Will I/my articles get negativity within dev and tech communities because they are written in Medium?
Please comment if you can think of better alternatives to Medium
The typography and layout on Medium is fine, it's the popups, nags, paywall, and the like. For a while there was a lovely extension called "Make Medium Readable Again" but they aggressively broke that too. I'm happy to let Medium fall off the tech community radar.
I remember talking to somebody who was so impressed that he got 70 views on an article on Medium and having to break it to him that I thought a blog post was a big hit if it got 70,000 views back in the day.
Perhaps it is as simple as this: any author who is exposing their readers to the awful experience is contemptuous of their readers and not really serious about blogging.
I do not write articles for a living or make money out of them. So no tribe stuff in my case.
I just did it out of enjoying it
This is an immediate red flag for me. It means that even if Medium is fine now, it's going to get populated by these types soon.
I wholeheartedly agree. And for this reason, and many others, I'm planning on setting up my personal website/blog using Wordpress.
But as for the default template being "less offensive" than Medium, I'd like to do a little better than this. I've looked at other WP templates and I am happy to learn PHP and become a real WP developer just to make a good site (I'm already an experienced developer in other languages). I also get the impression that WP development is a highly transferable skill.
I understand perfectly well that making a good, "minimalist" site takes a of expertise and effort. But I don't have the faintest where to being with this, as all my effort up until this point has been on the back end, data science computation, etc. Should I just start at the wordpress.{org,com} and follow my way from there? Is there some special resource that I should know about?
I am a programmer, I've written a programming book, I used to work at a tech publisher (O'Reilly). From O'Reilly, I know a lot about how to build a system around programmers that puts out important and accurate information. Medium started in the ballpark of that and then went in the wrong direction.
I think we can do a lot to change that. For me, change is less about changing our reputation and instead just getting the utility right.
We have syntax highlighting coming out in a week or so and I'll do a bigger post then about what is changing for technical readers and authors.
Just replace medium.com or other medium domain, and you get a clean representation with all cruft removed.
I've seen so many static site generators come and go over the past decade that the number of options now is just dizzying. From what I've seen, they all try to be "minimalist"... until the developer realizes there's a lot more work and expertise involved in "minimalist" design than they originally thought, and they grow, bit by bit by bit, etc, ... Then somebody sees these "bloated" SSG's and decides to reinvent the wheel by creating their own "minimalist" SSG with no baggage and thus the cycle starts all over again.
Because why put your admin interface out to the web if you can also just send some HTML files to a static site hoster. The static hosters are nearly impossible to hack and they can be heavily optimised because they only serve files.
As another argument, software engineers are used to Git meaning that you’ll have a proper backup for your site.
Isn't there any Medium-like theme for WordPress? (Though maybe you frighten people thinking they ended up in a Medium blog.)
It used to be that only passionate people would write content, but now there is this pervasive idea that you must produce content to demonstrate your expertise. Producing good quality content is really hard and time consuming and people who are only motivated by sending some expertise signal to recruiters and potential employers produce troves of garbage, often on Medium. A Medium article is the writing equivalent of an empty GitHub profile with a few unmodified forks in it.
- create a new branch in your fork, aside from original master/main (possibly a bare orphaned branch (with 0 commits))
- set it as default branch in repo settings
- then in README.md of the new default branch, explain your contributions to the upstream (possibly with a link to github.com/<repo>/contributions?user=<yourname>)
I mean, I still have the original comment saved on a wordpad if I decide to put it up again; but at a slightly later time when those people have moved on to whatever it is that annoys them next.
I'm also new here, so I am doing my best to curtail the effects of the malicious against me as best as possible.
In my opinion a personal blog or website on a personal domain is the most credible way to publish your ideas.
Creating such sites might be out of reach for a lot of nontechnical folks, but people in the dev and tech communities should be able to handle it.
A third party site is more likely to preserve your work in time than you remembering to pay and host your content.
