Medium is not the home for your ideas
hulry.com
hulry.com
Use webflow, ghost or whatever you like, but wordpress is good enough for most people.
HN audience can likely handle their own, but if ease-of-setup is an issue - I created StartABlog.com to help people do this (and we'll actually set up your site for you for free - https://startablog.com/start).
Own your platform. Own your content. Own your voice. Use everything else as distribution methods - not core dependencies.
But if there was something else i'd probably try it too.
With a properly set up cache, your website will be serving static files anyway.
That said I self-host other services, like Matomo or FreshRSS (also PHP apps that need a database).
The secret is in setting up auto-update policies. All the self-hosted services I host are in Docker and auto-updated [1] even if that means they can break.
Have been doing this for some time and worked great thus far, but granted self-hosting stuff is a continued investment, you can't just leave that server there to bit rot.
The most common hack I've seen is one where the admin doesn't even know, because it redirects some visits to their site that have Google in the referrer. Because they rarely Google themselves while logged out of WordPress, they never know every page on their site is redirecting to MyCoolMalwareDroppr.
I hosted my own blog for a short while and got hacked, so I moved back to Wordpress.com.
Also be very selective about installing plugins.
If you are extra paranoid then you can put the login/admin/api behind a vpn.
Almost all of the problem plugins weren’t even that important to the site. Someone just added it at some point and left it, maybe for years. Then there you are running old code with known exploits. Of course you’re going to get hacked.
Although I didn’t enjoy that work, I did love how excited and happy my clients were that their sites were fixed. You can’t measure the misery and anxiety some people feel when stuff goes wrong with their websites. Fixing that, with php and Wordpress no less, was a great feeling.
All that is to say that I agree; only adopt plugins you really need with a reputation you’re comfortable with.
I've recommended Hardypress (https://hardypress.com/) a couple times here on HN. Still happy with them.
a) Doesn't use node.js.
b) Has built-in syntax highlighting for C#, SQL, PowerShell and Rust at a minimum.
c) Is also good at "photo journals" or galleries.
I played around with Hugo, but the themes were ugly and it was very weak at managing pictures associated with an entry instead of the entire site.
I've written code in PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript before, it's just not my first choice.
Did something like that years and years ago as a learning project. Works great! Drop in some markdown and you’re done. The source is only a few hundred lines; no build or package manager.
Could you explain what you mean here?
Quoting their README:
Web server with built-in support for QUIC, HTTP/2, Lua, Markdown, Pongo2, HyperApp, Amber, Sass(SCSS), GCSS, JSX, BoltDB (built-in, stores the database in a file, like SQLite), Redis, PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL, rate limiting, graceful shutdown, plugins, users and permissions.
All in one small self-contained executable.
I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook.
> I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook.
This is exactly what I don't want to deal with. Sure, I could use a ci service but this is a typical case of over-engineering a simple problem.
On my end I write a new markdown post and push it to Github.
At that point Netlify takes over to rebuild and redeploy my site including the new post. It's pretty trivial to do.
Say Microsoft decides to kill github pages. OK, fine, next.
Now picture Netlify changing some policy, adding some pricing or killing off a service which you need(unlikely but not entirely impossible). You have to setup the whole thing all over again with someone else, be it circleci, jenkins, gitlab, etc. Though in different contexts, I've been in similar situations and by the third time I usually want to murder someone.
If you wanted to you could run the build process locally and commit the output HTML and CSS files to the repo, and the build process wouldn't even be necessary. You'd just need to copy the output files to a server using a git commit hook.
I DON'T want to do either of that. Add a file, push it and know everything has worked.
The topic of the thread is __specifically__ personal blogs/pages and my point is as strong as ever: having to deal with builds, cis, for your personal page is pure bs.
That's precisely what Netlify offers you.
Forgive me for suggesting the first thing that popped into mind, could you run the generator script locally and also push the /public dir which your server then serves directly?
A much better option. Still have to deal with the de-facto boilerplate of every html file: head, body, header, footer. Which is why I built something that does it in the browser for me.
> Forgive me for suggesting the first thing that popped into mind, could you run the generator script locally and also push the /public dir which your server then serves directly?
Same as CI - adds an extra step to the process. But as I said, services like Netlify come and go and the news might slip by you and catch you off guard. If I had to go down that road, I have ~10 raspberry pi's 6 of which are currently booted up. A 5 line shell script could easily do that. But again - I see no point in doing it if there's no need for it.
I find it fascinating that you'd go to all the trouble to build what essentially breaks down to a custom static site generator but you then balk at using an off the shelf one with a build script.
https://caddyserver.com/docs/markdown
”Caddy is both a flexible, efficient static file server and a powerful, scalable reverse proxy. Use it to serve your static site with compression, template evaluation, Markdown rendering, and more.”
Here’s a blog on doing this with the older version of Caddy:
https://blog.thomaspuppe.de/static-sites-from-markdown-with-...
The simplest solution I've used is to just have a Makefile that indexes and stitches together pages using cat/sed/ls. Sure, you have to run make (and possibly make upload if you're not doing it live), but it's not so bad.
Just serve your markdown git repo using Caddy.
https://caddyserver.com/docs/markdown
”Caddy is both a flexible, efficient static file server and a powerful, scalable reverse proxy. Use it to serve your static site with compression, template evaluation, Markdown rendering, and more.”
Here’s a blog on doing this with the older version of Caddy:
https://blog.thomaspuppe.de/static-sites-from-markdown-with-...
You get a lot of other “just works” goodness too.
In addition to the above it generates static pages rather than looking into the database and templates all the time.
