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> Serious question: why do people, software developers actually, use Medium for blogging?

Serious question: why first comment on HN have to be totally unrelated to the fine article?

Do we really need to discuss medium issues every time a blog post entry is posted here, instead of discussing the post itself.

Serious question 2: Why don't you write a blog post about "Using Medium for blogging" on your own static self-hosted blog, and put a link here for discussing it?

thank you for saying that. so annoying

In my case, it's not at all for the network effect, since these days they have too much content and anyway favor "premium" posts in terms of visibility...so for me it's more about the following:

* I don't need to create my own blog. I know, it takes a 5 minutes, have done it many many times before...just to kill it some time after because seeing it so empty was too sad. With Medium you publish whenever you want, and because it's not really "your blog", it doesn't feel as sad if you don't publish anything for months and months.

* it's super simple to paste images, code snippets and videos. I can just focus on writing and I know it will "look good" in the end. Sounds stupid, but it's true.

* I don't have to worry about spam comments, t&c, privacy policy (if I want to have analytics, which Medium has) etc...it's all on them

So yes, for a non-prolific writer, I think it works well. It's a pity they no longer allow custom domains though (which they had in the past), and at times it's toooo limited (eg: no nested bulleted/numbered lists...which I usually used a lot), but still good enough.

I'd probably switch to my own blog if were to publish stuff regularly and wanted to have my own "brand"/style/design.

I don't use Medium but I know one big reason is for their network and promotional features. If you're not active on social media and don't have a big following you can post your blog posts to, then Medium helps disseminate your writing to a larger audience with similar interests.

Sure, but a blog is how you get a social media following.

I don't buy that Medium can do a better job of connecting you with people. For programming you can just take that link and post it on Reddit and you'll get plenty of visitors.

It's not either/or, it's all of the above. They blog on Medium, leverage its network, and post on reddit/Twitter/etc.

In addition, the lack of syntax highlighting means authors have to either

- deal with shitty monochrome code

- have unsearchable and uncopyable screenshots

- embed a gist iframe

All of these suck. Jekyll/Hugo/every other blogging solution has this feature out of the box as table stakes.

Wat. 1 day of work for a SV dev is at least 1000 dollars, that's far too expensive.

By that metric taking a pee costs at least $20.

Far less costly than dealing with the medical problems you'd get from not peeing.

I agree and people who say about Medium's networking abilities, well WordPress already does this. You can self-host your blog using WordPress and connect it to their WordPress.com site using JetPack. Hey presto, you have a huge network of WordPress Bloggers with the advantages of controlling your own Blog.

Also, I applaud you on creating your own blog using a static site generator, the speed improvements and easier reading are great. I do however hope you also have an RSS feed so readers can subscribe and syndicate it[0].

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/RSS/Getting_Sta...

no one really uses RSS anymore imo, i just "subscribe" to the author on twitter - that way i get more interaction than just notification of articles

It's the experience of reading comments that does it for me. It's just so poor.

It's really bad. On my small phone in landscape orientation, the header has a height of 1.5 cm, the footer 1.0 cm and the content 3 cm.

Network effect of medium could be one

Why are they not GDPR compliant?

> you're a software developer and the setup would take you one day of work

I hear this a lot and I don't get it. Just because I'm tech savvy doesn't mean I want to do everything myself. My time on earth is finite like everyone else's. I don't value it less just because I can program.

I've built my own blog many times, actually. But the purpose of a blog is to write and share content. Every second I spend messing with the blog is energy I could've allocated towards writing content.

Also, static site generators tend to not have nice publishing editors, like the ability to just drag an image in.

But we really need to dispose of this idea that "you can build anything so why don't you want to build everything?" I also think hosting my email is a waste of my time.