Can we all stop using Medium now?
webdistortion.com
webdistortion.com
The thing is, the thing I wrote about isn't illegal. When you write articles on Medium keep in mind you're writing on someone else's website and they don't give a damn about you. You are subject to their opinions about what is appropriate and what isn't. I have no doubt if an alt-right voice wrote on Medium and were controversial enough in their views they'd be deplatformed.
But also the way they handle it is just rude. Fuck them.
BTW only druggies say "research chemicals", academic researchers just use "drugs"/"compounds" or maybe "fine organics" or the actual name of whatever it is. "Research chemicals" is basically "SWIM" in terms of being a "druggie heuristic"
At least some forums are discouraging that now because it obviously won't hold up in court and provides a false sense of security, but I imagine some people are still attached to it.
They are not.
Cops are demonstrably not required to tell you they are cops. The idea that they need to was always ridiculous misinformation.
Meanwhile, as far as I'm aware, SWIM has not been the lynchpin in a court case yet, so it's hard to say one way or the other if using it as legal cover is actually a gross misconception.
It doesn't work that way. If you try to buy 50 grams of coke off an undercover cop, no jury on earth is going to believe that you thought you were buying Coca-Cola. You're not going to get away with using a slang term universally understood to mean "me" and claiming it meant "someone else," either.
And then they typically shorten the whole thing to "I think you should talk to a lawyer."
(IANAL though, check with your local laws and all.)
It's not about covering your ass, it's about trying to be a decent guy and not accidentally mislead people.
Curious, how do you know this as a fact?
Also, curious about your nickname - any story behind it?
I do agree that “compounds” or 5-HT agonists, or whatever are far more neutral (if overly broad) terms and those should be used if you’re being careful (perhaps with some added description).
Google ranking doesn't care how technical you are. If you do a google search about anything somewhat nutritional or health related, you get a slew of low credibility websites with dubious information. Getting to any scientifically rigorous papers is a real research project.
It's a much easier project (though still requires some review and judgement) if you use Google scholar instead of the general search engine.
But that's true or any domain; if you are specifically looking for scientific papers, the general search engine is like going to the grocery store for lab glassware.
Regarding your situation and concerns of other comments...
Many people in this thread point out that marketing and creating an audience is difficult work. But I think obvious-in-hindsight solution is to always keep a backup of your own content no matter what platform you publish it on. I'm not sure how Medium interprets their rules exactly but I would be suprised if you couldn't at least link every post back to a mirror on your own blog which would let you both generate an audience and prevents you from loosing everything is medium goes nuclear on you.
As always, back up any content that you care about. Don't just backup your own content but also that of others - ever relize a youtube video you like has been taken down by a bogus DMCA claim?. Online services may have their own redundency but that doesn't matter if they decide to delete (your) content.
Now, obvliously, the content may contain personal data, or possibly be personal data (if it's pictures of people) and in that case I assume it would be covered.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
Some of these are very direct like your name and address. But since other personal data can be combined to create an identifying fingerprint of you it may or may not be covered.
There's a gray area in between of course were you really need to check the legal situation, but public content on a public forum is definitely not covered.
Think about pictures: the picture of a landscape you took on a holiday doesn't identify you, but other pictures in your library might do (they contain faces, places, etc.). All together, the pictures can tell who you are and where you've been and when and with whom.
I'm not sure that such content would count, though I'd have to review the wording of the GDPR to be sure. Its intent is to cover information about you that companies/people have collected or derived - which may not include things you have written about other things.
Even if the GDPRs "right to know what is stored about you" provisions does cover this sort of content, if they have truly deleted the it then they don't have to provide it as they don't have it to provide, and they are not compelled to keep it so that they can provide it on request. I have no idea whether they do truly delete the content in these cases or not, but they might if they've taken it offline due to a generic "inappropriate content" rule: if I deemed something posted to my site inappropriate I would want it properly gone so it couldn't be accidentally made available on my platform again due to some future cock-up on my part. Their ToS and other documentation my offer some clarity on what their policy is here.
As a side note (with somewhat insincere apologies for how snarky I am about to sound): regulations & laws aside, I tend to have little sympathy for people who keep data in an external system with no local (or otherwise independent) backup!
All the actual legal guidance I have seen says it does count, because the content can be cross-references with third parties to identify the author and the fact that they once posted this text on this service. This, if they close their account or delete the specific article the content must be purged.
> So, what are the alternatives? According to France’s GDPR supervisory authority, CNIL, organisations don’t have to delete backups when complying with the right to erasure. Nonetheless, they must clearly explain to the data subject that backups will be kept for a specified length of time (outlined in your retention policy).
It's talking about right to erasure, but it would apply for requests for personal information. They don't have to crawl through their backups for you, only the current data.
I do have a personal blog instead of Medium. But it's definitely not about the money.
Instead they have "pardon the interruption" and "Let's make this official". The "pardon me" politeness doesn't fly, because they recognize it as an interruption. If they are aware, then the polite thing would be to not interrupt.
And let's not make this official.
I don't want to sign up to read an article. I don't want the clap. I don't want to vote. I don't want to share my data. I just want to view the article. Maybe half way through I might even decide that the author has nothing interesting to say. 50% chance I don't want to read the full article.
Same can be said about other platforms like YouTube etc. When you produce content for all these mega-platforms, you're nothing more than a sharecropper... a digital one. [0]
You really have no rights and you're at the whim of the 'feudal lord' who doesn't care about you and can take all your work away in an instant. Since there's thousand others that will take your place, they really don't care about what your losses are. They hold all the power and you have absolutely no chance of remedy.
