43 ms·

Can we all stop using Medium now?

925 points by squiggy22 7y ago

cfitz 7y ago
I am happy to pay for well articulated content that can sometimes reach 45min/piece in reading duration. Medium will slowly learn what you’re interested in and send you opt-out’able weekly newsletters with recommendations. I’m surprised the OP has this much distaste for a platform which not only has good content, but rewards such, yet without ads. I’d happily pay to see less ads in my life.
musicale 7y ago
This should be medium link.
- Lowkeyloki 7y ago
  This. I dare the author to publish it on medium. Triple. Dog. Dare.
melling 7y ago
It’s halfway through the month and I’m blocked by Medium. It is a bit frustrating. I’m not sure about this comment though: “Learn to market yourself and your content. Quit being lazy waiting for Medium to do it for you.” Maybe I am lazy but there really isn’t an easy and inexpensive way to market your blogs or apps.
- jolmg 7y ago
  > Maybe I am lazy but there really isn’t an easy and inexpensive way to market your blogs or apps. HN, Reddit, and other social networks?
  - Untit1ed 7y ago
    I've had blog posts do well on Medium but sink like a stone on those platforms. It's a very different proposition submitting to medium and having it shown to people who are likely to be interested over a day, vs self-submitting to a site like HN or Reddit and watching it sink like a stone because the few people who are likely to be interested aren't looking at that particular moment. Not to mention the fact that if you self-submit anything to those sites people tend to take it as an invitation to eviscerate you.
    - rchaud 7y ago
      Well, for Reddit, I know that tech subreddits really don't like it if you drop a link and don't provide any additional commentary in the post. This is doubly true if the link happens to be "medium.com" because Reddit is already full of downvoted posts submitted by content marketers. If you aren't a regular poster on the sub that you're placing the link on, why would posters bother opening said link? You have to participate in the community as well, and that includes providing content in the form of Reddit posts as well, because Reddit users don't like clicking outbound links with no context.
- Deimorz 7y ago
  Just find a link to any article you want to read by searching Twitter (or even tweet it yourself). t.co links always bypass the paywall.
- bscphil 7y ago
  You could buy advertisements... what you're looking for is basically a way to get ads for your product in front of eyeballs, even if you don't call them "ads". I don't see any reason why that ought to be cheap. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what the goal of "marketing" is in this context, however.
duxup 7y ago
I've been amazed seeing some folks I think of as good web citizens who are thoughtful about the web, web development, and etc.... keep using Medium, or at least have recently. Some of these people would get plenty of attention posting on a personal site and just tweeting it out, but they choose medium, and I wonder why. Folks less well known, I get it it assuming they somehow get more attention on medium.
emptyparadise 7y ago
This site appears to break scrolling inertia on touch screen devices.
regnerba 7y ago
I don't publish anything ever really so I don't understand the appeal of using Medium. Can anyone explain it to me? Is it just the ease of use? Write some text, click button, it's available online?
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Originally it was their easy editor. Now I just don’t know, since every other blog copied the editor.
- ukulele 7y ago
  Built-in audience of readers
  - regnerba 7y ago
    I would be really curious how much of an effect that has. I have only ever gone to Medium because I followed a link to a post. Never because I was browsing Medium and found another article to read. I would be really curious if anyone who does post on Medium was able to offer some insights into where most their readers come from. Is it from people already on Medium or external. Don't know if they even have access to metrics like that.
    - MivLives 7y ago
      I post on Medium. I don't really promote anything I write. I get around 50-100 views per thing I write. Why do I do it? Well honestly I have no where else in mind. I don't have any one looking for my blog, I'm not really going to spam Hacker News or Reddit, or Discord rooms with links to get organic outreach. I just want somewhere nice I can post simple factual articles I enjoy writing. My articles aren't ones that show up behind the Medium paywall, I'm under no illusion there's money in it for me. Medium can tell you where your readers come from. Here's a Medium stat screen: https://imgur.com/a/8VhJEhJ https://imgur.com/a/8VhJEhJ
    - freddie_mercury 7y ago
      A friend has a blog -- about the history of labor & work -- that he often cross-posts to Medium. He wrote an article on his blog. A few dozen people read it over the next week -- basically all friends of his. He cross-posted it to Medium and he had 30,000 reads within the first 24 hours. Looking at the stats on my own Medium posts how much comes via Medium and how much is external varies. On a story with 3,000 readers (which is the most I've ever had), about 10% come from Medium. Most of what I post ends up having 20-30 readers and about 50% come via Medium.
_seemethere 7y ago
Not everyone has the time to create their own platform and curation network. That's the reason why people will keep using Medium. We need to stop acting like it's easy to build these types of platforms.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  WordPress, Blogspot, even Xanga and LiveJournal predate Medium and didn't have to resort to subscription services.
  - VWWHFSfQ 7y ago
    better than ads
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      I don't think Blogspot/Blogger had ads.
    - asdff 7y ago
      I'll take ads, I block them anyway.
  - egypturnash 7y ago
    Pretty sure all of them had subscriptions. Hell, I was a paid user of LJ until they got sold to the Russians and everyone left.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      I think they had subscriptions but they were certainly far less in your face than Medium's paid content ads. I think tiered services are fine if they don't spam you about them.
- regnerba 7y ago
  The struggle for me in understanding why people use Medium is that I am a reader of Medium articles, but I only find them when posted on Reddit, HackerNews, or when they come up on a Google Search. So as far as I can tell it wouldn't matter if it was posted on Medium or a personal blog on their own site.
skilled 7y ago
I have yet to figure out the 'persona' for Medium users. From time to time you can come across some decent content, but the loops and hoops you have to go through to read it are simply not worth my time.
- StevePerkins 7y ago
  It seems to mostly revolve around resume-enhancement spam. The sort of empty filler that people write, just to appear like a "thought leader" when potential employers or clients google them. There are two categories of resume-spam: 1. "Sunny" filler that doesn't really say anything new (e.g. "The Future Is Serverless"). The preferred platform for this seems to be LinkedIn. 2. "Edgy" filler that doesn't really say anything new (e.g. "Serverless Considered Harmful", or "Why I Don't Use Serverless"). The preferred platform for this seems to be Medium.
dickeytk 7y ago
The main argument in this article doesn't apply unless the Medium writer enabled the partner program on the post. That's what enables the pay wall.
- troydavis 7y ago
  A huge percentage of the authors behind the paywall don’t realize that they are. It seems like Medium might have made this option less clear than it needs to be be (like by describing the benefits but not the drawbacks) or made it on by default.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - knrz 7y ago
    Nah man, I considered turning it on for no reason in particular. Asked me for bank account routing info. Wasn't interested about it that much. Definitely not on by default.
    - DoctorOW 7y ago
      The partner program isn't on by default, the paywall is. You do not need to be part of the partner program for the paywall. Source: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018834314-Stories-that-are-part-of-the-metered-paywall https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018834314-Stori...
      - dickeytk 7y ago
        What on earth are you talking about? From the link you posted: > Stories become eligible to be part of the metered paywall if the writer selects that option in each story’s distribution setting. Medium will never meter a story without the writer’s permission. > During the publish flow, you have the opportunity to check the box to be eligible for curation review and distribution across Medium. Checking this box means that your story is also eligible to be part of Medium’s metered paywall, and can earn money if you are in the Medium Partner Program.
pwncake 7y ago
Is there a suggested alternative people should be turning to as opposed to building their own, especially if their expertise is in writing or some other field than computer science or web design?
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Though I also kinda resent the idea that, just because I have the skills to build my own blog from scratch, I'd want to waste even one second building it, setting it up, configuring it, maintaining it, fixing it, implementing basic features that other platforms already have, etc.
- recroad 7y ago
  WordPress.com
- CM30 7y ago
  WordPress/Ghost on their hosting? Or for the completely non technical, the cloud hosted versions of said scripts on WordPress.com and Ghost.org?
sgarman 7y ago
I know this doesn't justify all the issues but I'm at least a little excited that someone is trying to create a media/news service that isn't ad based. Seems like we have a way to go but at least this is a start. I'm a little surprised that there are so many complaints here - I bet a lot of the same people complaining also complain about ad based services and now they create news / journalism / articles designed for clicks and not quality content.
- mojuba 7y ago
  Ever since we switched our app from ads to ad-free soft paywall with daily limited content, we get a lot of hate and negative reviews on the App Store from our users. Some even said quite directly "bring back the ads". This is so strange. What this kind of people don't understand is, we all buy products whose prices include advertisement costs. Eventually we pay for everything anyway, there is no charity (unless something is explicitly charity). Let alone cases where ads make us buy things we don't need. And not to mention the rabbit hole behind the seemingly free services like Google Search/Maps. I don't get all the hate here. Paywalls are at least honest, clear and upfront about how the business makes money. We should support this type of businesses. It's usually the switch that triggers a lot of hate: businesses should probably be cautious about it.
  - inapis 7y ago
    > It's usually the switch that triggers a lot of hate: businesses should probably be cautious about it. I agree. The switch is the noisy period. When you are free, you attract people who are looking for free and would probably never pay for it directly. When you are paid and ad-free from the start, you attract a customer base who understands the value intrinsically and will probably run away if you switch to an ad-based model.
- inapis 7y ago
  The internet suffers from massive cognitive dissonance. Forums like HN/Reddit just amplify it. People complain about ads, People complain about subs. Fortunately, people who want to pay for content will pay for it as long as you express the value clearly. And people who complain about both are probably a minority.
vcavallo 7y ago
jeez, could you jack my mobile scrolling any further? not reading that for any longer than 2 seconds
gurlic 7y ago
I'm currently working on an alternative to Medium. So far it has all the elementary things like a working editor, notes and highlights, a decent commenting system. There are publications too, with teams, submissions etc. User profiles and publications have custom domains, custom CSS for branding. There's also a somewhat half-working Github integration for advanced writers but I'll need to work on it a fair bit to polish the edges. At some point, I'd ideally want to open-source the editor/bloggy bit and have people self-host it and perhaps push their content back to the platform for centralized distribution if they want. It's still a work in progress and I'm trying to figure out some sort of strategy, especially a content policy around not allowing clickbait and spammy "how to use learn redis in 3 minutes" type articles. I'd probably have to cap the max number of users and publication to a few thousand since I don't have the resources for this to be anything more than a hobby project. I'm aware of a couple of others working in the same space. Write.as comes to mind, thought I don't think they're doing publications etc.
- sdan 7y ago
  As a person who blogs on certain areas in ML, the sole thing I look for in any platform is SEO. I tried going on Medium, but because of the lack of LaTex support, I had to go on my own blog, but I'd really like if there's an alternate to Medium with amazing SEO (as you explained).
