "Reader" function.
Here's the thing: I don't want the font or the images to be bigger, I want columns to not be this absurdly long. The only way for the user to achieve it is to resize the browser window.
There is a "max-width" CSS property for that. No framework or JS required, just a modicum of care.
> Also this format works great with the browser's "Reader" function.
It still would using max-width.
At a certain point you have to recognize that even little CSS (max-width, font-size) can actually be a good thing, and when a site lacks this it doesn't make it somehow inherently better, it just makes it harder to read and I am nearly as inclined to simply hit the back button as I am on Medium articles. It's two ends to a horseshoe. The best place to be is somewhere closer to the middle.
Just resize your browser window: it's not the site's job to guess how you want content displayed.
I loved browsing the web in the 90s: I had a half-width browser window on one side of my screen, an editor window in the upper quadrant of the other side and a console window the the lower quadrant. It was great! Then suddenly every website decided that I must have a full-width browser window, and was ludicrously narrow with a half-width browser. And they all stopped using and started abusing CSS. And then they all started using & abusing (but I repeat myself) JavaScript.
All I really want from the Web in 2018 is the experience I had in the 90s, and I can't get it any longer.
body {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
line-height: 1.45;
background-color: #ededed;
margin: auto;
padding: 0.5rem;
max-width: 80ch;
}
.pd {
padding-bottom: initial;
}
Should publication platforms be giving us two choices: their design and implementation; or raw text (HTML) we can style ourselves?
A little used browser feature is alternate style sheets. (View -> Page Style in Firefox.) This lets a site ship multiple CSS styles to the end user with some default. Example: https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/cssref/altstyles/index...
I think this is why RSS did and is dying, although it also seems to be making a comeback.
Ironically, the "reading mode" thing that is becoming popular is essentially that - stripping the page of most of its custom styling, and then applying some sensible default style. It's like we went full circle, all the way back to pre-CSS times.
I humbly submit my own blog as being pretty darn readable without bloat. It’s responsive and simple. https://alanhogan.com
Edit: Here’s a relevant article: The problem with new blogging platforms https://alanhogan.com/the-problem-with-new-blog-platforms
Firstly, I hate sites that use such a narrow column on the screen. The wall of text from the previous post is obviously too much and is far too difficult to read and keep track of where you are, but using only a third of the screen seem far too little. I'm sure you could double the width of your text without affecting readability.
Secondly, I have really good distance vision but need reading glasses. I find the text on your site a bit small. From a distance it just a bit too small to read comfortably and from close with my reading glasses I feel like I need to get too close. Yes, I can increase the font size easily, but how about...
My suggestion: decrease the size of your borders by about 50% on each side and then increase the font size by 1 or 2 points. The increased column size will give more text on screen, but the increased font size will make sure it is not too much.
FWIW most professional typographers recommend a column width of 30-40em. Much more than that seriously increases the distance the eye has to travel from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, and makes it harder to keep track of where you are.
The max-width of this blog's main column is... 40em.
And now you know why so many sites do this thing you hate.
(An em, if you are not familiar with it, is a typographical measurement equal to "the width of an M in this font".)
Far be it from me to argue with professional typographers, but do you hear anyone saying "oh, the line lengths on paperbacks are far too long, I can't scan them"?
Maybe it's just me but I'm a little tired of always having to cater the the very lowest common denominator. That narrow width seems almost ludicrously too narrow to me, it's like a childrens book.
There has been research that suggests that most people don't finish articles, so it seems to me that maybe making columns so narrow is catering to the audience most likely to have such a short attention span that they probably won't finish your article anyway.
Or maybe I'm just a moany old git :-)
Cheers, Alan.
If most websites were like this one, I could write a simple one-page CSS that formatted them the way I want - including fonts, colors, lines etc. As originally intended by this whole HTML thing.
And even if you can somehow cut through all the complexity of modern hosting — you still have to make those HTMLs. Only now they have to be responsive, look no worse than whatever is out there, look nice when posted on Facebook or Twitter, render well in various read later apps, and generally work with a wide ecosystem. And then you have to continue to make your site work with all the new stuff, preferably without breaking older pages.