You create a folder of markdown files, you have 2 template HTML files (index and blog post), and you run my program (MMSSG). It compiles the index page with a list of all the posts, then renders the HTML for each markdown file into a separate blog post. That's it. Handles the linking and everything for you.
It’s all open source and the templates are already made, modify to your heart’s content. It's also REALLY simple, so should be easy to understand my code.
It’s what I used to generate my blog, and there’s instructions in the readme to get going quickly :) It's super simple and I really love it. This is my post about it, and the github link:
https://jacobkania.com/2020-01-18-the-great-blog-project/
https://github.com/jacobkania/mmssg
--
Edit: Just reverted a couple of commits from a WIP plugins feature that I got bored of and quit, and created new versions of the binaries (Linux and Windows are untested). Also updated this comment with a better description.
I'm going to bed, feel free to respond with any feedback! Thanks for looking :)
I started collecting my writings, all in Markdown and some HTML. Just a bunch of folders as topics, and then write markdown files inside them.
Then, a week or so ago, I threw in Jekyll and now they are published as the cheapest form of Digital Garden for me and hopefully, my family - https://oinam.fyi
The crappy code is at https://github.com/oinam/oinam.fyi and is not even worth being a template.
I get it, I shouldn't complain about the quality of open-source and freely offered software and the onus is on me to audit the libraries I put in my code, but blimey some people take an awful lot of liberty with the truth when they claim something is "production ready". I reckon a lot of people just build some rushed, poorly-written JavaScript libraries so they can pad out their CVs as an "open-source contributor" but the only thing they're actually contributing is a massive headache for muppets like me who foolishly use said code in their own projects.
I have also been looking for something like this for a while and I can't find it.
All the static HTML gallery generators seem to be focused on dumping all images into them at single time. They don't have RSS feeds, or a convenient option to add entries one at a time as you go along like you would in a blog.
On the other hand, blog generators generally aren't optimized for mostly displaying images (e.g. automatic resizing, thumbnail view, etc.)
I never found a solution for requirement C that I liked, so I’ve been building my own. It’s still very rough and not exactly in shape to publish, but its capabilities already by far exceed my previous solution: https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD
I left my WIP site running (‘jekyll serve’ using WEBrick) on my laptop and I’m going to bed, so these links may get hugged or just crash and become unavailable, but here you can get an idea of what I’ve been playing with for multi-image layouts: https://beta.cooltrainer.org/distorted/
And on the index page is a random smattering of some other media types I’ve been testing, like support for image-rendering SVGs, TTFs, and old DOS-codepage Nfos, mbedding PDFs, etc: https://beta.cooltrainer.org/
Anyway, big Jekyll fan. Try it out :)
(I'm considering node for a personal project or two, though as much as possible avoiding the mess that NPM seems to be as the projects are small enough I can manage the few dependencies manually, so insight into pitfalls I'm not aware of could be useful)
So even if a node.js solution would be the best solution, you would still not want to use it? Why?
Anyway, I'd recommend to write a static site generator yourself. It isn't very difficult, you get exactly what you need, and you never get stuck because someone abandoned their project or doesn't want to fix the bugs you reported.
It doesn't seem that strange to want to avoid it for such a project.
Jekyll is really nice to use, but the photo galleries are pretty few and far between.
Disclaimer, I couldn't get this to deploy using Github pages (which is nice) because it uses unsupported plugins. I have it split across two branches and works nicely enough. Certainly the most responsive gallery I've found.
Edit: removed direct link to the person's pictures :)
As a side note, I can't believe how many people are salty that you don't want to use node. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
It's dependencies are too big?
It cannot be hosted by cheap webhost?
It's not secure ?
It's in Python (pip install...), it uses a very complete and flexible Markdown library (never found a language that it didn't support, but syntax highlighting is in a plugin), and is a site generator, not a blog generator.
But it takes some up-front programming to define your site structure.
What is annoying though is that often people who self-host their blogs make the exact same mistake. More and more often I see something that will grab my attention and when I get to the bottom of a blog post, I find something along the lines of "The full guide is available in my free e-book, which you can download from here". And when you click "here", you are greeted with "Please enter your e-mail address". Sure, everyone has a spam-mail type of thing or mailinator or whatever but this is still a terrible thing to do.
I don't see it wrong to use it as marketing strategy.
That strategy might be better than writing a long-ish blog entry as a teaser, where the reader thinks they are going to get their information for free, only to be told "Psyche! You've actually got to pay for it!"
What’s the alternative, assuming the blogger doesn’t want to give everything away for free?
I create rare, valuable information that saves people money and headaches. On a good month, 2% of my revenue will come from donations. Usually, it's 0%. At best, it pays for a meal and a beer. This website has 135k page views per month.
If that's how much I get from teaching people how to navigate German bureaucracy, I doubt you'll make anything from your opinions alone.
And having some experience with German bureaucracy and taxes, and also having never lived in Germany nor speaking German, I'm fully aware how convoluted and complicated this can be and I could definitely see myself donating/paying for useful information if I didn't have a good accountant at my disposal.
I agree, on the grand scheme you won't make a whole lot but even with a population of 83 million, even if you add another 1 million like myself, your content still fits a relatively narrow niche. I'd love to give some advice but I honestly have no idea.
Affiliate marketing works well for my niche. I wanted to start similar sites about other topics, but if those don't naturally lead to certain purchases, they're extremely hard to effectively monetise.
In general, the internet got incredibly annoying, but I can understand why. Part of it is because we feel entitled to free content. There are few business models that allow people to be rewarded for their work while still offering a product for free. It usually involves selling something the user's data or attention.
I insist on keeping the content unconditionally free, and donations don't work, but affiliate marketing does. I help people navigate certain boring purchases, so it lends itself to that sort of monetisation. I'd be recommending those products and services anyway.
