Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog
github.com
github.com
Same here. So
1. I downloaded the gif
2. ffmpeg -i screencast.gif foo.mp4
The equivalent here would be a "switch from YouTube to your own video hosting site in a few minutes." I mean sure, you could, and it probably wouldn't be that hard, but that's not the point.
For example I mostly hate Facebook for the choices they have made for years, and if I was ever going to stop hating them it would be after many years of sacrificial demonstration that they have a new philosophy in mind. Not unlike what it would take for a scumbag person to reverse my opinion of them -- candor and sacrifice, rather than nice words and promises.
It is not entirely impossible to stop being hated. Microsoft is occasionally managing it with VSCode and TypeScript, although I'd say I still 98% hate them; they have a lot to make up for, and Windows is still miserable garbage.
It is easy to become hated. Google is pulling it off remarkably. Making money is often easier if you do things people hate, although it's a short-term view -- it definitely increases short-term profitability and guarantees that in 20 years everyone will hate you and avoid you. But it's definitely economically rational for the company's employees, with their 2-10 year tenures and the metrics they have to hit.
Medium started as a breath of fresh air, and has become hated by being annoying. The point of switching from Medium is to screw over Medium, benefits be damned. If you're not factoring resentment into your utility calculation, of course this action won't make sense.
Anyway, the underlying principle is one of morals and ethics, in a sense. The sensations of hate, resentment, or disgust are the outward manifestation of a calculation to determine who to trust. Naturally, someone who repeatedly screws you for personal gain should not be trusted. The result is the feeling of hating them.
But it is not only about raw 'utility'. Someone who does annoying things (Medium), or demonstrating tremendous hubris or arrogance, or just does things that are or should be inappropriate, gets resented also. If you send me lots of unsolicited emails, I can find a way to explain why I hate you in terms of a utility calculation ("you are taking up space in my attention that I don't want to give you"), but that's just hand-waving -- I just hate you (to some mild degree) and I'm working backwards from that.
I still cannot forgive Micro$oft for their past behavior, even if they seem cool now.
Unfortunately, it's not possible to set a canonical link on Medium a posteriori.
Furthermore, I don't know how Google handles cross-domain canonical reporting, but if I were writing a search engine, I would treat it as highly suspect.
Yeah, that's a problem. :/ I guess I'll continue rewriting my old content so I at least have a shot.
From the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA
Something like the following:
> Source: https://example.com
This should transfer link equity to your new blog post that helps offset any duplication penalty.
I left Medium, but because I own all of the URLs no links broke. Nor are there duplicate copies with canonical links. So there’s no SEO risk.
The reason that I say it's a trap is because I think search engines, especially Google, don't seem to index things as easily as they did in the past. Any time I host a new site, it can take months for it to surface in search results, and even then it might not even show up in other people's queries which seemingly depends on the age on a site and whether Google's algorithm subjectively likes the content. But Medium has been around for a while and your articles appear in search results in mere days, sometimes less than a day. It's a trap because we're made to believe that we can't or shouldn't host our own material.
I would prefer that we wouldn't have to use Medium, but Medium has a product that delivers, and it's not the scam that people are making it out to be.
You really don't have to use Medium. It's trivial to get things indexed by Google if that's what you're worried about (generate a sitemap and submit it with their webmaster tools, everything is indexed shortly, or just write good content that gets linked from other places and those links will be followed), and you'll thank yourself later when Medium decides to arbitrarily kick you off, or goes out of business, or who knows what else that could cause you to lose access to your content because you don't own the domain.
There was a large audience. Medium have introduced a paywall that you could dismiss with a click, but now they've started enforcing that paywall and stopping you reading more than a couple of articles a month. The audience who have chosen not to pay will fall away precipitously over the next few weeks to the point where people are going so see no traffic on their posts at all.
Authors need to choose to either support Medium or leave for a different platform now. The glut of 'how-to-leave-Medium' posts are a response to that.
I had a subscription to Medium in the past, and if I knew they were paywalling articles in general, I would have canceled right away.
The point was for me to publish writings so they would be generally available (and not get bogged down in details). It seems that's no longer offered. The idea that someone would hit a paywall trying to get to my articles is infuriating.
I hate everything about this. We're constantly bombarded with unwanted sharing. I get advertisements based on websites I visit, and there's nothing I can do about it. My activity is just free for the taking for advertisers. But heaven forbid I try to share something constructive to the rest of the world.
It's been so long now that I had no idea they'd put up a paywall. Make me feel like I had it right from the git go now.
Aside from that... this sounds like it's got to be close to the dumbest thing they could've done. It's akin to slapping your audience in the face every time they show up.
I hardly ever click on anything from WaPo or the NY Times. I have no problem with them charging for their content, they both do some great work, I just cannot pay for it and it's frustrating to run into their paywall.
Thanks for pointing this out. I'd still have been clueless about this had you not.
Youtube lets you make money. Medium just makes readers frustrated.
Their network is zero value. It might actually be negative value because Medium is now associated with shitty content.
Source: Have blog, left Medium for static hosting.
Although technically not that different from this project my objective would be not to switch over, but rather still use Medium's editor, but just have content mirrored.
The author of this repo built something to help people move off of medium (where their content is currently stored) to their own blog. This has become progressively more common and people might be putting it off because it takes too long.
E.G. the basecamp blog moved in January (https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/).
Furthermore, it is super easy to be critical of something that someone built but significantly harder to create something. Perhaps instead of taking the negative road you could offer suggestions, or build your own move your blog to medium repo... or literally anything that isn't trashing someone's hard work.
