24 ms·

Medium is a poor choice for blogging

• stevespang 8y ago
  Spot on. Medium is garbage.
• ordu 8y ago
  Funnily enough, I was able to read this story only by switching FF into reader view. For some reason I was unable to scroll page in normal view. Probably scrolling needs some javascript which was blocked by uMatrix, or something like.
• ArtemZ 8y ago
  I have neither Google nor Facebook account. So Medium is a no go for me.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• bko 8y ago
  Pretty convincing. I didn't notice how bad medium was since I'm always logged in and have an ad-blocker. I also don't think they do much in terms of discovery. My blog [0] has about 370 followers and my posts only get about 10 - 20 views unless I put them on social media. Then they'll get between 100 and 10k+. Does anyone have experience with an alternative platform? Preferably free and hosted. [0] https://medium.com/ml-everything https://medium.com/ml-everything
  • harveylord 8y ago
    There is a freemium service called Write.as [0]. It might not be the exactly same kind of thing as Medium, but, personally, I appreciate its ultra-simplicity. Since I have never went as far as starting my own blog, I occasionally host text content there that I want to share. [0] www.write.as
    • andrey-p 8y ago
      The underlying engine just got open sourced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18432327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18432327
    • how_to_bake 8y ago
      According to the creator's blog, he intends to complete a whole suite of products that all work together. As of now, normal people will have difficulty understanding how Read.as, Write.as, Snap.as all work together. Looking forward to when I can get a full Facebook replacement for like $3/month subscription.
  • messe 8y ago
    Github Pages + something like disqus if you need comments? Add in a simple enough theme like http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/, and that'll probably do the job. The main downside is having to use social media for discovery, but in that regard it doesn't sound too much worse than medium by your reckoning. You can even use your own domain. Myself, I'm using a VPS (5€ a month, but 10€ a year goes to the OpenBSD foundation) to host some static html (generated from markdown), and have done away with comments entirely. (The VPS isn't just for that blog. I'm serving multiple domains from it and hosting my own fossil repos there as well) It's obviously not for everyone, but maybe it'd suit you.
    • fyfy18 8y ago
      Disqus is really bad in terms of privacy of users [0] (that article was from 2014, now I guess it's on par with most other sites). I'm not really sure what the answer is as if it's going to work on a static site, the comments need some sort of backend. Most people aren't going to host it themselves, so that leads to these issues, as nobody will pay for a commenting system. [0] https://chrislema.com/killed-disqus-commenting/ https://chrislema.com/killed-disqus-commenting/
      • KajMagnus 8y ago
        > nobody will pay for a commenting system What if it costs $0 per year, if one gets < 10 comments and < 10 000 page views? And otherwise $10 per year? Or something like that. What do you think about that? (I'm developing a no-tracking and no-ads commenting system, + open source, SaaS hosting, link in my profile.)
  • jillesvangurp 8y ago
    Reach and engagement are problems these days. Many social platforms promote things they can inject ads on. E.g. a Facebook post will get a wider audience than simply posting a link to your FB feed. Same on linkedin. Same on twitter. They are optimized for keeping traffic inside their platform. They'll run your content but not necessarily bubble it up in other people's feeds. Medium is not a great platform for distribution compared to that (poor reach and it never really emerged as a destination) but not worse than other external/self hosted blogs. A good strategy if you are hungry for clicks is to target all of them with content appropriate to the platform and a link to your blog for reading more. By appropriate I mean optimized for the attention span of the reader. So short tweet on twitter, executive summary on Linkedin for those poor people with essentially no attention spans and an aunty friendly version for Facebook. Reddit post and HN link if you feel brave ;-). I've also been targeting dev.to.
  • davefp 8y ago
    I recently started a blog built with Hugo and published using Netlify by way of a private git repo on Gitlab.com. I would have used Gitlab pages but there is not support for automated SSL certs for custom domains. You have to upload your own manually which doesn't play nice with letsencrypt's 90-day expiry.
    • ar-jan 8y ago
      Or use a Cloudflare certificate (valid 15 years iirc).
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • chimen 8y ago
    I'll be launching Qards very soon. No servers, no databases, free, fast and modern. https://qards.io https://qards.io
• wongmjane 8y ago
  Disabling JavaScript and cookies for medium.com domain, and a bunch of uBlock rules [1] should do the job [1] Here's mine: medium.com##.metabar medium.com##.js-stickyFooter medium.com##.js-postAttributionFooterContainer medium.com##.js-postActionsFooter .buttonSet medium.com##.button--follow
  • kamaln7 8y ago
    Wow, this is great. Thanks for sharing!
  • shopkins 8y ago
    There are also dedicated extensions for this [0] [0]: https://makemediumreadable.com https://makemediumreadable.com
    • eyeundersand 8y ago
      Thank you for this.
  • whitexn--g28h 8y ago
    As I was reading I noticed that none of the complaints appear for me. uBlock Origin and uMatrix block all of it.
  • SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Firefox's Reader view works brilliantly on Medium FWIW.
• Gys 8y ago
  What would be a good alternative ?
  • notacoward 8y ago
    After way too many years of running my own web server, about half the time writing raw HTML or Markdown, I started using https://www.silvrback.com/ https://www.silvrback.com/ a while ago. It has a pretty nice editor with special consideration for posts including code or mathematical formulae, and without most of the warts the OP mentions at Medium. Might not be for everyone, but I find it quite pleasant. Non-disclosure: I have no relationship with Silvrback other than as a plain old customer.
  • braythwayt 8y ago
    I don’t know if it’s a good alternative, but I blog on GitHub using GitHub Pages. It’s a minimalist experience: I use Markdown (optional), and I have my own domain (critical!) If they ever shutter the service, it is very easy to generate all the HTML pages with Jekyll, and then throw them up on a static host. Every single one of Medium’s discoverability and traffic benefits feel like Faustian bargains to me, so I am not going there. The last time I experimented with publishing in a walled garden was Posterous, mostly because they were a YCombinator startup at a time when that wasn’t some kind of golden ticket, and I wanted to make a gesture of support for them and for YCombinator. Posterous shuttered, and I republished my work using GitHub Pages, but all the old urls broke, and I’m never doing that again.
    • Biqh1 8y ago
      I'm curious as to why you say it's 'critical' to have your own domain on Github pages? Is it to do with search engine listings?
