Interestingly enough, Substack is heading down the same direction - when you get linked to an article, it now forces a full screen popup on you asking if you want to subscribe or just read.
And like the OP I only care about people reading my stuff. I don't care about monetisation and I definitely don't want to put them through all the crap that medium does.. substack is not a great alternative because it's also monetisation focused for authors.
I thought of it but Hacker News posts are pure text, you can't add a single picture. The reading format is also not suitable for long form, and it makes the post text kinda grey which makes it even harder to read.
So, no. The community is great but it's not a blogging platform. I could self host my blog and post links here for discovery but self-promotion is generally frowned upon. I don't want to abuse the community.
... which is, in my opinion, an overlooked and extremely powerful filter.
If people can upload images people will upload atrocity pictures (with the caption POST A STUPID IMAGE MEME... U DIE!), lewd pictures, CSAM pictures, and other things that will waste your time to manage if they don't get you in trouble outright. (It was super easy to get a basically G rated site demonetized with a 10⁻⁴ fraction of problem images ten years ago, it must be much worse now.)
I've been building my own smart RSS reader so I'd much rather add a feed to by reader which puts me, the reader, in control.
Isn’t the whole point that there are no golden eggs? People don’t want to pay and people don’t want ads. Where would you get income for the authors and for the platform itself?
Either that or it could to be run as a loss leader for some other service
https://wordpress.com/pricing/?compare=1#lpc-pricing
that seem like what somebody would pay. If you'd assume somebody spends 4 hours a week blogging and their time is worth $25 an hour you'd be putting $400 of hour of labor in a month and spending $40 for hosting is a fraction of that. That $25/hour would seem low to some people but high to others: some people are time-rich and cash-poor and others the other way around.
The horrific truth about the "Next Medium" is that it is going to appeal to people who are too lazy to write a successful blog by having GPT-4 write their blog posts for them.
I remember a project I did some time ago where we required Github integration, every employee of the company was supposed to have a Github account, it was even part of the onboarding day, there was a very internal knowledge base page on how to setup Github, and EVEN then people would just hear the word "Github" and freak out saying a bunch of people in the company would never ever be able to setup an account there.