Unfortunately, it incentivizes dishonest recommendations and passing ads as content. I chose not to do that, but I know I'd get paid more to recommend the wrong things. Since it's blended into the content, you'd be abusing people's trust in your content. At least banner ads were separate from the text.
I do not offer services either. My goal was to help as many people as possible, and that would go against it. Information should be free, especially when poor people need it the most. I also want the website to run itself. If I wanted to be on the computer full time, I'd just get a job.
The website mentioned above is more of a "visit it when you need it" resource. It's painfully boring to read, as it's written like a plain English instruction manual. It wouldn't be an interesting book.
I am personally against it for my website in particular though. I insist on keeping everything on it open and free. Immigration advice should help everyone, not just developers with a generous relocation bonus.
I'd much rather invest the effort into making the content more navigable/discoverable. This is actually what I'm working on right now.
Again though, this is just personal preference for this specific website. Selling packaged information could work. I did buy a motorcycle travel book that was a rehash of the author's YouTube channel.
Ghost on the other hand is open source and can be self hosted.
>Own your platform. Own your content. Own your voice.
There's no way to fully own a place on the clearnet. At a minimum, you will have to rent a domain, and most people will rent the hosting as well. Moreover, authorities can seize or block both of those, while payment services can also "cancel" or "deplatform" you if you need them to pay for costs--so much for having a voice on the net.
The only way to own content on the Internet is to publish it in a free, decentralized and anonymous manner--I'm thinking I2P sites, for instance, and even that is subject to attacks that could make it inaccessible.
In any case, I wholewheartedly agree that Medium is not the home for anything worthwhile.
If you are trusting Google to be your entry point for traffic you have to play all kinds of gross games with your content for SEO purpose and if you are adding value to an already well explored topic there will be someone out there trouncing you in SEO.
Medium was initially brilliant because it solved this by aggregating content in a slick website, with great search, and it still does a decent job of showing you new content based on your interests. I think this is a part of why its so frustrating. When I go on the home page I see a bunch of articles I would want to read, go to click them and get paywalled.
But then the money men came. I'm not convinced there is anything out there like Medium in terms of ease-of-use, ability to get your content in front of others, good at surfacing new content you would want to read and also Medium pay content authors really really well.
This to me is the key thing, and what Medium's stated goal was: to re-think the way we pay for content. You may feel fine giving away your content for free, but it's perfectly reasonable for people to want to be paid for the value they create, and I like Medium's model way better than advertising.
Not sure I'd agree with this. I've tried looking for interesting articles on Medium recently, and it seems that once you want to go outside the 'make money online/internet nomad/political rants' genre, finding anything interesting becomes real difficult.
It'a slso quite hard to find things from unknown/unpopular authors there too. Remember looking through a few Medium Digests and counting how popular each creator was, and found there was a huge bias towards people with large social media followings/existing fanbases in what was being promoted in those newsletters and on the Medium front page.
Precisely this.
I also have been yelling [0] about hosting your own GitLab, Gitea solution for individuals, companies and open-source organisations which frees you from the mercy of 'centralising everything' in GitHub which is nonsensical.
Medium is essentially centralising and bringing blogs back into the dark ages with paywalls, de-platforming and Google Logins on someone else's blogging site.
Own your code on your servers just like you own your website and blog. If the creator of Wireguard can do it, you can do it too.
For me, Jekyll, Github Pages, and a couple lines of CSS were nothing[1], but there should be as little barrier to entry as possible if you have something to say
[0]: https://andrewtag.com (it's not self-promotion if it's someone else's blog)
[1]: https://amtunlimited.gihub.io (this is definitely self-promotion, feel free to ignore)
The top one just doesn't have it, the bottom is misspelled
amtunlimited.github.io
When you get sick, poor or die, your own platform will almost certainly disappear, taking your content and ideas with it.
If it's on Medium, your content is more likely to survive your demise.
Only if your site gets picked up by archive.org though.
(That's only going to happen with static sites, not those which require login or signup, etc.)
Even then your ideas will still effectively disappear because search engines don't appear to crawl archive.org. (If they do it's incomplete - my own past content on archive.org does not get found by specific Google searches.) But perhaps search will change in future.
[1]: https://pages.github.com/ [2]: https://neocities.org/ [3]: https://jekyllrb.com/
I would go with Netlify or Vercel with Gitlab.
100% agree. I even went as far as to write my own static-site generator (not that impressive, everyone seems to have one these days), but even hosted blogs are better than using the Mediums of this world.
There are trade-offs though. There is a little bit of on-going effort (and maybe expense) in keeping even an inactive blog going. Medium does take care of that side of things for you.
Brilliant idea.
> Your password for Bluehost (double check that you spelled this right!)
uhhhh
Also, you missed the fact that there's a typo on that line at the very end!
> Your password for Bluehost (double check that you spelled this right!)e
There's also the line above the password part:
> Once you've purchased your hosting - forward the confirmation email you received to: team@startablog.com
Which since I don't have I can't confirm if it has any sensitive information or not.
For a project blog I used hosted wordpress, and I found that to be a pretty good middle ground. Honestly I can't think of a case where running your own wordpress server is a good use of your time.
[1] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog (as of today available under MIT license)
As an example, Ubuntu still has theirs: https://planet.ubuntu.com/
Is there plan for non-English blog posts? Dev community is mostly in English, but many blog posts around the world are in native language. Some blogs write in English and non-English and it's very hard for me to find content in my language.
This also prevents me from registering my blog on diff.blog as my blog contains English and non-English content.
Hope the best for your project!