  - gurlic 7y ago
    That's definitely one of Medium's strengths and something I'd like to focus on when I find the time. I still have much reading to do about SEO in general. LaTex, syntax/code was high on my priority-list while initially building my product since I wanted to primarily target technical writers.
  - initself 7y ago
    The author's point certainly has to do with no more RSS networking.
- empath75 7y ago
  Writing a blog engine is trivial. Monetizing it is hard.
throw007 7y ago
I'm writing on Medium because its rank well on Google. I have several articles about the product I'm selling that rank 1-5 on Google and it gives me a lot of customers. It'll take me a lot of time to build my own website and content that gives me the same result. So, there's that. Sorry, not a native speaker.
- regnerba 7y ago
  No need to be sorry. Your English is fine and what you said makes perfect sense. As someone who doesn't post on Medium this is great in helping understand why people use it. So thank you for sharing.
- snazz 7y ago
  That is an important feature. Not having to convince Google that your domain isn’t a spam cesspool is a major advantage of most any centralized blog/CMS platform (but especially one as major as Medium). Write.as doesn’t seem to work as well for this purpose yet, unfortunately. And your English is plenty easy to understand, no need to apologize about that.
- yingw787 7y ago
  Your English is great, and it’s great that you prioritize shipping over worrying about which blogging platform to use. Shipping is very important. That being said, I do think a small investment into moving onto your own platform may be worth it, and that might kick in much earlier than you’d think. I use Hugo and a fork of hugo-minimo-theme for my technical and personal writing, and it took maybe three days to set up (granted I have some technical experience). If you paid a contractor to spend a week setting up a statically compiled site with a CMS, you may get competitive SEO without having to worry about content licensing or platform updates. I think statically generated content is generally friendly to search engines. I don’t update my blog infra at all really, and there’s very few steps involved if I needed to relearn how to do it. It is possible to use free open source software and have it get out of your way in terms of making money.
  - badestrand 7y ago
Hackbraten 7y ago
Please re-enable the `-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;` CSS style for your content. The article is a pain to read on Mobile Safari because bouncy/rubber-band scrolling is disabled.
- pokstad 7y ago
  Goes without saying, the consistent Medium experience is a good reason why we keep using it. Self made blogs like this that do annoying things that take away from content are foot guns.
  - notatoad 7y ago
    The OP's blog still does less annoying stuff than medium does
    - lowboy 7y ago
      On iOS I find the lack of inertial scrolling on this site an order of magnitude more annoying than anything Medium currently does by far. To the point where I closed the article after I first tried to scroll.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    The majority of non-Medium blogs are using Wordpress/Squarespsace themes of some kind and those usually are of the "responsive boilerplate" style that wouldn't have basic CSS issues like the site above.
- NightlyDev 7y ago
  That feature has serious bugs on iOS, and that's probably why it's not the default as Apple can't get it to be stable. Don't ask him to add it, ask Apple, it's their fault. It's not a production feature. And since it's Apple, you can't just use another browser as it's all the same crap on iOS. You're stuck with something worse than the 2019 equivalent of IE6. iOS is a joke when it comes to web browsing.
  - 7y ago
keyle 7y ago
I wish I could upvote this 10 times. Medium is the pinterest of thoughts.
tyingq 7y ago
Large.com is available for $850k if there's a VC thinking they can disrupt.
- jaza 7y ago
  Would you like fries.com with that? It's for sale too.
  - unityByFreedom 7y ago
    I'd like a literacola.com please.
    - mindgam3 7y ago
      I don't want alargefarvaIwantagoddamnliteracola.com, but perhaps you might be interested?
- kowdermeister 7y ago
  - So what's your USP? - We'll use bigger font size... and feature more clickbait headlines.
stanislavb 7y ago
What is your best alternative? I'd say dev.to is a good one for the context of software/programming related content
- julienreszka 7y ago
  Blogger is just fine
  - jlarcombe 7y ago
    It does still work well but I have the sense no-one is really using it for new stuff any more - it has a sort of unloved feel to it, and Google have recent form in dropping stuff...
spyckie2 7y ago
Please KEEP USING medium to keep all those uninspired rants, thought leader posturing, and no substance fluff pieces on subjects that are actually interesting behind a paywall. Please put more effort into creating better content by exhibiting interest and passion into a subject through deep exploration, insights, discussion of core issues and resolution, and great descriptive writing. It used to be that everyone who wrote a diary had no expectations of their content being anything valuable, and the value of writing was in the exploration of ideas and organization of your thoughts. Now the value of writing is how many people you reach? Philosophically, I'm against that change, so please keep that stuff behind a paywall.
jscholes 7y ago
> If you enjoy reading on the web chances are you’ve been forced to login to Medium at some point in the last week. I've never once logged into Medium. I see a "Pardon the Interruption" notice every time I want to read something, but I just hit Escape and move on with my day. If I had to pick a side, I'd probably say avoid Medium. But I don't know under what circumstances it forces you to log in just to read something.
- teej 7y ago
  The author has complete control over it.
  - corobo 7y ago
    Sort of. If you opt out of their paywall nagware stuff your posts don’t appear anywhere on the site other than your own feed. Technically you can opt out. Realistically if you do then you lose all of the benefits of being on medium
    - lmm 7y ago
      The biggest benefit of being on medium is that I can just write some words and push the button and I get a nice-looking web page I can share with my friends. I don't care about google rank or more eyeballs or whatever. But I'd rather focus on writing better words than worrying about the words -> website process. Give me something that's as easy to work with (log in, type stuff in the in-browser editor, push publish - no renting a server or installing ruby or whatever) and looks as good at the end, and I'll happily use that.
      - ronsor 7y ago
        That's been around for ages: http://blogger.com http://blogger.com http://wordpress.com http://wordpress.com Or self-host wordpress
- michaco33 7y ago
  I've been doing this too. I'm also doing this with NYT, WSJ, FT -- all publications behind higher and higher paywalls, all publications I tried, but ended up leaving because they still serve you ads on their mobile apps. Now the question is this: if I didn't care or it wasn't worth reading, why did I click on it in the first place? Perhaps I don't care about this content as much as I thought anymore. Maybe we've been addicted to reading content, rather than actually making use of most of the content anyway. PS: I'm trying out The Guardian now. No ads for premium users on mobile.
55555 7y ago
I was writing on Medium because it ranks well in Google. I wrote nearly a dozen really great articles on primarily health and dietary supplement topics. After 2 months they started to rank well and were getting daily readers, as the content was really great. Then I wrote an article on a 'research chemical' and they banned my account overnight. I lost the final edited versions of all content. They did not send me a zip with the content. They could have simply deleted the offending article(s) but instead they deleted all of them. The thing is, the thing I wrote about isn't illegal. When you write articles on Medium keep in mind you're writing on someone else's website and they don't give a damn about you. You are subject to their opinions about what is appropriate and what isn't. I have no doubt if an alt-right voice wrote on Medium and were controversial enough in their views they'd be deplatformed. But also the way they handle it is just rude. Fuck them.
- calimac 7y ago
  Your story represents the dilemma in the shit internet of 2019 where most people are content slaves locked into plantations. Medium, facebook, twitter, et, al. don't think twice before they ban human minds from expressing themselves for any reason. All these corporations hide behind $600 an hour attorneys and pr management teams. Fuck them all. replacefacebook
- ozzmotik 7y ago
  just out of curiosity, which chemical did you write about?
  - TomK32 7y ago
    asking for a friend?
    - ozzmotik 7y ago
      nope, asking for myself. i see no reason to hide behind a constructed other just to save face.
- xkcd-sucks 7y ago
ajflores1604 7y ago
So just my personal take, I definitely benefit a lot from Mediums recommendation system, however it might work. Probably because I'm brand new to programming, and even fields like machine learning are very fresh to me even though it seems like everyone and their mom already knows the basics. So having a system that can see that I looked up a specific topic and recommend similar articles from that domain. A lot of the time I don't know what I don't know, so having this recommendation system helps illuminate the domain a bit more for me. And the general style of medium where the posts can be a more casual overview of a topic compared to the deep dive of a whitepaper, helps me grasp concepts faster. The recommendation aspect also helps me explore domains in a more focused way compared to the random nature of social networks that just bubbles up whatever's popular. I'd be lying to myself if I said I haven't benefited from Medium. Not trying to excuse them for what they're doing, just trying to point out from my personal experience the value they've added to me and why following personal blogs or places like reddit, which I see mentioned as alternatives, isn't a one to one replacement for me. I don't know what or who I'd need to follow if the domain is new to me. I guess continuing on this train of thought, and not wanting to complain without putting out an idea for a solution...if something were to come in and be a viable alternative to Medium it would have to >Allow for easy publishing (editor) >Have reliable distribution/hosting (network) >And have some way to explore related topics or publications (discovery) For publication I think the community would have to come around to a standard format. Like a simplified latex, or something similar to it, with an approachable interface that even my Mom or Dad could write something up without needing to read documentation. As for distribution, the only thing I can really think of is an ipfs style network. Similar to how torrents can provide some security in the survival of a file even if the originator decides to stop seeding (hosting). And also similar to torrenting, I can see ppl willingly giving up resources for 'the cause' if they themselves benefit enough from the network existing. The only thing left, that also contains all the things I liked about Medium, is the discovery aspect. Also seems like it'd be the most difficult to implement on a distributed network. Maybe a few designated community servers, similar to tracker servers from the torrenting analogy, carry the information of what files are in the network. Im not sure exactly what the ipfs spec implements for this aspect of file discovery. But it seems some sort of designated 'discovery nodes' would be necessary. Maybe graph network nodes that ppl can query using their own discovery algorithms or ones shared within the community? Idk how well those would scale, I've heard from the Neo4j pitch that Behance rolled over their infrastructure to neo4j from cassandra and reduced their server requirements by a factor of 10. Maybe that kind of efficiency would be enough to support the network in general with a minimal number of critical nodes? I haven't worked on an infrastructure level with anything I've mentioned, mostly just know of the technologies, so I might be completely off base with the individual things I proposed, but I feel like the general concept is worth dissecting.
xkcd-sucks 7y ago
Somewhat relatedly, does anyone else need to adblock/disable medium.com JS in order to scroll through articles?
phantom_oracle 7y ago
The authors complaints are valid, but fails to acknowledge that besides Medium, so many great(and not so great) conversations happen on platforms that are now locked behind login gardens. It was fine back in the day to just create a throwaway FaceTwit account but now they demand mobile numbers too. Pre social media, how did people discover great content? You can go as far back to the 90s or very early 00s as a time reference
- azimuth11 7y ago
