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Comment by mft_ | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone explain how Medium got to be so big, despite its drawbacks?

I mean, it wasn't launched that long ago, and it's not like blogging platforms were rare then. Was it the curation/discovery aspect? Or something else?

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When it started it wasn't annoying at all, and is even lower-friction for a blog than github pages. However, they don't have enough of a draw to justify the annoyances/pay wall, and larger blogs leaving will make their value proposition even worse. It isn't that hard/expensive to setup a blog with a static generator like Jekyll or Hugo, the hardest part is migrating off of medium. They do have good SEO, but with freecodecamp & hackernoon leaving I would imagine they will start dropping in rankings.

Edit: For folks who want WYSIWYG editing, even something like the tools namecheap provides or hosted WordPress are very viable options as well, since not everyone will be comfortable with a static site generator.

Also forestry.io is a pretty good free backend for a static site with WYSIWYG editing.

From what I remember it wasn't too bad at the beginning. It was a clean layout and easy to read. That has now been polluted with sign up modals and toolbars.

I assume from a content producing side it was easier to not deal with hosting, scaling, etc.

They spent quite a lot of money building it out - you can buy a lot with a ton of devs, designers, marketing, being at the centre of the zeitgeist helped by insider founders.

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