You can indeed be simpler than most websites out there, and not lose anything important. But don’t kid yourself — the web is much more complex than it used to be.
https://habd.as/zero-to-http-2-aws-hugo/ Is an example of how to do this. It has some steps but is not that hard. I think it can be even easier by scripting most of this out for less technical people.
Every website is trying to reinvent the wheel. Foolish! I hate the grid/huge amount of white space layout that is so pervasive now. Websites that have their information in a nice and clean, condensed list view are unicorns now. Condensed lists are literally the best layout to convey information in a given space, take a look at how outlook or apple mail gives you the exact same information in their super condensed list views as they do in the 'mobile friendly' expanded view, except they give you much more information at a time without having to endlessly scroll. It would be acceptable if I was literally using my elbow to tap on a touchscreen, but I'm using a mouse and keyboard and I can comfortably click on something 10 pixels wide.
Take a look at any of the half dozen or so food delivery service websites. On my 13" screen on grubhub, I can see 5 search results at a time. 5! Each result takes up 1 full inch of screen real estate when it could be one single line of text. If it was single spaced, that would be 40 lines and therefore 40 results I could view at a time. But because the modern web is designed to be accommodating for a 500lb gorilla to poke at a touchscreen, I have to deal with only being able to see 1/8 the information that I could potentially see.
I think getting people to scroll isn't an accident, they want you to have to scroll.
Scrolling a website makes you physically interact with it, and I bet that has some psychological effects that work out in favour of the content creators.
Whenever I am in a place where you have to wait a lot, like at a bus station, nearly everyone is swiping at their phone.
They all look like crack addicts scratching for rocks in an alleyway.
Here's a relevant comic:
https://zenpencils.com/comic/129-marc-maron-the-social-media...
A blog used to be a text file on a screen. Like most words in the English language however, its meaning has changed overtime, as people's expectations have changed.
I personally like Medium because of its highlights feature and its unobtrusive comment system. In fact, I often scroll down to the comments first to see what people are saying, much like I (and many others) check the comments on HN submissions first before deciding whether to bother with the actual submission.
Don't get me wrong, medium has a lot of annoying issues. But this whole "let's go back to the stone ages" crap with regards to tech needs to stop.
I'm not saying that's right, but it is something to consider!
The only javascript on any page is for the service worker that allows offline loading of pages.
##Here's my thoughts on why Medium is so popular:
1. It's easy. We are all techies here. We often underestimate the weight of this.
2. It looks better than your average blog theme. (With 0 effort)
3. It promises the opportunity to access a larger audience. (Even if it does not deliver on that promise)
4. It provides an endorphin rush though likes/claps and the analytics/view counts.
##What the average blogger doesn't care about:
1. Effort Overhead. Managing a web server, buying a domain, configuring a wordpress blog, updating wordpress, choosing a theme, deleting spam comments etc.
2. Content ownership. Most people don't think about it that much.
3. RSS feeds. I'm willing to bet >80% of bloggers have no idea that people still use RSS (or even what it is at this stage)
------
I don't think Medium is perfect, but I also don't think any of the alternatives are good enough either.
Not offering RSS, when you're an online syndication platform, is a pretty clear sign that Medium made Medium to serve Medium first. Not to be the best experiences for readers and writers of blog posts and long reads. Which includes not informing people about things they could have had if Medium was a little less self-serving and actually cared about getting people's voices heard out there.
I wrote a tool which converts your Medium blog into a Jekyll blog, for publishers hoping to migrate:
That's a good point.
I have a medium blog. I've had a few posts got >10k reads within a month. Almost none of those reads came from Medium itself, but rather from the various outlets that have linked to my post, and Google.
The only reason I currently use Medium is that people are more likely to open a Medium url when it shows up in link aggregators. People trust the familiar url far more than www.mypersonalblog.me - and it'll never get blacklisted / shadowbanned on reddit.
