No More Medium – Build Your Own Site (2019) | Hacker News Reader

No More Medium – Build Your Own Site (2019)

nomedium.dev

694 pointsmooreds242 comments

I write on medium [1] and I don’t think switching to a stand alone website would be good for me at all.

Medium has “publications” where my work gets sent out to hundreds of readers that are reading about a topic, not necessarily from me - I’m not notable at all in the field so I’d have a rather hard time getting people to subscribe to __me__.

If I were to make my own website, I’d lose a ton of discoverability.

Plus, the monetization on medium is fantastic. Nowhere else would I get that return per view - I’m currently averaging around 25k views a month with a $500 return.

I do have my gripes with the platform, but in my case, Medium is the worst platform for writing besides all the rest. [1] https://anth-oleinik.medium.com/

For what it's worth, you're currently losing my discoverability by using a platform that I don't. Me (and many, many other people) will get redirected to your site, see a big intrusive banner on our screen, and leave. It doesn't matter if you were about to disclose the panacea or secrets to life, there's simply no writing on Medium that's worth the royal asspain of stepping through your digital metal detector.

You're increasing the amount of complexity in your reader's stack to reduce the complexity of your stack. Much like how nobody clicks the 'Reddit is better in the app!' button, you should be conscious that most people nope-out when they click a link and don't get your article.

Yes, they're losing yours, but that's a small cost to pay vs NO ONE discovering their stuff.

Basically what this comes down to is that there's a market for something like Medium's earlier days, back when it was decent. Someone just needs to figure out a better way to monetize it, while still having the mind share Medium used to have.

Ah yes the monetisation. That's always been a problem on the internet.

Yes you can reach millions of people but not earn a single €. Many such cases! Newspapers almost went broke because of the digital future until they decided to do something completely anti web 2.0: PAYWALL IT. And it worked newspapers were saved.

Did it work though? I've never actually signed up to a paper like that.

I've had a subscription to the guardian online but they didn't have a paywall. Especially because of that I got to know the content they brought better. If they'd had a paywall I'd have just closed the tab after the first three articles and never have gotten to the point of thinking "hey this is really a site that I identify with".

However when the whole Brexit thing started it became too big a topic and it became annoying as I'm not UK based so I stopped renewing. Before that time they had much deeper coverage of topics I was interested in

This is the main problem today. Good journalism costs money, and that money can come from ads, but that's usually not enough to pay the freight. Hence paywalls.

Or... it can be free.

But it also costs money to run a site. Especially if you're serving up millions of pages of content and images.

So... someone is paying the bills. The question is who, and why?

Bottom line is that "free" news either comes from someone selling you and your personal information, or it comes from someone with an agenda.

And that's the problem I spoke of earlier. You're either getting information from a recommendation engine designed to promote "engagement" and as such tends towards serving up controversy... or you're getting your information from someone with a specific agenda... which means they're feeding you what they want you to think.

I agree, but a paywall is not the answer IMO.

I'm not going to sign up to a site to read only a few random articles. And the number of free ones they usually offer is way too low to really get a feel for what the site offers. Most sites I visit already present a paywall when I click through a few links from hacker news or reddit. This way I don't really feel any engagement with the site and I'm not tempted to ever sign up for it.

The Guardian didn't have a paywall at that time, but the high quality of their articles and the strength of reporting on topics that interest me (privacy in particular) convinced me to take out a subscription. I wouldn't have experienced that quality if they had a paywall, they'd just have pissed me off after the first few and I'd never have come back. A newspaper is its own advertisement but if you can't read it you won't be swayed.

So what is the answer? I think added value. Extra deep content you can click through on or something, PDFs, things like that. It's a touch premise though, if you offer too much for free most people aren't going to pay for it. But put too many things behind a paywall and you'll be alienating potential customers.

Unfortunately the Guardian kind of lost its appeal as an EU-wide privacy-centric paper for me, as Brexit made it turn its focus inward just like the rest of Britain did. As I have no ties with the UK it lost its relevance to me.

I'm still looking for something that can fill that role now. EU-focused, privacy-first, progressive. I subscribed to Ars for a while too but I found it too 'popular'/'light' on the tech side and too US-centric (not a bad thing, just not my interest). If anyone else has a suggestion I'd appreciate it :)

Your observation is worth nothing because you also aren’t reading his personal blog, or wherever he would publish instead. You don’t even try to suggest other places you’d happily read.

Except he is reading HN which will link to personal blogs.

I am not saying write good context and they will find you, but Medium isn’t that great. Only ~9% of the writers made over $100 in a month, and the top earner fluctuates between 20 and 30k/month. You basically get a handful of people making a living and most people getting little more than free hosting.

How can he lose your discoverability when he never had it? Sure, you won’t read his blog now, but you had no way of discovering it before.

You can’t lose something you didn’t have.

TIL there's no way of discovering content outside of Medium.

We are literally on a forum where they could have discovered OP's blog before, now, or after.

Content can be discovered using a search engine or through a link from another website.

If the authors of other websites link to it. But how do they discover it?

Speaking of own sites, but did you ever find out what is going on with effbot.org? Somewhat off topic, but I just found your older post & HN has disabled new comments there… I’ve referred to that Tkinter guide so many times. Sad to see it down.

Word of mouth. If your writing is good, it spreads itself.

Someone has to discover it before it can spread by word of mouth.

If they're clicking on a link, discoverability is done. It's been discovered.

Clicking on a link from where? Sure, if you have popular places linking to you, you don’t need medium’s discovery

Who cares? Clicking on a link was the premise, we just assume it to be true and move on.

> Much like how nobody clicks the 'Reddit is better in the app!' button, you should be conscious that most people nope-out when they click a link and don't get your article.

I think you should be the one conscious that you're a small minority and not representing "most people" at all.

If you have to tell people out loud “you’re losing my business!” it usually means they didn’t even notice when they did.

Apparently adding this hoop is filtering for a lot more readers who are willing to pay, though. You're probably not willing to pay. I'm not either. From a financial point of view, both of our opinions on the Medium paywall are worth absolutely nothing.

There are other ways to make money on the internet, personally I like the "post shit everywhere for free, have a Patreon" model, which is giving me similar numbers of around $1k/mo for not much energy put into promotion, with a little bit more every month as my patrons grow. But some people like putting up paywalls, and it's their choice to do that with whatever they're creating.

Isn't the big banner only if the author opted into paid reads?

Does medium force you to be exclusive? Else why not do both, it takes a fre hours to set up and afterward 5min per post to post it nicely on both medium and your own site. In return you can have your own newsletter signups, freely link to ehatever you want, ... and have some independence if medium ever decides they don't like you (or you decide you don't like them).

