Ditching Medium
joshjahans.com
joshjahans.com
And then there's the lack of RSS feed, so I have to actually visit each individual blog to see if there are updates instead of having them dropped nicely in my inbox with the rest of my morning read.
Medium is a garbage place for readers and content producers: please stay away from it.
Google quite reasonably now sees duplicate identical content as an issue, you can use the "canonical" HTML tag can be used to help it see the "real" link where several exist.
I don't know what'll happen when there are only two copies of your page, but I'd hazard a guess it'll preference medium's domain over your own in most cases.
Anyone wants to defend Medium on this one?
“For the foreseeable future, it looks like independent blogs are back. Still, there’s a good business opportunity waiting for someone, as Medium seem intent on squandering the potential they had.”
I would argue the problem is that making a free blogging network like medium is NOT a good business idea. The reason things like Wordpress, Ghost, etc. work as a business is they have figured out a customer (bloggers) and something to charge them for (their paid blog hosting features).
The reason those sites don’t work as great discovery networks is it turns out their customers are possessive of their audiences and don’t really want the platform to be directing them elsewhere.
Medium is now trying to figure out a way for the readers to be the customers, which is just a really hard problem in the era of the internet and almost infinite free reading material.
Not a good business opportunity at all.
I don’t have an issue with medium for things that don’t involve discussion but for anything that should have discussion. Ahhhhh
Not me.
You would then have a financially stable organization backing the pages, have democratic input into the hosting process, and probably less censorship than a private company would apply for those that care about that sort of thing (since private companies need literally no reason to do so whereas a public enterprise would need a court order or some such).
It's debatable whether this is the sort of thing governments exist to do.
Out of all the indirect ways of paying for something, getting it funded by the government is probably the least user-hostile solution possible - it could be set up as just another public service, with zero incentive to milk people in some nonobvious way.
Highly recommended, I've had zero problems with them.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosti...
When the inevitable happens and the content needs to be monitored (can't have government funds used to host things like doxing blog posts, for example), then how much will you pay?
Governments don't hand out free stuff. They take your stuff to pay for it.
So long as the views expressed don't cross the line into violence or ethnic cleansing, I'm in favor of the first amendment. Yes, some manual curation will be necessary, but it's irrelevant to me if society as a whole pays for it or a company. It seems to me a free service for everyone is a better deal that has knock on benefits for public debate.
Making hosting free is unlikely to benefit anyone and more likely to actually hurt the First Amendment. Just like we have a division of Church and State, we are better off having a division between Blog and State.
btw, my phone also has larger fonts but the reading experience is so much better! but ofc that too is ruined by the constant nagging about getting the "real app" (when all i did is click on your own digest which opened in the browser...).
i mean i understand why you guys are doing all that but i certainly share the sentiment of OP here that the combination of all that makes medium look somehow annoying...
It's nice on the eyes purely from an aesthetic perspective, but I agree it lacks on the X in UX. It's a few shades form over function.
Side note: Apple's new Swift documentation feels like this to me. It was designed to look and read like a novel. Full of prose, lack of use of colour, wrong fonts, way too big. The 'parent class' is down at the bottom of the document! So many things like that. It looks great a first glance but it really lacks in X.
Or maybe I'm just getting old.
> A blog, to me, was a place for someone to put their thoughts up onto the internet and have anyone who wanted to come and read - for free.
But you can still do this, no? You can write articles on Medium that can be read for free.
> Medium relies on user-submitted content and then charges those same users for access to their content.
My experience is that Medium charges only for access to "premium" articles, submitted through their partner program, no?
Can somebody please clear these up for me?
On a slight off-topic, my biggest issue with Medium is no math formatting support. MathJax has been around for years now. Are there just not enough scientists writing on Medium?
Who needs to click on clickbait headlines like "Should I buy a Chrysler Pacifica or a Wagon Queen Family Truckster?" or "Does it hurt more to be hit with a .457 Automag or a Neo Armstrong Cyclone Jet Armstrong Cannon?"
> My experience is that Medium charges only for access to "premium" articles, submitted through their partner program, no?
After reading through Medium's FAQ, I believe that's right - an article is free to read unless it's published through Medium's partner program [0]. So if you want your posts to be free to read, just don't join the partner program.
[0] https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009297694-Frequ...
Basically, they ruined the site.
My problem is that I'm subject to the kind of writing I'd rather avoid. Perhaps if they were better able to segment their user bases and make their feeds and recommendations better tailored to them the experience could actually be decent. But as a modeling problem I appreciate that it's probably pretty difficult to tell a BS article about Bitcoin (or whatever) from one with substance.
1. It only uses a narrow column for content. 2. No code highlighting or snippets embedding support
I actually help people with that for pay if you want assistance.
The code snippets are a real issue. I'm not sure how much code you could even show because I don't show code snippets on any of my blogs.
Maybe screenshots would work. It's also possible that writing it in the "compose" interface would work.
I usually write in the HTML interface, but I use the app on my phone. When I copy and paste, it shows up differently depending on which interface I'm using.
It's possible that blockquoting it in the compose interface and then adding HR tags top and bottom to help set it off would get you satisfactory results. You can also add custom CSS to any layout. This has allowed me to get effects not natively supported by the user-friendly customization options without digging around in the code per se, which I'm not confident enough to do. I know a little HTML and CSS, but not so much that I'm comfortable going directly into the code. I tried it once and couldn't figure out where the thing was that I wanted to edit.
The thing that made Medium special was that anyone could post about something that mattered to them and get noticed no matter their background.