I have plan for supporting other langauges as well in future. Creating subdomains like de.diff.blog, ml.diff.blog, etc which only contains the blog posts in the respective languages should probably be good enough. The main difficulty is finding the initial set of blogs that are popular in languages which I don't understand and creating an initial user base. Maybe not be probably as hard as I make it sound.
Looking at your site I'm noticing there seems to be no RSS feed? I think that would make a good addition. You could have one personalized feed and one global one, like Reddit does it.
I'd also like to note that I was surprised about the github login. My blog has no connection to Github at all, most blogs won't, so I'm not seeing how that could work for others when people suggest their blogs?
Thanks! Will reach out to you once I start on this.
> Looking at your site I'm noticing there seems to be no RSS feed? I think that would make a good addition. You could have one personalized feed and one global one, like Reddit does it.
That sounds like a cool feature to have. I will add it to my todo list.
> I'd also like to note that I was surprised about the github login. My blog has no connection to Github at all, most blogs won't, so I'm not seeing how that could work for others when people suggest their blogs?
Yeah. I added GitHub login mainly to get the list of followers and organizations you follow on GitHub. Your account follows them automatically when you sign up on diff.blog. It also give me some idea on what kind of languages you use which I use a bit for showing user recommendations.
React or any frontend frameworks would have probably been an overkill (honestly, even jQuery was) in the case of diff.blog, since Django did most of the Job. If the frontend codebase becomes larger, I would probably rewrite them to make use of native Web Components. I still have not yet experimented with web components though.
(Of course their brand is now kinda poisoned by "log-in wall" and lots of low-quality "think-pieces", so you don't really want to be associated with theirs - which was somewhat different when Medium started)
If someone uses that in a bio you can just move along, you won't miss anything.
but they messed up their site chasing a business model, and nyt/wapo/etc basically turned into tech companies and fill the niche that medium wanted to. meanwhile substack mints prestige by emphatically not looking like a news site. medium doesn't really have a place on either end of that anymore
Use your own domain while still making it easy to publish blogs(eg. no servers, no code etc)
There's some history re-writing going on here. The tweet from Medium about unblocking his account was in July 2018 - the author replied with 'Happens. No worries. Thanks for resolving the issue guys', so they clearly weren't too bothered about this at the time. They then went on to post over ten further articles on Medium over the next six months - again, hardly the sign of someone annoyed by the platform. (for contrast, they had only written one earlier article in the year, so his output increased after the issue)
...and now in July 2020, two years on, they have decided that this was the thing that stopped them using Medium? How is this anything but a lie?
i mean, the blog post might not honest be either, maybe there is another motive, but i'd put the company-directed communications and tweets at about the bottom of the authenticity/trust hierarchy myself.
Like if your boss is an asshole, you might not want to shame them until you found a new job and secured your income.
At around the same time, I started working on a small blogging platform of my own but gave up and started using SSGs like Gatsby, Jekyll, etc.
More on the move here: https://hulry.com/back-to-wordpress/
Hope this clears things up. :)
I dont know if that is true, simply because they did not rant and rave like it common with cancel culture today does not mean they were not bothered
It almost never results in a good outcome to tell your current service provider your intentions to leave before you are actually ready to pull the trigger to leave
Stoicism is a virtue in these situations
This reminds me of Cloudflare blocking that pro-nazi website at the DNS level - not because the content was illegal, but because of social or other reasons.
What this means is even your own domain and web server can be censored in devastating ways, based purely on personal or cultural disagreement.
Of course I'm not supporting nazism, but it's a dangerous precedent for the free and open web to moderate and censor people when you are not legally compelled to. Even if you are, the laws of your country might be unjust.
Not blocking != endorsing, and to say it does is thought policing.
Thanks for this post. I won't be posting to Medium anymore.
Nazism is the easy target. The precedence is removal of something legal by a moral/social decision by a corporate entity. This is dangerous.
In the 50s, had they had internet, it could be leftist or communist sympathizers' blogs (under the red scare). In the 60s it could be blacks civil rights blogs (imagine a conservative southern CDN), In the 70s/80s it could be pro-gay writings. In the GWB era it could be criticism of various wars, etc - like the Dixie Chicks had their shows cancelled for speaking out.
It already includes all kind of right and left ideas stomped, if they don't agree not just with your local country morals, but what with Americans think those should be (this includes FB banning posts for "nudity" in 2020, as if we're in the Victorian era, or as if it's e.g. French users are ok with puritanism).
Do we want companies to do just what's legal or what's moral? in the end even laws are supposed to be trailing morality and disagreements are expected on what's moral and what's not.
This is again the same old debate of whether is some sort of fundamental right to be served by Cloudflare or have your content hosted by Twitter. I do not like all forms of censorship but I also don't want private companies to be forced to host just about any content people want to publish.
Content hosting platforms I want them to merely do what's legal.
It's not up to them to make moral decisions.
They could still make those (moral decisions) in other areas, e.g. paying their employees a good salary and not exploiting them, paying taxes, and so on.
>This is again the same old debate of whether is some sort of fundamental right to be served by Cloudflare or have your content hosted by Twitter.
I think that's mostly a debate in US culture, where the concepts about censorship begin and end with what some founding Santas said 3 centuries ago and its all about what the state can and cannot do.
In 2020, platforms are more important than the state for censoring. They even have larger revenue than entire countries GDPs, and they are also operated by people promoting their own culture and national interests, while catering to an international audience of billions. It's the ultimate soft power space and has vastly eclipsed the "public square".
So, in 2020, as opposed to 1920 where the public square might have been enough, having access to something like Google or YouTube should be enforced as a legal right unless explicitly cut off by court order (as opposed by corporate whim).
Even economically, if you think about it, think how Google search ranking for example (or lack thereof) could sink companies globally at the whim of Google operators.