I’m not a fan of Medium but I do admit that those are compelling arguments.

I'm with aoleinik. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, I had a stand-alone blog that--to put it bluntly--no one visited.

Today I put the same type of content on Medium and get thousands of readers on almost each and every article. So much, in fact, that I've consistently been in the top 1,000 creators on Medium several months running.

Yes, I understand that I'm simply part of their platform. but that's the same for anyone who attempts to create monetized content on Medium, YouTube, Twitch, or any of the many other platforms that pay creators for content.

As far as I can tell, articles and sites like the one above exist because some people simply believe that they should never have to pay for content, and that everything should be free.

Fair enough. And, that being the case, those people are never going to see my work. Also fair.

But Medium drives enough people to my content to make the exchange work for me. Plus it provides enough incentive to get me off my butt and create things that I probably won't have created otherwise.

If anyone who reads this doesn't like Medium. Fine. If you want to go elsewhere... also fine.

But thus far, the value proposition works for me, and it apparently also works for all of the people who read my articles and stories and tutorials each and every day.

To them, thanks.

Do you give up rights to your work by posting on Medium?

Also, do you have a link to your work?

No you don't give up rights. You own everything you write and publish. Medium has a setting where you can download all of your files at once as HTML files and there are tools for converting those html files into markdown.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/mediumexporter

Wow, that’s a significant return. I used to have a blog in which I wrote technical content, and the traffic was considerably more than 25,000 per month. I only spent money on that, never made a cent.

It did help me get jobs, but I can’t say with certainty that it got me better jobs than I would have without it. I’ve done far better since without a blog attached to my name.

Anyway, that’s a lot of money to make off of something I associated with costing money.

Sounds like someone should create a discoverability and curation service for independent blogs, independently of the hosting platform.

And we shall call it:

Real

Simple

Syndication

RSS was only part of the solution, the other half... was Google Reader: the homepage's "Suggested" section learned what you were starring/following and provided new content. I found tons of new stuff to read with that.

RSS is as you mentioned, syndication. Not discovery.

I guess apps like feedly have RSS recommendations, but that's not the same thing.

RSS made building discovery apps extremely easy. Today you can’t aggregate content at all most of the time unless you are the platform.

It was called Technorati.

Good ole days

$20 CPM is indeed very high. Just a cursory look at your blog I think 25k page views/mo is actually pretty low given the number of likes/user interactions you get on your posts and how frequently you post. I don't know how Medium is counting a view but usually 3 views translate to a unique user for blogs. I wouldn't be surprised if you counted your views with something like Google Analytics and saw numbers 10x more views than what Medium is reporting. If true then even a $10 CPM would put you in $2,500/mo range.

$20 CPM is very high for advertising, but it's not all that high for a paywall that is working well, no?

How do you get your posts into publications?

There are content curators for the publications - essentially, you just submit them and if your article is good enough they’ll publish it.

Step 1: put them behind Medium's paywall.

Step 2: I don't know what Step 2 is because I'm unwilling to do Step 1.

You work for medium and you only care about yourself, not about your readership if you have any

> I don’t think switching to a stand alone website would be good for me

"I don't agree with you, therefore you're a greedy jerk" why didn't you just come out and say what you meant.

> you only care about yourself, not about your readership if you have any

Well, that’s how capitalism is supposed to work innit? :) Producers care about themselves and consumers choose, competition ensues, the producers are therefore forced to conform to the consumers’ preferences.

What I mean is “you only care about yourself”, in a business setting, is not an accusation by itself, however unvirtuous it sounds. The opposite of “capitalism” in the first sentence is not “social democracy” or “welfare state”, it’s “planned economy”, and I’d say that every ethical judgment that moves us towards that has to go.

Except this works only when there’s (a lot of) competition, which is exactly what platforms attempt to exploit: you (a producer) move according to your best interest at each point, like everyone else, only to find yourself in a mono- (or oligo-) psony market where you have to sell through the platform(s) or perish, and now the platform(s) can enforce whatever they wish on you. The consumers aren’t feeling that spiffy, either. The laws of competition no longer apply.

(Huh, is moving to a platform essentially a prisoner’s dilemma with the (defect,defect) state obscured by marketing?)

> If I were to make my own website, I’d lose a ton of discoverability.

This is why I still (occasionally) write on Medium.

There are two sides to this, though we often only hear one.

For readers who aren't subscribed to Medium, it can be annoying. You go to read an article, and if that article is monetized, you see a banner to sign up. Plenty of people leave immediately.

Now let me tell why, as a writer, I still use Medium and will continue for the time being.

I only post 2-4 articles on there per month. But even then, I'm seeing ~50K views per month and this month I'm on track to earn $1000.

To see those same results on my own blog, I would need to learn a lot about SEO, affiliate marketing, and have a large Twitter following to direct traffic to my blog. I would also need to maintain it myself.

Sure, I might have a higher chance of going viral on HN, but how likely is that even anyway?

As a full-time developer with a newborn who's just looking to earn some fun money, Medium is perfect. I write, submit to a publication, and they take care of the rest.

People may say, "I'm not going to read your posts on Medium." My answer is: okay? Can't make everyone happy. But I'm still getting 50K views from people who do want to read them, and I'm okay with that.

The other point to make is that Medium only pays for views/reads from other Medium members, so I don't necessarily care if I go viral on HN or not. If I really cared about going viral, I would just post my article to something like dev.to and then submit it to HN.

If you're just looking to write and get views/go viral and don't care about money, then it might not make sense to post to Medium. But if you want to earn some money with relatively little effort, Medium is hard to beat.

Edit: Here's proof of my claims for people questioning them (https://medium.com/@SunnyB/proof-of-medium-stats-700c2b0b638...). Note: it is a Medium link to an unlisted post. Didn't know where else to put it.

I see why Medium is good for writers, and also somehow good for readers (it shows related articles which are sometimes valuable).

The problems with much of the audience is not that they do monetization, but how they do it.

Like many readers, I don't read enough Medium articles to pay $5/mo for it. I don't mind paying $5/mo for something useful, or sending a one-time donation. I gladly would pay, say, 25-50¢ for a good article, if I could do it without subscription. Such a commitment just feels unnecessary.

One way to do it is ads — good thing Medium is not pushing ads at me! My thanks. But there's still no easy way to pay a small amount.

I see how microtransactions are not economical. I wish Medium offered a "casual reader" plan, where I post, say, $10, and they go to pay per-article fees, not limited by time, that is, I'd not need to replenish it monthly if I haven't run into zero balance. This could be a gateway for more readers who just don't see the need to commit to a subscription. It could even lead to more conversions to subscribers.