1) Based on the GDPR comment. If you're really careful with how you do things the IP address could be argued to not be personal information (never let a user associate IP with any other PI - e.g. if a user can ban another from their channel something, don't let them see the underlying IP ban in place. Not sure how IPs are handled across ActivityPub).
2) People scared of p2p.. I'm still on the fence a little. For instance the opt out issue at Peertube[1] displays a snippet of p2p-fear however it should be noted that a feature to opt out of the p2p part is implemented in Peertube specifically now so may just be a non-issue. p2p fear needs to be determined with a simple "do users use this opt-out" before I can sway one way or the other
[1]: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/685
Thanks for calling it out, I might not have found out that what I knew was outdated otherwise :)
Current guidance (from the legal profession, not the HN peanut gallery) is that IPs are standalone personal data.
Everything I know and have found says IPs are classed as personal data only if combined with other data. I've yet to find anything that supports your claim, which is why I changed my mind on this.
Nothing that isn't privileged information, unfortunately.
> Everything I know and have found says IPs are classed as personal data only if combined with other data. I've yet to find anything that supports your claim, which is why I changed my mind on this.
Recital 30 (https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-30/) says "in particular" when combined with other information, but the addition of that phrase indicates this is not the only case. The accuracy of your statement depends on how you interpret that recital. Based on this case (https://www.alstonprivacy.com/ecj-declares-ip-addresses-pers...) I suspect the broader interpretation is the one that would win over regulators.
Additionally, the information about that case states there is clear agreement that static IPs are personal data, which alone contradicts your belief.
I think the hosting is not the problem. But the social features that YouTube provides are not easily replaced...
I would give it a go myself but I only have audio!
Is there a single video format supported by all browsers yet?
The number of naysayers that are implying that working with videos is so hard in these comments is shocking to me for such a supposedly technical group of people.
It's the transfer and bandwidth that are the problem. There isn't really such a thing as "unlimited transfer" (there's a hidden limit past which they'll rate-limit you, and kindly ask to stop or pay more). Moreover, once your video gets somewhat popular, you'll hit bandwidth issues. Given how popularity on the Internet seems to happen in spikes, this will likely severely limit the reach of your video.
People are also spoiled by big video services with unlimited budgets and CDNs all around the world.
If you are really really popular investing in a cdn is likely the only solution and for this you need some money, be it from advertising, donations or memberships. But this is the same on Youtube too, only that Youtube does the advertising for you and takes a cut.
Wait, we've been self-hosting our own videos for years. It's not exactly rocket science. YouTube is convenient, but what it is doing from a technical standpoint isn't that difficult to do on your own server.
You've left several comments in this thread talking down to people as if they're ignorant about how to write an HTML5 <video> tag on their own web server.
I wasn't the one that downvoted your comment but for some reason, a lot of technical folks like you misunderstand Youtube and how it enables video uploaders. (A previous commenter misunderstands Youtube the same way and my previous reply to it.[0])
There is no self-hosting web server stack to serve videos that charges $0 to the content creator whether it gets zero or 1 billion views. Therefore, repeatedly recommending "self-host your videos" -- completely misses the point.
Consider a corporate giant like Microsoft. Several years ago, they used to self-host their tech videos on channel9.msdn.com.[1] Now they're hosted on Youtube.[2] Obviously, MS is not so technically inept that they don't know how to stream their own videos! They also have billions in cash to prevent "server bandwidth exceeded" errors so cost isn't the issue.
Stop and think about why Microsoft switched to Youtube instead of using their own MS Azure infrastructure. As for the other metaphor of "sharecropper" for Youtube that seems popular... is Microsoft a "sharecropper"? Why or why not?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488275
[1] clicking any of the new videos on Microsoft's front page will play embedded Youtube videos: https://channel9.msdn.com/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/user/Microsoft/search?query=build
I do agree with your core message, that video is hard and not something a small player should build their own solution for. But saying video is to hard even for Microsoft seems a bit of a stretch...
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/build eg https://mybuild.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/77571
We still self-host for countries where YouTube isn’t available (or if something goes down), but for Channel 9 anyway[1], we’ve moved to YouTube because that’s where the audience is and it makes sense to be where our users expect us to be.
This isn’t about video being hard; our internal player is pretty good and works everywhere (which is not true for YouTube). This was a conscientious decision to go to where our audience is. We still have a self-hosted backup for each video, complete with captions in a variety of languages. But we’d heard repeatedly that our users preferred using YouTube to discover content and not being there didn’t make sense. This isn’t true for all Microsoft content, but for our developer focused videos, we want to be where the community is.
[1]: https://channel9.msdn.com
(I was directly involved in the decision to move our developer content to YouTube.)
I actually said the opposite of that. I emphasized that MS had both the technical skill and money to host their own videos and yet they still moved channel9 videos to Youtube. I wanted readers to pause and think about why they did that.
By using Microsoft as an example, I was hoping to break the mental loop of always referring back to "technical issues" as the reason creators choosing Youtube. It's not technical.
He seems to be trying to emphasize the relative triviality of the technical problem from building the MVP absent leveraging "someone else's computers" perspective.
You're talking about the delta and impact created by the fact we've become so dependent on someone else's computer to point us in the right direction to create the visibility and discoverability we want.
The point I think both of you are dancing around, but not hauling out into the light, is these platforms enable the abstraction of the techie work, and allow creators to just publish. Creators are so dependent on not having to do the techie work, that unfortunately, they are left at the mercy of the techie+business platform provider, and as a result, are vulnerable to censorship based on that platform's visibility to the world at large.