      • braythwayt 8y ago
        Joel Spolsky (if you don’t know him, he was one of the first “Celebrity Bloggers” in tech culture) gave me a piece of advice more than a decade ago: Own your own domain and publish under it, that way you always control your content and the links to your content. If my blog was raganwald.githubpages.com, GitHub could theoretically decide that githubpages needed to be deeply integrated with Windows or some other foolishness, and I’d be screwed. But since my blog appears to the world as raganwald.com, I can leave GitHub Pages whenever I like, and all the links will continue to work. It's about long-term control, and for that you need: 1. Control your content, ideally with a copy of the source on your own devices at all time, in an open format with an ecosystem of tooling, and; 2. Control your domain name.
• RobGav 8y ago
  Best alternative are static generators like Jekyll or static CMS like Publii https://getpublii.com https://getpublii.com
  • fullstackchris 8y ago
    Or, if you like having your own code base for your own blog, GatsbyJS ;) Obviously a bit more involved than your examples.
  • hobbescotch 8y ago
    Isn’t the main draw of medium the discussion? Static sites by their nature aren’t built for discussion considering the lack of a real database. Of course you could add a third party commenting system like discus, but then you relying on a third party service for comments and all the privacy and support concerns that come from that.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • meritt 8y ago
      TIL that Medium posts have a discussion section.
    • dqpb 8y ago
      I prefer discussions to be decoupled from content - e.g. hacker news.
    • dmitriid 8y ago
      Even though it’s the draw, Medium has gone out of its way to make discussions a horrible experience: hiding them, breaking mouse interactions, promoting discussions out of context, losing scroll positions etc.
    • opencl 8y ago
      I think an extremely tiny minority of readers of most blogs ever leave comments. IMO the best solution is to host your actual articles on a static site and host the discussion elsewhere with a link at the bottom of the page. Host your own forum, make a subreddit, submit links to HN, whatever.
• ddevault 8y ago
  So why the hell did you use it to write this article, then? I wrote a tool which converts your Medium blog into a Jekyll blog, for publishers hoping to migrate: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify
  • wongmjane 8y ago
    As an ironic living example of how it's a poor choice I guess
  • wpietri 8y ago
    Because it's not just a platform, it's an audience. If you want to reach the audience, you have to use the platform. And the audience most in need of this message are definitely the people publishing on Medium.
    • Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
      >the audience most in need of this message are definitely the people publishing on Medium That's a good point.
    • almostarockstar 8y ago
      Are you referring to platform generated content? The thing is, Medium doesn't do very well at that either. I have a medium blog. I've had a few posts got >10k reads within a month. Almost none of those reads came from Medium itself, but rather from the various outlets that have linked to my post, and Google. The only reason I currently use Medium is that people are more likely to open a Medium url when it shows up in link aggregators. People trust the familiar url far more than www.mypersonalblog.me - and it'll never get blacklisted / shadowbanned on reddit. Oh, and claps. I like the claps.
      • jasonlotito 8y ago
        > people are more likely to open a Medium url when it shows up in link aggregators. People trust the familiar url far more than www.mypersonalblog.me I know this is just anecdotal, but I assume anything coming from Medium is usually less worthwhile. First, the author isn't important on a Medium article. Medium is the brand, the other is someone that doesn't matter. Secondly, it's not easy to follow the author, so even if I did read the author bio at the bottom, following the author is a pain. Finally, everything the above article mentioned. Medium articles are all about playing SEO games and "Growth hacking" before good content (literally). I'll ready Medium articles, but personal blogs are far more credible every day of the week in my book. That being said, I would be interested in how you reached the conclusion that people are more trusting of medium articles?
• amelius 8y ago
  Outline.com strips away all the distraction. Although in this case it duplicates all the images somehow: https://outline.com/uZc4XF https://outline.com/uZc4XF
  • onemoresoop 8y ago
    Thanks for posting, I'm going to give outline a test drive. It seems to be doing what I want. The redundant images are less intrusive than the bells and whistles on medium.
• chuckgreenman 8y ago
  PostHaven is $5/month, but it is much better than medium. They add a tiny little chip with the logo and get out of the way.
• amelius 8y ago
  In any case, it is stupid to give one platform all the power (see YouTube). Internet should be decentralized.
  • criddell 8y ago
    There are some benefits to centralization. For example, if I want to watch a movie or TV show, I have to look for it on Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, HBO, and my cable box. I wish I could subscribe to a single mega-service that just covered everything.
    • lookforlight 8y ago
      I wonder if it would be possible to create a service (or if one already exist) where you could select which streaming sites you are subscribed to, and the service could search all those sites for the movie you want to watch, then redirect you to that site. Because it's hard to remember or to know which site has which movies/TV shows.
      • criddell 8y ago
        Roku tries to do that, but it isn't super reliable and doesn't have access to everything (especially iTunes and YouTube). There are sites that you can enter a title and it will tell you all the places it's available for streaming. I do use that once in a while, but it's still too much friction (IMHO).
      • briandear 8y ago
        Apple TV’s TV app does that.
      • SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
        Android TV has a unified search if you have multiple apps installed. It works very well - and on my SHIELD, highlights shows from multiple apps on the home screen with proper thumbnails etc.
        • 8y ago
• mockingbirdy 8y ago
  Nice, everyone is posting their favourite CMS, again. I use https://getgrav.org https://getgrav.org because I like flat-file CMS. Maybe there are some photographers here: http://koken.me http://koken.me (CMS for photographers). Another idea: Use a static page generator and Amazon's S3 with this neat blackhat trick - https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-one-website-exploited-amazon-s3-to-outrank-everyone-on-google.1059156/ https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-one-website-exploited-... (mildly joking). OT: I pay 0.19$/month for my blog hosting including domain with around 500 views/month (just a personal blog). Many services cost 5$/month, I don't think that's cheap. edit: Medium is for visibility. I know many SEO experts who use it extensively to increase their rankings. Its UX might be annoying for some, but its true value lies in its popularity and outreach.
  • cpoile 8y ago
    What hosting provider do you use for $0.19/mo?
    • mockingbirdy 8y ago
      Netcup
  • elcomet 8y ago
    What does flat-like means here? Are they talking about the design (flat) ?
