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Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog
- bitwize 9y agoGood on them. Medium is Tumblr for people who are a bit too mature for purple hair and Steven Universe. The social currency earned through Medium can't be reliably exchanged for anything that matters.
- Shpigford 9y agoSpot on re: currency exchange.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- matthewmacleod 9y agoI literally have no idea what you are banging on about; Medium appears to be a simple blogging site, and that's about the extent of it. I think you've probably just projected any other attributes you perceive.
- bitwize 9y agoBoth Medium and Tumblr are simple blogging sites the way the popular kids' table at the cafeteria is a simple table. Both have a secondary function as markets for whuffie among a certain crowd, and it's that function which distinguishes them from other blog platforms. That's what I was getting at.
- nailer 9y ago> We’ll publish new content two weeks later to Medium (so the initial publishing of the content is able to get solidified as the primary source from an SEO standpoint). Hrm interesting, but if it's the same content, won't Google rank the copy Medium very poorly?
- Shpigford 9y agoHow Google ranks the Medium post doesn't really matter in this case as that's not the point of it. Posting on Medium is about distribution to Medium readers.
- crestfallen 9y agoWhen you import, you can choose a canonical source. So in Google's eyes, you're viewing it on Medium, but the "credit" goes to the original source.
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoThe general term for what Baremetrics is doing is called "content syndication" which is the fancy buzzword term for putting all your content on your own blog/domain first and then copying/importing it to other sites. What makes Google not flip out and de-rank your content for duplication is two things: 1. There is a specific rel=canonical tag that sites can add into their headers pointing at the URL of the source article. Medium's import tool (which is hidden at https://medium.com/p/import https://medium.com/p/import ) will add this header to the articles you import with it, pointing them back to your blog and not hurting you and maybe helping your SEO. 2. There is a notion of timeliness - that if you post on your blog first, wait for Google to index your content there and then post to a place where there isn't a rel=canonical option (like Quora, Tumblr, etc.) If you're trying to convince someone else that they shouldn't put all their eggs in the Medium basket, point them to this article which is the "nuke it from orbit" article on the subject: https://sendcheckit.com/blog/why-you-should-put-your-content-on-medium-and-your-own-domain?rel=hn https://sendcheckit.com/blog/why-you-should-put-your-content...
- heyyyouu 9y agoThe problem is that rel=canonical isn't always effective. So you can still get the SEO hit. Esp. if Google reads which site posted first what wrong (it happens)
- michaelbrooks 9y agoIt depends on how you move it over to Medium. If you just did a copy and paste, then it would obviously be marked as duplicated content. If you choose to import it from the URL of your Blog, then Medium will add a canonical link to the original article and Google will know which is the original document.
- ucaetano 9y agoI applaud that. Medium makes it far harder to get a glimpse of the actual source of the article. Take this post, for example, HN lists (baremetrics.com) as the source. If it had been published on Medium it would have listed (medium.com) which is irrelevant.
- Shpigford 9y agoExactly. Medium does what's best for Medium (which is reasonable). I want to do what's best for our business.
- judge2020 9y agoThey stated in the article that they stopped pointing the custom domain blog.baremetrics.com to Medium, if they didn't do that and posted this on Medium then the domain would still show as baremetrics.com on HN.
- izuchukwu 9y agoWhile true at the time, Medium no longer offers custom domains at all. https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005579728-Custom-domains-on-Medium?mobile_site=true https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005579728-Custo...
- mgiannopoulos 9y agoWhat on earth are they thinking??
- misterbowfinger 9y agoDamn! Why did they stop?
- jstanley 9y agoThey possibly found that lots of people using a custom domain were switching away from them, and they wanted to make that harder.
- crispytx 9y ago
- zitterbewegung 9y agoYea, I'm evaluating options to get off of medium also (I dislike the interface and I don't know how claps will make me money if at all). Right now I am evaluating https://zarf.co https://zarf.co which allows you to put a paywall to your blog posts.
- sithadmin 9y ago>Right now I am evaluating https://zarf.co https://zarf.co which allows you to put a paywall to your blog posts. Seems like a pretty effective way to drive down readership.