Large integrated platforms are cool and all, but at some point, we need to sit down and look at the federatability of these types of communication platforms.
We can't rely on implicit Gatekeepers not being manipulated into acting as amplifiers/dampers as circumstances warrant from their side.
At least that's the vibe I'm getting.
No, not the techie work. In both of my previous comments, I de-emphasized the technical reasons.
Instead, I've tried to emphasize that the killer feature of Youtube for the content creator is the simplifying of finances down to $0 costs for distributing video. Others may argue that "audience & discoverability" is equal to (or more important than) the $0 costs to distribute. That's valid as well.
Since a technical solution of self-hosted video web stack does not solve $0 distribution costs and audience reach, it is irrelevant to the discussion. (Context of discussion was parent comments by fiala__ & ralphstodomingo talking about "scale" and "discoverability".[0])
To add some counterbalance, it does not mean Youtube's "value proposition" of $0 payment for audience reach is always a good deal. An example of this is Netflix. They don't need nor want Youtube's servers to host videos.
>Creators are so dependent on not having to do the techie work,
Again, this type of statement is evidence of techies misunderstanding Youtube.
Even if the content creator hired a techie such as a webmaster to set up a self-hosted video site, it still does not solve the problem that Youtube solves.
Even if you gave a set-&-forget "video hosting web appliance" to a content creator, it still doesn't solve the same problems that Youtube solves.
In both cases of those technical solutions, you've created new problems that the content creator doesn't want to deal with!
The cost of keeping your videos accessible are higher than keeping a typical blog accessible. Storage and bandwidth are obvious ones. How do you get ad networks to monetize your videos, if you want to? How'd you get people to discover your videos, as they are not first-class citizens of a search result page? Where do people even watch videos these days? Everything is on Facebook or YouTube.
You can somehow self-host your videos, but even if you manage to do so, your original purpose for doing it in the first place won't be met, it simply isn't worth it.
Contrast this with Medium, where there are not as many benefits for letting them benefit from your content. Hosting plaintext or markup is trivial, easier to maintain a blog with stuff like Wordpress than to learn how to manage your own server directly to optimize for video. There are a lot of aggregators like HN and Reddit that are populated mostly by blog content, and even if you don't resort to these, your pages are first-class eligible citizens in search results.
Heck, even the policy regarding discussions not being actively shown may hurt your specific type of content. Moderation is tolerable with Disqus, for example.
One big difference with Youtube is you don't create your work on their platform directly. You would record a video offline and then upload it to Youtube so you have a copy of your work by default.
With Medium, chances are you wrote the article directly on their platform so now if it gets removed from their site you probably don't have a local copy of it so it's gone forever unless it got scraped somewhere.
In either case I think Medium is really bad and I wouldn't use it.
I can't speak to how popular this feature actually is, but the YouTube app includes video recording, so not everyone is going have a local copy of their work, by default. Conversely, who uses the Medium editor, rather than, say, Google Docs?
I'm starting to self-host my content and services as I am starting to have some income (beginning of my career). However, I have to pay for a domain name, internet access, etc. I can afford to pay all of this right now, but I have no guarantees that the content will remain available in the future. The biggest unknown for me is the domain name, as it sounds much like a single point of failure: what if my registrar closes, or refuses to do business with me, or if I can't afford it anymore? Medium provides some relief against this, but not enough that I would care to use it.
How could this be "solved"?
Ideally, I could write a static page, sign it with a private key (maybe associated to a human-compatible string), and then host it in multiple places. A search engine could pick the right mirror, and interested people could choose to mirror the content. This sounds a bit similar to IPFS, but with the possibility of picking your hosting place and the content you mirror.
And to write something more about paid apps vs. add-based ones (which cropped up later in the discussion thread), when I was younder (kid/student), I was unfortunately in no position to buy paid apps (no income), nor to self host myself (I tried multiple times, but it was a pain to host even static content at the time). It seems to be getting better (github education pack, github/lab pages, etc), but I think that we as a society should think more about what is made available to kids. A free dynamic DNS and hosting service should probably be a minimal offer if you want to make them interested in tech. It could be also a good plan (though long-term) for a hosting platform to gain their trust/mindshare. Also making nice apps freely available to them.
Unfortunately, I had no e-mail address provided by my high school at the time or earlier, so I wouldn't have been able to get a github student pack (if it existed). I think that's something that should be solved at he state level.
If you can't afford a few dollars a year for your domain name, you likely have bigger problems. If ICANN disappears, we all have bigger problems.
Your solution is interesting, however hosting other people's content is fraught with danger. If I ran such a host, I'd assume within minutes I'd be hosting potentially illegal content. How would your system prevent that?
The stuff about kids just reminds me of geocities, TBH. There might be an appetite for something like that once again...
I had never heard about geocities, that's interesting, thank you for sharing this.
Now, to elaborate a bit more about what I said, I don't think there is a lack of technical solutions for this, but rather a fully integrated solution is missing. I would like to be able to "seed"/mirror specific content, like articles that I find interesting. Of course, that wouldn't help with content I (or others) haven't read already, but you would be responsible for the content you host, as you pick it (unlike ipfs or freenet, AFAIK). Integrated in a web browser, I suppose it could also "mirror by default", though I would be concerned about leaking user-specific content (so maybe a spec/protocol extension would be necessary for html/http to tell what could be mirrored?).