Yeah honestly if I wasn’t writing on Medium and was only a reader, I’m not sure I would pay for it either. I totally get the gripes from a casual reader stand point.

There are some unique approaches to this idea of casual viewing. I know Coil (https://coil.com/) is doing this with the whole idea of Web 3.0.

The idea, if I understand correctly, is you pay $5 a month for a membership, and any time you consume content from someone who has set up a coil wallet, part of your subscription goes to them. Like Medium subscriptions, but for the entire web.

The problem right now is no isn’t really an incentive to use it. It’s all volunteer based. So the payouts from it are pennies.

Websites would need to have Coil-only content that only members would get to see to incentivize adoption, similar to Patreon. But since it’s decentralized, it’s up to each site to implement it.

I didn't even know there was a paid subscription. Just always closed the tab when bugged

This, plus I downvote on Reddit and tell Google News to show me less medium.

Yeah you can sign up for free, but to read all the paywall/monetized articles, you need to pay $5 per month.

Use ByPass Paywalls on github. No need to pay anything

"I only post 2-4 articles on there per month. But even then, I'm seeing ~50K views per month and this month I'm on track to earn $1000."

That's impressive. I'm clearly writing the wrong articles haha.

Oh oh that's because he's 100% lying. Just trying to draw more people into the scam. Hacker news is such a naive place sometimes.

Attacking another user like that will get you banned here. Please read the rules and stick to them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've been posting flamewar comments repeatedly, and that's not what this site is for, so I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

I have an old Medium account with the partner program activated. It doesn't earn a ton but I'm averaging ~ $10 per 2,500 views. 50k => $1,000 seems steep, but maybe their category is worth more. In addition, you can earn more for new reader referrals.

There's likely multiple reasons for this. One of my gripes with Medium is it's lack of transparency for how writers earn money.

If your views are coming from mainly external sources, Medium won't pay you for that.

Also, Medium pays more for more recent stories. Probably as an incentive to keep posting more articles. 1 hour of readership for a brand new story could get you $2-5. For an older story, it'll probably only earn you less than a dollar.

What makes you say this and what would lying bring them? Looking at their profile clearly shows they've been an active Medium poster for the last year and a half, and probably don't have a deeper association with the platform than that authorship.

Proof: https://medium.com/@SunnyB/proof-of-medium-stats-700c2b0b638...

That’s quite the accusation. What makes you say that?

> I would just post my article to something like dev.to and then submit it to HN.

Dev.to is flagged by default on HN.

Have you considered Substack?

I've heard good things about substack and it's on my list to check out. Just been too lazy.

Do you use it? And if so, how do you like it?

Would you mind linking to your medium blog?

https://medium.com/@SunnyB

I didn't want people to think I was just writing this to get attention which is why I didn't originally post it.

Here's proof to the claims I made: https://medium.com/@SunnyB/proof-of-medium-stats-700c2b0b638...

Every nights I read through the hackernews posts of the day which didn't reach the front page for my newsletter. Every time I click on a medium posts and that I click "previous" the page freeze during 1-2 seconds.

Therefore I have a ban on Medium posts. When medium.com is in the URL it is automatically discarded, unfortunately they offer white label domain so I happen to click on some of those links.

Also I didn't do stats about it, but if you want to blog about something and do it on Medium you have a much lower chance to be featured on HN (not talking about others forum ). Choose wisely. HN is not the center of the world but there are only a few places that can offer 50k visits

Hah, it’s you! Thanks for doing that effort, I enjoy every day when your newsletter hits my mailbox! But I can only agree with you, the Medium experience is really one of the worst you can have when reading a blog.

> unfortunately they offer white label domain

I always feel a bit tricked when I encounter that, myself.

Tip: Add this line to /etc/hosts (after finding the exact domain names they use):

127.0.0.1 medium.com w3schools.org

This doesn't work for me because I forget that I redirected a specific host and end up troubleshooting my network. Especially if a few medium articles showed up at the same time, months after I blocked it.

Maybe setup a custom 404 locally on a pi or something and redirect to that instead?

> unfortunately they offer white label domain

Looks like they just brought this functionality back as well:

https://blog.medium.com/custom-domains-are-back-2dee29560d59

Medium feels like it's the Experts-Exchange of article publishing, it's well indexed and comes up in search results, but every time I open a link and get begged to signup I immediately close it.

Hosting on Hugo/Netlify is kind of a good solution, but I feel like there needs to be a completely free, managed version. Setting up Hugo/Netlify is mostly simple, but it's one of those things when you don't want to deal with updating your local tech stack vs a managed service.

I feel like Substack is slightly better, although it still does lean towards "subscription" first services (but at least it's per user / patronage type model)

WriteFreely [0] may be an alternative. It allows you to self-host, or choose a hosting package. It also has a companion with paid subscription that is built on top of it, Write.as [1]. The nice thing is that all server instances are federated, and are gradually more deeply integrated with other Fediverse apps.

[0] https://write.as/writefreely

[1] https://write.as

The business is going to a subscription model, because blogging for ads simply doesn't pay enough anymore, it has long stopped doing so. All the big newspapers, Bloomberg, now even Reuters go subscription, because ads simply doesn't pay enough anymore. And we dream about big advertising money for our fledgling blog? Forget it. If you want to make money, sell your body, not your brain, go Onlyfans.

>> Medium feels like it's the Experts-Exchange of article publishing

Experts-Exchange, without the experts.

Did experts-exchange ever have any real experts anyway?

My memory says yes. When you did manage to scroll all the way down and find the replies amid the clutter, the actual answers were pretty good.

1. Medium is not competing for people willing to spend 30 min playing with the command line to get a blog up. (Note)

2. Discovery! Medium is about getting people to read your blog.

(Note) there is an obvious opportunity to create a medium like experience that lets people blog using Hugo and Netlify. I open an app, connect to my account (GitHub pages, or Netlify) type my article and post.

P.s I tried to put an asterisk instead of Note but it ended up putting everything in between in italics.

> Discovery! Medium is about getting people to read your blog.

This. I feel like as a reader, medium is becoming pretty useless, with the gate screens and stuff. But back when I was using it a lot, I published my stuff on Medium because it gave me eyeballs, the same way I put videos on youtube now as opposed to hosting them myself (even if it was easy to do).

If I put a post on my own blog, I'll be lucky to get 20 people looking at it. Last time I posted something on Medium, it went viral and got several hundred thousand views, including from this very website (and I hadn't even submitted it to Hacker News).