I don't see how I was trashing OPs hard work. I'm simply pointing out that there's more that Medium provides than just a way to host a blog. No need to read so much negativity into it.
That's the phrase that caused people to read negativity into your post. You didn't mean it when you were typing but to those reading the phrase has come to mean, "there's something wrong with the {thing}" or even "that {thing} shouldn't be." Could your paragraph have omitted that sentence and conveyed your meaning or is people knowing you don't understand integral to what you were trying to say?
I also appreciate the humor of @jppope using that same sentence as the lead for his/her comment.
Don't want to run your own? Then pay for a Write.as account to have Matt run it for you.
The point of the post being that many authors don’t believe Medium provides this any longer and may be looking for tools to switch to a service that does.
I let Medium email me suggestions. Almost without fail, both the "Today's highlights" and "Based on your reading history" sections of the email are hard left or "woke", while I am neither. I think that if Medium were actually doing as you were saying, it would be taking the same sort of heavy criticism that Facebook and Youtube have for "suggesting" various right-wing figures. Medium has clearly taken deliberate measures to avoid this.
Maybe Medium works well for other people. I don't know. I do think that Medium is promoting the idea that it distributes your posts to the people interested in them, but I'm not really sure if it actually does so.
(Edited to add: Medium was not so obnoxious in the past: maybe it's trading on a reputation for content promotion that it no longer deserves.)
I know this is medium's pitch to bloggers, but is it actually true? It is for youtube, but i'm pretty sure i've seen some blog posts about people having migrated away from medium with minimal change in readership.
Is it fast? Am I writing well enough that people can follow my instructions, debates, etc? Did I have a hard time finding information or additional sources on a problem?
Things like canonical links are personally important to me for other reasons. I do use the analytics of my blog for personal improvement. If people are bouncing off a page after getting there with relevant search terms maybe that post needs to be re-written or my assumptions were wrong.
Ultimately though, if you're writing a blog and posting it on the internet rather than just keeping a personal journal at some point you've got to be expecting to get something out of that. I don't think you have to jump to "attention whoring" as a motive though.
Medium, for me, is a weird shit show. There are people there I want to read, but I dislike the "medium". For a variety of valid reasons, ranging from page weight bloat, to killing the custom domain feature, and finally...to paywall experiments. I do recognize their strength in visibility.
Edit: happy to hear critical feedback.
"If we do, what features would you like?" - Cloudflare CTO
It sounds like he's just curious what people want Cloudflare to do for the GitHub audience instead of making a full Github replacement.
In case you're worried about having lost the ability to read longer texts: Find one of those book that you can't put down. A physical book, away from the screens. I used to read a lot as a kid, then stopped. I'm glad I picked it up again. But do start with something easy to read.
I had a custom domain in Medium before the feature was shutdown for others, so after I manually copied the posts, I used the same URL slug as in the original Medium posts and deleted the medium posts. The SEO didn't get affected, same posts which had most visitors in medium have same number of visitors at my own host.
Perhaps this was the reason Medium removed the support for custom domains, those who didn't have it cannot move the posts to new domain and expect same SEO results.
I might not have realized it was an animation if you hadn't said this. It takes forever to load.
On twitter I did use a video instead of a gif: https://twitter.com/MathieuDutour/status/1134448154793914368
Then I transform the video into a gif using https://github.com/mathieudutour/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/mo...
Hope that helps!
[1]
See one of my projects for example: https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend#ffsend-wip
As far as I know, Netlify doesn't make this data available to users hosting sites on the platform.
My own (perhaps paranoid) theory as to why Netlify is able to provide so much for free is that they're selling the access log data, but I haven't seen any proof of that either, so who knows.
Another theory is that storing all those access logs would be huge and maybe they just store nothing...
Write searchable posts on topics people actually search for. Post it on Reddit, HN, etc. Those are specifically for distribution.
> 2- Autosave draft
Write it offline, copy paste it for online. Btw WordPress has had this for 10(?) years or something similar.
> 3- Social plugin integration
There are existing solutions for this, see IFTTT, Zapier, etc.
Since I got downvotes, let me clarify. People who use the terminal can probably handle an eventual migration without much hassle but it'd be good to consider non-technical people for future releases. Otherwise it's a fine tool.
When I asked if I could switch the domain they said "that will be another $99 USD please"
...I don't even know why I am writing on medium
Take a look at this experience https://www.freecodecamp.org/forum/t/we-just-moved-off-of-me...
Tl;dr: Medium's practice of paywalling articles and preferential treatment of those articles over public ones kills the reach of your content. Also, they lock you in by removing the feature of attaching your own domain name. Also, their weird upvote mechanism. Also, the dysfunctional comment system. I can go on and on.
It uses the same Medium export process and lets you pick what Site Generator to use (e.g. Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll) and more importantly it lets you pick between a variety of CMS like Contentful, NetlifyCMS, Forestry and DatoCMS.
Oh there are also several Blogging themes to pick with and your new imported blog can be up and running in 1-2 minutes.
Let's compile a list:
- Quora
- Medium
(You can add to it to see how far we go)
1. Wikipedia
2. Hacker News
3. Stack Exchange
4. Github and Gitlab
Then again, YouTube is basically an example of a company/site/service which does virtually everything wrong, but succeeds on pure network effect/inertia. The monetisation aspect is probably the least of their worries.
Also, for the record, yes, someone actually loathes LinkedIn. They are a spam factory
Partly due to their dark patterns, partly due to it attracts recruiters and therefore a lot more recruiter spam.
But only a quarter or a lot less of people I know stick to their guns and don't use Linkedin.
Most (me included), moan about it, but still, have a fairly updated profile on their site...
- most Google products