It occured to me that this was a bit like "boosting" a post in mastodon. Indeed ActivityPub could be an interesting transport mechanism for this, and could be a way to propagate update notifications back. Though I am not sure the content itself is mirrored with the current mastodon "boost" implementation. A mirror index could also be ran over DHT, while a "search engine" could provide the post hashes, and let clients fetch the content from the DHT.
The whole idea is still quite a bit rough, but it surprises me that in 2019, hosting plain text content (more or less a few images) in a future-proof way isn't a solved problem, and we still have to rely on the Web archive. Applying trusted timestamping (by a few trusted third-parties) to the web archive content would be a good start, to trust mirrored content.
If your register closes, most likely someone will buy them out with the customers. I can't imagine a registrar going bankrupt - that would require serious skills in mismanagement.
If they refuse to do business, there's a good chance you can file a dispute with someone (depending on a country) to recover the domain. (Not 100% certain, but possible)
For affordability... just choose something cheap. If you can't afford $12 / year, you likely have bigger problems then your online services being unavailable.
But regarding better solutions - ipfs is definitely good. There's also i2p/onion if you're ok with much smaller/dedicated reach. Or use the free credits on some large provider like AWS / gcp. You can host a lot as static content on S3 for ~free.
I'm currently working on a platform aimed at reducing internet feudalism and would love to hear more of your concerns and what can be done to improve on the status quo.
If you're interested in talking about it and learning more about what I'm building, shoot me an email at yaniv@mynexus.io
I myself write my articles on my blog and then copy them over to Medium. A bit more work but might pay off in an event like this one
Is this the main/only reason people blog on Medium, or are there others? It seems like something that would be easy enough to develop an open source, self hostable version of, but with Google now deranking small, independent sites, Medium would be hard to beat from an SEO standpoint.
It even federates with ActivityPub.
It is very helpful and I once used it download some articles/pages for my friend from her blogging website. The website had got blocked as it was a paid domain, which she purchased from GoDaddy and her 1 year subscription got over.
This highlights one of the ways Google has gone off-piste. The host or platform shouldn't affect your ranking/SEO this much. The same article on two platforms show rank side-by-side when searching by content. There's no reason to trust Medium above other platforms.
This is true for medium, but not universally true. It's pretty reasonable to rank an article in a well known credible publication than a random blog, as there is likely some editorial quality checks in the publication. However, with medium, there is no editorial check, they just know how to game the system better than a casual blogger.
Well fuck alt right too! They can get their own website after all. Why should Medium or any other company have to host their shit? People act like they have some kind of right to have their crap hosted by someone else. Companies are not public services after all.
And it doesn't have to be universal. E.g. you could decide DNS and internet access need to be a public service but since those two are always available you don't need to try to regulate the content on VPS since self hosting is an option.
At the moment authors wanted to get paid. When did somebody else's writing became a free for all?
If, as you say, that [Medium] is where "all your favourite content lives" (which means you appreciate the content), then it's troubling that you don't want to pay for it.
>Just so we are clear. Medium takes your content, rolls it up into a pretty SEO friendly package for themselves and sells it. Oh, and turns us all into seals waiting for someone to throw us a fish in the process. If you are lucky, you might even get a cut. You know. Like the sort of cut artists get on Spotify. Profit share I think the cool kids call it. So why is everyone still publishing on it? For what? More eyeballs? More attention? More reach?
All of the above. More eyeballs. More reach. More attention. A primed audience looking to read something. And also some authors make decent-ish money (far more than Spotify) on Medium. So there's that.
>Please. It’s 2019. Learn to market yourself and your content. Quit being lazy waiting for Medium to do it for you. OWN YOUR PLATFORM.
Yeah, and how does that work for you? We've only read your blog because it was picked by an aggregator (HN).
Medium makes these things easier. At an expense, I agree. And there might be better ways for them to do that. And there might be better alternatives, but the reason Medium exists is because they fill a need.
But then I only read articles on Medium because they're picked up by an aggregator (HN). After I've read the article I rarely find any of the suggested/related articles of any interest. I never head over to Medium to find stuff to read because I find quite a lot of the content is just puff, fluff and bad writing. It's kinda like Quora, mostly uninteresting, annoying to use but has a rare gem now and again that got linked to in a news aggregator.
You don't, but millions do -- and that's people post their stuff there.
I've never once logged into Medium. I see a "Pardon the Interruption" notice every time I want to read something, but I just hit Escape and move on with my day. If I had to pick a side, I'd probably say avoid Medium. But I don't know under what circumstances it forces you to log in just to read something.
Technically you can opt out. Realistically if you do then you lose all of the benefits of being on medium
http://blogger.com http://wordpress.com
Or self-host wordpress
Now the question is this: if I didn't care or it wasn't worth reading, why did I click on it in the first place?
Perhaps I don't care about this content as much as I thought anymore. Maybe we've been addicted to reading content, rather than actually making use of most of the content anyway.
PS: I'm trying out The Guardian now. No ads for premium users on mobile.
https://makemediumreadable.com/
I stopped minding medium (as a reader) since installing that.
Stylus is a godsend: https://github.com/openstyles/stylus. Sad thing is, this used to be a built-in browser feature.
Sure, there's advantages too, and I like the idea of user styles/scripts, but after wasting some time on trying (and failing) to use them to customize my browsing experience on a few sites, I settled on a Dark Reader + Auto Reader Mode + uBlock combo that makes all of the internet nice and readable with almost no extra hassle.
It'll take me a lot of time to build my own website and content that gives me the same result. So, there's that.
Sorry, not a native speaker.