  That’s a good point. It was much harder to find interesting stuff to read back in the day. I had my Google Reader with a bunch of blogs, but that ended up being pretty noisy and they took it away. You had to do the searching yourself and be your own data curator, or have a network of other friends pitching in content to check out (eg. forums, Maybe digg?) It’s locked in a somewhat growing, walled garden, yes, but Medium is now basically the Google Reader for a lot of people. Those people don’t care about logins if they can get a good read every now and then. And, when Medium goes to crap, some other platform will pop up with no ads (for a while :) ) and lure us all over there.
kgwxd 7y ago
I forget Medium exists until some complains about it. Several years ago, the popularity of Medium and several paywall/signup-wall sites posted on HN and Reddit inspired me to write a Firefox add-on that is able to apply CSS to any element that contains any text or attribute value matching a given regular expression on any site. So far, I've only used it to apply "visibilty: hidden" to sites I don't like, but it theoretically has other uses. I use a variation of the filter in Newsbeuter to keep them out of my RSS feeds. The result is that I do not see any links or any embedded content for sites I know I never want to interact with, ever. Search results, Reddit, HN, blogs, etc. The sites I add are basically erased from my personal internet experience. It is glorious, and I think if a lot of people used it, misbehaving sites would be more scared of it than ad blockers because they don't even get the chance to grab your attention. It's called ssure if anyone is interested. It's a bitch to configure but it works on desktop and Android FF.
miguelmota 7y ago
Medium should be used as a means to distribution (like a mirror) but not be the canonical source. Make your personal blog be the primary source of storing your articles but copy post on medium for discoverability
dmje 7y ago
There's quite a lot of mileage in what this guy says, and the "content behind walled garden" thing pisses us all off (I'm a non-Facebooker for All The Usual Reasons and have the same response whenever I see stuff "published" there). But: noone seems to have mentioned the fact that you can publish on WordPress and use the Medium plugin to copublish to Medium. It deals with the whole canonical content / SEO thing, you get to keep your original content, and you get the potential benefits of a Medium audience / stats / etc. Best of all worlds.
- vermilingua 7y ago
  If someone can find your work on medium, why would the bother to find your site and read it there instead?
  - corobo 7y ago
    The someone in question is a search engine. Telling them where your content originated from helps you when your content matches future searches
  - mayankkaizen 7y ago
    Your content is backed up. In addition to Medium, your own blog can also attract users. Your website is much more customizable. With some luck and work, your website may perform better in google search.
    - kkarakk 7y ago
      That's what archive.is is for(as a reader). if i share an article i usually back it up on archive.is first just in case. your hosted website can go down at any time as well sadly(i see this a lot for ms hosted content)
      - Crinus 7y ago
        What makes impossible for archive.is to go down? Last time i checked it was developed and funded by a single guy (who even seems to have some sort of agenda against cloudflare for some reason).
bwasti 7y ago
I wrote one article on Medium. I ended up writing my own little version using open source markdown rendering to see how hard it would be to roll my own, https://jott.live https://jott.live From what I found, there is a lot of stuff Medium does well that is hard to recreate by one's self. Super simple features, like - rich text editing that isn't ugly - caching what you're currently working on - tracking views and who has viewed your article aren't easy to build and generally aren't worth it unless you write many many articles. Although I don't like the aggressive account on-boarding and payment models for reading articles, Medium certainly makes life easy for writing articles.
- luckylion 7y ago
  You don't necessarily have to build it yourself to have control over it though. I mean, WP isn't the dream you've always looked for, but it (+ a plugin or five) can do that and is pretty much set up in an hour. With wordpress.com, you'll get that without running it yourself.
- bubblewrap 7y ago
  Wordpress has an app store for plugins. I installed a popular statistics plugin and it seems to be doing well. I think it is pretty amazing, actually (the app store). https://wordpress.org/plugins/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/ Hosting my blog costs me 5€/month, though. Not sure if I have the cheapest option. On the upside, it also supports multiple email accounts, so I am in the process of moving all emails (also family) over there, saving on extra costs for email. I think attracting viewers is the only real issue. That's why social media, Tumblr and Medium took over from blogs. Because they have the recommendation and sharing features that bring viewers to people's postings.
- chrshawkes 7y ago
  They use Quill.js - rich editing (you can use this in your project easily) Caching/saving work just simple AJAX calls to a localized database or filesystem which can store the JSON data that Quill.JS creates. Google Analytics is free and offers more customer insight and analysis opportunities and it's as simple as a script tag inclusion in the html. I plan to show how to replicate this website in a matter of minutes on my YouTube channel.
AngeloAnolin 7y ago
I've seen a lot of complaints about how Medium is becoming worse in terms of writing / publishing / blogging your thoughts on the internet [1]. I just don't see why no one (or group) has taken to building a similar service less the cruft and could still be a viable business. [1] https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/
azhenley 7y ago
Fine. I’m going to make a Medium alternative this weekend and this person better try it out.
superconformist 7y ago
But how will I "clap" for top-shelf webshit content if it's not on Medium?
- bubblewrap 7y ago
  Isn't there a "clap" plugin for Wordpress?
  - CM30 7y ago
    Yeah there is. Probably quite a few, though this one came up first: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-applaud/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-applaud/
- divanvisagie 7y ago
  Potential violation of the prime directive...
wtmt 7y ago
Side note. I didn’t read this post for two reasons. On mobile, the lack of inertial scrolling makes it like pushing hard against some massive slush, and the lack of a scroll bar prevents me from knowing how long the article is and whether I should read it quickly now or check it later. A criticism on Medium, including its usability (I presume), should do a lot better if it wants to be read.
- SCLeo 7y ago
  I am mobile and I have inertial scrolling. I think it is probably because you are using iOS safari. iOS' inertial scrolling for some reason breaks very often. It happened to my website a couple times, and I had to fix with a bunch of css hacks. Supporting iOS is just a pain. Sometimes, I would even rather support IE 11 than iOS. (btw, all iOS browsers are forced to use safari render engine.)
salutonmundo 7y ago
Prediction: next week on HN: an article titled "Why Medium is super great"
samwilliams 7y ago
A community member built a blogging platform on our permanent, decentralised web (Arweave) today. You might want to check it out: https://arweave.net/egqLRAbESk4BvrPZGwNM-koJZZU3_xYRb_G9-CYCvFs https://arweave.net/egqLRAbESk4BvrPZGwNM-koJZZU3_xYRb_G9-CYC... Full disclosure: I started the Arweave project. Sam
aerovistae 7y ago
Ironically this page doesn’t work on mobile. It doesn’t have inertial scrolling, and I just have no patience for that. I stopped reading after the first paragraph.
- aembleton 7y ago
  Works on Firefox 66.0.5 on Android 9
suzil 7y ago
Medium will often pop up when I search for something programming-related, but I'm less likely to find someone's blog post. What if we had a search engine that would only show programmer/technical blog posts? Then we could bring more traffic to the self-published.
StanislavPetrov 7y ago
Thankfully medium required a Google account to register, saving me the trouble of learning the hard way how bad they were.
girlsrule1234 7y ago
For someone with such strong opinions on personal platforms, he’d do well to fix the scrolling in his site.
davidz 7y ago
It's fine to dislike Medium and run your own blog, but I find the article intellectually dishonest in comparing Medium to Facebook. One harvests your data and lets advertisers target you with ads, the other charges a subscription to provide access to content. It's disingenuous to claim they "sell whatever advertising they please", and link to a ToS screen cap that's completely unrelated. Companies have to make money in order to pay their developers and pay for servers. Personally, I'd rather pay them instead of seeing ads plastered everywhere.
IloveHN84 7y ago
Funny how from "All to Medium, ditch WordPress and personal blogs" now people want to go the way around because of metered views and other limitations imposed by Medium popularity. I say it since ever: own your own content.
- pergadad 7y ago
  But you don't really own your WordPress. No way to get around using their services if you want to have proper spam filtering.
  - joecool1029 7y ago
    This works well enough for comment spam filtering: https://wordpress.org/plugins/antispam-bee/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/antispam-bee/ (or just disable comments)
  - luckylion 7y ago
    Sure you can. There are multiple anti-spam plugins out there, and unless you're running a super large high value target, most spam won't be custom made, so very simple things like hiding the "URL" field with CSS and marking as Spam when something has been entered will get rid of 95% of it.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
paulie_a 7y ago
A lot of content creators have posted their experiences here. It matters for SEO, while being shitty to content creators. From this readers perspective if it's on medium it's not worth reading. I've literally thought this "awesome that sounds like it will solve my exact issue...oh fuck it's on medium...next"
siscia 7y ago
There is definitely something I miss in the discussion self-hosted blog vs medium. But the simplest solution isn't to just write on your own self hosted blog and cross post on medium setting the canonical URL? Doesn't this give the best of both worlds? You still have control over your property and you still get the SEO benefits from the medium domain...
mikl 7y ago
I really hope people do. Medium is awful and getting awfuller as time passes.
dtornabene 7y ago
g-d forbid writers find a way to be compensated, eh? I despise medium, it sucks as a platform, it sucks to read, and 99 times out of a hundred if I'm on an aggregator or twitter and I see a medium link to a piece that sounds interesting I skip it, because medium sucks. But christ does that post reek of entitlement. On top of that, maybe learn to put words together a bit better if you want people to read your blog over another platform
bitL 7y ago
We need a Zeitgeist service returning Overton window for each company and automate hiding articles/content that are no longer fitting inside it.
- markn951 7y ago
  what
vfc1 7y ago
One of the big advantages of self-hosting is that you own not only own the platform, but also the traffic. When I started my business I had a previous blog with several topics covered. Because I self-hosted, I managed to redirect the traffic only for a specific set of posts on the topic to my new business blog where I moved several posts over, getting thousands of visits in my business blog (and converting customers) since day one. The Ghost blogging platform is open source, and you can self-host if you want (I do). With Ghost, you can also get their hosted service for a monthly fee and you own your own platform, you have a markdown-based editor with markdown on the left and content on the right. You can run your own ads, have a fixed top menu that does not go away with scrolling with links to your products and services, etc. If you are serious about running a business blog, you should definitively self-host. I know Medium has the sharing aspect, but it's not worth it because most of the traffic in blogs in general comes from Google searches and not sharing. The social sharing traffic is a drop in the ocean for most blogs, it's not worth getting potential paying customers blocked due to a medium paywall popup.
sytelus 7y ago
TLDR; The article says that Medium locks up content behind its walled garden, requires login and then payment in some cases. I think the article is not well researched and doesn’t understand the basic premise of Medium: Enable professional writers to make living off of writing. Medium is not your usual free blogging platform. There is an expectation that people will pay for good content and the hope that good writers should be able make living off of their writing. Medium wants to take on doing SEO, infrastructure, payments and let authors focus on just creating content. Here’s some stats on how much writers can earn on Medium: https://medium.com/s/partner-program-updates/april-update-from-the-partner-program-1bf39020f3f4 https://medium.com/s/partner-program-updates/april-update-fr... If I have to be devil’s advocate, I would ask why can’t Medium use ads as revenue source. Their $5/mo subscription may look like cup of coffee but honestly I am tired of having dozen such subscriptions in my life. Also, people outside developed world, kids, teenagers, college students will still find this unaffordable.