- criddell 9y agoWhy don't you blog on your own domain?
- Veen 9y agoIt's an interesting idea, but I think most people who publish on Medium are interested in self-promotion, rather than a direct cash payout. It would be lovely if writers could make a decent amount of money publishing to a small audience of dedicated followers who will pay, but the evidence is that advertising makes more money than direct payments.
- minimaxir 9y agoYou may want to look at Patreon and patron-only posts.
- TailorJones 9y agoMedium seems to hate mobile users - always putting up a non-closable popup.
- warrenm 9y agoThey want you to use the Medium app
- acconrad 9y agoI'm currently setting up my blog and I didn't even hesitate to host it myself. Companies like Medium come and go (e.g. Geocities, Xanga, Myspace, Posterous), but your dot com is yours as long as you keep paying the domain fee. Guys like Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood are probably very happy they've kept their presence on their own dot coms over the last decade.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zodPod 9y agoWow! I never really thought of Medium in the same realm as Xanga or Livejournal but you're absolutely right. It's crazy to think that people are moving to it. LiveJournal and Xanga were always kind of a stepping stone back in the day. You had your blog on their first then it started getting a lot of traffic and you moved it to your own domain. It's crazy to see the opposite happening now adays with Medium!
- wand3r 9y agoI hate Medium and I wouldn't let them be my primary distribution method for content but I would dual post. Is there a reason why you wouldn't just xpost from your blog to Medium?
- vthallam 9y agoSEO mostly I guess. Like medium already has a very high page rank or domain authority, so the medium's post comes first in search results. Also, Google probably considers having duplicate content as plagiarism and your blog might rank low. The alternative may be post on your blog first, then post on medium in a couple days.
- joelrunyon 9y agoEverytime there's a new "cool" blogging platform - people do this and then 2 years later, they write a blog post like the above one. Own your own blog!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- drcongo 9y agoFunnily enough, an hour or so ago I was trying to track down a Python blog I used to enjoy and went on a "This blog has moved merry-go-round... http://sayspy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/moving-this-blog-to-medium.html http://sayspy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/moving-this-blog-to-med... https://medium.com/coder-who-says-py/i-have-moved-over-to-svbtle-564d52028a65 https://medium.com/coder-who-says-py/i-have-moved-over-to-sv... https://nothingbutsnark.svbtle.com/moving-the-blog-to-silvrback https://nothingbutsnark.svbtle.com/moving-the-blog-to-silvrb... And eventually to https://snarky.ca https://snarky.ca
- fenwick67 9y agoWow this is a great example. Fortunately none of those services have gone out of business yet so you could track it down.
- Andrex 9y agoEven snarky.ca has moved, from Silvrback to Ghost! https://snarky.ca/why-i-changed-my-blogging-platform-to-ghost-pro/ https://snarky.ca/why-i-changed-my-blogging-platform-to-ghos...
- coding123 9y agoI'm reading and re-reading the first sentence with the words "has becoming". And I'm totally stumped if that is proper or not, my mind says "is becoming". Certainly a new usage to me, but I'm not convinced its actually incorrect.
- Shpigford 9y agoHaha, sorry, I've still got a bit of flu fog. Fixed. :P
- sheraz 9y agoI rarely click on links when I see the source as medium.com. The quality of content there feels too much like blogspot back in the day.
- bogomipz 9y agoSame. Quality issues aside, the experience of trying to read content on mediums miserable. Their insistence on taking up an outsized proportion of screen real estate for a header and footer promoting medium.com is beyond obnoxious. A platform for consuming content should not distract the reader from concentrating that content. Also if I like a blog I'll bookmark it and check back. I do not need to sign up to "never miss a story from _____."
- petercooper 9y agoWhat do you feel about custom "publications" that happen to use Medium? For example, hackernoon.com and codeburst.io are pretty popular around here and they just take Medium articles they find and add them to their publication.
- sheraz 9y agoFor me, the Medium name is hurting the credibility with anyone who would publish there. I'm more likely to give my attention to someone with a static site, even if it is a boring old template. (I'm thinking of doing the same for myself). As for Hackernoon I would be more likely to read their content off-medium. However, I do feel like I see them too often on HN, which means I now actively filter them out when deciding what to read. They are a little overexposed here.