    • applecrazy 8y ago
      It’s referring to how posts are stored serverside. CMS software such as Drupal, Wordpress, etc. store posts in a database. A flat-file CMS stores posts in a file, making editing and creating posts easier. Also saves on the hassle of securing an admin dashboard.
  • patrickk 8y ago
    What's your blog? I'm interested in reaching out, can you include your email in your profile? Thanks.
• mrapogee 8y ago
  This article seems to miss the point of medium entirely. He fails to mention that you can be paid for content you create on medium, and content consumers don't have to sell their eyes to advertisers. Yes, they have to be pushy so they can acquire that critical base of paid users, but I'll take that any day over traditional advertisers. Now, if you aren't interested in being paid for the content you create, then medium's goals might not be aligned with yours, so another self hosted platform may be better. > it’s bad. Bad. Really bad. It’s not good, for any meaning of good you can imagine. There’s no person on Earth who could honestly call it at even partially good. Banners all over the place. Aggressive tracking and profiling. Go poll 50 free users on the reading experience of Medium. Obviously this is anecdotal but almost everyone I speak to loves reading on medium. Compared to other ad-infested or high paywall websites, medium provides a incredible reading experience for it's goals as a for profit platform.
  • virgilp 8y ago
    For me, "the point of medium" is entirely different. I don't blog regularly... I hardly ever write anything. When I do, medium offers me a large audience. I don't feel pressured to write periodic posts in order to maintain my audience. I just write something when I feel like it. No self-hosting solution can give you that.
    • mrapogee 8y ago
      That's a good point, I think it ties back in as well. Medium does a solid percentage of the work of building an audience for you. They need a way to be compensated for the costs of that as well, hence get more paid users.
• tpaschalis 8y ago
  It's funny, because some years ago when Medium blogs were starting to be posted left and right, people were praising the interface, and nobody listened to the few who objected. Now, we need all kinds of tricks, add-ons and blocks to just read five-minute posts during our commute. It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of your stuff. The next free framework that comes, which promises a clean, non-distracting view, will also (most probably) eventually add advertisements, because, well, corporations need money. In my humble opinion, just write your Markdown files, and use one of the bajillion Static Sites Generators to create/host them, or fork a framework that already does this such as [1], copy-paste them in, and you're set. [1] https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now
  • michaelmior 8y ago
    Noone reads my blog anyway, but I also import my posts into Medium so people can read it there if they choose. Medium sets the canonical URL to the hosted version on my own site so SEO shouldn't take a hit.
  • sodosopa 8y ago
    I use Jekyll and Forestry.io for my site but I’m also realistic and know that solution is a little too complicated for a lot of WordPress and Tumblr folks. The uptake in these tools are because of their simplicity, which honestly the design patterns haven’t changed in almost 20 years.
    • RobGav 8y ago
      There is a great solution Publii - works like WordPress but generated static files. Great tool for beginners or developers. https://getpublii.com https://getpublii.com
      • aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
        Come on man, 100% of your posts is shilling for Publii.
• joeax 8y ago
  This is an on-point rant, but what alternatives are there that combine clean, useful publishing tools with the ability to reach a wide audience? Sure I can host my own blog, but what good is it if I have no reader engagement. If there is a decent replacement, I'm all ears.
  • imglorp 8y ago
    What does Medium do for engagement that ye olde static site doesn't do? Is this something that can be done outside Medium?
    • yitianjian 8y ago
      Users actually discover/browse Medium, and will hit content that isn't directly searched through their explore features/algorithms. Hosting your own site means relying on cross-posting/SEO/etc.
      • thrower123 8y ago
        This is a thing that people actually do? Who are these people, and what other interesting things do they do? I have never gone to medium.com directly, I have only ever wound up there through an article being crossposted on this site, Twitter, FB, or the rare case that one of my email newsletters links to something on there.
        • _coveredInBees 8y ago
          Even if that were the only way people got to medium posts, when you finish a post, you see recommendations for other related medium posts/articles. Writing posts/articles on Medium means that a lot more people could still find their way to your article when they didn't intentionally go to medium specifically for your article.
        • mikedd 8y ago
          You know what..when you put it like that you make a lot of sense. I too get most of my reading done this way. Through cross-posting on HN or /r/ or mastodon.
• educationdata 8y ago
  Medium makes reading comments extremely difficult. It must be intentional, i.e. it is a feature not a bug?
• sodosopa 8y ago
  It’s accessiblity is pretty bad and it’s not tweakable. Why support sites which treat the UI as if everyone can see perfectly?
• moron4hire 8y ago
  If the platform itself weren't so awful in many other ways, the blogging tools on LinkedIn are pretty good, and I've always had very good engagement with very little effort.
• alan_wade 8y ago
  What would it take for another platform to take over? What features would it need, in your opinion? How would it be promoted and monetized?
  • mprev 8y ago
    Isn’t the point that we don’t need another platform to take over but that the web was meant to be decentralised and we can all easily go back to that?
  • SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    It would be like Medium was when it first started. Such a platform will come along soon if it hasn't already, everyone will jump to it, and then they'll monetize it, and then another will come along...
    • mikedd 8y ago
      the never-ending cycle
• citilife 8y ago
  "Hosting" your own blog takes around an hour of setup for wordpress or github pages. Personally, I use vultr + wordpress for my blog[1], but I have technical expertise - it took only 30 minutes to setup and transfer from my previous provider. Reason I like to host my own, is I control the content, the popups, the UI, etc. If you care about that, host it yourself. Medium is there to make money, we can't fault them for attempting to collect for their service. [1] https://austingwalters.com/ https://austingwalters.com/
  • dbspin 8y ago
    I hosted my own wordpress blog for several years on various virtual private servers, and was hacked multiple times. Just got to be way too much work to admin the site. I use wordpress.com currently. It's less than ideal, but I think you're underestimating the amount of work required to secure a site long term, rather than simply install one. For most lay users, insuring that their host is keeping python up to date, that the security permissions are correct on each file, and that every plugin installed is 'safe' is more time consuming than it's worth. I'm not up to speed on the state of static site generators, but that's got to be a better way to go for most users.
  • ozten 8y ago
    It takes 30 minutes plus 9 months of learning DNS, hosting, S3, static site generator, CLI ;)
• MisterOctober 8y ago
  Yep -- I was a paid Medium subscriber / user for most of this year. Discontinued last month for many of the reasons already cited. In particular for me, the content creation interface is absolutely horrible [even worse in the iOS version] and it's a chore to get anything done using it. Clearly the guiding UX principles were aesthetic rather than usability-oriented.