jarym 7y ago
Just came here to say I hate Medium. I frequently get a strobing green bar at the top of the page that is permanently there and as far as I can tell doing nothing. WTF?
silveroriole 7y ago
Seems like not many commenters are giving a perspective on why people might like Medium more than going to a personal blog. Here’s mine. As a reader, I usually don’t care who wrote the post I’m reading. I also don’t care about seeing more content from the same person, which is all I would get on a personal blog; in fact, I would prefer to see related content but different viewpoints from other people, which is what Medium shows me. I want to read them all in the same format, not hop between different blog layouts. I want them all to have consistent like/comment mechanics. As a reader, sorry, I just don’t care about your personal brand or platform. I want to easily read a lot of stuff by different people on a topic. Never used it as a writer, but why should individuals have to set up their own SEO, comment system, blog system, etc just to post an article? Because they think that they’re so important or controversial that they need a personal space/brand? For most writers I think you get a lot for free with Medium.
- kgraves 7y ago
  Agreed, given the choice between Medium and a custom blog if I am a publisher, Medium is much faster to get up and running with a blog and has a larger reach than me setting it all up myself. Many people who aren't technical don't want to have to manage rolling their own comments system, custom SEO, analytics and all of that stuff.
  - marc_io 7y ago
    This can also be done either with a free WordPress.com account or with a simple shared hosting that supports WP (if you are willing to pay). Medium has no exclusivity on this.
- jesseschalken 7y ago
  > I want them all to have consistent like/comment mechanics. As a reader, sorry, I just don’t care about your personal brand or platform. This is an important point. There is a small mental burden users face every time they see a new website and have to understand how it has been laid out and where things are and what they mean. Medium gives users "just the content" in the same familiar layout to streamline the process. Not to mention the sites that have silly disorienting scrolling effects, with things moving around while they slowly load, or are barely even functional on mobile. Although these tend not to be problems for the average blog.
amelius 7y ago
What happens if you are a popular blogger, and one day you decide to take your business elsewhere, and make the announcement on Medium in your last blogpost there? Will they take that post or even your entire blog down? Similar question for YouTube.
myspy 7y ago
He is right. Medium was cool around 2016. Before the content was behind a paywall and the free content was accessible in a visible way. They send you a mail with interesting stuff everyday and now it's dead to me. The mobile site is horrendous, a banner where it says to download the app which can't be canceled after five or so tabs. The asshole that designed it should never get a job in the business again.
DanielBMarkham 7y ago
There's a deeper thing going on here that should be mentioned because it applies in so many places: the platform is the enemy. That is, once you create a platform to do X, the purpose of the platform becomes "get people to use the platform to do X", not X. They sound like the same thing but they are not. An example: Facebook, I guess, is all about sharing things with your friends. But over time it quickly morphed into an engine that was only concerned about how many people would spend their time on their site sharing and consuming things, not about sharing. So people "shared" by posting memes from other places. They shared by copying crap and fake articles. They "shared" by playing dumb and addictive games for hours at a time, asking anybody they could find to help them milk a fake cow or something. If you cared about sharing, you might think about a wise investment in time, both for the sharer and the folks consuming what was being shared. But if you think about whatever you could pass off as sharing, then you might think about virality, demographics, psychology, and so forth. Worse yet, you'd probably do whatever you could to prevent people from talking about real sharing. After all, that would be a huge hit to your site's metrics. It might even involve an existential crisis. Likewise Medium cared about blogging and publishing, but only in terms they had predefined and could control. As they started looking at their numbers, they started refining their definitions. The same thing is happening everywhere, for instance YouTube. YT couldn't care less about average folks making creative content to share, even though that's the schtick. What they really care about is reliable non-offensive video content being regularly produced and consumed by the most numbers of people that they can sell ads to. I'm not saying that any of these platforms are evil or ran by bad people. My point is that by defining a platform and business model that's widely-adopted, you end up preventing any sort of change, quality improvement, or re-imagining what the important drivers are for that platform. I can change what I consider to be high-quality video to create, share and consume ten times a day. YouTube cannot. Same goes for Medium and text content. The platform, the idea of fixing quality attributes for complex things into code, is the natural enemy of serious consideration and evaluation of the thing the platform supposedly supports.
pawurb 7y ago
Medium is also bad for SEO https://abot.app/blog/medium-blogging-platform-seo https://abot.app/blog/medium-blogging-platform-seo . Selling your personal brand for a fancy WYSIWYG editor does not seem to be the best trade-off.
throwaway13000 7y ago
I have decided not to post on internet platforms that take my content and put it behind a login wall. I guess if I post a blog or video, I expect that everyone must be able to view it without having to login. Only then I will give my content to your platform. This will stop the web from being a bunch of islands.
taylodl 7y ago
Can we all stop posting articles from Medium on HN? While we're at it let's stop posting articles residing behind paywalls. That'd be great.
coldtea 7y ago
>When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play? At the moment authors wanted to get paid. When did somebody else's writing became a free for all? If, as you say, that [Medium] is where "all your favourite content lives" (which means you appreciate the content), then it's troubling that you don't want to pay for it. >Just so we are clear. Medium takes your content, rolls it up into a pretty SEO friendly package for themselves and sells it. Oh, and turns us all into seals waiting for someone to throw us a fish in the process. If you are lucky, you might even get a cut. You know. Like the sort of cut artists get on Spotify. Profit share I think the cool kids call it. So why is everyone still publishing on it? For what? More eyeballs? More attention? More reach? All of the above. More eyeballs. More reach. More attention. A primed audience looking to read something. And also some authors make decent-ish money (far more than Spotify) on Medium. So there's that. >Please. It’s 2019. Learn to market yourself and your content. Quit being lazy waiting for Medium to do it for you. OWN YOUR PLATFORM. Yeah, and how does that work for you? We've only read your blog because it was picked by an aggregator (HN).
- nhumrich 7y ago
  Except the problem is that 99% of authors on medium dont get paid. So it's not really about authors wanting to be paid.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    The rest still get viewers in the free tier.
- spiderfarmer 7y ago
  I agree. Publishing things online is easy, if you have the knowhow. If you don't know how to set up your website or blog it is hard. And gaining an audience and eventually getting paid for all your work is very hard. Medium makes these things easier. At an expense, I agree. And there might be better ways for them to do that. And there might be better alternatives, but the reason Medium exists is because they fill a need.
- teh_klev 7y ago
DmitryOlkhovoi 7y ago
I don't read medium. It's just another stupid website that takes your time and gives nothing.
neop1x 7y ago
Your page still won't display in built-in webview of Materialistic Android HN client. And it has trouble parsing HTML. Just like Medium and many other modern (=broken) websites full of javascripts and ads.
jasonvorhe 7y ago
> You know. That old internet that used to be open and free. This is bullshit. Medium is free, you're free to use it, it's open (unless an author explicitly asks for a paywall for compensation) and you're free to register an account to have your own content published there. Medium isn't using a proprietary protocol nor does it require a licensed client to access it and everyone has a browser, so I really don't get the issue with publishing there.
getcrunk 7y ago
So what alternatives are there? Either as a service or code?
fbn79 7y ago
To make a parallelism with traditional paper it's like to say that everyone want to publish an article must become an editor and found a newspaper. That's not realistic. Medium and other platform put a lot on work on promotion, positioning and creating an engagement place for writers and readers. I don't think that every writer must became an editor in digital era. It's like to say that if you are a musician you have to host your clone of spotify and bypass all distribution platforms.
- omarchowdhury 7y ago
  Medium doesn't provide editing services, nor do they promote your content. Your content promotes itself by merit of engagement with readers.
  - fbn79 7y ago
    But Medium promote the platform, attract readers and give visibility to you article. I think is the same think a traditional newspaper do.
Grustaf 7y ago
Seems like you can have the cake and eat it too by posting to Medium AND your own domain, or wherever you want.
- slig 7y ago
  Do you mean using your own domain on a Medium blog? If so, that was disabled a while ago. Or do you mean cross posting the same content on Medium and your blog? That's tricky, how do you tell Google that it should consider your blog as the owner of the content? Otherwise you can get punished for duplicated content.
robsun 7y ago
I can remember praising Medium as the ultimate solution for professional bloging. I stopped using Medium when a pay wall was introduced. I didn't follow what happen since then with the platform. Can someone shortly introduce me to the topic why Medium is considered now as evil corp?
sproketboy 7y ago
YAY use webdistortion.com instead. NOT.
ausbah 7y ago
Doesn't medium also fill the gap of a sort of easy to use, personalized aggregate site for blogs and such? I'm not aware of any other site that does this. And isn't that kinda of the point of sites like Medium, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, etc. - that provide enough of a valuable service to people by providing a single place for people to view a certain type of content that in spite of ads, centralized control, some pay walls, crappy technology, etc. that consumers and producers still find it worth while to use for viewing and publishing. I would even go a step further and say such aggregate sites like Medium represent what the "new" internet represents, convenience and monetization. The average user doesn't care about privacy or ads as much as they want easy access to information. The average producer doesn't care about control compared to what runs their operation, revenue and readers. I think many "technologists" and other people who populate sites like Hacker News have values the align more closely to that of the "old" internet, so view many of the new trends negatively. I'm not trying to say if it's right or wrong, just my two cents.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ddalex 7y ago
> When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play? Stallman was right.
whydoineedthis 7y ago
No
manigandham 7y ago
> When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play? That's what happens when there are no ads. This is what the HN majority keeps saying they want.
Vordimous 7y ago
So I have been putting together a way for people to more easily make their own blogging platform. It would kind of mimic a social media platform, but since everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack it could easily be converted to a full website. Any feedback would be wonderful. https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ Everything is owned by the end user. This is only providing a recipe for people to use. I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.
rchaud 7y ago
A big chunk of the comments are about the problems of self-hosting video. The reality is that if you're not hosting on Youtube, or aggressively promoting the video via FB Ads or something, you will never get anywhere close to the number of views that would necessitate thinking about "video at scale".
ga-vu 7y ago
Had a friend lose hundreds of posts after he complained on Twitter about the company's annoying popup. They deleted his account within hours.