And your English is plenty easy to understand, no need to apologize about that.
That being said, I do think a small investment into moving onto your own platform may be worth it, and that might kick in much earlier than you’d think. I use Hugo and a fork of hugo-minimo-theme for my technical and personal writing, and it took maybe three days to set up (granted I have some technical experience). If you paid a contractor to spend a week setting up a statically compiled site with a CMS, you may get competitive SEO without having to worry about content licensing or platform updates. I think statically generated content is generally friendly to search engines. I don’t update my blog infra at all really, and there’s very few steps involved if I needed to relearn how to do it. It is possible to use free open source software and have it get out of your way in terms of making money.
Sorry, but that's just not how it works. The technical part is easy and certainly once piece of the puzzle, but without a certain website age and tons of good backlinks you will never be able to compete with medium.
Medium is just easier to spin up than a domain + WordPress. I don't see any other advantages
We need to stop acting like it's easy to build these types of platforms.
I've also clicked on articles while on the website for a different article
As far as someone without an audience posting an article is concerned, the chances of Medium suggesting your work this way is pretty slim.
Indeed it doesn't matter. Medium is just the quickest/easiest/nicest way to write something and get a nice webpage out. Compared to wordpress/blogger/... the UX is just that little bit nicer, and the resulting web page is nicer on the reader (at least, the reader who doesn't mind pushing the login button once at some point) too.
I used that a while back and now run it on Docker on GCP since DO was a bit expensive.
I've found the Medium experience to be quite good, and even world positive.
I'd been running a self-improvement group blog as an ancillary initiative to the rest of my business. The blogging was kind of cool, but not successful enough to think much about.
Then Medium asked if we'd be interested in professionalizing what we do. Medium's CEO and I both worked for the tech publisher O'Reilly early in our careers, so I think that's why he thought we could pull it off.
And so I've gotten to really experience the before and the after of Medium's paywall. Before professionalizing, publishing seemed barely worthwhile. And it only was worthwhile if I could make the posts viral enough and the call to action catchy enough. That's not really my MO, which is why we struggled.
Medium's CEO has made the case that free content has been deeply corrupted by these marketing needs. Maybe some people can opt out, but I wasn't able to. I absolutely was cutting short my effort as a writer and then manipulating the start and end of articles to serve my marketing goals (otherwise, I couldn't justify the time).
In the new system, we just write differently. We know the article is the product people pay for and we don't need to corrupt it with any secondary marketing goals.
I see this as a world positive, where Medium has been able to create an ecosystem that allows for deeper and more authoritative articles. If you're reading self-improvement articles on Medium, a simple judge is to ask yourself if the author has any 1st hand experience. The vast majority of the free side of that topic on Medium is written by content marketers who are experts in virality but are basically just making up or cargo culting the advice. (Literally, much of it is farmed out to Upwork)
Part of what drew in our subject matter experts was enough money to be worth their time. We're going to send more than $100k to authors this year (probably a lot more).
I'm trying not to jump in here to market my own stuff. What I'm talking about above is our self-improvement publication. We're also testing two more pubs on different topics, which I think says something about how lucrative we're finding the editing. But it's too early for me to say how those are going. I have a number of other biases here (small amount of Medium stock, Medium's CEO was on my board for a long time and was my boss in 2005), but I'm hoping people see my actions, which are to double down on Medium over and over again, to be an indication that I'm a true fan.
But: noone seems to have mentioned the fact that you can publish on WordPress and use the Medium plugin to copublish to Medium. It deals with the whole canonical content / SEO thing, you get to keep your original content, and you get the potential benefits of a Medium audience / stats / etc.
Best of all worlds.
Also you can choose on a post by post basis to publish to Medium or not, and to different publications there, so you could have your site as a hub holding all your stuff and niche audiences on your Medium pubs. Stuff like that.
https://medium.com/@w00t/the-2018-burning-man-ultramarathon-...
Has a canonical tag pointing here: https://johnvantine.com/2018-burning-man-50k-my-first-ultram...
When I search for a snippet of text from the article, the one on johnvantine.com ranks.
And you're leveraging the community on Medium, too, so there's some discovery that can happen on that end. Best of both worlds IMO.
Anything you post on Medium is subject to their whims.
As a reader, I usually don’t care who wrote the post I’m reading. I also don’t care about seeing more content from the same person, which is all I would get on a personal blog; in fact, I would prefer to see related content but different viewpoints from other people, which is what Medium shows me. I want to read them all in the same format, not hop between different blog layouts. I want them all to have consistent like/comment mechanics. As a reader, sorry, I just don’t care about your personal brand or platform. I want to easily read a lot of stuff by different people on a topic.
Never used it as a writer, but why should individuals have to set up their own SEO, comment system, blog system, etc just to post an article? Because they think that they’re so important or controversial that they need a personal space/brand? For most writers I think you get a lot for free with Medium.
Many people who aren't technical don't want to have to manage rolling their own comments system, custom SEO, analytics and all of that stuff.
This is an important point. There is a small mental burden users face every time they see a new website and have to understand how it has been laid out and where things are and what they mean. Medium gives users "just the content" in the same familiar layout to streamline the process.
Not to mention the sites that have silly disorienting scrolling effects, with things moving around while they slowly load, or are barely even functional on mobile. Although these tend not to be problems for the average blog.
minus the login prompts, the persistent top and bottom dickbars and the full-screen interstitial blocking the page if you've dared to open more than 5 links in a month.
I'm a little surprised that there are so many complaints here - I bet a lot of the same people complaining also complain about ad based services and now they create news / journalism / articles designed for clicks and not quality content.
