8 ms·
Ditching Medium
- skilled 8y agoIt's funny that you can clear cookies and reset the limit counter. Kind of annoying to have to do it often though.
- perseusprime11 8y agoMost of us read it on our mobile devices. You can't clear the cookies on your device.
- rhizome 8y agoProgramming blogs are kind of meh to me in general, and will be until the code-display aspects finally get ironed out.
- colordrops 8y agoCould you elaborate on the problems of displaying code in blogs?
- rhizome 8y agobroken font size, running off the edge of the page. pretty much everything outside of the first 40 characters of any line.
- themodelplumber 8y agoDon't worry. We'll soon get this WebAssembly thing just right, and the situation will change. You'll love the code-display aspects, and the blog-display aspects will drive you nuts.
- ben_jones 8y agoThe solution is pretty clear to me but to my knowledge it doesn't exist and the economics of creating it are not that favorable. You need to have a free github/publisher side cache which mirrors the public github repository of the code example. The example should be rendered server side without a javascript library for syntax highlighting / formatting. This way the author, or more likely a reader because the author abandoned the post a second after writing it, can make progressive updates and deprecations - sort of like stackoverflow where an answer can live on past the life of its author. This is not a rife target for a start-up and most likely would have to be offered by a larger player. The service needs to be long-lived and reliable from an operational perspective and its pricing model is not clear as most developers would not pay a dime for it. Github is the most favorable target, I'd pay an extra couple dollars a month to "upgrade" my github account for this functionality. Github Gists are already pretty close to what we need but miss out on a few key features for use in independent blogs (presumably a rate limit and a limited scope that may be too narrow for an example, it might need a full repository).
- tedmiston 8y agoI think you could achieve the "runnable blog post" component via a site like Glitch. http://about-glitch.glitch.me/about/features/ http://about-glitch.glitch.me/about/features/ https://medium.com/glitch/what-is-glitch-90cd75e40277 https://medium.com/glitch/what-is-glitch-90cd75e40277 Not sure if it is possible to hook it up to a CI or Git hook.
- Alex3917 8y agoOn the topic of programming blogs, are there any libraries to automatically detect code snippets within text? I know there are some StackOverflow posts talking about possible approaches to this, but not sure if anyone has actually built an open source solution.
- huntermeyer 8y agohttps://highlightjs.org https://highlightjs.org
- Alex3917 8y agoIt looks like this highlights code within <pre><code> blocks with a color scheme appropriate for the language, but it can't actually detect whether a snippet is code in the first place. This is good to know about, although I personally care more about just displaying code blocks in a different typeface than I do about highlighting them appropriately.
- Reedx 8y agoA downside of a pure growth first, monetization second strategy.
- Alex3917 8y agoI mean this is as much bad behavior on the part of users as it is bad behavior on the part of publishers. Users flock to products that are super polished and have tons of celebrity users (both made possible by huge fundraises), but then flip out when they're asked for $5 a month to pay for the service they're getting.
- m52go 8y agoIt's not fair to blame it on users. This is businesses playing bait-and-switch. No person would like it if all of a sudden they had to pay for something they were getting for free before. It's the business's job to charge a fair price upfront (or, at the very least, give the user some hint of its future plans so they're mentally prepared).
- crispytx 8y agoI moved my old blog to a new domain name recently, and wasn't able to keep using Medium because they no longer support custom domains. So now I'm using WordPress for my blogging software and also using their hosting as well. That's too bad for Medium, because Medium's blogging software is superior in my opinion. They've just made a few boneheaded mistakes. My theory is that Ev Williams wants to create the next Twitter, and that's the reason behind his poor decisions. Williams should have just worried about creating the best blogging software and blog hosting solution and things would have kept humming along just fine. Greed can make people do silly things. Ev, if you happen to read this: 1) bring back custom domains. 2) start charging a monthly fee for hosting custom domains like WordPress does 3) Create a native advertising service that publishes promoted stories into the main Medium.com story feed.
- village-idiot 8y agoI have never understood tech blogs on Medium. Surely if you’re writing about a technical subject, especially programming, you have the skills to setup a quick Jekyll blog? It’s what I did, and I have no idea why I’d hand control of my user experience over to Medium, no idea whatsoever.
- Alex3917 8y ago1) Built-in recirc 2) SEO optimized 3) Better tech than you'd get on your own platform -- e.g. the ability to act as an oEmbed consumer. The trade off is that you don't have as strong a relationship with your subscribers. But considering that 100k page views probably only gets you 100 subscribers, most bloggers have basically zero chance at getting any real number of subscribers to begin with so for them using a platform like Medium is all upside.
- PaulHoule 8y agoSEO optimized? From what I see there are a few accounts that spam every article posted on Tedium to HN.