925 points by squiggy22 7y ago

I am happy to pay for well articulated content that can sometimes reach 45min/piece in reading duration. Medium will slowly learn what you’re interested in and send you opt-out’able weekly newsletters with recommendations. I’m surprised the OP has this much distaste for a platform which not only has good content, but rewards such, yet without ads. I’d happily pay to see less ads in my life.

musicale 7y ago

This should be medium link.

Lowkeyloki 7y ago
This. I dare the author to publish it on medium. Triple. Dog. Dare.

melling 7y ago

It’s halfway through the month and I’m blocked by Medium. It is a bit frustrating. I’m not sure about this comment though: “Learn to market yourself and your content. Quit being lazy waiting for Medium to do it for you.” Maybe I am lazy but there really isn’t an easy and inexpensive way to market your blogs or apps.

jolmg 7y ago
> Maybe I am lazy but there really isn’t an easy and inexpensive way to market your blogs or apps. HN, Reddit, and other social networks?
- Untit1ed 7y ago
  I've had blog posts do well on Medium but sink like a stone on those platforms. It's a very different proposition submitting to medium and having it shown to people who are likely to be interested over a day, vs self-submitting to a site like HN or Reddit and watching it sink like a stone because the few people who are likely to be interested aren't looking at that particular moment. Not to mention the fact that if you self-submit anything to those sites people tend to take it as an invitation to eviscerate you.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    Well, for Reddit, I know that tech subreddits really don't like it if you drop a link and don't provide any additional commentary in the post. This is doubly true if the link happens to be "medium.com" because Reddit is already full of downvoted posts submitted by content marketers. If you aren't a regular poster on the sub that you're placing the link on, why would posters bother opening said link? You have to participate in the community as well, and that includes providing content in the form of Reddit posts as well, because Reddit users don't like clicking outbound links with no context.
Deimorz 7y ago
Just find a link to any article you want to read by searching Twitter (or even tweet it yourself). t.co links always bypass the paywall.
bscphil 7y ago
You could buy advertisements... what you're looking for is basically a way to get ads for your product in front of eyeballs, even if you don't call them "ads". I don't see any reason why that ought to be cheap. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what the goal of "marketing" is in this context, however.

duxup 7y ago

I've been amazed seeing some folks I think of as good web citizens who are thoughtful about the web, web development, and etc.... keep using Medium, or at least have recently. Some of these people would get plenty of attention posting on a personal site and just tweeting it out, but they choose medium, and I wonder why. Folks less well known, I get it it assuming they somehow get more attention on medium.

emptyparadise 7y ago

This site appears to break scrolling inertia on touch screen devices.

regnerba 7y ago

I don't publish anything ever really so I don't understand the appeal of using Medium. Can anyone explain it to me? Is it just the ease of use? Write some text, click button, it's available online?

Aeolun 7y ago
Originally it was their easy editor. Now I just don’t know, since every other blog copied the editor.
ukulele 7y ago
Built-in audience of readers
- regnerba 7y ago
  I would be really curious how much of an effect that has. I have only ever gone to Medium because I followed a link to a post. Never because I was browsing Medium and found another article to read. I would be really curious if anyone who does post on Medium was able to offer some insights into where most their readers come from. Is it from people already on Medium or external. Don't know if they even have access to metrics like that.
  - MivLives 7y ago
    I post on Medium. I don't really promote anything I write. I get around 50-100 views per thing I write. Why do I do it? Well honestly I have no where else in mind. I don't have any one looking for my blog, I'm not really going to spam Hacker News or Reddit, or Discord rooms with links to get organic outreach. I just want somewhere nice I can post simple factual articles I enjoy writing. My articles aren't ones that show up behind the Medium paywall, I'm under no illusion there's money in it for me. Medium can tell you where your readers come from. Here's a Medium stat screen: https://imgur.com/a/8VhJEhJ https://imgur.com/a/8VhJEhJ
  - freddie_mercury 7y ago
    A friend has a blog -- about the history of labor & work -- that he often cross-posts to Medium. He wrote an article on his blog. A few dozen people read it over the next week -- basically all friends of his. He cross-posted it to Medium and he had 30,000 reads within the first 24 hours. Looking at the stats on my own Medium posts how much comes via Medium and how much is external varies. On a story with 3,000 readers (which is the most I've ever had), about 10% come from Medium. Most of what I post ends up having 20-30 readers and about 50% come via Medium.

_seemethere 7y ago

Not everyone has the time to create their own platform and curation network. That's the reason why people will keep using Medium. We need to stop acting like it's easy to build these types of platforms.

Apocryphon 7y ago
WordPress, Blogspot, even Xanga and LiveJournal predate Medium and didn't have to resort to subscription services.
- VWWHFSfQ 7y ago
  better than ads
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    I don't think Blogspot/Blogger had ads.
  - asdff 7y ago
    I'll take ads, I block them anyway.
- egypturnash 7y ago
  Pretty sure all of them had subscriptions. Hell, I was a paid user of LJ until they got sold to the Russians and everyone left.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    I think they had subscriptions but they were certainly far less in your face than Medium's paid content ads. I think tiered services are fine if they don't spam you about them.
regnerba 7y ago
The struggle for me in understanding why people use Medium is that I am a reader of Medium articles, but I only find them when posted on Reddit, HackerNews, or when they come up on a Google Search. So as far as I can tell it wouldn't matter if it was posted on Medium or a personal blog on their own site.

skilled 7y ago

I have yet to figure out the 'persona' for Medium users. From time to time you can come across some decent content, but the loops and hoops you have to go through to read it are simply not worth my time.

StevePerkins 7y ago
It seems to mostly revolve around resume-enhancement spam. The sort of empty filler that people write, just to appear like a "thought leader" when potential employers or clients google them. There are two categories of resume-spam: 1. "Sunny" filler that doesn't really say anything new (e.g. "The Future Is Serverless"). The preferred platform for this seems to be LinkedIn. 2. "Edgy" filler that doesn't really say anything new (e.g. "Serverless Considered Harmful", or "Why I Don't Use Serverless"). The preferred platform for this seems to be Medium.

dickeytk 7y ago

The main argument in this article doesn't apply unless the Medium writer enabled the partner program on the post. That's what enables the pay wall.

troydavis 7y ago
A huge percentage of the authors behind the paywall don’t realize that they are. It seems like Medium might have made this option less clear than it needs to be be (like by describing the benefits but not the drawbacks) or made it on by default.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- knrz 7y ago
  Nah man, I considered turning it on for no reason in particular. Asked me for bank account routing info. Wasn't interested about it that much. Definitely not on by default.
  - DoctorOW 7y ago
    The partner program isn't on by default, the paywall is. You do not need to be part of the partner program for the paywall. Source: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018834314-Stories-that-are-part-of-the-metered-paywall https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018834314-Stori...
    - dickeytk 7y ago
      What on earth are you talking about? From the link you posted: > Stories become eligible to be part of the metered paywall if the writer selects that option in each story’s distribution setting. Medium will never meter a story without the writer’s permission. > During the publish flow, you have the opportunity to check the box to be eligible for curation review and distribution across Medium. Checking this box means that your story is also eligible to be part of Medium’s metered paywall, and can earn money if you are in the Medium Partner Program.

pwncake 7y ago

Is there a suggested alternative people should be turning to as opposed to building their own, especially if their expertise is in writing or some other field than computer science or web design?

hombre_fatal 7y ago
Though I also kinda resent the idea that, just because I have the skills to build my own blog from scratch, I'd want to waste even one second building it, setting it up, configuring it, maintaining it, fixing it, implementing basic features that other platforms already have, etc.
recroad 7y ago
WordPress.com
CM30 7y ago
WordPress/Ghost on their hosting? Or for the completely non technical, the cloud hosted versions of said scripts on WordPress.com and Ghost.org?

sgarman 7y ago

I know this doesn't justify all the issues but I'm at least a little excited that someone is trying to create a media/news service that isn't ad based. Seems like we have a way to go but at least this is a start. I'm a little surprised that there are so many complaints here - I bet a lot of the same people complaining also complain about ad based services and now they create news / journalism / articles designed for clicks and not quality content.

mojuba 7y ago
Ever since we switched our app from ads to ad-free soft paywall with daily limited content, we get a lot of hate and negative reviews on the App Store from our users. Some even said quite directly "bring back the ads". This is so strange. What this kind of people don't understand is, we all buy products whose prices include advertisement costs. Eventually we pay for everything anyway, there is no charity (unless something is explicitly charity). Let alone cases where ads make us buy things we don't need. And not to mention the rabbit hole behind the seemingly free services like Google Search/Maps. I don't get all the hate here. Paywalls are at least honest, clear and upfront about how the business makes money. We should support this type of businesses. It's usually the switch that triggers a lot of hate: businesses should probably be cautious about it.
- inapis 7y ago
  > It's usually the switch that triggers a lot of hate: businesses should probably be cautious about it. I agree. The switch is the noisy period. When you are free, you attract people who are looking for free and would probably never pay for it directly. When you are paid and ad-free from the start, you attract a customer base who understands the value intrinsically and will probably run away if you switch to an ad-based model.
inapis 7y ago
The internet suffers from massive cognitive dissonance. Forums like HN/Reddit just amplify it. People complain about ads, People complain about subs. Fortunately, people who want to pay for content will pay for it as long as you express the value clearly. And people who complain about both are probably a minority.

vcavallo 7y ago

jeez, could you jack my mobile scrolling any further? not reading that for any longer than 2 seconds

gurlic 7y ago

I'm currently working on an alternative to Medium. So far it has all the elementary things like a working editor, notes and highlights, a decent commenting system. There are publications too, with teams, submissions etc. User profiles and publications have custom domains, custom CSS for branding. There's also a somewhat half-working Github integration for advanced writers but I'll need to work on it a fair bit to polish the edges. At some point, I'd ideally want to open-source the editor/bloggy bit and have people self-host it and perhaps push their content back to the platform for centralized distribution if they want. It's still a work in progress and I'm trying to figure out some sort of strategy, especially a content policy around not allowing clickbait and spammy "how to use learn redis in 3 minutes" type articles. I'd probably have to cap the max number of users and publication to a few thousand since I don't have the resources for this to be anything more than a hobby project. I'm aware of a couple of others working in the same space. Write.as comes to mind, thought I don't think they're doing publications etc.