This is so strange. What this kind of people don't understand is, we all buy products whose prices include advertisement costs. Eventually we pay for everything anyway, there is no charity (unless something is explicitly charity). Let alone cases where ads make us buy things we don't need. And not to mention the rabbit hole behind the seemingly free services like Google Search/Maps.
I don't get all the hate here. Paywalls are at least honest, clear and upfront about how the business makes money. We should support this type of businesses. It's usually the switch that triggers a lot of hate: businesses should probably be cautious about it.
I agree. The switch is the noisy period. When you are free, you attract people who are looking for free and would probably never pay for it directly. When you are paid and ad-free from the start, you attract a customer base who understands the value intrinsically and will probably run away if you switch to an ad-based model.
Don't ask him to add it, ask Apple, it's their fault. It's not a production feature.
And since it's Apple, you can't just use another browser as it's all the same crap on iOS.
You're stuck with something worse than the 2019 equivalent of IE6. iOS is a joke when it comes to web browsing.
Technical previews is for Safari on Mac OS, and that browser works quite well. It's safari on iOS that is a huge shitshow.
Its more unstable than ever before and far behind everyone else on features, and it's freakishly unconsistent. Heck, Apple can't make up their mind if they are having a click delay or not, so now they have it only for standalone.
Hopefully that class-action against Apple for the app store monopoly bears fruit (pun fully intended) so some alternative browsers can be installed on iOS (via Amazon app store or something similar to f-droid).
Note for those new to the party "Chrome" and "Firefox" on iOS are just skins on top of Safari, iOS rules require you to just use Safari if your app browses web. See 2.5.6 here if you don't believe me - https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#sof...
There was some funky scrolling on this article I noticed on my phone which is not present on most websites/websites viewed through Safari backed mobile browsers.
- We'll use bigger font size... and feature more clickbait headlines.
That is, once you create a platform to do X, the purpose of the platform becomes "get people to use the platform to do X", not X. They sound like the same thing but they are not.
An example: Facebook, I guess, is all about sharing things with your friends. But over time it quickly morphed into an engine that was only concerned about how many people would spend their time on their site sharing and consuming things, not about sharing. So people "shared" by posting memes from other places. They shared by copying crap and fake articles. They "shared" by playing dumb and addictive games for hours at a time, asking anybody they could find to help them milk a fake cow or something.
If you cared about sharing, you might think about a wise investment in time, both for the sharer and the folks consuming what was being shared. But if you think about whatever you could pass off as sharing, then you might think about virality, demographics, psychology, and so forth. Worse yet, you'd probably do whatever you could to prevent people from talking about real sharing. After all, that would be a huge hit to your site's metrics. It might even involve an existential crisis.
Likewise Medium cared about blogging and publishing, but only in terms they had predefined and could control. As they started looking at their numbers, they started refining their definitions.
The same thing is happening everywhere, for instance YouTube. YT couldn't care less about average folks making creative content to share, even though that's the schtick. What they really care about is reliable non-offensive video content being regularly produced and consumed by the most numbers of people that they can sell ads to.
I'm not saying that any of these platforms are evil or ran by bad people. My point is that by defining a platform and business model that's widely-adopted, you end up preventing any sort of change, quality improvement, or re-imagining what the important drivers are for that platform. I can change what I consider to be high-quality video to create, share and consume ten times a day. YouTube cannot. Same goes for Medium and text content. The platform, the idea of fixing quality attributes for complex things into code, is the natural enemy of serious consideration and evaluation of the thing the platform supposedly supports.
I’m not sure about this comment though:
“Learn to market yourself and your content. Quit being lazy waiting for Medium to do it for you.”
Maybe I am lazy but there really isn’t an easy and inexpensive way to market your blogs or apps.
HN, Reddit, and other social networks?
Not to mention the fact that if you self-submit anything to those sites people tend to take it as an invitation to eviscerate you.
If you aren't a regular poster on the sub that you're placing the link on, why would posters bother opening said link? You have to participate in the community as well, and that includes providing content in the form of Reddit posts as well, because Reddit users don't like clicking outbound links with no context.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what the goal of "marketing" is in this context, however.
From what I found, there is a lot of stuff Medium does well that is hard to recreate by one's self. Super simple features, like
- rich text editing that isn't ugly
- caching what you're currently working on
- tracking views and who has viewed your article
aren't easy to build and generally aren't worth it unless you write many many articles.
Although I don't like the aggressive account on-boarding and payment models for reading articles, Medium certainly makes life easy for writing articles.
Hosting my blog costs me 5€/month, though. Not sure if I have the cheapest option. On the upside, it also supports multiple email accounts, so I am in the process of moving all emails (also family) over there, saving on extra costs for email.
I think attracting viewers is the only real issue. That's why social media, Tumblr and Medium took over from blogs. Because they have the recommendation and sharing features that bring viewers to people's postings.
Caching/saving work just simple AJAX calls to a localized database or filesystem which can store the JSON data that Quill.JS creates.
Google Analytics is free and offers more customer insight and analysis opportunities and it's as simple as a script tag inclusion in the html.
I plan to show how to replicate this website in a matter of minutes on my YouTube channel.
Asked me for bank account routing info.
Wasn't interested about it that much.
Definitely not on by default.
Source: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018834314-Stori...
> Stories become eligible to be part of the metered paywall if the writer selects that option in each story’s distribution setting. Medium will never meter a story without the writer’s permission.
