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Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

As far as I'm concerned, posting any content of value on any platform or service that you don't pay for and don't have a good control over is a bad idea. It doesn't matter if it's Medium or Facebook or Instagram or Quora or anything else. If it's, say, on one of the Facebook properties that puts up barriers for people not registered with them (and thus the content is not easily accessible on the open web), it's a terrible idea.

Those who value their content should (when financially feasible) ideally use paid services or paid hosting where the provider's interests and the publisher's interest are aligned.

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> Those who value their content should (when financially feasible) ideally use paid services or paid hosting where the provider's interests and the publisher's interest are aligned.

Or, when financially constrained but technologically inclined, use a custom domain on a service like Tumblr or Github, to allow migrating later down the line.

The author touches on this:

"If I had used a custom domain for my Medium publication, it wouldn't have been much of an issue. In that case, I could have just set up 301 redirects to the new articles and deleted the old ones from Medium. All the SEO juice would have been preserved, and Google would have shown the updated article in the search results."

Agreed. I once got upset with a forum for the same reasons.

Why am I throwing my content away?

So I set up a CMS and started blogging away.

Made over $50k over the last 10 years, just with Adsense.

It’s now mostly “dead”, but on a $3/month s3 static copy that still earns $100/month.

The most difficult part now is the yearly tax/accounting work.

I can make ~3-5k/yr on ads, but I make 25x more at my day job, it seems petty.

Although, this seems like bad capitalism, cant grow if I dont charge money...

But I started my website to help everyone(especially the lowest income people).

Very conflicted.

I was mostly just shifting my online forum posting onto my own platforms.

It’s not hard to find people that make thousands upon thousands of posts on forums. They’re making a killing: for other people.

For the most part, I would bash companies that overcharge and recommend cheaper alternatives.

Hence why I didn’t bother with anything more than Adsense. I was basically toxic, but it was popular and refreshing.

Blogging is part and parcel of establishing your own brand, and makes it likelier you will get your next day job and a raise.

Maybe that’s where I screwed up by never writing anything related to work. Haha.

Most would laugh at my generic site, but the content was good and the numbers didn’t lie.

Do you work more than or less than 25x at your day job?

The usual issue is scale. Trying to write 25x the content without taking a hit gets difficult.

As a side-gig, it’s pretty good to write good stuff when it comes to you.

Mostly I trash crappy products and recommended better and cheaper competitors.

There was only so much I came across that upset me enough to write them up.

If your site is http://efficiencyiseverything.com I think it could be a hit with a graphic redesign and maybe converting some posts to YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc. It’s a neat idea but slow and a little hard on the eyes.

Definitely not. My site worked on mobile because it wasn’t trying to be cool.

Yep, going to improve the web design next year.

Priority now is new content.

wow man! what are you blogging about?

Basically anything finance would pay well. But I’m not USA. It’s much more competitive now.

Just find any industry that has high margins for each marginal sale. That means there’s lots of marketing being spent.

Or a new product/industry/problem where it’s hard to find info.

This is basically B2B media, which has been around forever. We built a very profitable company about writing content that people in niche industries need to do their jobs, and then selling ads around it.

Though I was focusing on consumers. Pretty much all xxx/hr services fall into the high marginal profit category.

But so can cars, even if the manufacturer is losing money, they do much better with each extra vehicle they can sell.

There are many factors that go into what industries we cover and who within that industry we write for, but the biggest one is probably that they all make buying decisions for stuff that costs a lot of money: https://www.industrydive.com/industries/

This exactly. Companies exist to make money, and that's of course a good thing. But the way that some tech companies choose to go about that (growth at all costs, maximizing attention by clickbait, and ultimately selling whitespace for advertisments) may not be the best long-term way to do things.

It's like the real-world option between choosing to publish your own little newspaper versus writing a small column in someone's else newspaper, where you have no control over.

> and that's of course a good thing.

[Citation needed]

> As far as I'm concerned, posting any content of value on any platform or service that you don't pay for and don't have a good control over is a bad idea. It doesn't matter if it's Medium or Facebook or Instagram or Quora or anything else.

Playing devils advocate for a moment: what about HN?

I get this place generally behaves differently but the points you discuss doesn't explicitly exclude HN.

