Fuck Medium
tengl.net
tengl.net
It's obviously not the best solution if you want to monetize, but there are other options for that, like Ghost. But I'd be curious as to the fraction of Medium writers that actually turn out more than beer money from their articles.
It strikes me that a lot of Medium content is something that would have gone on a small personal blog in the past, rather than the premium content worth paying for that Medium seems to be aiming for.
Originally, writing on Medium had nothing to do with making money from the writing. In the early days, just the fact that you were writing on Medium instead of your own blog gave you much better SEO and made you much more discoverable. It was much easier to reach a new audience vs. your own blog on your own new domain that will take 6 months for Google to rank in any search results. It was just a much more efficient way to actually have people read what you wrote.
The point where Medium became total trash is when they created an "optional" paywall, but they also made the paywall enabled by default and they give the author a bunch of scary warnings if they attempt disable it. Basically, they blackhole your content if you don't opt in and they won't ever recommend or promote it. So most people who don't care about making money still leave it on.
I still disable the paywall, but I imagine 90% of the content people hit that is paywalled is not because the author thinks they are going to make money. It's because Medium forced them down that path with dark ui patterns. It didn't used to be like that.
I used one, and it was kept up to date by the hosting provider, and everything was great until it got hacked. And then the hosting company suspended my account, unless I bought some expensive security solution or fixed my site myself and proved it was safe. I ended up rebuilding the site as a static site and changing hosts. Anecdotal, but I won't bother with a self-hosted Wordpress again. It wasn't a noname hosting provider, either.
I mean I don't actually actively use it despite my great Intent a few years back, but still.
edit: s/ready/read/
Yep! There's an extension. No more towardsdatascience to trawl through, hooray!
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
We can do better, and often do, around here.
Last time I checked, they now let you personalize your profile and its design and include a custom username.medium.com URL for your profile. They became the very thing they said they weren't.
But let me know if there's anything I can help with
Thanks for putting the hard work into Ghost, but in the last couple of years, it went from "easy to use self-hosted blogging software" to "publishing platform with highly specific requirements", which is quite a change.
> Now it's a platform for creating multiple sites, and anyone can do it once you have installed Ghost. The default installer does not ask you a question to turn this off; I couldn't find it in the configuration options, either.
There is no way to create multiple sites with Ghost, and never has been, which is why there is no option to turn it off.
Overall, I think if you try using the product I think you might get a more realistic idea of what it does and doesn't do. But I'm not here to sell you anything, so I'll leave it at that :)
That's literally Wordpress. Installed by default on almost every shared host anywhere. There's even a free tier on wordpress.com.
I've tried static site generators - Lektor was the latest - but every one of them fell short of what I wanted in some way or another. But Wordpress always works.
The Medium writers I don't get are the corporate/startup blogs. You a company, you're blog isn't part of your revenue stream, hopefully, so why not just have an S3 bucket with a static blog, or a Wordpress installation. It is just convenience?
Somebody trying to earn some money from their writing - yeah, I get why they choose Medium. It sucks, but there's not really a tremendous amount of better options.
But the majority of Medium articles aren't that. They're promotional personal blogs (so why not just put those on your personal site?) or more often they're technical blogs written as marketing material for a company. That can easily be hosted on a company's own site with little effort.
I'm not a Mac user, but why is it so bad to use Chrome on a Mac?
Yes we know it.
No need to tell us.
Just stop using it.
Medium can coast for a while on inertia, but the payment-first model of substack, for authors you actually care about, is just miles ahead.
Pretty sure the rest of the search-engine traffic will be able to coast on the fact that substack has a real revenue stream from day 1.
It's hard to express how disappointed I am in medium. I have written several very popular articles and I don't have a subscription and can't read hardly anything on there. Also I found it confusing to tell if your article is behind a paywall. They pulled a major bait and switch.
I was so mad, I made a python script to copy my medium posts to a Ghost blog instance: https://github.com/ageitgey/medium_to_ghost
That's fine with me.
Not sure what the hate for "Chrome users on Mac" is for though. Why not "Fuck Mac users" for supporting a company that is actively trying to bring down general purpose computing and user control over their own computing devices in the name of "security" but really for profit?
Personally, the way I deal with capitalist parasites is to put aside all desire and avoid getting locked into their crap. Outside of utility bills, taxes and mortgage - no product or service can hold me prisoner. If the leeches start sucking too hard, I simply drop them and find something else to do.