- drcongo 9y agoHis stats for Medium views vs own-host views are the exact opposite of my experience. Everything I've ever written on Medium has way more views than anything I've ever published elsewhere, and we find the same happening for clients who make the switch too. We tend to recommend publishing on Medium to clients these days, both for the traffic and the inbound link SEO bonus. There's tons wrong with Medium, but it still feels like a better option than a self-hosted system that nobody ever discovers.
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoThe best practice (and what Baremetrics is doing) is to do both. Post your content first to your own domain and then later import it with the Medium article import tool.
- heyyyouu 9y agoThe double content can be a hard negative hit on SEO, even with canonical links (it's not perfect).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- codegladiator 9y agoCan stats reported by medium be trusted ? Is there a way to cross-verify their stats ?
- bbx 9y ago> Everything I've ever written on Medium has way more views than anything I've ever published elsewhere I guess if you're an author, it makes sense to use Medium to find an audience. But if you're a company, how relevant are those views? Are the people reading your articles a quality audience? Or just random Medium visitors? Does 1000 views equal to even 500 visits to your website? Or to 10 sales? I think the reading experience is pretty good on Medium: you can easily browse content via topic. But I think the content is more memorable than the author. I never know who wrote a piece on Medium because 1) most blogs look the same 2) the author's name is not really prominent. So I wonder what's the cost of that increase in views? Would you rather have a tiny blog with 100 visitors a month who follow you closely? Or 5,000 views from random readers who might not remember you the next day?
- tandav 9y agoMy wish: much more developers use github issues for blogging.
- untog 9y agoGithub pages, sure. But Github issues? How/why would you blog through that?
- adnzzzzZ 9y agoI've been doing it for a while (https://github.com/SSYGEN/blog https://github.com/SSYGEN/blog) and it works fine. It has markdown support and a commenting system, which is basically everything I need. Although it has its limitations depending on what kind of blogging you're doing, so it doesn't work for everyone.
- madebysquares 9y agoUsing GH issues for a blog doesn't seem like it could really work for most people. While you can get comments and discussions which is cool, GH isn't a great way to read long form content IMO. Plus if you want any time of analytics how can you find views/reads/etc. On side note you're current tutorial looks very neat, I've never used LUA so I'm going to try and follow along.
- drcongo 9y agoThat's brilliant.
- QasimK 9y agoThat’s a great suggestion for commenting on blogs!
- warrenm 9y agoewwwwww Why on earth would you want to blog on github?!
- rmrfrmrf 9y agoPlease don’t do this. It’s bad enough with the number of repos that de facto use github issues as documentation.
- pilingual 9y agoI've been meaning to blog more, and currently I have 2 posts on Medium. Part of the problem is the work it takes to make a solid post. But mostly, as Fred Wilson points out, it is the lack of control. Want to add a small image customly placed? Can't do it. Want to provide your non-logged in readers an experience where an annoying interstitial doesn't appear every time they visit? Can't do it. I have thought about syndication, and I'm glad to learn here about the import tool. Edit: Incidentally, where is Dustin Curtis? There is opportunity here. Own your blog and make it social. Must be a way.
- bogomipz 9y agoTitle: "Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog" Closing paragraph: >"Going forward, we are still going to publish to Medium, ... A better title might have been "Why we are now using both our own blog AND Medium. I'm guessing that's a less click-baity title though.
- tzahola 9y agoWow, it’s almost as if making free content for another company to capitalize on is not the brightest idea.
- lucideer 9y ago> ultimately your takeaway is “I read this article on Medium”, and that’s not what I wanted. I wanted to get back to people saying “I read this article on Baremetrics”. Is that what you'd be getting back to though, or would it be "I read this article on some blog I found on Google" (or didn't find, since—as he says—Medium is excellent at surfacing content). He says his traffic has slumped since the Medium switch; it may be causal, or not.
- tracker1 9y agoAlong a similar note... anyone have suggestions on tooling to publish from markdown files with yml front matter to a github site? I took the time to convert my blog to a more generic format, but got lazy on building tooling.
