Dear Devs, please stop using Medium for your contents
Having a hard time to reading without the annoying popup for your sign up, please, let me know which other platforms do you use?
1. Go to medium.com or a medium.com article
2. Click the icon to the left of the url in the url bar, it will probably be a lock or an info icon.
3. Select site settings.
4. Under permissions, change Javascript to Block.
Works a treat! Thanks!
Do people realise that interested readers aren't getting to their content because they chose Medium?
It's very easy to roll out a Hugo/Jekyll/Zola static blog published for free on Github/Gitlab/Netlify. Then point it to your own domain name so you own your content and don't have to worry about what some 3rd party site does on top of your writing.
Every step is very straightforward individually (configure Jekyll, set up Netlify, buy a domain), but the sum of the parts is still a considerable time sink if it isn't what you do for bread and butter. I know I configured DNS records in uni networking class many years ago, doesn't mean I remember the slightest of it.
The friction obviously goes down if you've already gone through the process before, but if you're simply looking to get your voice out there, it can be very tempting to use a packaged solution. Medium simply has a big name, so that's what a lot of people default to.
There is also https://habr.com , but there is always a risk that they go the way Medium went.
It's a question of do you get more people from medium than people you lose from other sources because your post is on medium?
Medium used to be good, people published good content there. but as they increased their gatekeeping it seemed like there was a sharp decline in quality and quantity.
It only happens more often with Medium because Medium articles are posted more often. I don't think it's an objective indicator of much, beyond HN's generally cantankerous attitude towards the modern web.
If/When Medium decides to add more popups, tracking or advertise over your writing and you'll eventually have to move off the platform, you'll probably regret not having put in the work up front to own and publish your own content.
Also, if your project/article is interesting, people will share it after some minor promoting on social medium or on HN, regardless if it's on Medium or not.
People who are part of the audience you don't have because you aren't on Medium?
If you already have dev experience, I'd argue that rolling out a static blog with a pre-made Hugo/Jekyll theme (lots of Medium-ish clones) would be just as fast as rolling out a self-hosted WordPress blog.
I've never enabled analytics either. I just assume I have 100 million readers. (-:
Because in the early days of Medium you got a lot of reach through them promoting your content on other blog posts. This now went down a lot from what I've read and the additional paywall / nagging module on each visit is not helping either.
I think it'll naturally disappear as more and more people realize that creating their own site isn't that hard any more and having your own domain / brand is useful.
I wish more people realized that. It costs as much as a cup of coffee per month and you can also use it for backups etc. Wordpress comes preinstalled and autoupdating in most hosts.
Fair enough if all you want to do is post to HN, but if posting to HN is only one delivery channel, you're giving up a huge audience just to placate techie UI sensibilities on this site.
Posting on my own blog gets me single digit views, because I don't have an audience of my own. Sure, I could and probably should work on that, but working on that is a long term plan. Posting to Medium via an established publication such as The Startup, HackerNoon or The Mission has delivered 5k to 50k reads (not views) for me in the past.
I think a sanity check is required here. Annoy a few techie users or have your work read by many thousands who would not otherwise read it. To me that's a no brainer.
Medium seems to strike a good a balance as I have been able to find with regards to quality albeit with a little searching.
I want to follow interesting JS/web-dev related stuff, but if I follow related tags all I see is "5 tips for new devs" and "how to pass the interview" type articles.
Each time I visit a Medium page I wonder why people are still using it.
Checkout the following resources if you are interested:
https://github.com/dbriemann/glyph
https://github.com/dbriemann/glyph-zero
As an example have a look at my blog (not very active):
https://dbriemann.github.io/blog/
You can click on the "Discuss" button to go to the "original" markdown as a Github issue.
Maybe making a post on that blog about how you use your own software would make more people interested in your project? Plus it can act as documentation.
It would greatly reduce the friction people have trying out something new to see it being actively used.
https://dbriemann.github.io/blog/2-introducing-glyph-static-...
In fact that is the reason why I linked it because as you said I am not writing any blog posts these days.
The downside is that discoverability is lower, but my goal for it is writing for myself rather than getting page views.
A Chrome/Mozilla extension to help you avoid clicking on links from websites you don't like. I use it to block medium.com links.
Mobile support would be a big attraction for users with low-powered devices. Accidental taps on slow links to fatty content e.g. news sites can trigger some pain.
I instantly close your post.
People see numbers of visitors in Medium that they don't see when they post on their personal websites...
So, unless you also come and check people's personally hosted blogs, and convince millions to do the same, don't let the door hit you on your way out when you "instantly close" Medium posts...