Well, one could argue that's what they're doing. Unless we make it illegal for them to make moral choices over content, they're merely doing what's legal and what they perceive in their best interest.
But, ok, I do kind of get your point and it seems you care just when it comes to content, as you still want them to make moral decisions in other areas (employee compensation). I guess that's what I find different from my expectations (I'm not from the USA btw). I am fine with them making moral decisions on the content hosted in their platforms, even if that means sometimes they may censor my own point of view, it's their platform after all and I can still host my content on my own. I know, is not where "everyone" is, but perhaps that's a good thing, if people is missing that content they can get it elsewhere. Perhaps is that I don't perceive Twitter or Cloudflare as essential as say, ISPs. I'd have an issue with an ISP snooping and making moral choices about what traffic to allow beyond what the law requires because is not like I can build my own internet as an alternative.
>>> So, in 2020, as opposed to 1920 where the public square might have been enough, having access to something like Google or YouTube should be enforced as a legal right unless explicitly cut off by court order (as opposed by corporate whim).
That's a good point and my view is somewhat swayed now, or at least I understand that point of view better. I usually don't pay attention to twitter or facebook which somewhat bias me to deem them as unimportant social noise.
>>> Even economically, if you think about it, think how Google search ranking for example (or lack thereof) could sink companies globally at the whim of Google operators.
Search (content discovery, not content hosting) I do find more inclined to believe should be pretty much impartial (beyond perhaps top results that are clearly marked as "sponsored"), but instead of expecting google doing the right thing, we should push clear legislation about it.
That's the thing - they're not being 'forced' to host content. They willingly offering a service to host all and any (at least legal) content. If they're no longer willing to do that, then they're no longer a neutral Internet service provider. They're a private publisher and morally opinionated content moderator, like Facebook. That makes them no longer a provider of 'free' and 'open' Internet.
Perhaps a solution that makes everyone happy is strong / privacy layered end-to-end DNS encryption in a way that Cloudflare never sees or can control the delivery and allocation of website addresses based on domain queries. Not sure if it's possible, but I'm thinking something like Tor .onion site HSDirs and lots of cryptography is involved.
Also, people should just filter out the content they don't want to see, instead of everyone being forced to agree on what's good or bad as if they're all in the same one-size-fits-all boat.
I don't see how this concept of a purely neutral platform that is adamant about allowing any kind of content is a necessary or useful thing. At the very least I don't think it should be mandated that platform companies meet that standard or even attempt to. The ones that do descend into toxicity very quickly. It's not clear to me what value is really being preserved there, and from my perspective the level of censorship in the US in 2020 is generally toeing a pretty good line, i.e. not sliding down a slippery Orwellian slope (though no doubt in a country of 300 million you can find a fair few concerning counterexamples).
Shadow-banning is a useful tool for online forums but many moderators would usually considered it to be the last in a series of escalating steps that might be used for particularly troublesome users who ignore moderator warnings.
I wouldn't have expected a blogging platform to implement it and certainly not at the whim of an automatic spam filter. Even worse, its algorithm does not seem to take into account past behaviour or a positive reputation of the user before banning them; all articles are hidden due to a false positive in just one of them.
> The web is meant for free speech. Your content shouldn’t be jailed for being controversial.
You mentioned your profile was taken offline after being mistakenly caught in their spam filter. Shouldn't spam blocking be a basic function of a publishing site? Obviously in a perfect world there wouldn't be false positives, but sometimes these things happen. Your content wasn't banned for being "controversial".
We can remove any content you post for any reason.
So even if it wasn't a mistake, takedowns may still happen for whatever reasons and you need to take this into account before you start using the platform.
I really don't understand why some people complain about services doing exactly what's stated "on the box".
[1] https://policy.medium.com/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e...
That is dumb. I shouldn't have to pay money to get around a pay wall for a project's technical documentation.
But that's on the project, not Medium; and if they want to be paid for the work that goes into their documentation, what's the problem?
I mean, seriously, Medium is $5/month, for loads of advertising-free content. Why not just subscribe?
For one, if you don't like a project using a freemium service for its documentation, then take it up with the project, not with Medium.
Secondly, documentation isn't free; is it really that unreasonable for projects to want to be funded for the work they're doing? Medium is pretty cheap. If you're running into your Medium limit regularly, why not just subscribe?Complaining that you have to pay $5/mo to access a resource you use a lot, when you're probably paying $50/mo for internet anyway, seems a bit unreasonable.
Seems like the kind of software that Apple/Google might be inclined to fast-track given the current state of affairs?
Wrong.
Neither Apple nor Google approved the apps, so the team spent 8 weeks going back and forth with them about what seemed (to me at least) like totally ineffectual, CYA security theatre.
Instead we ported the code to a web-app on a domain we owned and could start helping people with symptoms immediately.
Own your platform.
From their perspective, it makas sence because otherwise the App Analytics would pick up that there is this thing called coronavirus and is popular so from business perspective they should target it and the search results would degrade. Then the analytics would pick up that testing positive on Covid-19 test app has a good conversation rate and people would make apps where you test positive(or whatever goes. conspiracy theories, denialists - anything that brings eyeballs). This is essentially what happened with the News market. Analytics showed what kind of news people like and publishers made the news that people demand. They simply wrote the articles that brought most eyeballs.
When you own the platform, then it is your responsibility to spread it. Good luck with that, you can be a good citizen or conspiracy theorist and it is all fine until you succeed. If you are the "undesirable" and you actually succeed then people will start talking how to block your platform. You can be undesirable by telling the truth(journalism) or invoke trouble(shootings, racism and so on).
Owning the platform is not going to be the solution, it will simply delay the consequences.