Oh, and claps. I like the claps.
I know this is just anecdotal, but I assume anything coming from Medium is usually less worthwhile. First, the author isn't important on a Medium article. Medium is the brand, the other is someone that doesn't matter. Secondly, it's not easy to follow the author, so even if I did read the author bio at the bottom, following the author is a pain. Finally, everything the above article mentioned. Medium articles are all about playing SEO games and "Growth hacking" before good content (literally). I'll ready Medium articles, but personal blogs are far more credible every day of the week in my book.
That being said, I would be interested in how you reached the conclusion that people are more trusting of medium articles?
Really just from my own experience. I've been writing and posting content for a few years and usually I get more clicks and comments when using the medium domain. (not always but noticeably more often)
thatsthejoke.jpg
But seriously, my guess is that the author wants you to see the things that he's talking about on the page. Like you read that the banner sucks and you can look up and see the banner and understand immediately what he's talking about without having to take his word or trust that supplied images aren't photoshopped to hell.
iphone is the worst phone ever!
-sent from my iPhone
They should fix it.
Meanwhile, on mobile one can use one of the 10s of HN client apps.
Even for code it is annoying because of the wide margins. The margins take up about 50% of the width of the screen (!)
Here's what Google's lighthouse sees: https://imgur.com/a/wDCIrpP
"Time to Interactive: 10+ seconds" is particularly terrible.
Where do you find the most Medium users? Medium.
[0] Google Chrome Extension: https://github.com/philc/vimium
I recently also found a Firefox extension [1] I'd been looking for a some time: a way to automatically enter reader mode on some URLs, such as medium.com. This makes browsing Medium much nicer.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...
Safari has this built-in.
Enter reader mode on a web page, then right-click on the reader icon and you can set every page in the domain to automatically display in reader mode.
Safari isn't usually the first with new features, so it might be available in other browsers, as well.
Does anyone have experience with an alternative platform? Preferably free and hosted.
[0] www.write.as
As of now, normal people will have difficulty understanding how Read.as, Write.as, Snap.as all work together.
Looking forward to when I can get a full Facebook replacement for like $3/month subscription.
Myself, I'm using a VPS (5€ a month, but 10€ a year goes to the OpenBSD foundation) to host some static html (generated from markdown), and have done away with comments entirely. (The VPS isn't just for that blog. I'm serving multiple domains from it and hosting my own fossil repos there as well)
It's obviously not for everyone, but maybe it'd suit you.
I'm not really sure what the answer is as if it's going to work on a static site, the comments need some sort of backend. Most people aren't going to host it themselves, so that leads to these issues, as nobody will pay for a commenting system.
What if it costs $0 per year, if one gets < 10 comments and < 10 000 page views? And otherwise $10 per year? Or something like that. What do you think about that?
(I'm developing a no-tracking and no-ads commenting system, + open source, SaaS hosting, link in my profile.)
Medium is not a great platform for distribution compared to that (poor reach and it never really emerged as a destination) but not worse than other external/self hosted blogs. A good strategy if you are hungry for clicks is to target all of them with content appropriate to the platform and a link to your blog for reading more. By appropriate I mean optimized for the attention span of the reader. So short tweet on twitter, executive summary on Linkedin for those poor people with essentially no attention spans and an aunty friendly version for Facebook. Reddit post and HN link if you feel brave ;-). I've also been targeting dev.to.
I would have used Gitlab pages but there is not support for automated SSL certs for custom domains. You have to upload your own manually which doesn't play nice with letsencrypt's 90-day expiry.
If you're a writer and you want your words to get in front of people, those words need to be on a server somewhere. Someone's gotta pay for the electricity and maintainance on that server. If you don't know who pays for that and what their motivation for doing so is, you don't have a clear understanding of how your words get to your audience.