sdan 7y ago
As a person who blogs on certain areas in ML, the sole thing I look for in any platform is SEO. I tried going on Medium, but because of the lack of LaTex support, I had to go on my own blog, but I'd really like if there's an alternate to Medium with amazing SEO (as you explained).
- gurlic 7y ago
  That's definitely one of Medium's strengths and something I'd like to focus on when I find the time. I still have much reading to do about SEO in general. LaTex, syntax/code was high on my priority-list while initially building my product since I wanted to primarily target technical writers.
- initself 7y ago
  The author's point certainly has to do with no more RSS networking.
empath75 7y ago
Writing a blog engine is trivial. Monetizing it is hard.

throw007 7y ago

I'm writing on Medium because its rank well on Google. I have several articles about the product I'm selling that rank 1-5 on Google and it gives me a lot of customers. It'll take me a lot of time to build my own website and content that gives me the same result. So, there's that. Sorry, not a native speaker.

regnerba 7y ago
No need to be sorry. Your English is fine and what you said makes perfect sense. As someone who doesn't post on Medium this is great in helping understand why people use it. So thank you for sharing.
snazz 7y ago
That is an important feature. Not having to convince Google that your domain isn’t a spam cesspool is a major advantage of most any centralized blog/CMS platform (but especially one as major as Medium). Write.as doesn’t seem to work as well for this purpose yet, unfortunately. And your English is plenty easy to understand, no need to apologize about that.
yingw787 7y ago
Your English is great, and it’s great that you prioritize shipping over worrying about which blogging platform to use. Shipping is very important. That being said, I do think a small investment into moving onto your own platform may be worth it, and that might kick in much earlier than you’d think. I use Hugo and a fork of hugo-minimo-theme for my technical and personal writing, and it took maybe three days to set up (granted I have some technical experience). If you paid a contractor to spend a week setting up a statically compiled site with a CMS, you may get competitive SEO without having to worry about content licensing or platform updates. I think statically generated content is generally friendly to search engines. I don’t update my blog infra at all really, and there’s very few steps involved if I needed to relearn how to do it. It is possible to use free open source software and have it get out of your way in terms of making money.
- badestrand 7y ago

Hackbraten 7y ago

Please re-enable the `-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;` CSS style for your content. The article is a pain to read on Mobile Safari because bouncy/rubber-band scrolling is disabled.

pokstad 7y ago
Goes without saying, the consistent Medium experience is a good reason why we keep using it. Self made blogs like this that do annoying things that take away from content are foot guns.
- notatoad 7y ago
  The OP's blog still does less annoying stuff than medium does
  - lowboy 7y ago
    On iOS I find the lack of inertial scrolling on this site an order of magnitude more annoying than anything Medium currently does by far. To the point where I closed the article after I first tried to scroll.
- rchaud 7y ago
  The majority of non-Medium blogs are using Wordpress/Squarespsace themes of some kind and those usually are of the "responsive boilerplate" style that wouldn't have basic CSS issues like the site above.
NightlyDev 7y ago
That feature has serious bugs on iOS, and that's probably why it's not the default as Apple can't get it to be stable. Don't ask him to add it, ask Apple, it's their fault. It's not a production feature. And since it's Apple, you can't just use another browser as it's all the same crap on iOS. You're stuck with something worse than the 2019 equivalent of IE6. iOS is a joke when it comes to web browsing.
- 7y ago

keyle 7y ago

I wish I could upvote this 10 times. Medium is the pinterest of thoughts.

tyingq 7y ago

Large.com is available for $850k if there's a VC thinking they can disrupt.

jaza 7y ago
Would you like fries.com with that? It's for sale too.
- unityByFreedom 7y ago
  I'd like a literacola.com please.
  - mindgam3 7y ago
    I don't want alargefarvaIwantagoddamnliteracola.com, but perhaps you might be interested?
kowdermeister 7y ago
- So what's your USP? - We'll use bigger font size... and feature more clickbait headlines.

stanislavb 7y ago

What is your best alternative? I'd say dev.to is a good one for the context of software/programming related content

julienreszka 7y ago
Blogger is just fine
- jlarcombe 7y ago
  It does still work well but I have the sense no-one is really using it for new stuff any more - it has a sort of unloved feel to it, and Google have recent form in dropping stuff...

spyckie2 7y ago

Please KEEP USING medium to keep all those uninspired rants, thought leader posturing, and no substance fluff pieces on subjects that are actually interesting behind a paywall. Please put more effort into creating better content by exhibiting interest and passion into a subject through deep exploration, insights, discussion of core issues and resolution, and great descriptive writing. It used to be that everyone who wrote a diary had no expectations of their content being anything valuable, and the value of writing was in the exploration of ideas and organization of your thoughts. Now the value of writing is how many people you reach? Philosophically, I'm against that change, so please keep that stuff behind a paywall.

jscholes 7y ago

> If you enjoy reading on the web chances are you’ve been forced to login to Medium at some point in the last week. I've never once logged into Medium. I see a "Pardon the Interruption" notice every time I want to read something, but I just hit Escape and move on with my day. If I had to pick a side, I'd probably say avoid Medium. But I don't know under what circumstances it forces you to log in just to read something.

teej 7y ago
The author has complete control over it.
- corobo 7y ago
  Sort of. If you opt out of their paywall nagware stuff your posts don’t appear anywhere on the site other than your own feed. Technically you can opt out. Realistically if you do then you lose all of the benefits of being on medium
  - lmm 7y ago
    The biggest benefit of being on medium is that I can just write some words and push the button and I get a nice-looking web page I can share with my friends. I don't care about google rank or more eyeballs or whatever. But I'd rather focus on writing better words than worrying about the words -> website process. Give me something that's as easy to work with (log in, type stuff in the in-browser editor, push publish - no renting a server or installing ruby or whatever) and looks as good at the end, and I'll happily use that.
    - ronsor 7y ago
      That's been around for ages: http://blogger.com http://blogger.com http://wordpress.com http://wordpress.com Or self-host wordpress
michaco33 7y ago
I've been doing this too. I'm also doing this with NYT, WSJ, FT -- all publications behind higher and higher paywalls, all publications I tried, but ended up leaving because they still serve you ads on their mobile apps. Now the question is this: if I didn't care or it wasn't worth reading, why did I click on it in the first place? Perhaps I don't care about this content as much as I thought anymore. Maybe we've been addicted to reading content, rather than actually making use of most of the content anyway. PS: I'm trying out The Guardian now. No ads for premium users on mobile.

55555 7y ago

I was writing on Medium because it ranks well in Google. I wrote nearly a dozen really great articles on primarily health and dietary supplement topics. After 2 months they started to rank well and were getting daily readers, as the content was really great. Then I wrote an article on a 'research chemical' and they banned my account overnight. I lost the final edited versions of all content. They did not send me a zip with the content. They could have simply deleted the offending article(s) but instead they deleted all of them. The thing is, the thing I wrote about isn't illegal. When you write articles on Medium keep in mind you're writing on someone else's website and they don't give a damn about you. You are subject to their opinions about what is appropriate and what isn't. I have no doubt if an alt-right voice wrote on Medium and were controversial enough in their views they'd be deplatformed. But also the way they handle it is just rude. Fuck them.

calimac 7y ago
Your story represents the dilemma in the shit internet of 2019 where most people are content slaves locked into plantations. Medium, facebook, twitter, et, al. don't think twice before they ban human minds from expressing themselves for any reason. All these corporations hide behind $600 an hour attorneys and pr management teams. Fuck them all. replacefacebook
ozzmotik 7y ago
just out of curiosity, which chemical did you write about?
- TomK32 7y ago
  asking for a friend?
  - ozzmotik 7y ago
    nope, asking for myself. i see no reason to hide behind a constructed other just to save face.
xkcd-sucks 7y ago

ajflores1604 7y ago

So just my personal take, I definitely benefit a lot from Mediums recommendation system, however it might work. Probably because I'm brand new to programming, and even fields like machine learning are very fresh to me even though it seems like everyone and their mom already knows the basics. So having a system that can see that I looked up a specific topic and recommend similar articles from that domain. A lot of the time I don't know what I don't know, so having this recommendation system helps illuminate the domain a bit more for me. And the general style of medium where the posts can be a more casual overview of a topic compared to the deep dive of a whitepaper, helps me grasp concepts faster. The recommendation aspect also helps me explore domains in a more focused way compared to the random nature of social networks that just bubbles up whatever's popular. I'd be lying to myself if I said I haven't benefited from Medium. Not trying to excuse them for what they're doing, just trying to point out from my personal experience the value they've added to me and why following personal blogs or places like reddit, which I see mentioned as alternatives, isn't a one to one replacement for me. I don't know what or who I'd need to follow if the domain is new to me. I guess continuing on this train of thought, and not wanting to complain without putting out an idea for a solution...if something were to come in and be a viable alternative to Medium it would have to >Allow for easy publishing (editor) >Have reliable distribution/hosting (network) >And have some way to explore related topics or publications (discovery) For publication I think the community would have to come around to a standard format. Like a simplified latex, or something similar to it, with an approachable interface that even my Mom or Dad could write something up without needing to read documentation. As for distribution, the only thing I can really think of is an ipfs style network. Similar to how torrents can provide some security in the survival of a file even if the originator decides to stop seeding (hosting). And also similar to torrenting, I can see ppl willingly giving up resources for 'the cause' if they themselves benefit enough from the network existing. The only thing left, that also contains all the things I liked about Medium, is the discovery aspect. Also seems like it'd be the most difficult to implement on a distributed network. Maybe a few designated community servers, similar to tracker servers from the torrenting analogy, carry the information of what files are in the network. Im not sure exactly what the ipfs spec implements for this aspect of file discovery. But it seems some sort of designated 'discovery nodes' would be necessary. Maybe graph network nodes that ppl can query using their own discovery algorithms or ones shared within the community? Idk how well those would scale, I've heard from the Neo4j pitch that Behance rolled over their infrastructure to neo4j from cassandra and reduced their server requirements by a factor of 10. Maybe that kind of efficiency would be enough to support the network in general with a minimal number of critical nodes? I haven't worked on an infrastructure level with anything I've mentioned, mostly just know of the technologies, so I might be completely off base with the individual things I proposed, but I feel like the general concept is worth dissecting.