HN does this too, if enough people downvote a comment it will disappear from the conversation, but not from the posters viewpoint (and if you have showdead on, as a reader it shows up as lighter and lighter shades of grey).
The rational behind it is that if a spammer notices that their post/account has been banned, they can quickly spin up another one.
Apparently this is quite effective against spammers, (or used to be) but of course seems extremely unfair in the case of false negatives.
So when you say dishonest - how would you feel if the fine article was written by someone who said he had wasted 2 months on Medium writing posts that try to trick people into downloading malware before he realised that Medium had shadowbanned his account?
There will be people using your site that just need to go away. They're different from your typical pharmaceutical spammer because they genuinely think they're not doing anything wrong. If you tell them to stop posting affiliate links to timeshares, they'll put themselves in this box of "banned for doing nothing wrong", and simply start a new account posting affiliate links to timeshares in a slightly different way that hopefully will get around your algorithm.
The worst part is that after enough time, and enough tries, you'l have given them (and the pharmaceutical spammers as well) detailed instructions for how to circumvent your spam protection. All every step of this does is add more work to you to run your site for the people who you want to have there.
So the simplest and most effective thing you can do is make those people think they have succeeded. Let them promote their timeshares (and v1agra) to their heart's content. Just don't show anybody but them.
Real people have friends who read their blog and will point this out if it happens by mistake, and you have a "fix" button in your admin console to hit a few times a year.
Trust me. Run your own blog host for a few months and you'll implement this too.
Maybe shadow banning is quite fair and necessary and the answer is for people to educate themselves about it and go to other places where it won't happen to them. #rollyourown
These matters are not simple at all. I'm still trying to decide on whether Fb ultimately is a 'public square' vs. a 'private publisher', as is basically the whole world.
Shadown banning is an act of fraud against the user, with the hope that it's mostly against malicious already-banned users and that false positives will get it undone.
But since the cost of shadow banning is on the users and the benefit is on you, there isn't a particular incentive to not miscalibrate and cause a lot of damage to users.
The only backstop is that if you're very far into the false positive domain it'll kill your venue but because shadowbanning is invisible by its nature it requires a truly massive amount of false positives to have that effect.
There are also secondary damages that good users worry that they've been silenced and don't comment. E.g. after my last several submissions to HN received no comments I suspected I might be subject to some kind of shadow ban (since HN engages in that sort of thing) and stopped submitting.
If you mention them that they're banned, they might just use another account and persist in their spam.
The problem of this approach in this case is that user was not an spammer.
If my domain registrar, my DNS provider, my hosting company, ... go "bad" I can just move and my readers won't notice. Even if you are on hosted wordpress etc, you can archive your site as is and move, preserving the URLs. That's not the case with Medium etc where your content lives under their domain.
I think the reasonable answer is that you need to pay for all your needs and not rely on any free services. Then you can rely on your providers.
Is it possible (not feasible, but possible) to put something on the internet that relies on nobody else at all?
If you're looking to move off Medium, give it a try. If anyone is interested I'm happy to share the mini server I wrote to compile pug aka jade / stylus, which is what I use for my blog.
I was using a digital ocean droplet for 5$ a month.
A democratized internet requires that we exercise that democratic right and retain control over our content, rather than handing control to new platform masters.
It can run on shared hosts like Siteground, Lithium, Green Geeks, Hostgator, as well as VPS platforms like Digital Ocean. The admin interface for making new posts is great, separating it from static site generators. It uses a modified Markdown called Kirbytext which is additive. If you write pure Markdown you'll see it rendered as expected.
No database means no worrying about getting hacked (at least in terms of SQL injection).
If you don't want to build it yourself, there's themes for sale too, despite how niche Kirby is. My own blog is a Kirby theme I bought because I knew if I built it myself, I'd never finish.
But, software like Grav and presumably also Kirby are very much not easy to run for 'normal' people. They would need to secure hosting without getting overwhelmed with the technical details or all the upselling that providers try to do, then install the software which is 'easy' but not 'click this button and you're done' easy, and of course also deal with domains and DNS etc. A hosted solution - even if you have to pay for it - is the only practical solution for normal people.
That said, for the type of people that read HN I would highly recommend Grav. Installation is easy, it has a nice web-based interface for administration and writing posts, it is fast, and it is not the latest trendy static site generator. It is a boring PHP application that will probably keep working for 20 years with no changes required - but is still actively maintained and will be for the foreseeable future.
Grav's advantage over Kirby is that it's totally FOSS, but I encountered Kirby first and have a more thorough understanding of how it works. The maintainers and community are also quite helpful as well as super lenient about unlicensed usage.
This is amazing. I didn't want to really do HTML5 and create a new html file per post.
https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a...
There's no SEO risk as the author alludes to. This is Medium's tool for dealing with that.
Can you get around this by posting the medium version later than the one on your own website? (Obviously, G crawls medium more frequently; so say, maybe, a week later.)
To get around Google thinking that your personal hosted version is a copy, can you pepper the medium version with links back to your domain/blog ? Would that help ?
https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a...
It sets up a canonical tag and backdates your post to prevent just that from happening.
Also, why do people host their tech tutorials on Medium? I have few of my own and always put them up on my own github pages blog. It's not too difficult.
I feel GitHub pages and Medium are not the same thing.
If you own the domain name, yes. Otherwise, no.
I mean, it is hard to find something on medium which isn't some variant of 'hiring is broken' sponsored by triplebyte (let's really break it!)
Mulesoft getting bought by Salesforce has given us some respite from 'does your content marketing strategy need an app strategy?' They never ask 'what are the two things you need to build a business around an api?' or 'what are the two features you never get from an app management platform?' because those two questions have the same answer.