There are many places that I didn’t mention. And I did forget HN, to be honest. But you’re right — what I said applies to any long form and/or thoughtful/useful content, even on HN.

I've seen similar discussions about Stack Overflow as well. At one time people really welcomed comments being posted on there but some people have since become a little jaded due to how strictly moderated that site is. While it keeps the place in order, it does also mean anyone who might disagree with a moderators decision - even when they have genuinely thoughtful content to post - is left out from the community.

One day people might say something equivalent about HN. So your points are valid about HN if just at a theoretical level.

It’s not just valid theoretically. There is a cognitive bias on HN in certain hot button topics including psychiatry, addiction, and Facebook. Dissenting opinions there run the risk of getting you trolled and flagged under dubious pretenses.

Overall the moderation system here works better than any other I’ve seen on the internet, but like any organization of humans there are some dysfunctional areas where power prevails over logic.

You can't really have a discussion by everyone posting on a separate site.

So I guess it boils down to whether things you type on HN are discussion or 'content'.

There are federated platforms that let you do this - or at least a lot closer to that kind of reality than a forum / HN style site does.

You do make an interesting distinction though. My counterargument would be "Ask HN" style topics where the entire content is hosted on HN - however I don't disagree with the point you're making either.

can you point to some good examples of how that looks like?

It's a bad idea to post content of lasting value on HN. You can't edit or delete old posts, for example.

If it has lasting value why would it require editing or deleting? Do we edit or delete paragraphs from Moby Dick, or notes from Brahms? :)

Spelling corrections, factual accuracy corrections that kinda thing needs the ability to be edited.

Using HN to publish "lasting value" content isn't the same as publishing a book where likely you'd work with an editor to reach the final error free imprint. Even an e-book can be updated to allow corrections, and future print editions can be published with corrections or an errata.

After a certain time limit you can't even add a new reply to your own "lasting value" post that could contain these types of changes.

Stallman reccomends that if someone needs social media for publicity or business need, then you set up your own domains and only post "title, who, date, link" and get the useds off predatory platforms like Facebook or Instagram or Quora.

If you do that, you retain the meager control of your profile, and you don't ignore social media. 'Better' of both worlds.

Except that a least Facebook tends to show this kind of posts to no one. Instagram is worse in that your posts can't have external links at all. I guess all other social platforms will end somewhere on that continuum in their quest to keep you and your content on their site.

There is another twist. Facebook's terms of service say:

> [..] you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content [..] when you share, post, or upload content on or in connection with our Products [sic] [..]

Emphasis mine.

So if you post a link, do you grant them a license to the link itself or to the content the link points to, because it is content posted "in connection" with their product?

Out of interest: Do you have a link to that Stallman quote. I'm interested to read more about it and about the context in which he said it.

The advice comes from Stallman's article 'If you feel your organization needs a "presence" in Facebook'

https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html

It was linked to in his article 'Reasons not to be used by Facebook'

https://stallman.org/facebook.html

Thank you for responding on my behalf, ksangeelee. That is indeed the source from Stallman that I was thinking of.

Ideally, we need to stay off these platforms. But I believe these are a good middle-ground to retain a presence when we have a need to be there. But we need to corral these useds so they end up getting away from the para-sites :)

Wikipedia. I wrote a series of items which were plain hard work, mostly owing to attitudes of other wikipedia editors. I saved some back, posted on my own site and made a good source of ad revenue over the past 10 years or so.

May I ask how much can one make with such sort of income?

> Those who value their content should (when financially feasible) ideally use paid services or paid hosting where the provider's interests and the publisher's interest are aligned.

Which works until those paid services are bought out by someone with more money and radically change direction, disappear, or both.

Hosting your own content is the only solution. Anything else puts you at the mercy of someone else.

Its more about hosting on a domain you control, with full backups of all content. This way, you always have the option of moving away from a provider.

The problem is I get more viewers on Instagram than with hosted stuff. So ideally I would love to not use Instagram, but I guess I feel my hand is forced :/

It's almost like there is a trade off of getting additional distribution for limited control.

Only because of the way large companies shaped the web. It doesnt have to be this way.

What does paying have to do with it? A paid service can have a bad control, and a free service can have good control. It's the quality of the system that matters.

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