- seangransee 9y agoI recently moved my blog from Tumblr to Hugo (static site generator), and I've had a great experience with it. My posts exist in a repository in the content/posts folder as markdown files. When I push to master, it kicks off a CircleCI build that generates all the HTML and pushes that to the gh-pages branch of the same repo. Repo: https://github.com/seangransee/blog https://github.com/seangransee/blog Final result: http://blog.seangransee.com http://blog.seangransee.com
- rusbus 9y agoHugo plus Netlify is perfect. Did that recently. Pushing to GitHub deploys. There's a link to the source in the footer: https://rcoh.me https://rcoh.me
- rekado 9y agoI use [Haunt](http://haunt.dthompson.us/ http://haunt.dthompson.us/) for that (because it's written in Guile Scheme). It supports markdown files in the Commonmark variant. Github also supports Jekyll directly.
- etskinner 9y agoUse the default GitHub site generator, Jekyll https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-as-a-static-site-generator-with-github-pages/ https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-as-a-static-si...
- kaushalmodi 9y agoIf you call this tooling, I have developed an Emacs app that allows blogging in native Org mode, leaving out the interpretation of meta-data to happen automatically (the package does the parsing). It's designed to generate Markdown files + front-matter in TOML or YAML for Hugo (https://gohugo.io https://gohugo.io). The package is ox-hugo: https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/ https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/ In fact, that site is dog-fooding ox-hugo.. I simply commit the Org files, and Org --ox-hugo--> Markdown --hugo--> HTML conversion happens on Netlify, and that site gets updated. Github repo: https://github.com/kaushalmodi/ox-hugo/ https://github.com/kaushalmodi/ox-hugo/
- shopkins 9y agoAll great reasons to leave. We really need to consider who's getting enriched when we put crucial parts of our businesses on certain platforms, and in Medium's case, it seems like they absorb most of the value (I always cringe when people say "check out my Medium post"). I've kept a personal blog on Write.as for the past few years, and while it's still not self-hosting, I can at least get my data out, have a custom domain and syndicate to Medium when I'm really fiending for those claps (hint: I'm usually not).
- rusbus 9y agoI recently decided to move from Svtble elsewhere. I looked at medium briefly but wasn't super thrilled. I ended up with using Hugo and hosting it with Netlify. Pushing to GitHub publishes my blog , it looks pretty nice and I have total control over it. And most importantly, as the author notes, it's "my blog", hosted on my site with links to hire me. Definitely way more enjoyable, and as a result I blog a lot more.
- agentgt 9y agoI remember once someone who posted their blog and it was just a listing of markdown files in a github repository. Not even a jekyllyzed version... just a folder with date prefixed markdown and rst files. I have to say it hit me and I was like... damn I should just do that. Forget all this blogging platforms and getting caught up in look and feel. Just write text files. Even with Jekyll (and its variants) I got caught up on making it potentially look nice but this person just said ... f-it... let google and github figure out how to organize the content.
- rocky1138 9y agoYou might be interested to know that this is how blogs got their start. For reference, see .plan files [0]. [0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/plan-file.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/plan-file.html
- jcurbo 9y agoSee also: John Carmack's plan file updates. https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive
- bachmeier 9y agoI've come to the conclusion that all the design stuff is a waste of time. In most cases, it doesn't impress me on other sites, and if someone cares, they can use Reader View or Pocket or something like that. Unless you are good enough to create a design that makes folks say wow, there is no benefit at all from doing so.
- kaybe 9y agoOne of the most popular German blogs, fefe's blog, only has pure html. It's perfect for testing things because it is so fast. https://blog.fefe.de/ https://blog.fefe.de/
- drdrey 9y agoor http://danluu.com/ http://danluu.com/
- dlandis 9y agoAs someone who randomly highlights words and lines when they read, I can't stand sites like Medium that display that annoying toolbar with the Twitter icon every time you highlight something. Terrible UX in my opinion.
- nerdywordy 9y agoI'm glad there is another random highlighter out there. Medium & kin infuriate me with the popup toolbar.