> During the publish flow, you have the opportunity to check the box to be eligible for curation review and distribution across Medium. Checking this box means that your story is also eligible to be part of Medium’s metered paywall, and can earn money if you are in the Medium Partner Program.
https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018677974-About...
Follow the chart from the top:
> Are you enrolled in the partner program? NO
> Would you like to be eligible for curator review? YES
> Was the story curated? YES
> Story is distributed by Medium, is part of the paywall, and does not earn money.
This person’s screenshot of the UX (as of Dec 2018) seems like it could be easy to misinterpret. It certainly doesn’t say anything like “Medium visitors are only able to read X free Medium articles. If your readers exceed X, they may be shown a paywall and be unable to read your post”: https://twitter.com/SachaGreif/status/1069842296844120064
I would be really curious if anyone who does post on Medium was able to offer some insights into where most their readers come from. Is it from people already on Medium or external. Don't know if they even have access to metrics like that.
I just want somewhere nice I can post simple factual articles I enjoy writing. My articles aren't ones that show up behind the Medium paywall, I'm under no illusion there's money in it for me.
Medium can tell you where your readers come from.
Here's a Medium stat screen: https://imgur.com/a/8VhJEhJ
He wrote an article on his blog. A few dozen people read it over the next week -- basically all friends of his. He cross-posted it to Medium and he had 30,000 reads within the first 24 hours.
Looking at the stats on my own Medium posts how much comes via Medium and how much is external varies. On a story with 3,000 readers (which is the most I've ever had), about 10% come from Medium. Most of what I post ends up having 20-30 readers and about 50% come via Medium.
Our Google Analytics filters out bots and crawlers, which do significantly inflate pageview stats.
Some people are saying authors use it for the built-in audience. I can't say that was an appeal for me—or that I got very many readers from within medium anyways.
I started my own blog with hugo/netlify (though notably I don't post things very often). The main reason I switched is because so many people enable the pay wall on medium I feel the medium brand is hurting my own now, even though I've never enabled the pay wall myself.
I definitely miss that editor—and not having to update the site's dependencies.
On the other hand, Hugo’s quality is verrrry dependent on the theme you pick. Configs change from theme to theme. Hand rolling a theme from scratch is also a severe pain. I don’t think there are any paid themes for Hugo, and if there are I’m not sure it’s as good of an ecosystem as say Wordpress.
What about a local code editor with live reloading on a local copy of your site running in a browser?
This is what I do in Jekyll. I write everything in the same code editor I wrote code in, and on save, I see a 100% replicated live view of my site in about 1 second (even with 200+ posts). Both windows sit side by side. To me this beats any alternative set up.
I can still embed with Hugo, but not as quickly and this does impact my writing flow.
It's not as pleasant as pasting a URL in but it takes about 3 seconds to get it all set up when I want to embed a video. Very minimal impact IMO.
If I had to embed hundreds of videos all the time I would probably just write a custom plugin that scans the file and converts Youtube URLs to embed snippets.
Medium is the pinterest of thoughts.
I say it since ever: own your own content.
(or just disable comments)
A criticism on Medium, including its usability (I presume), should do a lot better if it wants to be read.
iOS' inertial scrolling for some reason breaks very often. It happened to my website a couple times, and I had to fix with a bunch of css hacks.
Supporting iOS is just a pain. Sometimes, I would even rather support IE 11 than iOS.
(btw, all iOS browsers are forced to use safari render engine.)
It's disingenuous to claim they "sell whatever advertising they please", and link to a ToS screen cap that's completely unrelated.
Companies have to make money in order to pay their developers and pay for servers. Personally, I'd rather pay them instead of seeing ads plastered everywhere.
Please put more effort into creating better content by exhibiting interest and passion into a subject through deep exploration, insights, discussion of core issues and resolution, and great descriptive writing.
It used to be that everyone who wrote a diary had no expectations of their content being anything valuable, and the value of writing was in the exploration of ideas and organization of your thoughts. Now the value of writing is how many people you reach? Philosophically, I'm against that change, so please keep that stuff behind a paywall.
It's still a work in progress and I'm trying to figure out some sort of strategy, especially a content policy around not allowing clickbait and spammy "how to use learn redis in 3 minutes" type articles. I'd probably have to cap the max number of users and publication to a few thousand since I don't have the resources for this to be anything more than a hobby project.
I'm aware of a couple of others working in the same space. Write.as comes to mind, thought I don't think they're doing publications etc.
LaTex, syntax/code was high on my priority-list while initially building my product since I wanted to primarily target technical writers.
Make sure you also check out WordPress, Ghost, GatsbyJS, Hugo (and then expand the search by those terms + " alternative").
Good luck!
And isn't that kinda of the point of sites like Medium, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, etc. - that provide enough of a valuable service to people by providing a single place for people to view a certain type of content that in spite of ads, centralized control, some pay walls, crappy technology, etc. that consumers and producers still find it worth while to use for viewing and publishing.
I would even go a step further and say such aggregate sites like Medium represent what the "new" internet represents, convenience and monetization. The average user doesn't care about privacy or ads as much as they want easy access to information. The average producer doesn't care about control compared to what runs their operation, revenue and readers. I think many "technologists" and other people who populate sites like Hacker News have values the align more closely to that of the "old" internet, so view many of the new trends negatively.
I'm not trying to say if it's right or wrong, just my two cents.
Pre social media, how did people discover great content? You can go as far back to the 90s or very early 00s as a time reference
It’s locked in a somewhat growing, walled garden, yes, but Medium is now basically the Google Reader for a lot of people. Those people don’t care about logins if they can get a good read every now and then. And, when Medium goes to crap, some other platform will pop up with no ads (for a while :) ) and lure us all over there.