So many web horror stories these days — privacy violations, shady business practices, broken user trust, companies "losing their morals", etc. — stem from the fact that the users deriving value from some product weren't paying for it and were unpleasantly surprised to discover that the people who are paying for it expect something in return, whether freely given or not. Even many startups that begin with their hearts in the right place eventually go wrong once those early "angel" (an ironic term if there ever was one) investors want to recoup their investments, somehow, anyhow.
Fortunately, there is a solution. It's not in wide use yet on the Internet (it is a long-established mechanism in other industries like food and consumer goods), but I have some hope that adoption will grow. I call it, "pay for shit". ("Macropatronage", "c-to-b", or "crypto-free currency network" might be better terms for the HN zeitgeist.) The way it works is like this: If you want some product or service, you give a company some of your own money and then they give you the thing in return.
This system is not without its flaws. Every time you use it, your total wealth goes down by a measurable amount. Companies often end up incentivized to give you the minimum value in return for maximum money. But it least somewhat aligns the interests of the companies you do business with because you are, well, actually doing business with them.
When you buy sausage from the sausage factory, you may not be exactly sure of what you get. But it's still probably better than being the sausage.
However, it feels there should be a "fair" amount to pay.
What is the fair amount to pay for blog hosting? Free is too cheap and surely subsidized by something else. $20/month seems like too much for a blog.
The odd thing is that the marginal cost goes down with the popularity of the site.
Something like $5 feels right (svbtle is at $6). I think if you hit scale you might be profitable at $3 or $4.
I am not talking about the value I get, but about the cost + profit threshold for the provider.
I also think free makes sense, if the business model is to get people using the tool for personal projects, hoping they will recommend it at work.
However I really dislike syndicating my blog to it because the formatting is so limited. You cannot do bullet point lists for example, which makes it a huge pain having to tinker with your existing post to reformat it for medium.
Nowadays I just syndicate an introduction to the post and a "click here to continue reading" hyperlink to my actual blog. Which is a rubbish experience for Medium users.
I'm wondering if there's a decentralised version of a blogging network, where users host their blog themselves, with the social features like claps/comments wrapped around it, plus a bit of a 'recommendation' system for other posts in the network to get that network of writers feel.
I know disqus exists but it's not quite the same
Also, about the recommendation system for self-hosted content, I've seen a few sites that link to HN or Reddit for comments. Upvotes can stand in for "claps", and posting on HN or Reddit makes your article discoverable.
I think linking to HN/reddit is fine but that means leaving the original site where you were consuming the content. I was more thinking along the lines of the social features would be embedded in your blog, and would act as part of a bigger network.
I'm wondering if Medium in this way fools people into thinking their / others stories are more popular, than what they actually are? And in that way Medium thinks Medium will get more traction? Or why allow that many claps and not show # clappers?
I clapped 50 times for this story "Medium is a poor choice for blogging".
> No, those do not go away as you scroll. They literally (yes, literally) take up 25% of your vertical space
On my computer the bars do go away the instant I scroll down (Chrome on a Mac, and logged-in, not sure if those matter), and 25% is a made-up exaggerated number for a window the author has made much shorter than any reasonable person would be browsing with, even on a small laptop.
Yes, Medium strongly nudges you to have an account and be logged-in, and if you do a lot of the other complaints go away. Because it's inherently a social blogging platform, not a static blogging platform. And the social aspect helps spread your audience and build engagement... that doesn't make it a "poor choice". To the contrary, it's a great choice to have.
Neither bar disappears when I scroll down. You can test this with Chrome dev tools and see the same thing.
There are sites that you can enter a title and it will tell you all the places it's available for streaming. I do use that once in a while, but it's still too much friction (IMHO).
The only thing we use Android TV for is the MLB app. I'd like to figure out some way to delete everything but that one app because I always have to search for it.
Very few ISPs will hand you a static IP necessary for this to work.
[1] Here's mine:
medium.com##.metabar
medium.com##.js-stickyFooter
medium.com##.js-postAttributionFooterContainer
medium.com##.js-postActionsFooter .buttonSet
medium.com##.button--follow
I have never gone to medium.com directly, I have only ever wound up there through an article being crossposted on this site, Twitter, FB, or the rare case that one of my email newsletters links to something on there.