- _asummers 9y agoMedium and SBNation are my two worst offenders. I have custom CSS rules I install whenever I see a site do this to just hide the div they're trying to show me.
- Nicksil 9y agoAbsolutely! The New York Times website has a similar "feature:" When the user double-clicks, the font changes size... I ended up developing an ad hoc plug-in which intercepts and suppresses the Event.
- samfriedman 9y agoFinally someone else who's been peeved by the Times' web reader! What's worse is that it captures mouse drag, so that I can't highlight words: dragging to the sides is hijacked to load previous/next article. Terrible design.
- mkl 9y agoYes, this is very frustrating! I often select a word to mark my place when going off to do something else. Can you share your solution?
- trw19 9y ago@mkl If you use Chrome desktop then see if my above post helps .. without the need for extensions/plugins.
- makecheck 9y agoMedium is one example of something that went from “nice” to “annoying” very quickly. (LinkedIn and Meetup are other examples.) Then it gets “improved” and customers just want to leave. I don’t know who these people are that just can’t help themselves, stomping all over something that was nice the way it was. And it means we need to desperately revisit open platforms, since you should always have the option of forking from the pre-shark-jumping point.
- dceddia 9y agoI sometimes wonder about this in the larger context of companies as a whole. If a company has one product, and that product is released and "done", then from a purely logical standpoint, why do they still need to retain employees (other than Support probably)? There are plenty of reasons to keep people on of course, but at some level it's kind of a "default" thing to do.
- freehunter 9y agoBecause if they lay people off it's bad press, and if they say they're in maintenance mode people will think the company is failing and both of those things aren't great for user adoption. You grow until you fail, and then another competitor takes over. That's what disruption means.
- dceddia 9y agoYep, that's how it works, and that's "by default." Not saying that's wrong, it's just interesting. It's not just for "disruptive" companies either.
- untangle 9y agoIf the company is venture funded, growth is the imperative. VCs aren't looking for margins, they are looking for massive growth that leads to big multiples. Hence the imperative to lean into the wind.
- icebraining 9y ago
- jl6 9y agoI used to run my own blog, but I became disillusioned with the direction HTML/CSS/JavaScript was taking. I lost confidence that my content would continue to be readable in future browsers. I know I could have customised a solution that perfectly preserved the content, but it would have been a lot of work, plus ongoing maintenance. Now I have a Medium blog and I export articles to PDF for safekeeping. Dead easy.
- etskinner 9y agoWhy not just stick with basic HTML and CSS? Isn't it likely that Medium will fall out of favor faster? There are many static site generators out there that perform just fine for blogs, and are not hard to use.
- dboreham 9y agoYou can also use Wordpress to address this issue, and still have self-hosting.
- nicolaslem 9y ago> I became disillusioned with the direction HTML/CSS/JavaScript was taking. I lost confidence that my content would continue to be readable in future browsers. Can you tell us why you feel this way? Any current browser can display websites that are 20 years old just fine. You really don't need anything fancy to display static content.
- CodeWriter23 9y agoViewing Medium as a content discovery / syndication tool instead of a blogging platform is pretty insightful. Now I have a reason to use Medium, where I previously did not.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Hoasi 9y agoMedium works great as an amplifier and as an aggregator. It can get you additional traffic for your blog, product or site. But yeah, own your own content.
- styfle 9y agoThis article has the same conclusion I came to...use Medium to syndicate[0] content, not originate content. Medium is still very useful to get content to readers that would otherwise not visit your website. Articles I wrote that were picked up by a "publisher" on Medium get way more views than anything on my own domain. To put some real numbers on it, one article I wrote this month got 92 hits on my personal website[1] but 429 hits on hackernoon[2]. That makes me motivated to write because people will actually read it :) [0]: https://medium.com/p/import https://medium.com/p/import [1]: https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2018-01-01-es6-proxy-localization.md https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2018-01-01-es6-pr... [2]: https://hackernoon.com/es6-proxy-and-localization-c1269bbc0a26 https://hackernoon.com/es6-proxy-and-localization-c1269bbc0a...