xkcd-sucks 7y ago

Somewhat relatedly, does anyone else need to adblock/disable medium.com JS in order to scroll through articles?

phantom_oracle 7y ago

The authors complaints are valid, but fails to acknowledge that besides Medium, so many great(and not so great) conversations happen on platforms that are now locked behind login gardens. It was fine back in the day to just create a throwaway FaceTwit account but now they demand mobile numbers too. Pre social media, how did people discover great content? You can go as far back to the 90s or very early 00s as a time reference

azimuth11 7y ago
That’s a good point. It was much harder to find interesting stuff to read back in the day. I had my Google Reader with a bunch of blogs, but that ended up being pretty noisy and they took it away. You had to do the searching yourself and be your own data curator, or have a network of other friends pitching in content to check out (eg. forums, Maybe digg?) It’s locked in a somewhat growing, walled garden, yes, but Medium is now basically the Google Reader for a lot of people. Those people don’t care about logins if they can get a good read every now and then. And, when Medium goes to crap, some other platform will pop up with no ads (for a while :) ) and lure us all over there.

kgwxd 7y ago

I forget Medium exists until some complains about it. Several years ago, the popularity of Medium and several paywall/signup-wall sites posted on HN and Reddit inspired me to write a Firefox add-on that is able to apply CSS to any element that contains any text or attribute value matching a given regular expression on any site. So far, I've only used it to apply "visibilty: hidden" to sites I don't like, but it theoretically has other uses. I use a variation of the filter in Newsbeuter to keep them out of my RSS feeds. The result is that I do not see any links or any embedded content for sites I know I never want to interact with, ever. Search results, Reddit, HN, blogs, etc. The sites I add are basically erased from my personal internet experience. It is glorious, and I think if a lot of people used it, misbehaving sites would be more scared of it than ad blockers because they don't even get the chance to grab your attention. It's called ssure if anyone is interested. It's a bitch to configure but it works on desktop and Android FF.

miguelmota 7y ago

Medium should be used as a means to distribution (like a mirror) but not be the canonical source. Make your personal blog be the primary source of storing your articles but copy post on medium for discoverability

dmje 7y ago

There's quite a lot of mileage in what this guy says, and the "content behind walled garden" thing pisses us all off (I'm a non-Facebooker for All The Usual Reasons and have the same response whenever I see stuff "published" there). But: noone seems to have mentioned the fact that you can publish on WordPress and use the Medium plugin to copublish to Medium. It deals with the whole canonical content / SEO thing, you get to keep your original content, and you get the potential benefits of a Medium audience / stats / etc. Best of all worlds.

vermilingua 7y ago
If someone can find your work on medium, why would the bother to find your site and read it there instead?
- corobo 7y ago
  The someone in question is a search engine. Telling them where your content originated from helps you when your content matches future searches
- mayankkaizen 7y ago
  Your content is backed up. In addition to Medium, your own blog can also attract users. Your website is much more customizable. With some luck and work, your website may perform better in google search.
  - kkarakk 7y ago
    That's what archive.is is for(as a reader). if i share an article i usually back it up on archive.is first just in case. your hosted website can go down at any time as well sadly(i see this a lot for ms hosted content)
    - Crinus 7y ago
      What makes impossible for archive.is to go down? Last time i checked it was developed and funded by a single guy (who even seems to have some sort of agenda against cloudflare for some reason).

bwasti 7y ago

I wrote one article on Medium. I ended up writing my own little version using open source markdown rendering to see how hard it would be to roll my own, https://jott.live https://jott.live From what I found, there is a lot of stuff Medium does well that is hard to recreate by one's self. Super simple features, like - rich text editing that isn't ugly - caching what you're currently working on - tracking views and who has viewed your article aren't easy to build and generally aren't worth it unless you write many many articles. Although I don't like the aggressive account on-boarding and payment models for reading articles, Medium certainly makes life easy for writing articles.

luckylion 7y ago
You don't necessarily have to build it yourself to have control over it though. I mean, WP isn't the dream you've always looked for, but it (+ a plugin or five) can do that and is pretty much set up in an hour. With wordpress.com, you'll get that without running it yourself.
bubblewrap 7y ago
Wordpress has an app store for plugins. I installed a popular statistics plugin and it seems to be doing well. I think it is pretty amazing, actually (the app store). https://wordpress.org/plugins/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/ Hosting my blog costs me 5€/month, though. Not sure if I have the cheapest option. On the upside, it also supports multiple email accounts, so I am in the process of moving all emails (also family) over there, saving on extra costs for email. I think attracting viewers is the only real issue. That's why social media, Tumblr and Medium took over from blogs. Because they have the recommendation and sharing features that bring viewers to people's postings.
chrshawkes 7y ago
They use Quill.js - rich editing (you can use this in your project easily) Caching/saving work just simple AJAX calls to a localized database or filesystem which can store the JSON data that Quill.JS creates. Google Analytics is free and offers more customer insight and analysis opportunities and it's as simple as a script tag inclusion in the html. I plan to show how to replicate this website in a matter of minutes on my YouTube channel.

AngeloAnolin 7y ago

I've seen a lot of complaints about how Medium is becoming worse in terms of writing / publishing / blogging your thoughts on the internet [1]. I just don't see why no one (or group) has taken to building a similar service less the cruft and could still be a viable business. [1] https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/

azhenley 7y ago

Fine. I’m going to make a Medium alternative this weekend and this person better try it out.

superconformist 7y ago

But how will I "clap" for top-shelf webshit content if it's not on Medium?

bubblewrap 7y ago
Isn't there a "clap" plugin for Wordpress?
- CM30 7y ago
  Yeah there is. Probably quite a few, though this one came up first: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-applaud/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-applaud/
divanvisagie 7y ago
Potential violation of the prime directive...

wtmt 7y ago

Side note. I didn’t read this post for two reasons. On mobile, the lack of inertial scrolling makes it like pushing hard against some massive slush, and the lack of a scroll bar prevents me from knowing how long the article is and whether I should read it quickly now or check it later. A criticism on Medium, including its usability (I presume), should do a lot better if it wants to be read.

SCLeo 7y ago
I am mobile and I have inertial scrolling. I think it is probably because you are using iOS safari. iOS' inertial scrolling for some reason breaks very often. It happened to my website a couple times, and I had to fix with a bunch of css hacks. Supporting iOS is just a pain. Sometimes, I would even rather support IE 11 than iOS. (btw, all iOS browsers are forced to use safari render engine.)

salutonmundo 7y ago

Prediction: next week on HN: an article titled "Why Medium is super great"

samwilliams 7y ago

A community member built a blogging platform on our permanent, decentralised web (Arweave) today. You might want to check it out: https://arweave.net/egqLRAbESk4BvrPZGwNM-koJZZU3_xYRb_G9-CYCvFs https://arweave.net/egqLRAbESk4BvrPZGwNM-koJZZU3_xYRb_G9-CYC... Full disclosure: I started the Arweave project. Sam

aerovistae 7y ago

Ironically this page doesn’t work on mobile. It doesn’t have inertial scrolling, and I just have no patience for that. I stopped reading after the first paragraph.

aembleton 7y ago
Works on Firefox 66.0.5 on Android 9

suzil 7y ago

Medium will often pop up when I search for something programming-related, but I'm less likely to find someone's blog post. What if we had a search engine that would only show programmer/technical blog posts? Then we could bring more traffic to the self-published.

StanislavPetrov 7y ago

Thankfully medium required a Google account to register, saving me the trouble of learning the hard way how bad they were.

girlsrule1234 7y ago

For someone with such strong opinions on personal platforms, he’d do well to fix the scrolling in his site.

davidz 7y ago

It's fine to dislike Medium and run your own blog, but I find the article intellectually dishonest in comparing Medium to Facebook. One harvests your data and lets advertisers target you with ads, the other charges a subscription to provide access to content. It's disingenuous to claim they "sell whatever advertising they please", and link to a ToS screen cap that's completely unrelated. Companies have to make money in order to pay their developers and pay for servers. Personally, I'd rather pay them instead of seeing ads plastered everywhere.

IloveHN84 7y ago

Funny how from "All to Medium, ditch WordPress and personal blogs" now people want to go the way around because of metered views and other limitations imposed by Medium popularity. I say it since ever: own your own content.

pergadad 7y ago
But you don't really own your WordPress. No way to get around using their services if you want to have proper spam filtering.
- joecool1029 7y ago
  This works well enough for comment spam filtering: https://wordpress.org/plugins/antispam-bee/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/antispam-bee/ (or just disable comments)
- luckylion 7y ago
  Sure you can. There are multiple anti-spam plugins out there, and unless you're running a super large high value target, most spam won't be custom made, so very simple things like hiding the "URL" field with CSS and marking as Spam when something has been entered will get rid of 95% of it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

paulie_a 7y ago

A lot of content creators have posted their experiences here. It matters for SEO, while being shitty to content creators. From this readers perspective if it's on medium it's not worth reading. I've literally thought this "awesome that sounds like it will solve my exact issue...oh fuck it's on medium...next"

siscia 7y ago

There is definitely something I miss in the discussion self-hosted blog vs medium. But the simplest solution isn't to just write on your own self hosted blog and cross post on medium setting the canonical URL? Doesn't this give the best of both worlds? You still have control over your property and you still get the SEO benefits from the medium domain...

mikl 7y ago

I really hope people do. Medium is awful and getting awfuller as time passes.

dtornabene 7y ago

g-d forbid writers find a way to be compensated, eh? I despise medium, it sucks as a platform, it sucks to read, and 99 times out of a hundred if I'm on an aggregator or twitter and I see a medium link to a piece that sounds interesting I skip it, because medium sucks. But christ does that post reek of entitlement. On top of that, maybe learn to put words together a bit better if you want people to read your blog over another platform

bitL 7y ago

We need a Zeitgeist service returning Overton window for each company and automate hiding articles/content that are no longer fitting inside it.

markn951 7y ago
what

vfc1 7y ago

One of the big advantages of self-hosting is that you own not only own the platform, but also the traffic. When I started my business I had a previous blog with several topics covered. Because I self-hosted, I managed to redirect the traffic only for a specific set of posts on the topic to my new business blog where I moved several posts over, getting thousands of visits in my business blog (and converting customers) since day one. The Ghost blogging platform is open source, and you can self-host if you want (I do). With Ghost, you can also get their hosted service for a monthly fee and you own your own platform, you have a markdown-based editor with markdown on the left and content on the right. You can run your own ads, have a fixed top menu that does not go away with scrolling with links to your products and services, etc. If you are serious about running a business blog, you should definitively self-host. I know Medium has the sharing aspect, but it's not worth it because most of the traffic in blogs in general comes from Google searches and not sharing. The social sharing traffic is a drop in the ocean for most blogs, it's not worth getting potential paying customers blocked due to a medium paywall popup.