That's hard to beat. If someone else wants to make something similar, to help blog authors get the same thing publishing to Youtube or Spotify get you, that isn't Medium, go right ahead. I'll certainly consider your product.

> (Note) there is an obvious opportunity to create a medium like experience that lets people blog using Hugo and Netlify. I open an app, connect to my account (GitHub pages, or Netlify) type my article and post.

This is what I'd really like. All these alternatives assume you want to use your editor in the terminal and git and CI publication process. I want to edit markdown text in a web browser and click a button to see how its rendered and then go back to the editor without changing contexts at all.

The editor/git/CI model feels too much like actual fucking $dayjob work. Writing is already a difficult enough process -- lets turn it into software development while we're at it! I need to worry more about dependency management of my plugins while I'm trying to write and publish something.

Medium is worse though, its very annoying.

>I want to edit markdown text in a web browser and click a button to see how its rendered and then go back to the editor without changing contexts at all.

imml[1] comes close to this, it's all css tricks to display content so I imagine SEO would suffer until search engine's learn css #navigation but for everyone else it just works. If it had a push to github pages button it would be the perfect minimalist site/blog. For now the publishing step involves downloading the single resulting html file and uploading it manually with surge.sh or to the website host you bought your domain from.

[1] https://leoncvlt.github.io/imml/#

Well there is https://www.netlifycms.org/

This is exactly what I want.

A modern Wordpress. But with strict guide rails and simplicity.

Does such a thing exist?

I’ve seen ghost but it’s quite expensive for personal use.

I’ve ended up using something like the “headless WordPress” technique mentioned in the article on one of my websites, though I use a simple Django front end to pull directly from WordPress db. It’s super fast.

I really like WordPress’s out-of-the box classic editing experience and revision history.

It’s probably missing some of the “strict guide rails” you probably want, but I can at least disable user-uploaded plugins which helps a lot.

https://hackmd.io/ is pretty nice for editing markdown, I haven't used the site in a long time. It looks like they are offering something commercial which is nice.

Anyway hackmd+zero click integration to posting to a serving system, anything.

Check out http://getpublii.com, it is quite similar to the app you're describing. (it's not Hugo-based, but similarly outputs a static site with easy upload options, including to GitHub Pages or Netlify, and is free and open-source)

I think what you're describing is Forestry: https://forestry.io/

Hugo user here. I just wanted to reinforce your message - I sometimes think about posting on Medium instead, for "hits"... When I crave attention; but as you said, those readers likely aren't my target audience anyhow. For those thinking of using Hugo (or any static site generator), do it!

Yes, do it! Hugo is great because it's fast. [1]

Fast software is the best software. [2] (Comments: [3])

Speed is the killer feature. [4] (Comments: [5])

Slow software is an opportunity for competitors. [6]

[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2019/12/performance-matters-jekyll-v...

[2]: https://craigmod.com/essays/fast_software/

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20517144

[4]: https://bdickason.com/posts/speed-is-the-killer-feature/

[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26312516

[6]: https://fabiensanglard.net/silicone/index.html

Hugo is great until you want to do something it doesn't support. The performance and single-binary nature of Hugo are really cool, but I ended up sticking with Jekyll for its robust plugins API despite the trade-offs in speed and complexity (dealing with gem/bundler, maybe even rbenv, etc)

That makes sense; there's always a tradeoff. For me, it was a lot of work to switch from Jekyll to Hugo, and for some, that's not worth it.

Similarly, it took me about 2 hours to set up a personal Jekyll website with a deployment script to a S3 static website cached by cloud front. I usually pay less than $1 per month in AWS fees.

No trackers, no JavaScript, no third party assets. If you can get away with a static website it is definitely the way to go and the tools are out there and easy to use.

Don't you also need to pay for a domain name?

Not if you use GitHub Pages, GitLab Pages, Netlify, Neocities etc etc. They all offer the same kind of deal substack and wordpress do, ie an author.platformname.com kind of domain.

Yes, I have a route 53 domain name for approx $14/yr

Pps. * Just put a space after asterix.

The correct syntax is \*, so you can write ***lala*** or \\* or something.

I noticed early on in with HN that the culture for references when commenting is to use [1]

[1] so I just simply adopted it also.

Medium seems to be old news, Substack is apparently the new hotness. Seeing more interesting content showing up at the latter. Not sure substack doesn't have a lot of the same issues Medium has, though.

As an aside: I don't understand why Google hasn't updated Blogger to compete with Medium (and now Substack). Seems like some Google employees could get a good review/promotion by doing that. With all the stuff Google changes (often for no good reason), Blogger seems to just remain stuck in the amber of ~2005.

Substack is still in the “investors throwing money at them” phase. Medium is in the “squeezing every possible source of revenue to justify that investment” phase.

Does anyone know if Substack is making more money than Medium was at this point? From the outside looking in, it sure seems that way.

Sounds like a great time to take advantage of all that VC funding then. I'm sure there will be a new blog platform burning investor money by the time Substack starts to squeeze their users.

Being 'stuck' in 2005 is exactly why I use Blogger for my blog posts. I don't post to get eyeballs, I don't have monetization turned on. I post (about mainly tech) for my future self, so that if I run into the same weird error or need to do the same thing again, I have it documented online; a place that I can access from any device with an internet connection. If others find my posts helpful, that's fantastic, but it's secondary.

I wanted a platform that I could log into, that was fast, non-intrusive, that I could link my own domain to, and that was 'stuck' in 2005. I don't need anything shiny and honestly, for most things people blog about, a site that exists in circa 2005 is more than enough.

As someone in IT tier 1/2/3 support, I and many peers would not be able to do our jobs without blogs like yours. If only people knew how many times we just google/ddg an error and end up on a blog with a fix.

Your service is appreciated o7

>Blogger seems to just remain stuck in the amber of ~2005.

I dont blog myself, but what would be needed to be added to Blogger? A blog is just header image + text anyway right?

Meduim blogs are mostly just text right? Is it just the nice theme? Ads? Payment?

hahaha god if only, Blogger is a giant blob of javascript that constantly gets in the way of reading stuff.

Substack doesn't seem great either.

https://twitter.com/Codie_Sanchez/status/1408473091727052804...

(From the POV of a reader, not an author)

Substack has its share of warts, but is much more acceptable than Medium.

For now.

Medium was originally praised for no bullshit presentation too.

Imgur is another example, founded as the "no BS" image host as counter to what photobucket/imageshack has become, it's now pretty much at the state those two were at imgur's founding

Substack is great if you already have followers. Medium is great when you are starting out and looking for readers.

Substack tends to annoy you for your mail rather obtrusively.