To me a personal blog shows more commitment from the author for two reasons: you have to spend some time to ser it up and search engines tend to position them high when you search for the author name.
Even Medium posts being signed I don’t know why it gives me some anonymity feeling and makes it harder to navigate through other content from that same author.
Although I remember there being some option to verify a website for name searches on Google.
That plus having a Twatter/Fecebook/HN/etc account to confirm the official site should be enough to reasonably avoid impersonators.
100% agree.
Doing that also gives you a ton of street cred as opposed to writing on medium where you're right off the bat announcing to the world that you've basically surrendered your stuff to someone else the moment you finished writing it.
I used to run my own Wordpress blog (don't recommend it any more because of the security issues), now it's a Hugo blog hosted on AWS Cloudfront. Costs me about $4 to $5 a month to run.
It’s not trivial but was painless to set up. I think it’s kind of fun to see the various setups that devs use to host their stuff.
Medium isn’t a long term solution, so aside from its other problems (terrible aesthetic and UX), I’d still want some sustainability for hosting.
Right now, I am using a Notion website builder: https://super.so/ It serves my need as someone who wanted to have a personal website. More like a resume tbh. No bells and whistles. I am used to Notion so that’s another plus. And the page loads fairly quickly. However, I find that at $12/month, I could get better value elsehwere. Not to mention, I am unable to blog there.
One of the platforms that attract me is Ghost (https://ghost.org/vs/wordpress/). Open-source and I’ve found the websites there have a far more modern-look.
That is also a Notion website builder, but more geared towards blogging.
This is an example site built with Notion + Feather
Disclaimer: I am the creator of feather.so
That still leaves the question of how to handle site search and comments.
I noticed it is next to impossible to get personal blog articles in own domain onto Google search results unless they are specifically crafted for Google bot and not for a human reader (it seems to like a thousand words of introduction followed by a thousand words of historic context, then a lengthy personal anecdote and then at the very end - possibly on next page actual answer the reader is looking for).
This includes really niche subjects where almost no content exists. Google still favours showing you forums where people ask similar questions (unanswered). And lots of unrelated stuff rather than an actual blog post that has an exact answer+tutorial in under 300 words.
I guess the best recipe to get your blog indexed is:
* Make sure you have robots.txt with correct host and sitemap.xml
* Link it everywhere: on your Linkedin, Github, Reddit and every profile.
* Make re-posts on social networks, reddit or other related resources.
* It must be fast and never down so reliable hosting with CloudFlare.
* Google loves when you have Google Analytics. Surprise surprise.
* Do add it to Google Webmaster so your search overloard can connect your domain to Google account.
So yeah people who hate CloudFlare and Google Analytics with passion are more likely to have issues to getting on google search result page.
>Make sure you have robots.txt with correct host and sitemap.xml
Yes, but no idea what is meant by correct host.
>Link it everywhere: on your Linkedin, Github, Reddit and every profile.
Yes, pagerank
>Make re-posts on social networks, reddit or other related resources.
Possibly. Much more helpful if your content is actually shared as opposed to you spamming it out
>It must be fast and never down so reliable hosting with CloudFlare.
Less important than most realize. As long as it’s not dog shit slow it’s probably fine
>Google loves when you have Google Analytics. Surprise surprise.
Utter nonsense. The anti trust blowback from this would be spectacular.
>Do add it to Google Webmaster so your search overloard can connect your domain to Google account.
It’s called Google Search Console now, not webmaster tools. Helpful for insights but zero effect on ranking.
> About half of your suggestions would not be effective. Source: am SEO consultant
I'll be honest here: it was mostly years ago, but I spent good chunk of my life doing some white and black hat SEO myself. I'm not very proud of some of it either. If you're actually working in this area then you well aware that figuring out what works and what doesn't take a lot of time and change constantly
What non-experts can do is to at least to follow some recommendations to get into search index. So I just shared some common tricks that I used myself and they cost nothing to implement.