Some of these people would get plenty of attention posting on a personal site and just tweeting it out, but they choose medium, and I wonder why.
Folks less well known, I get it it assuming they somehow get more attention on medium.
https://arweave.net/egqLRAbESk4BvrPZGwNM-koJZZU3_xYRb_G9-CYC...
Full disclosure: I started the Arweave project.
Sam
I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.
When I started my business I had a previous blog with several topics covered.
Because I self-hosted, I managed to redirect the traffic only for a specific set of posts on the topic to my new business blog where I moved several posts over, getting thousands of visits in my business blog (and converting customers) since day one.
The Ghost blogging platform is open source, and you can self-host if you want (I do).
With Ghost, you can also get their hosted service for a monthly fee and you own your own platform, you have a markdown-based editor with markdown on the left and content on the right.
You can run your own ads, have a fixed top menu that does not go away with scrolling with links to your products and services, etc.
If you are serious about running a business blog, you should definitively self-host. I know Medium has the sharing aspect, but it's not worth it because most of the traffic in blogs in general comes from Google searches and not sharing.
The social sharing traffic is a drop in the ocean for most blogs, it's not worth getting potential paying customers blocked due to a medium paywall popup.
Similar question for YouTube.
From time to time you can come across some decent content, but the loops and hoops you have to go through to read it are simply not worth my time.
There are two categories of resume-spam:
1. "Sunny" filler that doesn't really say anything new (e.g. "The Future Is Serverless"). The preferred platform for this seems to be LinkedIn.
2. "Edgy" filler that doesn't really say anything new (e.g. "Serverless Considered Harmful", or "Why I Don't Use Serverless"). The preferred platform for this seems to be Medium.
Medium will slowly learn what you’re interested in and send you opt-out’able weekly newsletters with recommendations.
I’m surprised the OP has this much distaste for a platform which not only has good content, but rewards such, yet without ads. I’d happily pay to see less ads in my life.
From this readers perspective if it's on medium it's not worth reading. I've literally thought this "awesome that sounds like it will solve my exact issue...oh fuck it's on medium...next"
But the simplest solution isn't to just write on your own self hosted blog and cross post on medium setting the canonical URL?
Doesn't this give the best of both worlds?
You still have control over your property and you still get the SEO benefits from the medium domain...
Stallman was right.
That's what happens when there are no ads. This is what the HN majority keeps saying they want.
I think the article is not well researched and doesn’t understand the basic premise of Medium: Enable professional writers to make living off of writing. Medium is not your usual free blogging platform. There is an expectation that people will pay for good content and the hope that good writers should be able make living off of their writing. Medium wants to take on doing SEO, infrastructure, payments and let authors focus on just creating content.
Here’s some stats on how much writers can earn on Medium: https://medium.com/s/partner-program-updates/april-update-fr...
If I have to be devil’s advocate, I would ask why can’t Medium use ads as revenue source. Their $5/mo subscription may look like cup of coffee but honestly I am tired of having dozen such subscriptions in my life. Also, people outside developed world, kids, teenagers, college students will still find this unaffordable.
Not trying to excuse them for what they're doing, just trying to point out from my personal experience the value they've added to me and why following personal blogs or places like reddit, which I see mentioned as alternatives, isn't a one to one replacement for me. I don't know what or who I'd need to follow if the domain is new to me.
I guess continuing on this train of thought, and not wanting to complain without putting out an idea for a solution...if something were to come in and be a viable alternative to Medium it would have to
>Allow for easy publishing (editor)
>Have reliable distribution/hosting (network)
>And have some way to explore related topics or publications (discovery)
For publication I think the community would have to come around to a standard format. Like a simplified latex, or something similar to it, with an approachable interface that even my Mom or Dad could write something up without needing to read documentation.
As for distribution, the only thing I can really think of is an ipfs style network. Similar to how torrents can provide some security in the survival of a file even if the originator decides to stop seeding (hosting). And also similar to torrenting, I can see ppl willingly giving up resources for 'the cause' if they themselves benefit enough from the network existing.
The only thing left, that also contains all the things I liked about Medium, is the discovery aspect. Also seems like it'd be the most difficult to implement on a distributed network. Maybe a few designated community servers, similar to tracker servers from the torrenting analogy, carry the information of what files are in the network. Im not sure exactly what the ipfs spec implements for this aspect of file discovery. But it seems some sort of designated 'discovery nodes' would be necessary. Maybe graph network nodes that ppl can query using their own discovery algorithms or ones shared within the community? Idk how well those would scale, I've heard from the Neo4j pitch that Behance rolled over their infrastructure to neo4j from cassandra and reduced their server requirements by a factor of 10. Maybe that kind of efficiency would be enough to support the network in general with a minimal number of critical nodes?
I haven't worked on an infrastructure level with anything I've mentioned, mostly just know of the technologies, so I might be completely off base with the individual things I proposed, but I feel like the general concept is worth dissecting.
That's a very good point. Before the advent of Google, we used to have curated link lists for topics that you could explore. It's become rare, and it's probably harder to do now that everything moves much faster (or maybe it doesn't and I've just gotten much slower).
This is bullshit. Medium is free, you're free to use it, it's open (unless an author explicitly asks for a paywall for compensation) and you're free to register an account to have your own content published there.
Medium isn't using a proprietary protocol nor does it require a licensed client to access it and everyone has a browser, so I really don't get the issue with publishing there.