As a reader rather than a writer, I find Medium to be so bad that I stopped going there entirely. If it's only on Medium, it doesn't exist to me.

Here we go again.

People posting on Medium (or any other "platform") are seeking distribution, not a 200ms rendering performance or owning their namespace.

Also, nothing wrong with paying for content — I'm a Medium subscriber, among many other publications.

Let's discuss again when a major NYT columnist leaves for the sake of publishing with Hugo.

Honest question: Do columnists leave NYT for Medium? (Perhaps they do, but if so I have failed to notice it.)

I was referring to the NYT as an equiv. distro platform.

Except it isn’t the same at all. The NYT is an edited publication, not a distribution platform.

https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/

I mean, he "resigned under pressure"[1] over his behaviour and comments - it's not like he voluntarily upped and left the NYT for Medium.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/business/donald-mcneil-ne...

The uncertainty about whether my readers will get blocked from reading or not is a legit concern.

Well, if your target audience is HN, then you really need to worry about this. But for the majority of the (non-technical) bloggers, this isn’t the case.

Theyre doing that with substack, which is way less naggy than medium.

> Also, nothing wrong with paying for content — I'm a Medium subscriber, among many other publications.

There is when your publishing medium gatekeeps you for no other reason than to drive its own metrics. (Also nice humblebrag?)

Medium is scum, I hope it burns

What's wrong with paying for text? I don't own a TV and I assume most people are splurging more on their cable in a single month than s/o paying for five or six web publications.

Do you get paid by Medium for your posts that others need to pay to read? (Edited: misread that you're also an author there).

In my book, it's wrong to pay if original authors don't get that payment.

> In my book, it's wrong to pay if original authors don't get that payment.

Wait, are you under the impression that the authors don't get paid?

It is my understanding that Medium will nag visitors to sign up and/or restrict access to your Medium articles even if you're not enrolled into its partner program.

Is this incorrect?

Medium, like YouTube, is a platform for creators to make money with little friction while also providing exposure that is difficult to build on their own. That, above all, is why platforms like this are successful.

Compared to YouTube, Medium is not "successful".

Correct. They failed at monetization without pissing off their users. Partly because they did it earlier. Youtube was ubiquitous by the time they started pushing intrusive ads, so people either dealt with it, paid, or used an adblocker instead of just leaving.

That doesn't change that the "idea" behind Medium is good and that there's a market for a blogging platform that gives authors easy access to a large audience.

Good ideas aren't worth much if the business model doesn't work. They've raised over $100M and have pivoted multiple times. At some point you have to ask whether the idea is not a feasible one.

Alternate possibility: the core idea is a good one, but they raised too much money. Now they have to live up to an impossibly-high valuation and can't just be a blogging platform.

"Good ideas aren't worth much if the business model doesn't work"

I'm reminded of the dot com bubble in the late 90s.

I have nothing to say about Medium, but if someone indeed can make $1K with a couple of articles about an arcane subject, then by all means do it.

You will not make the money it costs to run the web server of your own blog by writing a couple of posts a month.

To make some money, you will need several posts per day, on a hot subject, and you will have to promote it all day long.

I was editor-in-chief of a large, well-known website for many years, and I know what I am talking about.

We paid our contributors $25 a piece, that's how much it was worth. Later on, we could get away with paying nothing.

I know people with well-read and well-maintained websites who received $20 a month from Google Ads.

For a website to receive some traction, you must be at it for years, and after a few years, pay per clicks will be lower.

Websites grow with abandon, but advertising budgets don't. So the advertising dollars are split into smaller, and smaller pieces.

Serious advertising money goes into microtargeting, no more target groups, but target persons. For that, you must be a Facebook et al.

Basically, the times of making serious money with writing are over. I have many well-known journalist friends, and they hurt. Their numbers dwindle.

I was lucky, I made serious money decades ago by writing – as a copywriter for ad agencies. Even that doesn’t pay as royally as it used to. But to make a living with writing, you need to "go to the dark side," into advertising, PR, best to the PR department of a large company with long-term job security and health insurance.

Forget the easy money with your own website. Use it to build your brand, to advertise yourself, to put together a portfolio of your work, an interactive business card.

But forget the easy money with your own website.

I’m surprised they didn’t mention Substack.

It’s not optimal for discovery, but rewards writers far better than Medium can.

It’s telling that so many people go to Substack once they’re kicked out of somewhere.

If you want to build your brand or an audience, Substack is the place to go.

Substack is better for building an audience for sure, but I think Medium is better for less “known” authors. You would probably go to Substack for someone you personally trust/value, for analysis. Medium is more for evergreen content, casual reading, less “current events” stuff.

The author lists a bunch of alternatives, but none of them have monetization built in. How are those viable alternatives?

This seems like it is totally missing the point about why people want to write on medium, which is to make money.

This is the equivalent of telling people “why are you working at a job, why don’t you work on hobby projects instead”

> This is the equivalent of telling people “why are you working at a job, why don’t you work on hobby projects instead”

This is literally what people do sometimes. I released two decently successful freemium apps and get regularly one-liners in reviews and e-mails like this:

- 3/5* Good app! Please make it free.

- 1/5* Bad app! Feature XYZ costs money and I won't buy PRO [~4USD] just for it.

- 1/5* Make it fully free and I will give you 5 stars!

- Please send me your source code.

HN posts and comments aren't that impudent but it's unfortunately often the same lack of perspective. You'll read here walls of text about how the web nowadays sucks because of ads and tracking without any consideration of the fact that publishers rely on this form of monetization. The most popular "solution" here is just blocking ads via pi-hole etc. and creates a good example for the tragedy of the commons[1]. It becomes an arms race between ad-blockers and ad-providers and makes everything even worse. This makes the appeal to stop using medium even more ironic. Medium is at least trying to create a sustainable online publishing platform that doesn't need classical online ads to survive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

I have 2 major problems with medium:

1) Something on their page causes my browser to use up 100% CPU. Navigating away or using readermode fixes the problem. I suspect they have a CSS animation on an element.

2) After loading the page, wait a few minutes, the page reloads by itself. 4 times out of 5, it will fail to reload itself and display "500 Oops, we couldn't load that article" or something like that.

Utterly shit experience. It seems like I'm the only person experiencing these problems because I can't find any discussion online about these really annoying problems.

You are not the only person; it's miserable.

Let me add (3), the editor interface, possibly the most infuriatingly bad software I've had to use (for work) in the last few years. And I am routinely exposed to awful software.

I've noticed the CPU thing too...when I am on a medium page, my phone will slow to a crawl and heat up like crazy. My only guess so far is that they're trying to crowdsource some crypto mining.