• esotericn 8y ago
  Sometimes I read articles like this and think I'm past it. It's like the whole web has turned in to this pool of mud and no-one realises what it was like before. A blog is a text file on a screen. There's really no need to do it on a proprietary system, you can literally upload a text file to your own host, but if you can't be bothered, somewhere like GitHub Pages. You want an image? Here's a tag: <img> If the idea is that it doesn't look pretty enough - well, a Medium blog doesn't look like anything at all because I've closed it after closing the first three popups. Here is a link to my own personal blog: https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/blog.txt https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/blog.txt You're reading this comment right now on a site that gets it right.
  • maxxxxx 8y ago
    "A blog is a text file on a screen. There's really no need to do it on a proprietary system, you can literally upload a text file to your own host, but if you can't be bothered, somewhere like GitHub Pages. You want an image? Here's a tag: <img>" Don't be surprised if someone has this "idea" soon and makes a killing with it. A lot of people seem to get tired with the current stream of "innovation" that makes the web slower and more complex.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • esotericn 8y ago
      > Don't be surprised if someone has this "idea" soon and makes a killing with it. Let's change the world. You can find my contact details in my bio[1, 2, 3]. [1] please note that by e-mailing me you are agreeing to my privacy policy which states that all e-mails may be read by me [2] your IP address will be logged and tracked by both your ISP and Hacker News when you click the link to my bio [3] [modal] this isn't actually anything, I just wanted to put something in your face [ yes ] [ yes ] [4] alert('ha! gotcha! there's another one!') edit: [5] would you like to sign up to my newsletter? [ no ] (there isn't one)
    • felipetavares 8y ago
• marpstar 8y ago
  I'm glad the author mentioned the thing that I dislike most about Medium: the "share" tooltip that appears any time you highlight anything in the article. I realize that they consider this a value prop (and it certainly hasn't hurt their ability to grow) but for those of us who highlight text as we read, it's incredibly annoying.
  • yeutterg 8y ago
    Tangentially related: Evernote Premium does this when you highlight-as-you-read on PDFs. They assume you want to annotate all the time. I would rather press a toolbar button or keyboard shortcut to bring up an annotation, like the way it works on Preview.app.
  • onemoresoop 8y ago
    Same here, highlighting the text helps me keep track of the paragraph i'm reading and I was annoyed by this feature as well. On a related note, I've been looking for a plugin that highlights lines/paragraphs of text and is controlled by the cursor keys up/down (for desktop viewing only) but haven't been able to find such a thing yet. I keep on hoping that one day somebody would come up with such a thing.
    • ericmjalbert 8y ago
      I think Vimium [0] would allow you to highlight lines with hjkl keys. They have a "Visual Select" mode that'll highlight lines as if it were in VI [1]. [0] Google Chrome Extension: https://github.com/philc/vimium https://github.com/philc/vimium [1] https://github.com/philc/vimium/wiki/Visual-Mode https://github.com/philc/vimium/wiki/Visual-Mode
  • iaml 8y ago
    It's very annoying, but thankfully reader mode in every browser gets rid of it and every other annoyance medium has, including popups.
    • nindwen 8y ago
• foobarbecue 8y ago
  Why is this post written on medium??? Just to be ironic?
• theriddlr 8y ago
  It's so laggy on Safari OSX Sierra and often hangs. I'm not subscribing to read articles by amateurs. What it has going is nice content, white space, a feed feature – that's about it.
• jpfed 8y ago
  This is as good a place as any to ask- what's the easiest way to get a POSSE setup?
• burtonator 8y ago
  I suspect posts on medium get up voted more in hacker news but I don't have data to back this claim.
  • minimaxir 8y ago
    Nope; if anything, the signal-to-noise is much lower.
• batat 8y ago
  I hate modern web. Every site nowdays filled with bright/flashing/wobbling/jumping buttons, modal windows, pinned bars covering 1/3 of the content (or 2/3 on my phone in landscape mode) and asking me to install Yet Another Special App to view site. But I already have app for viewing sites - damn web browser. Browser can even open different pages in different tabs. Or even different sites in different tabs, unbelievable! (Will it ever end?)
  • SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    I hate the modern web too. I also hated the web's pseudo-skeumorphic rounded corners and drop shadows phase. Why can't we go back to good old framesets and (mostly) plain text. ;)
  • onion-soup 8y ago
    No it won't
• octosphere 8y ago
  http://medium.com/joe_wegner/why-i-dont-write-for-medium-c7cc156bc5d9 http://medium.com/joe_wegner/why-i-dont-write-for-medium-c7c...
• tmaly 8y ago
  I just use Hugo for my personal blog. I use medium to post snippets to help attract traffic.
  • foo101 8y ago
    I have taken it a step further. I started with Blogger (blogspot), then Medium, then Jekyll, then Hugo. Even with self hosted Jekyll/Hugo, I never felt comfortable about the tooling dictating how my directory structure should be. Now I have my own static site generator written in Python. It is based on https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite that was posted to HN sometime back. What I like about generating my blog with pure Python is that I can control every aspect of my blog just the way I want it.
• michaelbuckbee 8y ago
  The proper way to think of Medium is as "Long Form Twitter" - that it's not where you should primarily post your long treatise about XYZ, but that it's a secondary platform for promoting it, interacting with the audience there, etc. OPs article describes the first landing UX - which is definitely bad, but not what a habitual Medium reader sees. I wrote this much bigger posts about it here [1], but the TL;DR is that you should post on your own site and use Medium's hidden "Import" tool to bring your content into their platform: https://medium.com/p/import https://medium.com/p/import This preserves the SEO of your original article because it adds a rel canonical tag. 1 - https://sendcheckit.com/blog/why-you-should-put-your-content-on-medium-and-your-own-domain https://sendcheckit.com/blog/why-you-should-put-your-content...