> Yes, but no idea what is meant by correct host.
As correct host I meant the one target website is using. There are countless websites that have www-prefixed version in robots.txt while actually using non-prefixed domain and not having redirections. Also some of us might start blog on github pages and then forgot to specify correct host when moving it to independent domain, etc.
> Much more helpful if your content is actually shared as opposed to you spamming it out
I'm not suggesting anyone to spam something, but Google cant exactly guess who posted your blog post on reddit or why. Having some is better opposed to having zero ingoing links from social media.
> As long as it’s not dog shit slow it’s probably fine
Reliability is very important though. We're on HN and my guess that a lot of people there would love to host their blog on $10 linode / digitalocean test-server that also run VPN and torrent client and can be down for days after some experiment went wrong.
> Utter nonsense.
That just my personal experience. I dont argue that it will help you with rankings, but it's certainly make it less-likely to get under some anti-spam filter.
> Helpful for insights but zero effect on ranking.
Again it's not about rankings. But at least in past their "Indexing Tool" actually worked to make sure your new blog post actually there in search index.
Person above was complaining about his blog not being indexed at all. So if indexing tool is still there it's will help with this problem.
> Utter nonsense. The anti trust blowback from this would be spectacular.
I've seen spend on ads heavily affect organic results. I wonder when anti trust will fix that
This sounds like something the FTC and /or anti-trust should be looking into.
And check whether that's still legal [0] in your country before you do so.
Getting quality inbound links is tricky. First you have to write great content that people might want to link to... but if nobody hears about it that won't help much.
Back at the dawn of blogging there was a really strong culture of bloggers linking to and amplifying great content from each other. That activity mostly moved to places like Twitter - I'd love to see that happen more again.
In that context what you describe is functioning exactly as intended. The searcher is certainly the product.
What are your favorite options for personal blogs? I'm strongly leaning towards self-hosted WP.
Zero maintenance. Zero cost except for domain name.
* The software: Medium somehow managed to make majority-plain-text articles slow to consume in modern web browsers, negating decades' worth of web browser optimizations.
* The culture: Medium is overrun with self-promoting "thought leader" types.
The site has been better more recently, but the stigma is still there, at least for me.
When I wanted to write, I wanted to create the experience of curling up with a good book that changes how you relate to the world after. I don't want to be a part of someones community of subscribers, I want to become someone who has read this thing. That's what books were and represented. Online, there is zero investment in anything we read. It's what people do with wasted time, and in this sense a blog can only be as good as a recycled waste product. There is no value created by investing it in reading a blog, it is not enriching whereas finishing a book made you a kind of steward for that experience and interpretation. This was the difference, this idea of reading and writing as an enriching experience. The largest possible impact a blog post can have is to shift or dent a narrative - but what if you don't value the attention of people whose experience is an artifact of narrative? Only a decade ago, the idea of someone having a conversation about the characters in supermarket tabloids was kind of pitiful, but now we seem to live in a competition where everyone online tries to angle and align themselves to these dramas.
It's not Medium, it's the medium, and the whole thing is an inferior substitute to living.
Substack... it was okay, but it seems that now there's a full page popup that comes up while we're reading the post. I'll probably start to avoid their links too.
As for the alternatives, if all you need is a place to write about stuff, why not a blog? WordPress (self hosted or not) + your domain + simple theme.
Example:
https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/12/12/a-cor...
Marketing by threats doesn't help either. You have used 1 out of your 3 free reads! Subscribe to the newsletter! With no obvious way of closing the popup. Yes, I'm looking at substack now.
This is an attempt to continue paper magazines, but done wrong. Back then you could impulse buy a paper issue with no commitment. And perhaps another. And more randomly. If you liked it enough, you maybe subscribed.
Skip the no commitment transactions and spam people and the trust goes away.