I just noticed that almost all of the URLs in this contain UTMs.

So as we read and discuss this post, are we deliberating on a valuable piece of insight shared by a peer? Or are we primarily participating in a set of promotional campaigns?

If you're a developer comfortable with working with Markdown, I strongly recommend Hugo as this page recommends, and deploying it with something like GitHub Pages.

For themes I recommend Wowchemy (https://wowchemy.com/), which has many features necessary for a modern technical blog albeit a bit of a learning curve as a result.

I've previously used Medium to post articles I wrote, and decided to move my blog to Hugo about two years ago, and I definitely love it.

Load times of Medium posts on my Nexus 5X/Firefox Mobile were so bad, I stopped clicking on links to Medium eventually.

I declined to renew my Medium subscription a couple days ago. I had generally stopped visiting the site ages ago.

My problem is not with Medium's paywall. In principle, I'm 100% fine with being asked to pay to read something that someone else wrote. $5 per month doesn't bother me; I would gladly give even more if I felt that it was supporting the production of high-quality media. I already give many times that much to my local NPR and PBS stations.

My problem with Medium is the pay-per-read model. They have eliminated the actual ads, but left in place all of the incentive structures favoring the production of low-value clickbait articles.

That said, I don't want to harsh on writers for choosing Medium. Sure, they could use Hugo to slap together a blog. But, in order to get paid, they would probably end up needing to drop in Google ads, and end up with much the same situation that exists with Medium, only perhaps minus the access to an audience, and plus a bunch of other annoying ad network crap.

> They have eliminated the actual ads, but left in place all of the incentive structures favoring the production of low-value clickbait articles.

This is my biggest beef with Medium - which isn't really a problem with Medium itself, but how certain "authors" are (ab)using it.

It's quite often that I'll be googling for something, and end up at a Medium article - but it's 50/50 whether it's a good article, or a single paragraph of basic information that's been largely copy/pasted from somewhere else.

There are lots of good articles on Medium, but the large quantity of articles that are basically SEO spam have me clicking through from Google less and less these days.

I have trouble taking advice like that from a page on which hovering over links ramps up browser's CPU usage to over 100% (of a core).

Also, kinda ironic that the page links to an article from 2017 called ‘Why Medium Doesn't Matter Anymore’, while here we are complaining how we still hate having to deal with it.

You know your website is bad when people build a browser extension to make it usable for its original purpose. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/make-medium-readab...

I feel like this page misses the point. While I agree with the sentiment entirely, the author then goes on to recommend a plethora of static site generators.

Fact is, one of the selling points of Medium is it’s simplicity to use. If a Medium user were to read that page, they’d take one look at the many technical hurdles needed to run an SSG and they would dart back to Medium at the speed of a thousand gazelles.

What they should have done, in my opinion, is provide options that have little to no technical barriers to entry. Like managed Wordpress hosting, for example.

30 minutes for alternative? It should be 5 minutes tops if not that for you to host content on ready made platform.

It feels that Medium is a product that could be disturbed. Basic WYSIG editor and easy upload. Then again I wonder what would be business model for such product. And would it just end up being what Medium is doing...

Yeah Medium was great at first. All the issues now are driven by monetization.

Did this lead to a lower quality of articles, as it was less about having to say something and more about saying (obvious) things about popular topics in order to make money? Or did Medium find a good way of taking the best of both worlds?

(I always skip Medium articles, so I cannot judge for myself)

"All the issues now are driven by monetization"

5000 years of human civilization summed up in one sentence.

That "free 3 articles" is REALLY annoying. We are actually building a content-oriented app and Medium is the #1 example of what we DON'T wanna become on all the meetings. Having a completely subscribed platform? Fine. Giving some stuff free then asking for money (Which in my case switching to Private Browsing/Incognito): annoying. It might look nice for authors, but at the end of the day it's the readers who enable that monetization. If you can't make readers happy, they'll eventually go away no matter how compelling the platform looks for the authors. And I frankly want to see quality content move to other platforms that deserve to be monetized and doesn't annoy readers.

Medium blocking copy/paste and instead prompting tweets of the highlighted text must be one the most infuriating things I encounter on the web. The only thing making it bearable is FireFox reader mode.

Medium used to be so good in it's early days (first 2-4 years) that it was my favorite site to visit. I remember even signing up for paid membership as soon as they rolled it out.

Now I never go there. The design degraded so much and the user experience sucks.

It's amazing to me how can something so good become so terrible so quickly. Truly makes me believe that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a great mantra to live by when it comes to redesign initiatives.

I like Medium. These days I rely on them to get my news since I can't rely on mainstream media. Articles written by regular people sharing their thoughts is the best way to know what's going on in the world.

I feel that Medium's recommendation algorithm is one of the least biased ones of all social websites. Maybe that's why some people are advocating to stop using it?

Without medium, I'd be left with only Reddit's /r/conspiracy as my source of world news.

Past threads:

No Medium – Build Your Own Site, Please - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19602238 - April 2019 (11 comments)

No Medium - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19442873 - March 2019 (3 comments)

There's so much low quality blog spam out of medium that all my Google searches automatically get -medium.com suffix

How did you set that up?

Firefox lets you set up custom search engines with bookmarks' keyword and %s replacement variable

So I have a bookmark to "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+-medium.com+-quora.com+-a..." and "g" as keyword

When I type "g center div" in my search bar, I will get a search page for "center div" with all of my excluded sites

I'm still trying to understand why anyone remotely technical is using it at all

Setting up a blog isn't exactly rocket science

Medium is low-friction, aids discoverability, and makes monetisation easy - those are pretty compelling reasons compared to setting up your own blog.

Simply telling people to 'Stop Using ABC' and 'Switch to XYZ' which the latter is more user unfriendly probably makes them stay and continue using ABC.

They will only move to another platform if it makes them more money and is easier to setup or migrate. Like Substack.

As a Medium author (1), I'm very content with return. On a good month I made more than 500 and when I don't feel like writing I can still make good 200-300 per month.

(1) https://mlengineer.io/

Heh. How long until substack will fall out of favour with the tech and free speech crowd?

Is this site supposed to be an example of this "good journalism" it's talking about? Because I miss the compelling arguments which are targeting the real reasons why people use something like medium.

twtr is also bad (requires an account just to read its amazingly intellectual social media content), but people still use it. Sigh. Let's blacklist this blogger guy for his perpetual crimes against civilization.

“Build your own” is not a solution. Not everyone is an engineer. Most are not.

I am surprised why medium is so popular for technical/coding articles, despite not having any support for rendering syntax highlighted code snippets and math symbols.