- dmerfield 9y agoI run a small blogging platform (https://blot.im https://blot.im) and get a steady stream of Medium-apostates who've made this realization. Medium is a deeply flawed product and is not designed in the best interests of its writers or its readers. I recommend The Billionaire's Typewriter by Matthew Butterick if you're interested in why this is so: https://practicaltypography.com/billionaires-typewriter.html https://practicaltypography.com/billionaires-typewriter.html Medium's trendy design can be enticing but I'd try to steer people towards a platform over which they have control.
- kaushalmodi 9y agoI'm getting a 404 here: https://blot.im/guides https://blot.im/guides
- dmerfield 9y agoOops, I was working on the documentation earlier today. Will fix those broken links tomorrow. Thanks for letting me know!
- zodPod 9y agoI agree with this a lot. I barely take note of the author or their site when I read stuff on Medium. So it makes a lot of sense if you want people to read the stuff you write but it seems to make much less sense from a marketing perspective assuming that I'm not alone in the way I use it. Though from the article that seems to not be the case.
- contingencies 9y agoMedium is banned in China.
- kim0 9y agoAnd Egypt! Why, beats me though
- dabeeeenster 9y agoI'm thinking of building a blogging API as a Service (kind of like moltin but for blogging instead of ecommerce). Would anyone be interested in that?
- mprev 9y agoWould contentful be a similar idea?
- rodolphoarruda 9y agoI have stopped reading anything in Medium because I cannot save the page for offline reading using the Evernote Webclip browser extension.
- QasimK 9y agoI encountered this problem on iOS where you have no control. On Firefox I managed to solve it with a lot of effort of scrolling to get the images to load and carefully selecting how to clip the page. It kind of works. It did more to make me re-assess why I’m paying for Evernote than make me avoid Medium.
- tomc1985 9y agoThe less we patronize organizations that serve their own good as opposed to the general good, the better. Medium took something wonderful -- elegant, self-service blog hosting -- and ruined it.
- city41 9y agoI don't understand why anyone posts on Medium. If you are an individual, a github blog is easy to set up and completely free. If you are a business, I don't understand relinquishing control and diminishing your brand. Whenever I visit Medium it asks me to create an account, which is mildly annoying. Id' be worried Medium will increase the annoyances to a point you'd have no choice but to move elsewhere, which is a hassle.
- juvoni 9y agoFor people or businesses that don't have enough reach Medium is a reasonable tradeoff to get more reach on their network.
- kentf 9y agoI have been waiting for a post like this for a while. Thanks for sharing.
- urda 9y agoMuch like blogger before it, people are starting to figure out it's best to have your own digital home on the internet. Medium echoes Blogger today, the downturn is coming.
- Groxx 9y ago>I realized Medium is really great about surfacing content, but it removes the face of it. It neutralizes all content to basically be author-agnostic. It’s like Walmart or Amazon in that you can buy from thousands of different brands, but you rarely actually know what brand you’re buying…you just know “I got it from Amazon.” Medium has pretty much always pushed the stance that they're the "face" of the blogs on the site. You're not hosting your blog on Medium, you're writing for Medium. Heck, their "our story" section says right at the top: >Medium taps into the brains of the world’s most insightful writers, thinkers, and storytellers to bring you the smartest takes on topics that matter. So whatever your interest, you can always find fresh thinking and unique perspectives. That's pretty clearly "Medium has great content", not "look at these excellent bloggers". They're a curator / reading platform, intentionally emphasizing the value you get from Medium itself. Given that stance, loss of brand identity seems like a pretty natural outcome.
- willow9886 9y ago> They’ve been fumbling left and right trying to figure out how to make Medium sustainable, and I’m just not convinced they’ll always do what’s best for us and our business. This is the risk of becoming dependent on any outside service or company for your critical business activities. SaaS services make your life easier... until they stop working the way you want, go out of business, get acquired and shuttered, etc. etc. Pick and choose wisely. And always have a backup plan!
- calimac 9y agoMedium is an example of a terrible idea that one cool influencer thought was a good idea. In reality it pimps everyone’s content and controls traffic, directing it to its darlings and withholding it from those who write any descending opinion.