• almostarockstar 8y ago
  This topic comes up fairly often. I think about it a lot - as a Medium user and as a person who has managed multiple wordpress blogs. ##Here's my thoughts on why Medium is so popular: 1. It's easy. We are all techies here. We often underestimate the weight of this. 2. It looks better than your average blog theme. (With 0 effort) 3. It promises the opportunity to access a larger audience. (Even if it does not deliver on that promise) 4. It provides an endorphin rush though likes/claps and the analytics/view counts. ##What the average blogger doesn't care about: 1. Effort Overhead. Managing a web server, buying a domain, configuring a wordpress blog, updating wordpress, choosing a theme, deleting spam comments etc. 2. Content ownership. Most people don't think about it that much. 3. RSS feeds. I'm willing to bet >80% of bloggers have no idea that people still use RSS (or even what it is at this stage) ------ I don't think Medium is perfect, but I also don't think any of the alternatives are good enough either.
  • TheRealPomax 8y ago
    A small note on that very last one: RSS falls in the "you probably don't know about this, so let us tell you that you can reach more people with it" category. Any platform that doesn't offer it, or offers it "tucked away" is doing so intentionally, to keep traffic siloed, and keeping the posts from reaching external audiences. Not knowing what RSS is as a user is completely fine, and really:to be expected. But that's true for all technology: pick any tech you value and the majority of the world won't be familiar with it (case in point: I didn't know hackernews existed until my stuff got posted to it and people started yelling at me about it) so it's not a matter of "do people know about it" but "should there be a reasonable expectation that people are told about it when they start doing a thing that would greatly benefit from it". Not offering RSS, when you're an online syndication platform, is a pretty clear sign that Medium made Medium to serve Medium first. Not to be the best experiences for readers and writers of blog posts and long reads. Which includes not informing people about things they could have had if Medium was a little less self-serving and actually cared about getting people's voices heard out there.
• crazygringo 8y ago
  No site has perfect UX, but some of these complaints don't seem true, e.g.: > No, those do not go away as you scroll. They literally (yes, literally) take up 25% of your vertical space On my computer the bars do go away the instant I scroll down (Chrome on a Mac, and logged-in, not sure if those matter), and 25% is a made-up exaggerated number for a window the author has made much shorter than any reasonable person would be browsing with, even on a small laptop. Yes, Medium strongly nudges you to have an account and be logged-in, and if you do a lot of the other complaints go away. Because it's inherently a social blogging platform, not a static blogging platform. And the social aspect helps spread your audience and build engagement... that doesn't make it a "poor choice". To the contrary, it's a great choice to have.
  • michaelt 8y ago
    Here's what I get opening the post with a landscape iphone: https://imgur.com/a/ywJtaCn https://imgur.com/a/ywJtaCn (that's after I dismissed the cookie warning popover) Neither bar disappears when I scroll down. You can test this with Chrome dev tools and see the same thing.
• jypepin 8y ago
  I'm amazed at how many people here say that people should simply use a static site generator instead of wordpress or medium. Does anyone else understand that probably 99% of Medium traffic (both reader and writer) don't even understand those words and would have no idea even where to begin? Most of them probably had trouble just signing up on Medium and already forgot their passwords. This is where Medium wins. It looks ok, makes posts look professional, and doesn't give any choices. You don't have to choose a theme, or setup anything. Signup (or even, login with twitter/facebook) and just write. Done. You can't possibly hope that any writer on Medium is ready or interested in a static site generator.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • pier25 8y ago
    Medium also liberates writers from social stuff. It has claps, comments, etc, but also when you share a Medium article on Twitter or Facebook you have all the meta-tags to make it look good. Also, no infrastructure headaches either.
    • ayoisaiah 8y ago
      Medium comments are up there with the worst comment implementation I've ever seen
      • pier25 8y ago
        UX wise I agree. But, I think those are better than having comments on your own blog.
  • thomasfedb 8y ago
    Maybe a middle ground that could work is Ghost? I use their hosted service and it works well.
    • Kye 8y ago
• msadowski 8y ago
  I started modestly blogging on Medium in 2016. The same year I moved away from the platform to a Github Pages + Jekyll combo (https://msadowski.github.io/ https://msadowski.github.io/). I'd never go back to hosting my content on external platform.
  • SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    You and me both. Now they support custom domains and HTTPS it's an even easier decision. Authoring posts in plain text and then a commit and a push to put it live (just a click of a button in a half decent editor). According to most of the posts in this thread this is "too complicated" for your average blogger, apparently.
• chenshuiluke 8y ago
  Do any of you guys know how I can downvote posts or let Medium know that I'm not interested in having articles like x on my feed?
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• mmartinson 8y ago
  If we didn't have medium where would all the documentation for js frameworks be published?
• samat 8y ago
  Why on earth did he post it on Medium, then?!
• mothsonasloth 8y ago
  I would like to put forward an alternative called Ghost, I self host my version but its nice and simple.
• briandear 8y ago
  Have we forgotten how awesome https://svbtle.com https://svbtle.com is?
  • mikedd 8y ago
    uuu, what's this. it looks shiny :D
  • wcpines 8y ago
    I said the same thing. I'm sad it didn't catch on more.
• ninjakeyboard 8y ago
  Why is he writing the post on medium instead of a platform that doesn't have the issues mentioned?
  • PKop 8y ago
    Because the target audience for the message he is presenting (Medium is bad, use it less) is Medium users.
• KrishnaAnaril 8y ago
  Medium may not be providing Rss, but I'm a big fan of their curated content. Plus it gives your posts more publicity.
• mpurham 8y ago
  I don't think anyone should be locked into a specific blogging platform and should own their content 100%. WordPress has been my blogging platform of choice for years but, I've tried many different platforms and ultimately ended up returning back to a platform (ORG) in which I could have total control over. I've also built a tool (https://scribewp.com/ https://scribewp.com/) which allows me to now write my blog posts in any text editor I prefer and later I can sync a markdown file to a posts or page in WordPress. This has improved my productivity and I own my content 100%. While medium is a great platform, there is too much noise going on when reading a blog post.
  • amelius 8y ago
    The problem is not only how much how a blogging platform owns your blog, but also that it owns the viewer's eyeballs. From the moment the viewer reads your blog, the platform has power over the viewer.
• vvpan 8y ago
  Ha. I was about to write an identical blog post. Must be zeitgeist.
• calimac 8y ago
  Virtue signaling hippster sheeple use medium.