Why not write on medium and have a Hugo blog? You can publish the same post on both places and link Medium readers to your blog.

Medium has a terrific writing experience. Click a button and start writing. Don't have to think about the title, what the file name will be, none of that. No friction. That's why I've used it in the past.

I have a Hey account and have tried Hey World, and it's... ok. Formatting sucks. No discoverability. Just meh.

I haven't written on Medium in a couple do years now. Last time I did, though, the writer had the option to have the article be part of the paywall or not. I do not know if that is still optional, but if so maybe anger is misdirected at Medium for this (or you could just pay for the content...).

Medium is just YouTube, but for written text.

Perhaps someone can develop a "medium-dl" to make reading less painful.

There are plenty of reader apps that will do this for any type of article/blog post.

I've been blogging for a number of years; most of the time on my own domain (dsebastien.net), but without being overly serious about it.

After a long pause, I started writing again. I decided to give Medium a try, as it had gained a lot of popularity. It was refreshing compared to my old custom Wordpress theme. I was also curious about the possibility of monetizing my content

In 2019 I put more effort into blogging on Medium and my posts started gaining some traction on the platform. For about a year, I didn't get much ROI ($0-3 per month), but then, probably as I approached it better, it started to compound. Since 2020 I get $50-100 per month from Medium and sometimes much more ($300-700 with outliers).

Still, I concur with the points made in the post. Medium has many downsides, the first of which being the paywall, which is getting more and more aggressive. Also, I realized that I was just hurting my personal brand by not bringing visitors directly on my own domain.

That's why I've changed my approach this year. I've rebooted my own Website and publish there first. Still, I continue to post my articles on Medium as well, behind their paywall, but with the canonical URL pointing to my blog so as not to hurt SEO as much. I think that this is a safer long-term approach and it gives me the best of both worlds; I can still monetize (even if less than before) while keeping full ownershop and better SEO towards my domain.

People writing about Free, Open source content on a platform which hides it behind a pay wall.

I’m very interested in seeing a comparison of Medium and Substack, payout-wise.

I ignore articles on medium.com

Custom-domain medium-hosted sites are a real pain.

Medium blogs must have the worst experience in the web.

I’d need to go out of my way to make a website that bad.

I automatically devalue the authors on that side, obviously unfairly.

Someone on this site coined the phrase “Medium developers”, which sticks in my mind.

Which of these problems can be fixed by using an ad blocker?

Happily, just pay me the equal ~$100s/Mo, the distribution of Publications, the killer SEO rankings from Medium (always first page) & the 1000s of click-throughs to my personal site.

There is a lot out there that is bad. What is good?

If you’re going to write about how terrible a platform is, make sure your presenting it in a responsive way. This is a pain to use on my phone

Reads fine on my tiny old smartphone. It seems responsive (as in responsive design). Also, looks fine in reader mode.

What problems did you have with it?

I’m on an iPhone 12 mini and half the page is horizontal scrolling and it jitters as I scroll down the page.

Looks like it may just be you. No issues on a cheap $300 no name Android device. Renders and scrolls fine.

Test it with a feature-complete browser and see how it compares to Safari, then.

I also tested on iPhone 12 Mini and RealMe R3.

I got the same problem as them

Also, the contrast is not great and the letters are really thin. I'm not a fan of Medium but the text on it is usually readable without effort.

That's only true if you're selling your platform as an alternative.

I was getting so many paywalled medium articles in Google searches that I removed them with uBlock:

google.##.g:has(a[href="http://medium.com"])

If they aren’t paywalled, they’ll hijack ctrl+c in code snippets and give you the option to tweet the snippet. Like what the actual fuck, I’ll find it elsewhere if I don’t figure it out on my own.

Writes an individual who strongly suggests Hugo and who just happens to create Hugo themes.

> Writes an individual who strongly suggests Hugo

Why is this a problem? I should hope that someone asking me to drop a particular piece of software has a strong argument for using another, and actually believes in it enough to use it themselves.

> just happens to create Hugo themes.

from their github, I see 3 Hugo themes out of 64 projects. They aren't even paid themes. If you are trying to reveal some kind of conflict of interest, it isn't very convincing.

at that point it will be faster to list the nice platforms

Is substack any better? It seems to be the new hotness.

I currently subscribe to one Substack newsletter and so far I like it.

Even if Substack would tank I would still be able to read those articles in my e-mail client.

However, I’m quite selective with subscribing to newsletters. So if others are the same, that could be a limit on the potential growth of Substack.

I stopped using Medium when I realized you can read more content for free if you don’t login. Once you are logged in the paywall comes up way more often and the you get bombarded with email by default.

Maybe the "boomer" in me is showing (Im 30) but why did people move to medium from blogspot.com or wordpress.com?

Seems like medium just looks like a normal blog to me with a fancy theme. Most posts are mostly text, so a blogspot/blogger site would do fine for free right?

I remember when most bloglinks where .blogspot.com links.

Wordpress seems to host blogs for free too, with paid plans for more features. The free plan actually seems great. https://wordpress.com/pricing/?compare=1#lpc-pricing

Medium allows making money from blog posts, similar to how you can make money on YouTube. It also does some work in helping you gain readership by allowing helping people discover other blogs in ads and in a special section on their website.

As a writer, Medium is probably the best medium to blog on. As a reader, it's probably one of the worst popular ones.

I think Medium works better with JS disabled, I don't remember seeing any paywalls there since I started to browse with JS disabled by default.

I chose random blog post on Medium and tried to copy a sentence out of it. It offers to let me "create an account to highlight a passage", or tweet it out via Twitter, but I can't just copy it and paste it into my notes elsewhere.

Whose idea was it to assert this level of control over written material, especially user-generated material? It's a very unpleasant experience.

EDIT: Dialing down my tone a bit here, I should have taken a minute between trying the frustrating thing and posting about it.

I understand general public can fall prey to fancy UI and easy blogging but I do not expect medium to be used by people from IT who know better.

For example, recently both Dart and Flutter got version upgrade and they announced this via Medium. I mean you have largest Software company backing you. Why would you choose medium for your blog!?

Isn't software development currently just going and picking up what is the big popular name today. Be that platform, database, language or framework. Picking Medium fits perfectly to this mind-set. Move fast break things. Don't reinvent the wheel... Or do when it makes CV better even if you are writing same product again...

It's not like Google has it's own blogging platform...