2- Write post.
3- Post to multiple aggregators (HN, reddit, etc)
It can even be made (semi)automatic.
HN, on the other hand, feels like a more matured community. Any other such matured communities where one can feel comfortable about posting their blog posts?
G+, for its many, many, many flaws, could keep a discussion going on those rare instances where it started in the first place. In ways few other sites do.
The fact that all members of a conversation (up to a point) are informed of new posts, helps. That's a two-edged sword: low-value comments, if left standing, merely annoy others, and tend to cause them to mute out of the discussion.
But it's a dynamic few other sites match.
I've also been using Reddit as a blogging platform (not simply syndicating content) for several years. I'd already been in the process of moving that elsewhere when the G+ shutdown announcement hit -- I've been somewhat engaged in that over the past month or so. I do plan to continue syndication, though I moderate strongly for quality.
Although in this case it duplicates all the images somehow: https://outline.com/uZc4XF
I've been running my own company since 2001 and been on Twitter since 2006 and I still don't have a readership that is anywhere near what I can get through the Medium algorithm.
I write to think. But I publish to get that thinking read. There really is no other feature that comes close to mattering more to me than Medium's network effects. I published something the other day that has 269K views with an additional 1k coming every day through the Medium network.
Medium's stats say they were directly responsible for 170k of those views.
Then when I look at the external views, I mostly see that those were driven by Medium as well. For example, 10k views came from Twitter, but those were Medium readers retweeting. I looked at my own promotion: Reddit, HN, newsletter, Twitter and can only count up about 10k views that I was directly responsible for.
Moved to markdown and and self-hosting and haven't looked back since. Much prefer the freedom of owning my own files and not being married to any platform.
However I do miss the convenience of just being able to post online without needing to compile everything on my laptop with a static file generator and pushing to GitHub, so maybe I'll switch to Wordpress or something later if I take writing more seriously.
The issue I see is one of ownership:
You think you "use" Medium to publish your content, you call that blogging. But Medium own the domain and the tools: you'll never exploit the owner using the tools they offered you. In the end, it's medium that really exploits you (ie. the content you freely gave). And they'll use your content in the way they want.
Your content is just a hook they'll use to attract readers and push them to those obnoxious pop-ups, banners, buttons, etc. Well you read the article.
Personally I own my domain. I use open source tools (ghost & custom made web apps). It serves me well. I own my place and have the freedom to grow it as I'd like.
Thanks for reading, take care :)
I clicked on it actually expecting some random article about "hey check out this cool open-source _built_in_some_hipster_language_ blogging _buzzword_ _buzzword_ platform I've built"..
Joke aside..gimme alternatives fam.
Reason I like to host my own, is I control the content, the popups, the UI, etc. If you care about that, host it yourself. Medium is there to make money, we can't fault them for attempting to collect for their service.
(Will it ever end?)
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/01/04/The-Well-Appointed...
I use https://getgrav.org because I like flat-file CMS.
Maybe there are some photographers here: http://koken.me (CMS for photographers).
Another idea: Use a static page generator and Amazon's S3 with this neat blackhat trick - https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-one-website-exploited-... (mildly joking).
OT: I pay 0.19$/month for my blog hosting including domain with around 500 views/month (just a personal blog). Many services cost 5$/month, I don't think that's cheap.
edit: Medium is for visibility. I know many SEO experts who use it extensively to increase their rankings. Its UX might be annoying for some, but its true value lies in its popularity and outreach.
I use medium to post snippets to help attract traffic.
I started with Blogger (blogspot), then Medium, then Jekyll, then Hugo. Even with self hosted Jekyll/Hugo, I never felt comfortable about the tooling dictating how my directory structure should be.
Now I have my own static site generator written in Python. It is based on https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite that was posted to HN sometime back.
What I like about generating my blog with pure Python is that I can control every aspect of my blog just the way I want it.
