Why I’d rather write in Medium than my personal blog | Hacker News Reader

Why I’d rather write in Medium than my personal blog

medium.com

Why would you post here on HN that you'd rather write on medium when you hardly participate here to begin with?

If it were a post with some actual content I can see why you'd want to post it here for discussion but it is a meta post about the medium you write on, not an actual post. Not exactly hacker news. Personally I think medium is the new geocities, it'll implode one day and leave another big hole in the web unless archive.org or archiveteam get there first.

Beware of who you give control of your content.

You're right. I was more active on Inbound.org vs Hacker News simply because I used to primarily write marketing content. The post I wrote yesterday which was actually a rant about the growth hacking buzzword hit the first page of HN momentarily. That obviously caused a server crash which made me want to switch ship to Medium / Quora.

Medium's editor was just a lot nicer.

And, I was talking about Medium vs my personal blog. Not really talking about Medium vs HN.

Eh, use a static site generator in tandem with something like s3+cloudfront and you can have a lightning fast and practically infinitely scalable personal site for pennies a month.

My site's not particularly complex, but it comes out ahead speed wise on pingdom when compared to medium.

http://i.imgur.com/O2xVK7t.jpg

Possible true, but that's a tad too technical for me. I just want to focus on the writing.

I'd say blogging on a "platform" as opposed to a self-hosted/controlled solution would have some benefits over a self-baked one.

But at the end of the day, if you're blogging for your business/startup it makes more sense for it to be under your control as you can leverage the analytics and if possible turn them into conversions.

What surprised me most about the speed stats in your image is the file size of the pages. The medium.com page is half a megabyte! And yet it's a plain text page. What's causing the bloat? Are fonts being downloading? Even if they are, it's still feels excessive.

I had the same Error establishing a database connection incident. So I moved to Github Pages.

There are many, many places for long-form content that won't crash under load. Posterous's replacement, Tumblr, Wordpress.com, etc. "Not crashing" is a bizarre and bad reason to choose exclusively Medium.

Medium has a prettier editor? I could get featured on the first page of medium if my content doesn't suck?

Game Theory. If everyone joins Medium to "get on the front page," then the probability of getting on the front page becomes that much lower.

Also, getting on the front page of Medium is mostly irrelevant since you have mostly nil personal branding anyways. If you're going to hit #1 on Hacker News, do it on a website you own with your own content.

then the odds of getting on the front page become that much higher.

you mean lower

Yes sir. My bad.

This is going to give me an aneurysm. For the love of freedom, people, please own your content online – host it on your own domain.

I used to think the same way. But, propagation of your content is a lot more important than just feeling good that it's hosted on your own blog.

Even if you no longer own or control the content?

What use is owning it if nobody reads it?

You'd be surprised at how much traffic you can get if your blog is properly indexed on Google.

I would argue, as a modern professional, propagation of your FQDN is also very important.

I understand the point being made ( running a personal server can be frustrating / time-consuming /annoying ) but the principle of the Web is peer to peer hyperlinking.

Consolidating onto 'easy' vended services may work short-term, but will accelerate the transformation of the Web into 'channels' owned by media conglomerates. Opera Unite was a valiant effort to fight the transformation for 'normal folk' to use but sadly withered.

No-one much visits my blog so I don't have a problem with load, but several co-geeks have moved theirs into AWS to handle peaks. I still feel that's sort-of cheating but at least they retain control and technical nous.

Quora anyone? As a writer, I feel its neat, accessible and of course reliable. People are more likely to follow your profile on Quora than signup with their emails on your personal blog. And don't forget the easy-to-earn upvotes and shares. Down side: No analytics :(

As a reader, Quora gives me more insight about the author through answers on diverse topics.

Disclaimer: Quora fan here! Answer may be biased.

Quora's content ownership and presence of personal branding is worse than Medium, which is quite an accomplishment.

Well, Medium is good. But I like the way I find content on Quora than on Medium. Its more like I stumble upon a post through someone's good answers and comments. Feels more like a discovery. Medium gives me a much narrow view of the author. Something only what the author wants me to see and nothing more.

Only because Medium hasn't accumulate‎d enough free content yet to disclose how they are planning on appropriating and monetizing it.

Don't forget Medium is brought to us from the makers of Twitter, with such classics as "Here's an API; get the fuck off of my API."

So now medium is the cool blogging platform. Last year it was svbtle. Who's next, who has even prettier stylesheets?

Note that the content you put on Medium is not viewable in Opera Mini on Android, Symbian and J2ME dumbphones.

Yet another yay for medium.

So and do you drive a rental car because, you know, you don't do any maintenance on your own?

Great argument. But, not quite the same. I run my personal blog on a $5/mo digital ocean box - I'm too cheap to shell out $100/mo for a managed SingleHop box.

I don't know how to use terminal too much, I just learnt how to reset mysql AFTER my server crashed yesterday.

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