- tedmiston 8y agoNot for technical reasons, for distribution. A lot more people subscribe to Medium publications for instance than my personal blog.
- village-idiot 8y agoHanding control of distribution to one company is always a dicey proposition.
- markbnj 8y agoWell, from my perspective I've had my own blog since 2005 and still do (wordpress on a cheap vps), but the articles I publish on Medium get way more interaction, views, reads and comments.
- milancurcic 8y agoEither I or the Author are confused about how Medium works. > A blog, to me, was a place for someone to put their thoughts up onto the internet and have anyone who wanted to come and read - for free. But you can still do this, no? You can write articles on Medium that can be read for free. > Medium relies on user-submitted content and then charges those same users for access to their content. My experience is that Medium charges only for access to "premium" articles, submitted through their partner program, no? Can somebody please clear these up for me? On a slight off-topic, my biggest issue with Medium is no math formatting support. MathJax has been around for years now. Are there just not enough scientists writing on Medium?
- PaulHoule 8y agoMedium is a place that pretends to be slightly better than average but is really slightly worse than average. Who needs to click on clickbait headlines like "Should I buy a Chrysler Pacifica or a Wagon Queen Family Truckster?" or "Does it hurt more to be hit with a .457 Automag or a Neo Armstrong Cyclone Jet Armstrong Cannon?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDut-saDvV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDut-saDvV8
- mkolodny 8y agoI think the author is confused about how Medium works. > My experience is that Medium charges only for access to "premium" articles, submitted through their partner program, no? After reading through Medium's FAQ, I believe that's right - an article is free to read unless it's published through Medium's partner program [0]. So if you want your posts to be free to read, just don't join the partner program. [0] https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009297694-Frequently-asked-questions-about-distribution-on-Medium https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009297694-Frequ...
- tedmiston 8y agoMy impression is that the author is referring to the handful of free premium articles Medium allows you to see per month without having a subscription.
- ageitgey 8y ago
- blondin 8y agoslightly off-topic but i hope a UX person from medium would stumble upon this. medium posts have a terrible UX -- for me at least. i tend to set my fonts to be 125%-150% larger. it gives me an easy-to-read feeling on most blogs. especially when fonts are chosen carefully. but this breaks medium blogs so bad i often gave up on many articles. the header usually takes 40% of the viewport height. and there's always a "get updates" footer which also takes about 20%. so yes... what you care about fits in less than half the space. and on posts with many big pictures, it just gets worse. btw, my phone also has larger fonts but the reading experience is so much better! but ofc that too is ruined by the constant nagging about getting the "real app" (when all i did is click on your own digest which opened in the browser...). i mean i understand why you guys are doing all that but i certainly share the sentiment of OP here that the combination of all that makes medium look somehow annoying...
- sonnyblarney 8y agoOveruse of white space, really weird comment/reply system and more. It's nice on the eyes purely from an aesthetic perspective, but I agree it lacks on the X in UX. It's a few shades form over function. Side note: Apple's new Swift documentation feels like this to me. It was designed to look and read like a novel. Full of prose, lack of use of colour, wrong fonts, way too big. The 'parent class' is down at the bottom of the document! So many things like that. It looks great a first glance but it really lacks in X.
- mLuby 8y agoThe highlight/comment/DM system is the only part I like (and actually love it—all text sites should use it IMO).
- michaelpinto 8y agoa ux designer would tell you to not trust your own experience, but to measure the experience of others.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
- philliphaydon 8y agoIt was never a go to platform for programmers blogs. It’s the worst platform for programming blogs. The way comments work makes it impossible to have kind of coherent conversation. I don’t have an issue with medium for things that don’t involve discussion but for anything that should have discussion. Ahhhhh
- PaulHoule 8y agoMedium is a Ghetto. Who wants to be seen along with thinly sliced salami articles that almost have something to say, desperate content marketers who are writing articles like "Does your API Need a Content Marketing Strategy?" and who are amazed that they got 35 people to view their steaming Turd Emoji? Not me.
- tomc1985 8y agoIt definitely feels like the bloggers on Medium are considerably more self-indulgent and considerably less intelligent.
- opportune 8y agoI think it went through a similar transition as Quora where it was known as a place for smart people to blog, and as it grew it then attracted a bunch of users who wanted to be seen as smart
- Haydos585x2 8y agoAbsolutely, it used to be a place for pretty in-depth and well thought out writing. It began attracting a lot of people that wanted to be seen as that kind of writer while not being that kind of writer. I bailed once it just became lists and lists and clickbait with more clickbait. I think it's gone through what TEDx has gone through. Their latest strategy to try and get my money has been the nail in the coffin for my use of the platform.
- JumpCrisscross 8y agoI developed an aversion to medium well before the paywall went up. Most articles involved a novice doing preliminary research about something they had limited prior experience with, coming up with a toy solution and then lambasting the experts for having not seen said solution. (Granted, my route to Medium was mostly through HN.)