• foo101 8y ago
  Most of the popular online services have screwed up their interface. I think it started with Digg. It was once a loved website. The screwed up the interface and everyone ran to Reddit. Now Reddit has screwed up their interface too. We all used to love Google for its simple and elegant web interfaces. Look at what a mess GMail is now. If there is anything that more than 10 years of Web 2.0 teaches us, it is that once we host our content on another company's service, we are at the mercy of that company. They can take our content and serve it over absolute crap interface providing an absolute crap experience to our readers whenever they want to. They are never going to care about the presentation of the content the way the original author might. So I think it is time to take back control and host your own blogs. I know not everyone wants to buy a domain name, buy a VPS, set things up, and keep a blog running. And no, GitHub Pages, is not a solution. GitHub Pages is great today but if there is anything that more than 10 years of Web 2.0 teaches us, it is ... Do you see my point? So as technologists, we need to think how we can make it easier so that anyone (from young kids to the suits type) can setup their blogs and publish content with ease. Any interesting solutions? Any takers?
  • FiveSquared 8y ago
    Yeah i dont wanna setup up a sever (because that hella insercure) but I want my info to be free! Wordpress?
  • MH15 8y ago
    Githuh pages is the solution. For now. And that's all we need, as you said, nothing lasts forever.
  • dntrkv 8y ago
    The main thing that killed Digg was them selling out to advertisers and having power users control all the content on the front page. The redesign was just the final nail in the coffin.
  • _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    > Now Reddit has screwed up their interface too. At least Reddit has alternatives (for now), e.g. dm.reddit.com ; old.reddit.com
• Globz 8y ago
  Honestly I don't bother with Wordpress and the like anymore. I simply write what I want to publish in org-mode then export it to HTML or PDF and that's it... My data is no longer tied to anything like a database or some specific framework so its easier for backups and moving it to new servers when needed.
• colinprince 8y ago
  A bookmarklet I adapted from an example I read about NodeIterator in js. Removes sticky and fixed blocks from the dom. I use it all the time, even on mobile safari. https://gist.github.com/colincbc/f8d1b8768e1e566d86b6ef4e691ecc5b https://gist.github.com/colincbc/f8d1b8768e1e566d86b6ef4e691...
• xena 8y ago
  I wrote my backend blog code mainly so I could have a step above a static site gen, but allow for future expansion in weird ways if i want to do that.
• goldfishcaura 8y ago
  Does anyone else believes that social publishing should be operated by a non-profit foundation - in an open-source sort of way both for the use of tech (be that Ghost, Hugo, or whatnot) and for the social review/promotion/editing apparatus?
• ryanmarsh 8y ago
  Having just posted a programming related article there last night I think it’s a poor choice for technical subjects too. We need a Medium for technical people. Maybe not quite Observable (Mike Bostock’s thing) but with more tools than Medium.
• LastZactionHero 8y ago
  Anyone want to start a web ring? I'd love to self-host, but without some audience from Medium I'd probably just be blogging to myself.
• kemenaran 8y ago
  Could be a good time to mention Plume [1], a Medium clone written in Rust that uses the fediverse for displaying blog posts across different instances. Still very much a work in progress – but one can already publish articles, comment them, and follow people using RSS or a Mastodon account (because ActivityPub rocks). Not ready ret, but quite promising. [1] https://github.com/Plume-org/Plume https://github.com/Plume-org/Plume
• mikedd 8y ago
  Bashing medium is cool and all but why not present some alternatives. I clicked on it actually expecting some random article about "hey check out this cool open-source _built_in_some_hipster_language_ blogging _buzzword_ _buzzword_ platform I've built".. Joke aside..gimme alternatives fam.
  • bbbowzer 8y ago
    open port 443
• markkat 8y ago
  This cycle has been repeated and will continue to be repeated until the underlying economic models change.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• bbbowzer 8y ago
  Medium only carries mediocre stuff. My heart sinks a little when an enticing title carries that domain. No I don't want another es6/react top 10 stuff. This is the best article medium has posted. Speaks volumes.
• robot 8y ago
  try https://getbuzz.io https://getbuzz.io, we're in private beta, it is white label and you can put it on your domain.
• nathan_f77 8y ago
  There's a Chrome and Firefox extension called Make Medium Readable Again: https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA It works great and disables many of these annoying things.
• sebringj 8y ago
  Maybe a different paradigm to blogging would be bring your own cloud, put in your cloud creds, then it does the beauty work for you in publishing static stuff to those cloud providers like AWS S3. You just pay a minimal fee to use it ad hoc or something as you would need a way to keep it running. Wouldn't need to store creds, just client-side signing to upload. It then updates its "home page" to list your articles recently for SEO. Have community plugins etc you can use etc. Kind of like a modern wordpress but without the terrible code. I don't have time to do this but thought it might be a good idea to flip it based on what we have now. I guess an issue could be broken links if people flop on their cloud payments but seems pretty light weight to build.
• brian_herman__ 8y ago
  You realize you are using medium to blog right?
• abalone 8y ago
  > Sure, Medium editor is nice. Typography is good (for English, other languages are not supported). Publishing is free. That's it? I'm not sure the author accurately summarized the upside of Medium. I thought the main benefit is distribution.
• djhworld 8y ago
  I think medium has some cool features like the "claps", comment boxes and story analytics. There's a lot of stuff that that just works out of the box However I really dislike syndicating my blog to it because the formatting is so limited. You cannot do bullet point lists for example, which makes it a huge pain having to tinker with your existing post to reformat it for medium. Nowadays I just syndicate an introduction to the post and a "click here to continue reading" hyperlink to my actual blog. Which is a rubbish experience for Medium users. I'm wondering if there's a decentralised version of a blogging network, where users host their blog themselves, with the social features like claps/comments wrapped around it, plus a bit of a 'recommendation' system for other posts in the network to get that network of writers feel. I know disqus exists but it's not quite the same
  • supermdguy 8y ago
    You actually can do bullet points if you type '*' or '-' and then a space. For some reason, they have a few markdown-like formatting features that aren't shown in the popup editing bar. Also, about the recommendation system for self-hosted content, I've seen a few sites that link to HN or Reddit for comments. Upvotes can stand in for "claps", and posting on HN or Reddit makes your article discoverable.
    • djhworld 8y ago
      Sorry, you are right, I misremembered, I think I meant further indentation of bullet point lists is not supported, so only 1 level of indentation is supported. I think linking to HN/reddit is fine but that means leaving the original site where you were consuming the content. I was more thinking along the lines of the social features would be embedded in your blog, and would act as part of a bigger network.