If I wanted to let friends add their blogs or comments, I would enable a chroot sftp and link to a root page for them. I've taught teenagers to use sftp, so it can't be that difficult.
In summary, I suppose I agree that any heavy framework on some domain you do not own is less than ideal. If self hosting were not an option for whatever reason, I might use neocities [1] for nostalgic reasons. That would also be free to view for everyone.
[1] - https://neocities.org/
And this is a trend I'm seeing more often recently. I've encountered multiple sites that start to fail on all sides once you use adblock, and I'm not talking about noscript or others where the site not working is already the default behaviour more often than not.
In fact some websites actually worked better in a purely terminal-based browser than on my current Firefox setup when I tried it a few weeks ago. Something is really going in the wrong direction.
WordPress has been my blogging platform of choice for years but, I've tried many different platforms and ultimately ended up returning back to a platform (ORG) in which I could have total control over.
I've also built a tool (https://scribewp.com/) which allows me to now write my blog posts in any text editor I prefer and later I can sync a markdown file to a posts or page in WordPress. This has improved my productivity and I own my content 100%. While medium is a great platform, there is too much noise going on when reading a blog post.
However, Medium's unique value propositions typically outweigh these concerns:
1. For creators wanting to monetize, Medium automagically promotes content that is getting engagement on their platform. Everything from emails to their huge user base and social media promotions can drastically amplify engagement.
2. For non-technical writers, it offers a great UI for writing and publishing, and tools for engagement and feedback (claps, comments, ....)
Highly technical people, like the founders of basecamp/inventors of ruby on rails, use Medium for these reasons
Until a viable alternative for these 2 emerge, it's just as valid to recommend rsync over dropbox
It works great and disables many of these annoying things.
That's it? I'm not sure the author accurately summarized the upside of Medium. I thought the main benefit is distribution.
And basecamp is moving away from Medium.
The problem with Medium is that the inbuilt audience will go away soon. Browse their home page, and now most of the articles are premium ones.
This is very similar to Facebook. When pages started, they were great. But as Facebook wanted to make money, they began restricting reach.
Clearly, that's where Medium will head towards.
Still very much a work in progress – but one can already publish articles, comment them, and follow people using RSS or a Mastodon account (because ActivityPub rocks).
Not ready ret, but quite promising.
As many have mentioned, there are some awesome utilities out there for simple Markdown publishing -> Push to Github pages. Sure, you won't get all the interwoven clicks and promotion, but in my book, I think shooting for a smaller quality group of readers, then a huge mass of people is more where I am at. Milage may vary, I'm sure.
Very cringe worthy indeed.
It's written in go. You write text files and put them in a directory. It applies a template and serves them. That's it. Personally I love it, you might too!
I had never used Medium until then and will probably never use it again but I still gotta ask. Why are we stuck with this awful platform, and why do they still not have markdown/code support?
Removes sticky and fixed blocks from the dom. I use it all the time, even on mobile safari.
https://gist.github.com/colincbc/f8d1b8768e1e566d86b6ef4e691...
According to most of the posts in this thread this is "too complicated" for your average blogger, apparently.
I simply write what I want to publish in org-mode then export it to HTML or PDF and that's it...
My data is no longer tied to anything like a database or some specific framework so its easier for backups and moving it to new servers when needed.
I tried it, and after turning on all the extension's features, it pretty much solves the problem.
There is no reason for that. Why would anyone sign up without knowing the pricing?
OPs article describes the first landing UX - which is definitely bad, but not what a habitual Medium reader sees.
I wrote this much bigger posts about it here [1], but the TL;DR is that you should post on your own site and use Medium's hidden "Import" tool to bring your content into their platform:
This preserves the SEO of your original article because it adds a rel canonical tag.
1 - https://sendcheckit.com/blog/why-you-should-put-your-content...
I'd love to self-host, but without some audience from Medium I'd probably just be blogging to myself.
1000 times better writing experience, and non of the political fluff that pesters you on Medium.