Shhh, don't tell them! They'll kill it if they remember it's there.

medium was a great platform, you can make you own subdomain and mange what you want, then the focus change from make a great blog experience from a modic price for non tech-savy to, try to become a premium buzzfed, the ui is the same but the home screen is full of crappy shit first post(The Real Way to Figure Out How Smart Someone Is it work every time), and you are force to premium or kick like happens to hackernoon and freecodecamp

One of the founders of Hackernoon here. They didn't kick so much as "you cant make any money here, and we are going to make it difficult for you to operate"

Ev and co arent bad people. Im actually a fan, but i think he is shortsighted in his goals.

> Whose idea was it to assert this level of control over written material

The real mistake was giving web developers the power to do this in the first place. It was meant to help usability by preventing selection of things that weren't meant to be selected.

Of course the first thing people did instead was abuse it in order to protect "their content".

It's even more frustrating when it some programming related blog and you can't copy and paste the code snippet

Also, the code snippets often don't work when you paste them because of the "smart quotes".

The worst part is this can be activated with CSS.

There's a lot of genuine use cases for pointer-events: none, so it's a difficult issue to navigate.

No need to dial your tone down, the absolute fucking baboons whose idea that level of restriction on a website was deserve every bit of hate and criticism they get.

Reader mode is your friend. (Not that I'm a supporter of this pattern)

It seems that you’re using a user-hostile agent instead of a user agent.

It's been this way since they launched, hasn't it?

I tell you what would be really nice: a browser that lets me click & launch into reader mode directly.

None of these shenanigans with Turing complete JS. Just give me text to read.

Everyone talks about how complicated browsers and the modern web are, and how impossible it is to make a new browser engine, even Microsoft gave up...

What about a reader mode browser engine? Couldn't you make a great browser from scratch by limiting it to this use case?

Perhaps imperfect, but how about [1]?

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...

> I tell you what would be really nice: a browser that lets me click & launch into reader mode directly.

Safari can be set to use reader mode by default (then you can tell it to ignore individual sites). I use it in this mode.

Safari is stuck in the dark ages of Apple lockin, isn't it?

I'm not sure I would call it "lockin" but yes, it only runs on Apple devices.

You asked if any browser does this, and I said that one did. Other browsers supported by your browsing history are unlikely to make this change.

Totally fair take.

Seems like it should be an easy plugin. I'll see if firefox has anything.

> Safari is stuck in the dark ages of Apple lockin, isn't it?

Why would Apple be obligated or even incentivised to make their browser for other operating systems?

Same reason smart musicians embraced Napster. Led to more sales as the world shifted to streaming.

In what world would they not want their browser to be used?

They used to support Safari for Windows but it was a lot of work. It was worth it so that developers using Windows had a change of testing for Safari as well. Once the iphone came out and Macs became popular development machines in their own right, the burden of supporting Safari on Windows stopped mattering.

In Google's case the opposite applies: they don't have a development platform but need ubiquity because collecting user data is their reason for being. So they need to support a lot of platforms for the sake of their customers' (i.e. companies buying ads).

Can you not do this with browsers? Turning off JS should get rid of most of the egregious stuff, and I think at least Firefox lets you strip out CSS and inject your own (or if not, then via plugin like Greasemonkey)...

Maybe? The experience would be:

- Normal model with JS on (modulo ad blocker/flash blocker)

- Oh, hey, a site that plays shenanigans with text!

- Rightclick, open in reader view

I solve that in Safari by enabling the Development menu and mapping Shift⌘J to Disable JavaScript.

Works great for any website that tries to disable right clicking for whatever reason.

> Whose idea was it to assert this level of control over written material, especially user-generated material? It's not just user-hostile, it's sadistic.

It's optimized for public sharing of user generated content to social network platforms. Web 2.0 in a nutshell but optimized for outreach, not personal log.

Breaking a browsers default behaviour IMO needs a good justification. This isn't a good justification.

If sharing would be really that important to your plattform, why not add it as an option that doesn't break expected behaviour?

You are not the intended audience.

I am not defending their model nor their implementation.

> Breaking a browsers default behaviour IMO needs a good justification. This isn't a good justification.

Good enough for them though. Their site, their choice. Also, it's not like there isn't many browser extensions to disable that behavior.

> You are not the intended audience.

A site full of programming articles (Medium) probably wants its articles to be read by programmers.

> A site full of programming articles (Medium) probably wants its articles to be read by programmers.

I haven't found official data but programming is in the 25th position and software in dev in the 40th:

Here are the top 43 most popular Medium tags in 2021

    Life (520,000 followers)

    Startup (487,000 followers)

    Blockchain (473,000 followers)

    Poetry (455,000 followers)

    Life Lessons (452,000 followers)

    Politics (396,000 followers)

    Health (374,000 followers)

    Love (350,000 followers)

    Travel (334,000 followers)

    Technology (334,000 followers)

    Entrepreneurship (333,000 followers)

    Self Improvement (332,000 followers)

    Education (330,000 followers)

    Writing (324,000 followers)

    Business (320,000 followers)

    Cryptocurrency (314,000 followers)

    Design (267,000 followers)

    Social Media (241,000 followers)

    Music (228,000 followers)

    Relationships (214,000 followers)

    Social Media (214,000 followers)

    Sports (209,000 followers)

    Mental Health (202,000 followers)

    Productivity (187,000 followers)

    Programming (186,000 followers)

    Food (167,000 followers)

    Leadership (166,000 followers)

    Javascript (160,000 followers)

    Art (152,000 followers)

    Fiction (143,000 followers)

    Humor (143,000 followers)

    Artificial Intelligence (143,000 followers)

    UX (138,000 followers)

    Culture (136,000 followers)

    Books (135,00 followers)

    Photography (128,000 followers)

    Creativity (126,000 followers)

    Data Science (123,000 followers)

    Psychology (119,000 followers)

    Software Development (117,000 followers)

    Coronavirus (115,000 followers)

    Self (104,000 followers)

    Family (103,000 followers)

https://findingtom.com/most-popular-medium-tags/

Other articles I found also show programming articles are in the bottom of the list.

I'm not saying that there is only tech content on Medium, but it's a large part of the site. The list you posted has many programming-related categories in it.

Its almost like someone should have started a programming focused publication on Medium or something :P

I use Firefox with Noscript browser next to my regular browser for any such websites with questionable practices.

> Please stop using Medium > Switch to Hugo and Netlify (https //netlify com/?utm_source=nomedium&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=nomedium)

I really wish people would disclose when they're profiting from a link click. Am I misunderstanding something or is this website profiting in some way here? There's no referral code but it has a utm source/campaign

Those are tracking, not monetization.

Doesn't utm_campaign imply that Netlify has an active marketing campaign against Medium (nomedium) and this is contributing to that?

It implies it, but may not mean it.

Why would the author be interested in helping netlify track where the clicks were coming from unless they got something out of it?

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