- great for casual blogging
- very cheap to host
- monetization tools built-in
WordPress has improved a lot in the past few years in terms of security, "worpdress is insecure" is an old meme. Sure if you just go on installing any plugin under the sun, there can be a risk. But the stock installation of WordPress with just a handful of reputable plugins should be good. Much of the slowness comes from the oodles of plugins that people install.
For speed, there are many great and free caching plugins available for WordPress which can considerably speed up your site.
WP will never be faster (and will use more resources) than a JAMStack website.
WP will never be more secure than a JAMStack website. It is literally impossible to deface my static Ghost blog without compromising my upstream provider. This is obviously not the case with any WP site.
WP definitely has its uses. I don't think a personal blog is a good one.
Here's a comparison of Ghost vs WP in terms of time to install: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMKNgV1gTHg
Google never did get serious about provenance. They scrape so often that they should be able to tell who's the original. I've seen Wikipedia copy sites outrank the real Wikipedia.
As a backup, you should be able to submit a hash to a time-stamping notary service and have Google pick up on that.
> Update: As pointed out in the comments section, Medium has an import tool which allows you to add a canonical link from your Medium post to your original blog post.
> This process ensures that Google does not think of your blog post as a duplicate. Thanks to Nicolas and Matthias for this correction.
This is an excellent way to do things. Publish on your blog first, and then mirror the same post(s) on Medium.
Feel free to steal my example
I don’t run analytics. I have no idea how many people have read my writing. I’m okay with that. I actually thought nobody reads my site but one day a piece I had just published hit hacker news, so I guess somebody is watching. I keep the content so I can refer people to it, and as a record of my thinking over time. I share the links when relevant in an online discussion.
I highly recommend it! I should say, I was inspired by Paul Graham and his essays. Just keeping it simple and putting good ideas out there. Oh and I licensed all my work as CC0, so anyone can copy it for any purpose.
Most well-known is WriteFreely.org (written in Go) that can be a good replacement for Medium (hosted version is Write.as that comes with a paid subscription). But there are also new, more specialized apps such as FediReads and Readlebee that are Amazon Goodreads alternatives.
Here's a list of blogging apps in various stages of development:
https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...
They all load almost instantly.
I'm not sure what it does really but you can achieve a similar design with a few Kb of CSS.
Is it? I had to write a bunch of µBlock and usercss rules to make their articles somewhat readable. The sticky bars waste a lot of screen estate. Firefox reader mode (Ctrl+Alt+R) is a wonderful thing, but it breaks on some pages (I guess due to Medium's incompetence or brain-dead priorities since they're still using gist for code snippets (every single snippet in a separate iframe!) instead of spending half an hour to integrate highlight.js)
Is it heavy for such a simple blog? Yes absolutely. Is it heavy for a modern React app? Not really. I think the crux of it is that we often rely too much on heavy frameworks for React even for simple things. It's definitely an antipattern in development today.
Server Side Rendering(react or w/o react) would be a better way to do serve their content and have the added benefit support users who have no js support (noScript , terminal based browsers, screen readers? etc)
(Given your numbers and the ones in the talk, it would appear medium pages have doubled in size since the talk was given).
But yeah, I think folks reach for heavyweight frameworks too quickly. You shouldn't be using React for a blog.
I would think that 0.5mb should be more than enough.
Jekyll amd similar static site generators are more than good enough for 99% of blog sites anyone might want to build.
Again: STOP OPENING POPUPS WHEN I'M SELECTING TEXT!
https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/n...
AdTech creates measurement problems not experienced in mass advertising, newer yet:
Another related pet peeve is when websites use JavaScript to silently stick a citation at the end of the thing you copied.
"The web is meant for free speech. Your content shouldn’t be jailed for being controversial."
<Followed by a Tweet Icon>
People who like Medium almost always say they like it for the distribution.
So people who say you should host your own blog should be more clear about where you get distribution from.
Almost always, you are going to get distribution by trying to siphon readers away from other walled gardens. But you are almost always working with these massive systems you don't control. Google SEO, Twitter & FB followers, etc.
And even if you manage to siphon away a user and get their email address, you still have to deal with GMail's spam filters. You're never really in control, that's a pipe dream.
For example, other day I found one post on Netflix tech blog was also behind paywall.. check posts from famous tech blogs of companies, you would find some of them behind paywall. I don't think big corporates want to make money from their tech blogs.
The algo based recommendation that force feed you the content that "they" think you should read and constant trackers all over the place that profiles everyone with heavy ads scripts with tons of js css files just to read a simple text from someone.
I've built what I had in mind (_sort of_) for myself and many others.
Anyone wants to start a blog, without the headache of self hosting or maintenance without ads and sneaky business model is welcome gonevis.com
This is probably one of the things I hate most about the modern web. There are a ton of situations where I want raw, un-autofiltered results from something and I can't get it.
If your company is still running on Medium you're very limited with customizing your blog.
You can't add any CTA button, popup window, widget, or anything that can help you to justify your blog exsistance. If 1000 people get into your blog post, only around 30 will hit your homepage.
Compare it to other blogs where you can design it the way you want, because great UX and some traffic from Medium, I don't see the benefit of it.
FWIW, I utterly abhor these when reading blogs. Consider “goodwill” as being an abstract benefit of your blog existing.
Now that I have been using Cookie AutoDelete and enabling it so that it does delete cookies automatically (and whitelisting the sites I care about) it has been very nice.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...
The ux can be described as slimy at best.
It seems like Medium manually reviews any story (and user!) that crosses some threshold of traction.
If so, then yes, they have a curation team that is manually reviewing articles for extra distribution across their network. As a publishing partner, I have a copy of their guidelines--mostly stuff that can be done at scale. And mostly what they are doing is trying to find the right topics to feature the article in.