If you write technical articles, go to Dev.to
Non-disclosure: I have no relationship with Silvrback other than as a plain old customer.
If they ever shutter the service, it is very easy to generate all the HTML pages with Jekyll, and then throw them up on a static host.
Every single one of Medium’s discoverability and traffic benefits feel like Faustian bargains to me, so I am not going there.
The last time I experimented with publishing in a walled garden was Posterous, mostly because they were a YCombinator startup at a time when that wasn’t some kind of golden ticket, and I wanted to make a gesture of support for them and for YCombinator.
Posterous shuttered, and I republished my work using GitHub Pages, but all the old urls broke, and I’m never doing that again.
If my blog was raganwald.githubpages.com, GitHub could theoretically decide that githubpages needed to be deeply integrated with Windows or some other foolishness, and I’d be screwed.
But since my blog appears to the world as raganwald.com, I can leave GitHub Pages whenever I like, and all the links will continue to work. It's about long-term control, and for that you need:
1. Control your content, ideally with a copy of the source on your own devices at all time, in an open format with an ecosystem of tooling, and;
2. Control your domain name.
The "hate" isn't based solely on being hip.
If you install wordpress, and then grab a bunch of plugins and themes and install them without taking any care, it won't bundle and minify your javascript. It's no different to having a static website and grabbing a load of jquery plugins and throwing them onto a page.
But if you use some techniques such as building your theme and plugins using gulp or similar, you can have your wordpress site outputting bundled and minified javascript.
There are also caching techniques that can be used at the webserver level, just like any other website.
Rebuilding my blog from scratch at the moment (using my own theme), it's not so bad dealing with PHP and wordpress.
I really dislike not fully owning my content, especially with medium or middle-ware like disqus which is pretty much required with jekyll. Medium has really poor syntax color formatting as well.
Security is not really a big issue for me, especially if you pick a good hosting provider, and follow basic 101 practices.
I'll still use medium to link back to my blog though (not really doing it at the moment though).
Now, if you aren't interested in being paid for the content you create, then medium's goals might not be aligned with yours, so another self hosted platform may be better.
> it’s bad. Bad. Really bad. It’s not good, for any meaning of good you can imagine. There’s no person on Earth who could honestly call it at even partially good. Banners all over the place. Aggressive tracking and profiling.
Go poll 50 free users on the reading experience of Medium. Obviously this is anecdotal but almost everyone I speak to loves reading on medium. Compared to other ad-infested or high paywall websites, medium provides a incredible reading experience for it's goals as a for profit platform.
I think it started with Digg. It was once a loved website. The screwed up the interface and everyone ran to Reddit.
Now Reddit has screwed up their interface too.
We all used to love Google for its simple and elegant web interfaces. Look at what a mess GMail is now.
If there is anything that more than 10 years of Web 2.0 teaches us, it is that once we host our content on another company's service, we are at the mercy of that company. They can take our content and serve it over absolute crap interface providing an absolute crap experience to our readers whenever they want to. They are never going to care about the presentation of the content the way the original author might. So I think it is time to take back control and host your own blogs. I know not everyone wants to buy a domain name, buy a VPS, set things up, and keep a blog running. And no, GitHub Pages, is not a solution. GitHub Pages is great today but if there is anything that more than 10 years of Web 2.0 teaches us, it is ... Do you see my point?
So as technologists, we need to think how we can make it easier so that anyone (from young kids to the suits type) can setup their blogs and publish content with ease. Any interesting solutions? Any takers?
At least Reddit has alternatives (for now), e.g. dm.reddit.com ; old.reddit.com
Since chrome removed javascript from the site model I've been using ublock's javascript button. it looks like this `</>`
Outside of images that don't render the full resolution version on sites like the Times, its a truly objectively better experience.
In fact, I want to see that as an addon, a plugin that disables on javascript on sites based on a list, like adblocks now and days, with the following criteria: does disabling javascript lead to a net increase in UX?. For sites like Medium, almost every news site, etc, the answer is yes.