Ask HN: Why do developers blog on Medium while it's paywalled? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do developers blog on Medium while it's paywalled?

37 pointsbehnamoh15 comments

Unfortunately, there's so much good content on Medium that appears at the top of Google search as well, but non-subscribers are deprived of such content.

At the same time, I see lots of discussion here on HN about how many developers care for the free and open internet. How is it then, that many developers write and contribute to such paywall websites?

And it's not just Medium. Many websites are built on top of Medium and they too get paywalled.

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> so much good content on Medium

There is some, but it's mostly crap just like everywhere else. I usually avoid it unless I'm pointed to something of specific interest, and I don't find that I miss it.

Substack on the other hand does seem to have better stuff than most places.

Amen. Paywall works well here cause if/when you pay to take it down, you expose that Medium is a fantastic crap aggregator.

Publications and spread. I have a larger following on Medium than I have in dev.to or hashnode. So I post there and usually provide a canonical link to the actual article in a more "decent" location.

The value is the publication such as https://medium.com/javarevisited/ which I usually use or https://medium.com/better-programming which is a bit more painful (for the submitter). But the benefit is that both have orders of magnitude more followers than I do. When an article goes up in a publication I get huge viewer numbers.

Monetization isn't available in my country so I never enabled it as an option. I'm not sure if I would turn it on to begin with as all my new content on medium isn't exclusive to the platform.

It wasn't that way for a long time. I guess some people who post on Medium haven't noticed?

Probably a mix of audience generation (for lesser known blogs) and money (for very large blogs)

Likely...it's because they're getting a cut of the paywall

I dislike Medium (and other "plogging" environments) because you don't own anything that goes on it

plogging?

Portmanteau of "paid" and "blogging", I'd venture.

PLatform blOGGING - term I first saw 6 years ago in Wired: https://www.wired.com/2015/10/long-blogging-hello-yep-going-...

I really despise Medium, not only because of the sneaky default paywall, but also because it's slow, pervasive and in general a bad choice for displaying code. I'd rather read a gist. dev.to is a better platform.

Remeber when developers took pride in their blogs, hosted on a platform of their choosing, occasionally coming across someone who wrote their own blogging software. Whilst it is significantly easier to use and get going with Medium, its all just so fucking boring. No personality at all.

Make the internet unique again.

Developers eventually go on to make their own site and paste the same content there.

That will be the end game.

Not sure how much they earn behind the wall.

because setting up a static site updating it once in a blue moon then remembering the commands to do so a second time in a few months time is less reliable than logging into a platform that isn't wordpress.com!

> "but non-subscribers are deprived of such content."

If you want to disable the "paywall", open the dev tools of your browser and delete the cookies. In Chromium-based browsers you find them under the "Application" tab.

I always click hide stories from X when a story in the my android google feed is paywalled.

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