- azhenley 8y agoSo we are back to running our own blogs again? What are the alternatives to Medium if you don’t want to self-host? Ghost?
- briandear 8y agoWordpress.com
- aantix 8y agoUpdate your .plan
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rococode 8y agoSeveral YC-affiliated people (Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, etc.) use Posthaven.
- tradertef 8y agoThanks. This seems to be the best platform.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoBlogspot.
- SoulMan 8y agoI am on blogger. But what I don't like about it is 1. It only uses a narrow column for content. 2. No code highlighting or snippets embedding support
- DoreenMichele 8y agoThere are multiple layouts, all further customizable. If you can edit HTML, you have access to the code. If you can't, there are myriad user-friendly options for making the interface do what you want. I actually help people with that for pay if you want assistance. The code snippets are a real issue. I'm not sure how much code you could even show because I don't show code snippets on any of my blogs. Maybe screenshots would work. It's also possible that writing it in the "compose" interface would work. I usually write in the HTML interface, but I use the app on my phone. When I copy and paste, it shows up differently depending on which interface I'm using. It's possible that blockquoting it in the compose interface and then adding HR tags top and bottom to help set it off would get you satisfactory results. You can also add custom CSS to any layout. This has allowed me to get effects not natively supported by the user-friendly customization options without digging around in the code per se, which I'm not confident enough to do. I know a little HTML and CSS, but not so much that I'm comfortable going directly into the code. I tried it once and couldn't figure out where the thing was that I wanted to edit.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thoughtstheseus 8y agoReminds me of jaron Lanier
- tedmiston 8y ago> Medium would be charging people to read content that I am putting out for free. Agree that this ^ is non-ideal. But was Medium ever the go-to platform for programming blogs? They don't really have much feature-wise catering towards technical posts e.g., nice syntax highlighting or code embedding, runnable snippets, limited embedding support, minimal analytics offering.
- TACIXAT 8y agoThis blog is gorgeous on mobile. Nice PWA features too for adding to the home screen.
- SamWhited 8y agoNot to mention that it drives your users away and reduces your conversion rate by showing them a big full-screen banner in front of your posts every single time they visit the site unless they sign up for Medium themselves. Who wants to have to log in just to read some blogs? And then there's the lack of RSS feed, so I have to actually visit each individual blog to see if there are updates instead of having them dropped nicely in my inbox with the rest of my morning read. Medium is a garbage place for readers and content producers: please stay away from it.
- godzillabrennus 8y agoIf you reblog your content on a Medium blog to take advantage of their user base it can be a great tool. Don't use it for a primary blog.
- kuhhk 8y agoDoesn’t that destroy your SEO? I was warned 6+ years ago never to do that, but can’t recall the technical reason.
- technion 8y agoGo back far enough and I remember you would Google a key phrase, and see the first full ten pages being the exact same article, as accordance with some SEO gaming scheme. Google quite reasonably now sees duplicate identical content as an issue, you can use the "canonical" HTML tag can be used to help it see the "real" link where several exist. I don't know what'll happen when there are only two copies of your page, but I'd hazard a guess it'll preference medium's domain over your own in most cases.
- rococode 8y agoI could imagine Google being smart enough to have some tracking between duplicates. If you include a link to your main blog on Medium perhaps it may understand "pages A and B have the same main content, but A contains an additional link to B so B is probably the true source".
- EduardoBautista 8y agoThat's because it is plagued with "growth hacking" features. I am always being bothered to sign up/sign in when I just want to read the damn article.
- SoulMan 8y agoI am not sure if it's a goto platform for programming blocks if it does not even give your syntax highlighting capability or embedding code snippets such as gist.
- burlesona 8y agoI think the author makes a giant mistake when he says the following: “For the foreseeable future, it looks like independent blogs are back. Still, there’s a good business opportunity waiting for someone, as Medium seem intent on squandering the potential they had.” I would argue the problem is that making a free blogging network like medium is NOT a good business idea. The reason things like Wordpress, Ghost, etc. work as a business is they have figured out a customer (bloggers) and something to charge them for (their paid blog hosting features). The reason those sites don’t work as great discovery networks is it turns out their customers are possessive of their audiences and don’t really want the platform to be directing them elsewhere. Medium is now trying to figure out a way for the readers to be the customers, which is just a really hard problem in the era of the internet and almost infinite free reading material. Not a good business opportunity at all.
- rococode 8y agoFrom a business perspective Medium is more of a magazine or newspaper than a blogging platform. They have a bunch of readers and try to get them to stay on their site by pushing interesting posts from their other writers. The problem is that their writers seem to just want it to be a blogging platform.