  • KajMagnus 8y ago
    Yes they have this claps feature. Isn't it weird, like, cheating, that one can clap 50 times for the same story? I'm wondering if Medium in this way fools people into thinking their / others stories are more popular, than what they actually are? And in that way Medium thinks Medium will get more traction? Or why allow that many claps and not show # clappers? I clapped 50 times for this story "Medium is a poor choice for blogging".
• recmend 8y ago
  Why did you post your rant on medium?
• munificent 8y ago
  More and more, I find myself relying on "follow the damn money" to understand how increasingly weird the Internet is and how to unweird it. If you're a writer and you want your words to get in front of people, those words need to be on a server somewhere. Someone's gotta pay for the electricity and maintainance on that server. If you don't know who pays for that and what their motivation for doing so is, you don't have a clear understanding of how your words get to your audience. So many web horror stories these days — privacy violations, shady business practices, broken user trust, companies "losing their morals", etc. — stem from the fact that the users deriving value from some product weren't paying for it and were unpleasantly surprised to discover that the people who are paying for it expect something in return, whether freely given or not. Even many startups that begin with their hearts in the right place eventually go wrong once those early "angel" (an ironic term if there ever was one) investors want to recoup their investments, somehow, anyhow. Fortunately, there is a solution. It's not in wide use yet on the Internet (it is a long-established mechanism in other industries like food and consumer goods), but I have some hope that adoption will grow. I call it, "pay for shit". ("Macropatronage", "c-to-b", or "crypto-free currency network" might be better terms for the HN zeitgeist.) The way it works is like this: If you want some product or service, you give a company some of your own money and then they give you the thing in return. This system is not without its flaws. Every time you use it, your total wealth goes down by a measurable amount. Companies often end up incentivized to give you the minimum value in return for maximum money. But it least somewhat aligns the interests of the companies you do business with because you are, well, actually doing business with them. When you buy sausage from the sausage factory, you may not be exactly sure of what you get. But it's still probably better than being the sausage.
  • projectramo 8y ago
    I agree with you in general. However, it feels there should be a "fair" amount to pay. What is the fair amount to pay for blog hosting? Free is too cheap and surely subsidized by something else. $20/month seems like too much for a blog. The odd thing is that the marginal cost goes down with the popularity of the site. Something like $5 feels right (svbtle is at $6). I think if you hit scale you might be profitable at $3 or $4. I am not talking about the value I get, but about the cost + profit threshold for the provider.
• MrStonedOne 8y ago
  Number one web experience trick: If its a article style website (news, blogging, etc), disable javascript. Since chrome removed javascript from the site model I've been using ublock's javascript button. it looks like this `</>` Outside of images that don't render the full resolution version on sites like the Times, its a truly objectively better experience. In fact, I want to see that as an addon, a plugin that disables on javascript on sites based on a list, like adblocks now and days, with the following criteria: does disabling javascript lead to a net increase in UX?. For sites like Medium, almost every news site, etc, the answer is yes.
• blhack 8y ago
  Just to throw my dead-simple blogging software into the mix: https://github.com/blhack/blogeyBlog https://github.com/blhack/blogeyBlog It's written in go. You write text files and put them in a directory. It applies a template and serves them. That's it. Personally I love it, you might too!
• sergiotapia 8y ago
  I moved on to https://dev.to/sergio https://dev.to/sergio 1000 times better writing experience, and non of the political fluff that pesters you on Medium. If you write technical articles, go to Dev.to
• rockoo 8y ago
  Story about Medium sucking published on Medium... the irony
• tonystubblebine 8y ago
  Counterpoint: Medium brings you readers and that's the most valuable feature I've been running my own company since 2001 and been on Twitter since 2006 and I still don't have a readership that is anywhere near what I can get through the Medium algorithm. I write to think. But I publish to get that thinking read. There really is no other feature that comes close to mattering more to me than Medium's network effects. I published something the other day that has 269K views with an additional 1k coming every day through the Medium network. Medium's stats say they were directly responsible for 170k of those views. Then when I look at the external views, I mostly see that those were driven by Medium as well. For example, 10k views came from Twitter, but those were Medium readers retweeting. I looked at my own promotion: Reddit, HN, newsletter, Twitter and can only count up about 10k views that I was directly responsible for.
• wcpines 8y ago
  I like(d) Svbtle for both reading and writing. I'm sad it didn't catch on more.
  • projectramo 8y ago
    It took me so long to find the pricing. I actually cannot find it anywhere on the site and had to give up and do a google search. There is no reason for that. Why would anyone sign up without knowing the pricing?
    • wcpines 8y ago
      This is a good point. But that aside, I like that it's a simple platform for reading/writing. Its drawback, I suppose, is content/topic discovery.
• LinuxBender 8y ago
  I am not into blogging. If I were, I would just you a very lightweight html and css on a tiny VM, precompress it and serve it from the ram disk. No CDN. No CMS. Just good ol' vim. Maybe I would get fancy by having a header and footer that shows up on each page. There would be no limit to how many times people could view it for free. If I wanted to let friends add their blogs or comments, I would enable a chroot sftp and link to a root page for them. I've taught teenagers to use sftp, so it can't be that difficult. In summary, I suppose I agree that any heavy framework on some domain you do not own is less than ideal. If self hosting were not an option for whatever reason, I might use neocities [1] for nostalgic reasons. That would also be free to view for everyone. [1] - https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
• alpaca128 8y ago
  On a related note, while scrolling towards the second half of the article, the site started breaking apart in front of me. By the time I reached the comments the whole article had become invisible, seemingly blocked by a pop-up background that wasn't removed by the adblocker. And this is a trend I'm seeing more often recently. I've encountered multiple sites that start to fail on all sides once you use adblock, and I'm not talking about noscript or others where the site not working is already the default behaviour more often than not. In fact some websites actually worked better in a purely terminal-based browser than on my current Firefox setup when I tried it a few weeks ago. Something is really going in the wrong direction.