I've been meaning to start up a blog again, and I've been debating doing bearblog as an easy way to get started again since my Hugo blog has sat in a half-finished state forever, and it seems like they can get decent visibility.
Pick an instance (or selfhost) and set your browser up to automatically redirect to it. https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector and https://libredirect.codeberg.page/source_code are good options.
Lesson learned again and again: all blogging platforms have a limited shelf life, and there really needs to be a better way to own your own content beyond self-hosting.
The interests of anyone who wants to use a blogging platform without directly sharing those costs are very unlikely to align with those paying the costs. (I think it can be done, but will probably be very inefficient and susceptible to being out-competed for attention.)
However, it's terrible for readers. The dynamic loading of images is mediocre on anything but a fiber connection, the web pages are slow and the pay wall is an instant turn-off. Even if you get into the free experience, half your screen is covered by banners and side bars.
I think Medium is great for a specific audience: Medium readers. Some people like to browse Medium and the blogs it hosts and for those people, the setup is perfect. For anyone who doesn't like to browse Medium but rather gets linked to it occasionally, it's an awful experience.
Personally, I prefer plain old websites. You don't need a domain and a server, throwing something into Github/Gitlab Pages is more than enough. You can set up a whole CI/CD system for static site generation or write a document in Word and export it to HTML if that's what you want. You'll need to rely on platforms like HN and Reddit to get new people to discover your site, though, but from what I've been recommended on Medium, the articles that get attention seem to be very SEO-optimized and not very technical. Listicles and terribly written blog spam that just repeats the same basic information in several ways get a lot of attention. There are also opinionated articles about subjective things (UX design etc.) that only exist for the author to make their preferences known to the world; there are great articles on there that reference sources and research, but it's not what I see pushed on the website because outrage clicks and reactions from people disagreeing are worth more than people consulting the website for information.
If you want something easy and hosted, WordPress still has a free tier. Your options are very limited but if you care about the content more than building a specific look and feel, they're fine.
Wading through such results looking for something in-depth is too tedious for me. As others note, the articles I bookmark and come back to tend to be from personal blogs more often than not. For real depth, however, I still turn to books.
I guess anything with a low barrier to entry, has to do more to prove itself.
The web has become broadly influenced and geared towards a certain way of doing things that happens because:
1. it costs money to create and maintain a substantial web property. Medium, Substack, Patreon, gumroad, ghost, buttondown, etc all run on top of services that cost money. Maybe AWS, maybe Google App Engine, plus Cloudflare, Heroku, Netlify, Digital Ocean, etc. Oh and Stripe, PayPal or some payment processor, if the site has a subscription model, too.
2. the web of the 2020s really has only one way to make enough money to pay for these services: advertising. There's only one way to get enough money through advertising to be profitable, and that's to have some portion of attention-getting, clickbaity, top 10 list content. That content generates enough 'virality' to show up on Twitter, FB, here, or wherever.
A no-paywalled, no-ads site (like Hacker News) is a cost center maintained as a sort of vanity project for a company that makes money elsewhere.
What people are complaining about around Medium is really a complaint about how content on the web is, and must be, monetized, if it is to be a money-making business, as opposed to my blog, say, which is just money out of my pocket.
It's going to take a concerted effort to break away from the current economic model of the web. Just turning up our noses at Medium or Substack and pivoting to the NEW new thing won't change anything, as the new new thing inevitably gets dragged into the web economy or goes broke.
Also its a wasteland of copy paste from the documentation of the subject official website.
I learned a while back that if the article had code in image format there was 100% certianty it was not functional and I could close the article without reading.
When it comes to getting people to buy your articles: Well, I've never met a person who pays for their articles. Ever. Maybe you should sign up with a writing team that has a big website, I don't know, The Verge or something, and write there and get paid for it?
If it's for good SEO, well, as of now Google is flooded with low-quality, copied click-bait articles full of trackers, ads and spam.