- tehjoker 8y agoHosting blogs is cheap and everyone should be able to have one. However, if we leave it to the corporate sector, they'll either need a subscription or ads, neither of which are conducive to public discussion. Since serving blogs is so cheap, why doesn't the government offer a free service where you can host a text website? Kind of like a university webpage for all students, but for everyone? You would then have a financially stable organization backing the pages, have democratic input into the hosting process, and probably less censorship than a private company would apply for those that care about that sort of thing (since private companies need literally no reason to do so whereas a public enterprise would need a court order or some such).
- newsbinator 8y ago> why doesn't the government offer a free service where you can host a text website It's debatable whether this is the sort of thing governments exist to do.
- tehjoker 8y agoThat's not an argument that it won't work fwiw.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoIt is debatable, and I think it's really worth considering the argument for it. Out of all the indirect ways of paying for something, getting it funded by the government is probably the least user-hostile solution possible - it could be set up as just another public service, with zero incentive to milk people in some nonobvious way.
- jlebar 8y agoI host my (static site, very-low-traffic) blog with nearlyfreespeech.net for less than $10/yr. My hosting costs are less than domain-registration costs. Highly recommended, I've had zero problems with them.
- wtmt 8y ago
- hadsed 8y agoWell the medium partner program is meant to enable people to earn money from their writing, no? As an author you have to make a choice to do that. I don't see a problem with this and if anything it's a great innovation. My problem is that I'm subject to the kind of writing I'd rather avoid. Perhaps if they were better able to segment their user bases and make their feeds and recommendations better tailored to them the experience could actually be decent. But as a modeling problem I appreciate that it's probably pretty difficult to tell a BS article about Bitcoin (or whatever) from one with substance.
- msadowski 8y agoI've left medium about 2 years ago after using it for 8 months. I never felt in control there. After moving from medium I created my blog using jekyll and hosted it on GitHub pages and never looked back.
- concurrency 8y agoRecently decided to self-host as well, and used it as an excuse to build a command line controlled cms with Sublime-esque syntax highlighting for the code snippets. https://synref.com/ https://synref.com/ It's been a lot of fun, and I'd encourage anyone that's considering going the self-hosting route to do so.
- cheriot 8y agoAre there any good, free hosted options for blogs about programming?
- thatoneuser 8y agoI didn’t even know they were doing a paywall thing. I got into medium last year for a while because it seemed like this perfect place for people in different tech sectors to share wisdom. But not too long and I realized that most of the writers are talking out of their ass and playing the “use strong language so people will believe you” tactic while being wholly absent of meaning. It’s honestly like reading one of those subreddits where people get to ask and field questions about an industry. You realize pretty quickly that the sub is filled with wannabes (still in college or otherwise) who spend their days fantasizing about what an industry is like while they have literally no experience. They’ve just read the tropes enough times that they can echo “good sounding” advice with no basis in reality. That’s what medium is to me. A place where people pontificate over things they really don’t know anything about other than reading other online posts.
- alexmorley 8y agohttps://write.as https://write.as ftw. Clean, minimal design. And you can auto-publish to medium/twitter/mastadon etc if you want a wider reach.
- ChicagoDave 8y agoI’m happy to pay $5/month. The content I receive far outweighs the content I create and I’ve learned so much from others. The servers aren’t paying for themselves.
- cryptos 8y agoI wonder how easily people bind themselves to a certain provider. Since the appereance of Medium I waited for the day they try to monetize it and people would leaving for better options. The possibility to move away should probably considered before starting to use such a service. My own website is based on Hugo. While the usage (especially the template syntax) is not exactly a joy to use, it works fine and fast for years now. The only thing I need is some web space to drop static files, so it would be really easy to move to another provider. However I wouldn't recommend Hugo to non-technical writers, since the configuration and template syntax would scare them probably away. The world needs more "static CMS" software (instead of just "static site generators")!
- StavrosK 8y agoI evaluated Hugo and went with Lektor for the reasons you mention. I haven't regretted it, Lektor is much more sane.
- cryptos 8y agoWhile Lektor doesn't look bad, I doubt it would be attractive for non-technical persons. I'm thinking of something more like Ghost, WordPress (with less features), but with static files as output.
- StavrosK 8y agoLektor includes a very nice publishing interface. Only deployment is "hard", in that it needs you to run a command, AFAIK.
- johnonolan 8y agoThis is possible with Ghost :) it functions as a headless CMS and can be used with essentially any static site generator which can pull content from an API, eg. Gatsby -- https://docs.ghost.org/api/gatsby/ https://docs.ghost.org/api/gatsby/ We'll be sharing more about this on Weds in a bigger blog post - it's a fairly recent addition
- phnk 8y ago> I already talked about how bloated Medium articles are. That one-sentence essay is easily over a megabyte. https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm