Ask HN: What Is an Alternative to Medium? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Is an Alternative to Medium?

6 pointsjonas_kgomo5 comments

Its been 10 years since Medium first created an interesting design and approach to blogging. Substack came along as a fresh take on writing for creators. Ghost created the open-source alternative. But how would you design/create an alternative to Medium in 2021? What is it that you think is missing on the Medium platform or what impedes you from using it.

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Really depends upon what you want from your blogs. If you are doing it as an independent journalist and want to use it as a profession as well as maybe get more eye, then Substack is a pretty good alternative. They already have the whole payment, email lists, SEO etc stuff handled and all you need to do is type and publish your content and don't have to worry about things like payments, email lists etc. Substack (similar to medium) has started to get pretty good number of eyes so your content will get eyes from their platform. So far, substack has also been pretty good with hosting opposing political view points.

However, if you don't care about monetizing your content, want full control over your content, then it's not that hard to start your own single publisher website - either developed from scratch or using some existing solution like Wordpress. You could also simply post your content on places like Reddit, HN, Lobsters etc. One more thing - you can try sending your blogs to local & national newspapers as Opinion pieces - this has less chances of being accepted but worth trying.

Personally, I absolutely hate medium simply because of how slow they are, how they push their popups everywhere as well as censorship. I am a paid subscriber to multiple substacks as I want ti support independent journalists - Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Michael Tracey, Aaron Mate. I also regularly read Abigail Shrier, Bari Weiss, Caitlin’s Newsletter, Karen Hunt etc.

Hashnode looks nice for dev blogs, but I haven't tried it yet. It's on your own domain and you own all your data but it has community features too. https://hashnode.com

All the centralized blog sites go through the same general syndromes. The value of them is that they're a single name to remember in order to get to a lot of varied content. The harm of them is that eventually they start removing people for political reasons ("deplatforming") or doing various other things the content creators don't like, but have little power to stop.

I wouldn't create an alternative to Medium, because I just think it's the wrong approach. We know the answer, because it's what everyone had no choice but to do before: run your own stuff, host it yourself, own your own domain, have your own process, keep things much more under your control. RSS.

I was about to make precisely the same comment. I would add that it’s trivially easy to make your own site superior in every way to these centralized sites, by applying basic principles of web design and simply not tracking your readers.

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