I don't publish anything ever really so I don't understand the appeal of using Medium. Can anyone explain it to me? Is it just the ease of use? Write some text, click button, it's available online?
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.
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.