WordPress, Blogger, and other free things cost energy in place of money because they're top-heavy with features and weak accessibility. That's as much a blocker as a recurring charge.
[1] "But it's $70 if you pay the full year!"
That's not much of a deal for someone who's already wary about trusting a company with a direct line to cause a cascade of overdraft feeds.
The main reason why the web is such a sight for sore eyes in 2019 is that people seem to think $72 a year is a lot for having a voice. People can find 10x that for a new iPhone or spend that much on beer in a month or on a cable subscription but having a blog sure can't be worth much to most people.
For one thing, how much do they think their time is worth? That is 10 hours of time spent writing at around minimum wage in the U.S.
I don't get it. On the other hand, I don't understand how grandmothers spend $5 on acrylic yarn when they could spend $10 to make a (better) wool scarf that they'll spend 20 hours knitting. (e.g. the wool scarf will protect you in a fire, the acrylic scarf will melt, burn you, and produce toxic fumes.)
Sites like Medium though are a place where people go to experience networking effects. Thinking about it in the long term might be like buying into a year’s subscription of speed dating at the local bowling alley. It may be all the rage with all the types of people you want to be with this week, but what does next week bring? The hot speed dating activity might move somewhere else. Or the group of people you want to hang out with there might be replaced by a different group of people.
Years ago, Brad Cox (of Objective C fame) wrote a great essay on micropayments and the Internet. I can’t find it right now, but IIRC it talked about why micropayments might be the way to go to fund intenert related activities. Unfortunately, my observation of MBA business models is that they have never wrapped their heads around how to implement micropayment models that reach that happy point where consumers benefit as well as producers.
With this particular image, there's virtually no DO configuration (just standard size / region settings which have smart defaults IIRC). You do have to SSH in, but the new Ghost 2.0 CLI handles updating Ghost much more smoothly than in the past. I've been happy with it personally.
Ghost 2.0 is definitely better than prior versions but still needs babysitting. As an infrequent blogger, I've found I am updating Ghost more frequently than I'm blogging.
Github pages or Gatsby (via something like Netlify) are much better suited to this problem because server config & SSL are handled and they're just serving static pages.
Solid platform, discoverability baked in, great writing tools. They do need to polish their UX though as I wrote a lengthy article for about an hour and then clicked on "Write a Post" instead of Save to publish. This wiped my editor clean with no way to recover what was lost. Horrible experience there.
They should at least autosave for you on every keystroke. No reason not to.
Ev, if you happen to read this: 1) bring back custom domains. 2) start charging a monthly fee for hosting custom domains like WordPress does 3) Create a native advertising service that publishes promoted stories into the main Medium.com story feed.
Tap the lock next to the URL, tap on 'SITE SETTINGS', then tap on 'CLEAR & RESET'.
This is good to know about, although I personally care more about just displaying code blocks in a different typeface than I do about highlighting them appropriately.
Agree that this ^ is non-ideal.
But was Medium ever the go-to platform for programming blogs?
They don't really have much feature-wise catering towards technical posts e.g., nice syntax highlighting or code embedding, runnable snippets, limited embedding support, minimal analytics offering.
2) SEO optimized
3) Better tech than you'd get on your own platform -- e.g. the ability to act as an oEmbed consumer.
The trade off is that you don't have as strong a relationship with your subscribers. But considering that 100k page views probably only gets you 100 subscribers, most bloggers have basically zero chance at getting any real number of subscribers to begin with so for them using a platform like Medium is all upside.
From what I see there are a few accounts that spam every article posted on Tedium to HN.
My own website is based on Hugo. While the usage (especially the template syntax) is not exactly a joy to use, it works fine and fast for years now. The only thing I need is some web space to drop static files, so it would be really easy to move to another provider. However I wouldn't recommend Hugo to non-technical writers, since the configuration and template syntax would scare them probably away.
The world needs more "static CMS" software (instead of just "static site generators")!
We'll be sharing more about this on Weds in a bigger blog post - it's a fairly recent addition
It's the business's job to charge a fair price upfront (or, at the very least, give the user some hint of its future plans so they're mentally prepared).
"What Tim Cook Needs To Do Now To Save Apple"
That kind of thing, right? It's so cringey.
After moving from medium I created my blog using jekyll and hosted it on GitHub pages and never looked back.
It’s honestly like reading one of those subreddits where people get to ask and field questions about an industry. You realize pretty quickly that the sub is filled with wannabes (still in college or otherwise) who spend their days fantasizing about what an industry is like while they have literally no experience. They’ve just read the tropes enough times that they can echo “good sounding” advice with no basis in reality.
That’s what medium is to me. A place where people pontificate over things they really don’t know anything about other than reading other online posts.
You need to have a free github/publisher side cache which mirrors the public github repository of the code example. The example should be rendered server side without a javascript library for syntax highlighting / formatting. This way the author, or more likely a reader because the author abandoned the post a second after writing it, can make progressive updates and deprecations - sort of like stackoverflow where an answer can live on past the life of its author.
This is not a rife target for a start-up and most likely would have to be offered by a larger player. The service needs to be long-lived and reliable from an operational perspective and its pricing model is not clear as most developers would not pay a dime for it. Github is the most favorable target, I'd pay an extra couple dollars a month to "upgrade" my github account for this functionality. Github Gists are already pretty close to what we need but miss out on a few key features for use in independent blogs (presumably a rate limit and a limited scope that may be too narrow for an example, it might need a full repository).
http://about-glitch.glitch.me/about/features/
https://medium.com/glitch/what-is-glitch-90cd75e40277
Not sure if it is possible to hook it up to a CI or Git hook.