• writepub 8y ago
  The criticisms here are regarding the end user's reading experience, which are all fair. However, Medium's unique value propositions typically outweigh these concerns: 1. For creators wanting to monetize, Medium automagically promotes content that is getting engagement on their platform. Everything from emails to their huge user base and social media promotions can drastically amplify engagement. 2. For non-technical writers, it offers a great UI for writing and publishing, and tools for engagement and feedback (claps, comments, ....) Highly technical people, like the founders of basecamp/inventors of ruby on rails, use Medium for these reasons Until a viable alternative for these 2 emerge, it's just as valid to recommend rsync over dropbox
• andrew-dc 8y ago
  I have a growing collection of resources under the title: "My Own Platform," and this is exactly why. As many have mentioned, there are some awesome utilities out there for simple Markdown publishing -> Push to Github pages. Sure, you won't get all the interwoven clicks and promotion, but in my book, I think shooting for a smaller quality group of readers, then a huge mass of people is more where I am at. Milage may vary, I'm sure.
• bookofjoe 8y ago
  I just read every single comment, and not one person mentioned Typepad. Perhaps I'm the only one still using it. I started my blog there in 2004 and have been posting many times/day 7 days/week since: over 30,000 posts, all instantly accessible by anyone in my Archives sidebar. I haven't changed a single thing about the look or format since it began. I know nothing about coding, RSS, etc.; reading the comments, all the techie stuff washed over me like an invisible medium (no pun intended).
• partycoder 8y ago
  Pissing off the user creates an opportunity for competitors to kick in.
• kemitchell 8y ago
  I stopped writing on Medium because I don't want claps and statistics and incentives to add stock photos and so on. I don't want my writing gameified. Other than that, it's pretty nice. More here: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/01/04/The-Well-Appointed-Skinner-Box.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/01/04/The-Well-Appointed...
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• automathematics 8y ago
  Funny, medium suggested this message to me.
• knowingathing 8y ago
  One of the worst things about Medium is the commenting section. I still have no idea how it works, the UX is terrible.
  • Quiza12 8y ago
    Ditto. Absolutely dreadful. It's like they sort of tacked it on without much thought of how to do it.
• perseusprime11 8y ago
  Switching to LinkedIn these days is a better value proposition considering that your professional network is right there.
• 0xmohit 8y ago
  > Another interesting point is that they are really eager to block embeds that do not respect Do Not Track header but do not respect DNT themselves. Yes, Medium will collect your profile even if you are not a registered user and explicitly ask them not to do it.
• b3b0p 8y ago
  Most of the time when I see a Medium link I refuse to read it. The website is awful. The comment system/discussions are awful. The content is mostly awful. Why should I listen/read from some random on Medium? What is your background? How are you an expert that I should read and take advice from? It seems like a bunch of random people trying to make it blogging again, like in the first Dotcom bubble. Medium feels like Twitter long reads. Maybe it's just me though.
• CMCDragonkai 8y ago
  I just use Github Gists. I've posted over 500 articles onto Github Gists. It's the best blogging system in the world imo. It is git backed, renders ipynb and other fancy formats, has comments and stars and allows forking. Also I use giscus to notify me of comments. The search system can use some UI help though. But hashtags help. https://gist.github.com/CMCDragonkai https://gist.github.com/CMCDragonkai
• adarsh_thampy 8y ago
  I wrote about why you should not move to medium sometime back citing the example of Basecamp. https://medium.com/@adarsh_thampy/basecamp-moved-their-blog-to-medium-but-you-probably-shouldn-t-ab36aa88158a https://medium.com/@adarsh_thampy/basecamp-moved-their-blog-... And basecamp is moving away from Medium. The problem with Medium is that the inbuilt audience will go away soon. Browse their home page, and now most of the articles are premium ones. This is very similar to Facebook. When pages started, they were great. But as Facebook wanted to make money, they began restricting reach. Clearly, that's where Medium will head towards.
• jack1243star 8y ago
  The first thing I see is this: https://i.imgur.com/jFJRaoB.png https://i.imgur.com/jFJRaoB.png Very cringe worthy indeed.
• JDiculous 8y ago
  I stopped using Medium when they removed the ability to see a list of just your articles, mixing your comments into the list (as though every comment you write at the bottom of an article is just as significant as an article you wrote, what a stupid idea though it looks like they've realized that and reverted back). Also I never liked how they don't let you nest bullet points. Moved to markdown and and self-hosting and haven't looked back since. Much prefer the freedom of owning my own files and not being married to any platform. However I do miss the convenience of just being able to post online without needing to compile everything on my laptop with a static file generator and pushing to GitHub, so maybe I'll switch to Wordpress or something later if I take writing more seriously.
• SilverSlash 8y ago
  I tried to port an article from my personal blog to medium once. The experience was abysmal. They don't render Markdown, there is no easy way of adding code sections, etc. I had never used Medium until then and will probably never use it again but I still gotta ask. Why are we stuck with this awful platform, and why do they still not have markdown/code support?
• blaze33 8y ago
  Not sure the issue is Medium being a poor tool compared to other ways of blogging... The issue I see is one of ownership: You think you "use" Medium to publish your content, you call that blogging. But Medium own the domain and the tools: you'll never exploit the owner using the tools they offered you. In the end, it's medium that really exploits you (ie. the content you freely gave). And they'll use your content in the way they want. Your content is just a hook they'll use to attract readers and push them to those obnoxious pop-ups, banners, buttons, etc. Well you read the article. Personally I own my domain. I use open source tools (ghost & custom made web apps). It serves me well. I own my place and have the freedom to grow it as I'd like. Thanks for reading, take care :)
• jpincheira 8y ago
  What's great about Medium is the exposure it can quickly get you if you get to write something worth it for people to read. It's still powerful for that.
• cbar_tx 8y ago
  over a year ago, the rapid fire, almost daily updates to their android app had given me the suspicions that their operating expenses would be too much to remain humble for long, then came the notifications and social media posts inviting me to come read the paywall articles. I'm not against paying for access with subscription, as I have a few, as well as a healthy list of creators on Patreon but I feel it's kinda like YouTube profiting massively from user generated content. I know they aren't in it for fun, just saying it's been obvious for a while now
• Skillset 8y ago
  Someone in the comments linked to this Chrome extension: https://makemediumreadable.com/ https://makemediumreadable.com/ I tried it, and after turning on all the extension's features, it pretty much solves the problem.
• sudovancity 8y ago
  Honestly, it used to be pretty good, they did some UI changes and added a paid platform and I haven't used it since.
• dredmorbius 8y ago
  DeFuckifyingMedium.css: https://pastebin.com/YdmTFcBi https://pastebin.com/YdmTFcBi