I'm wouldn't be surprised if they have some sort of prioritization system to deal with the volume of articles along the lines of what you describe. If an article is getting traction and hasn't been reviewed, then do it quick.
In an ideal world, I would have that interface to write my markdown on the phone. It would encourage me to write more. I could start a draft of something when a thought occurs to me and finish it up later at home.
I want an SSG with the following requirements:
- If it requires a dev env, it must be node. I don't want to install Ruby, Go or any other system-wide thing.
- Support for (simple) custom CSS written from scratch must be first class citizen, and not buried in a dark corner of the docs.
- RSS feed.
Thanks for your suggestions
Do you know of anyone that did something similar?
I want to provide the same easy way to publish your blog while at the same time using your own custom domain and own your platform.
The ideal case is that you own the platform.
> They started with a Medium publication, and when they gained traction on their content, they moved to their own hosted blogs.
This is false. Basecamp's blog "Signal v Noise" is much older than Medium itself, and their transition perfectly illustrates what Medium has become[1]:
> Three years ago we embraced an exciting new publishing platform called Medium. It felt like a new start for a writing community, and we benefitted immensely from the boost in reach and readership those early days brought. But alas it was not to last.
> When we moved over, Medium was all about attracting big blogs and other publishers. This was going to be a new space for a new time where publishers could find a home. And it was. For a while.
> These days Medium is focused on their membership offering, though. Trying to aggregate writing from many sources and sell a broad subscription on top of that. And it’s a neat model, and it’s wonderful to see Medium try something different. But it’s not for us, and it’s not for Signal v Noise.
[...]
> So now we’re back on the indie trail. The new blog is powered by our friends at WordPress, and the new amazing design is courtesy of our in-house designer Adam Stoddard.
> Thanks to the fact that we kept our own domain when we moved to Medium, all the articles and links still work. The pieces have simply swapped the Medium styling for our own look. (Although, sad to say, Medium didn’t let us export the comments, so those are gone ).
Tech's virtuous cycle will forever run...
* integrated into the browser (an extension is OK)
* automatically downloads feeds and gives notifications of new text
* keyword searchableNetflix has the skill and money to operate its own blog without Medium putting up a paywall over its content.
And you wouldn't necessarily know where to start.
And you would have the mental hurdles of "where do I start", "who do I listen to", etc.
i listen to some Joe Rogan's podcast when he got some interesting guests. i don't remember which one but Joe mentioned Twitter ban Zuby for a reply to someone with "OK, dude".
i look up Zuby and yup. Twitter ban Zuby for saying "OK, dude" to someone. how the fuck is "OK, dude" hateful? Joe said Zuby is the nicest guy that he ever meet and Joe is right. they come for Zuby because transgender activist mock Zuby and Zuby reply with "Ok, dude".
the cancel culture in the West is destroying people from speaking freely.
the cancel culture in the West is the reason why you must own your own content. there are many people on the internet who doesn't agree with cancel culture and want to see your content but due to powerful tech company like Twitter. they can't see it because Twitter act like a publisher but don't want the responsibities that come with it.
the current Western society is in a very sad state.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Yes - they do act like publisher. There is even editorial guide called "guidelines". They will remove things they don't want.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And no - hackernews should not bear the responsibility for whatever we decide to write here, unless it's unlawful.
But I agree on "own your own platform".
But if you have something substantial to say and want to put the effort, then write a blog post, build your own brand and own it.
To play devils advocate, when was ‘western culture’ great?
Pretty much any time period that comes to mind has a rather large set of inconvenient exceptions.
No, they didn't.
Zuby was suspended: https://summit.news/2020/02/27/rapper-zuby-suspended-by-twit...
* Twitch.tv for example, never use "suspension" but "ban" for everything from a 24hr suspension through a month suspension to an indefinite permanent ban.
Is it really in the West, or just in the United States? Perhaps I'm just not paying attention, but I don't recall anything similar happening in my country. At least it definitely doesn't seem to have the same importance.
All of the pundits complaining about “cancel culture” are themselves constantly demanding that various things be “canceled” (fired, taken off the air, defunded, boycotted, deported, imprisoned, ...).
Not in every case, but as a general rule, “cancel culture has gone too far” is a hypocritical euphemism for “I don’t like it when people call out my bigotry”.
Transpeople have been 'cancelled' from all sorts of opportunities since time immemorial without a single person outraged at Zuby's short term Twitter suspension being prepared to defend them to the death...
This kind of free speech is their fundamental. They were founded in opposition to the anti-leftist Palmer Raids in the 1920s however have also supported the freedom of speech of right wing (notably Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis)
However they have been criticized strongly for their defense of some issues e.g. posession of child pornography [not creation], prevention of a registry of gun owners, defense of neo-nazis and kkk freedom of speech.
There was a leaked internal memo which gets to the crux of a core problem where someone internally was of the strong view was "Speech that denigrates [minority/marginalized] groups can inflict serious harms and is intended to and often will impede progress toward equality". In what seems to be alignment with this, in 2017 they had to announce "the ACLU will no longer defend hate groups protesting with firearms."
They have also been criticised over time in not following their own beliefs clearly (simple as they may appear on the outside), notably for not defending Paul Robeson in the 1950s from McCarthyism.
This is after he tried to dismiss the legitimacy of trans people by way of entering a woman's weightlifting competition, claiming he identified as a woman while not out as trans. These dumbass shenanigans are consistently done by folks who "don't believe" in transpeople, or go the route of claiming they have a mental illness.
The rest of the world already cancelled transpeople before the phrase cancel culture existed. Give them a break already.