A curated personal lightweight website attracts me more: see https://lemire.me/blog/ (Wordpress) https://lilianweng.github.io (powered by https://gohugo.io)
I can't view text without JS and I don't want to turn it on so Medium can track the anal cream my neighbour uses on their cat.
> Please comment if you can think of better alternatives to Medium
Markdown + Pandoc + static page host. With that you get control and personality.
Elitism at its best.
I mean how dare someone focus on writing and not on maintaining.
When you read Medium content, much of it is junk optimized to hoover up as many views as possible. Articles often have an optimized-for-Medium tone that is just off putting. Plus there is the the constant sword of Damocles hanging over your head any time you read because they might cut you off for having read too many Medium articles without paying (or at least there was, I don't know if they have updated the model).
Not broadly, but definitely within the HN community, and probably a few others. But with that being said, I also don't think it will affect your ranking on HN negatively, at least not by much.
Medium articles regularly hits the frontpage (and as of writing this, there's a medium blogpost just below this poll on HN)
Thankfully using Google Cache or Pocket can usually still get to the content, but requires a tiny bit of extra effort.
This is just what medium has brought onto itself with this sort of incentive model.
But lets bqck up a second...it would help to know your objectives, as well as your target. For example, might video be a better medium? No pun intended.
Possible stigma aside, Medium is a tool. It does have a "community", but so does LinkedIn and YouTube. Maybe it's some combination? You goals, target and budget* all matter.
* e.g., Do you have time to build a Twitter following, and use that community to drive traffic to anything you publish? If not, then maybe - at least for starts - start where there is a community you can "borrow" traffic from.
If you use Notion to write your articles, you can check out https://feather.so. It converts your Notion pages and builds a blog out of it. You can then assign your own domain to it.
https://ghost.org/ is also another excellent option that you can check out.
These people ruined Quora years before they did the same to Medium.
> Will I/my articles get negativity within dev and tech communities because they are written in Medium?
I don't think the author or their writing will get any ire for being hosted on Medium. The negativity is purely towards Medium itself. However I probably won't read your article if it's on Medium unless it's in the #1 spot on HN.
Is there some tool to export a medium article to readable html or markdown? Or will I have to copy-and-paste the raw text and add back all the formatting myself?
The platform is cluttered with low value, biased, or uninteresting content.
There's nothing special about Medium in that regard, I've seen decent articles and rubbish and everything in between.
But even then I am more likely to see a good title, see medium, have a moment of silence for the author, and not click through.
Try viewing your articles in a private browser to see just how bad the experience is for most of your readers.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Things I want to tell the rest of the world go here
</BODY>Never really understood what the supposed added-value of medium above the above actually is.
If you want me to read your article, DO NOT put it on Medium.
Or, you can go professional: https://lee-phillips.org/whypay/.
People will assume you lack basic technical skills, and that will tint what you wrote.
If you're genuinely into tech, you know how to set up your own website and host a blog with very little effort or hassle. It's kindergarten stuff. Hosting a tech blog on medium is like a chef putting instant noodles on the menu. It sends really weird mixed signals, and makes me think you're yet another one of those vincent adultman types on medium attempting to make a career in tech by chinese rooming barely coherent tips from other people's writing while knowing jack shit about anything they're saying.
Probably sounds really harsh, but that's the sort of assumptions I go into a medium article with.
I don't deny there's some quality content out there, but I feel it's not well curated and every other search phrase, I'm getting bombarded with tons of bland tutorial-blogposts (in ML domain especially) which really makes me disdain the website itself.
Hashnode(tech focused) Substack
Strictly speaking it sounds like you're asking the former but the latter is the reason I don't tend to read Medium content.
I would argue that this kind of ambiguity means your results are probably worthless. (On the whole I find most surveys suffer from an issue like this)
Medium has a paywall & annoying pop-ups. I'd prefer the author maintain their own websites. With services like Netlify & Vercel, it's incredibly easy & cheap to do so. (Free if you don't care about the domain.)