sytelus 7y ago

TLDR; The article says that Medium locks up content behind its walled garden, requires login and then payment in some cases. I think the article is not well researched and doesn’t understand the basic premise of Medium: Enable professional writers to make living off of writing. Medium is not your usual free blogging platform. There is an expectation that people will pay for good content and the hope that good writers should be able make living off of their writing. Medium wants to take on doing SEO, infrastructure, payments and let authors focus on just creating content. Here’s some stats on how much writers can earn on Medium: https://medium.com/s/partner-program-updates/april-update-from-the-partner-program-1bf39020f3f4 https://medium.com/s/partner-program-updates/april-update-fr... If I have to be devil’s advocate, I would ask why can’t Medium use ads as revenue source. Their $5/mo subscription may look like cup of coffee but honestly I am tired of having dozen such subscriptions in my life. Also, people outside developed world, kids, teenagers, college students will still find this unaffordable.

jarym 7y ago

Just came here to say I hate Medium. I frequently get a strobing green bar at the top of the page that is permanently there and as far as I can tell doing nothing. WTF?

silveroriole 7y ago

Seems like not many commenters are giving a perspective on why people might like Medium more than going to a personal blog. Here’s mine. As a reader, I usually don’t care who wrote the post I’m reading. I also don’t care about seeing more content from the same person, which is all I would get on a personal blog; in fact, I would prefer to see related content but different viewpoints from other people, which is what Medium shows me. I want to read them all in the same format, not hop between different blog layouts. I want them all to have consistent like/comment mechanics. As a reader, sorry, I just don’t care about your personal brand or platform. I want to easily read a lot of stuff by different people on a topic. Never used it as a writer, but why should individuals have to set up their own SEO, comment system, blog system, etc just to post an article? Because they think that they’re so important or controversial that they need a personal space/brand? For most writers I think you get a lot for free with Medium.

kgraves 7y ago
Agreed, given the choice between Medium and a custom blog if I am a publisher, Medium is much faster to get up and running with a blog and has a larger reach than me setting it all up myself. Many people who aren't technical don't want to have to manage rolling their own comments system, custom SEO, analytics and all of that stuff.
- marc_io 7y ago
  This can also be done either with a free WordPress.com account or with a simple shared hosting that supports WP (if you are willing to pay). Medium has no exclusivity on this.
jesseschalken 7y ago
> I want them all to have consistent like/comment mechanics. As a reader, sorry, I just don’t care about your personal brand or platform. This is an important point. There is a small mental burden users face every time they see a new website and have to understand how it has been laid out and where things are and what they mean. Medium gives users "just the content" in the same familiar layout to streamline the process. Not to mention the sites that have silly disorienting scrolling effects, with things moving around while they slowly load, or are barely even functional on mobile. Although these tend not to be problems for the average blog.

amelius 7y ago

What happens if you are a popular blogger, and one day you decide to take your business elsewhere, and make the announcement on Medium in your last blogpost there? Will they take that post or even your entire blog down? Similar question for YouTube.

myspy 7y ago

He is right. Medium was cool around 2016. Before the content was behind a paywall and the free content was accessible in a visible way. They send you a mail with interesting stuff everyday and now it's dead to me. The mobile site is horrendous, a banner where it says to download the app which can't be canceled after five or so tabs. The asshole that designed it should never get a job in the business again.

DanielBMarkham 7y ago

There's a deeper thing going on here that should be mentioned because it applies in so many places: the platform is the enemy. That is, once you create a platform to do X, the purpose of the platform becomes "get people to use the platform to do X", not X. They sound like the same thing but they are not. An example: Facebook, I guess, is all about sharing things with your friends. But over time it quickly morphed into an engine that was only concerned about how many people would spend their time on their site sharing and consuming things, not about sharing. So people "shared" by posting memes from other places. They shared by copying crap and fake articles. They "shared" by playing dumb and addictive games for hours at a time, asking anybody they could find to help them milk a fake cow or something. If you cared about sharing, you might think about a wise investment in time, both for the sharer and the folks consuming what was being shared. But if you think about whatever you could pass off as sharing, then you might think about virality, demographics, psychology, and so forth. Worse yet, you'd probably do whatever you could to prevent people from talking about real sharing. After all, that would be a huge hit to your site's metrics. It might even involve an existential crisis. Likewise Medium cared about blogging and publishing, but only in terms they had predefined and could control. As they started looking at their numbers, they started refining their definitions. The same thing is happening everywhere, for instance YouTube. YT couldn't care less about average folks making creative content to share, even though that's the schtick. What they really care about is reliable non-offensive video content being regularly produced and consumed by the most numbers of people that they can sell ads to. I'm not saying that any of these platforms are evil or ran by bad people. My point is that by defining a platform and business model that's widely-adopted, you end up preventing any sort of change, quality improvement, or re-imagining what the important drivers are for that platform. I can change what I consider to be high-quality video to create, share and consume ten times a day. YouTube cannot. Same goes for Medium and text content. The platform, the idea of fixing quality attributes for complex things into code, is the natural enemy of serious consideration and evaluation of the thing the platform supposedly supports.

pawurb 7y ago

Medium is also bad for SEO https://abot.app/blog/medium-blogging-platform-seo https://abot.app/blog/medium-blogging-platform-seo . Selling your personal brand for a fancy WYSIWYG editor does not seem to be the best trade-off.

throwaway13000 7y ago

I have decided not to post on internet platforms that take my content and put it behind a login wall. I guess if I post a blog or video, I expect that everyone must be able to view it without having to login. Only then I will give my content to your platform. This will stop the web from being a bunch of islands.

taylodl 7y ago

Can we all stop posting articles from Medium on HN? While we're at it let's stop posting articles residing behind paywalls. That'd be great.

coldtea 7y ago

>When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play? At the moment authors wanted to get paid. When did somebody else's writing became a free for all? If, as you say, that [Medium] is where "all your favourite content lives" (which means you appreciate the content), then it's troubling that you don't want to pay for it. >Just so we are clear. Medium takes your content, rolls it up into a pretty SEO friendly package for themselves and sells it. Oh, and turns us all into seals waiting for someone to throw us a fish in the process. If you are lucky, you might even get a cut. You know. Like the sort of cut artists get on Spotify. Profit share I think the cool kids call it. So why is everyone still publishing on it? For what? More eyeballs? More attention? More reach? All of the above. More eyeballs. More reach. More attention. A primed audience looking to read something. And also some authors make decent-ish money (far more than Spotify) on Medium. So there's that. >Please. It’s 2019. Learn to market yourself and your content. Quit being lazy waiting for Medium to do it for you. OWN YOUR PLATFORM. Yeah, and how does that work for you? We've only read your blog because it was picked by an aggregator (HN).

nhumrich 7y ago
Except the problem is that 99% of authors on medium dont get paid. So it's not really about authors wanting to be paid.
- coldtea 7y ago
  The rest still get viewers in the free tier.
spiderfarmer 7y ago
I agree. Publishing things online is easy, if you have the knowhow. If you don't know how to set up your website or blog it is hard. And gaining an audience and eventually getting paid for all your work is very hard. Medium makes these things easier. At an expense, I agree. And there might be better ways for them to do that. And there might be better alternatives, but the reason Medium exists is because they fill a need.
teh_klev 7y ago

DmitryOlkhovoi 7y ago

I don't read medium. It's just another stupid website that takes your time and gives nothing.

neop1x 7y ago

Your page still won't display in built-in webview of Materialistic Android HN client. And it has trouble parsing HTML. Just like Medium and many other modern (=broken) websites full of javascripts and ads.

jasonvorhe 7y ago

> You know. That old internet that used to be open and free. This is bullshit. Medium is free, you're free to use it, it's open (unless an author explicitly asks for a paywall for compensation) and you're free to register an account to have your own content published there. Medium isn't using a proprietary protocol nor does it require a licensed client to access it and everyone has a browser, so I really don't get the issue with publishing there.

getcrunk 7y ago

So what alternatives are there? Either as a service or code?

fbn79 7y ago

To make a parallelism with traditional paper it's like to say that everyone want to publish an article must become an editor and found a newspaper. That's not realistic. Medium and other platform put a lot on work on promotion, positioning and creating an engagement place for writers and readers. I don't think that every writer must became an editor in digital era. It's like to say that if you are a musician you have to host your clone of spotify and bypass all distribution platforms.

omarchowdhury 7y ago
Medium doesn't provide editing services, nor do they promote your content. Your content promotes itself by merit of engagement with readers.
- fbn79 7y ago
  But Medium promote the platform, attract readers and give visibility to you article. I think is the same think a traditional newspaper do.

Grustaf 7y ago

Seems like you can have the cake and eat it too by posting to Medium AND your own domain, or wherever you want.

slig 7y ago
Do you mean using your own domain on a Medium blog? If so, that was disabled a while ago. Or do you mean cross posting the same content on Medium and your blog? That's tricky, how do you tell Google that it should consider your blog as the owner of the content? Otherwise you can get punished for duplicated content.

robsun 7y ago

I can remember praising Medium as the ultimate solution for professional bloging. I stopped using Medium when a pay wall was introduced. I didn't follow what happen since then with the platform. Can someone shortly introduce me to the topic why Medium is considered now as evil corp?

sproketboy 7y ago

YAY use webdistortion.com instead. NOT.

ausbah 7y ago

Doesn't medium also fill the gap of a sort of easy to use, personalized aggregate site for blogs and such? I'm not aware of any other site that does this. And isn't that kinda of the point of sites like Medium, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, etc. - that provide enough of a valuable service to people by providing a single place for people to view a certain type of content that in spite of ads, centralized control, some pay walls, crappy technology, etc. that consumers and producers still find it worth while to use for viewing and publishing. I would even go a step further and say such aggregate sites like Medium represent what the "new" internet represents, convenience and monetization. The average user doesn't care about privacy or ads as much as they want easy access to information. The average producer doesn't care about control compared to what runs their operation, revenue and readers. I think many "technologists" and other people who populate sites like Hacker News have values the align more closely to that of the "old" internet, so view many of the new trends negatively. I'm not trying to say if it's right or wrong, just my two cents.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ddalex 7y ago

> When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play? Stallman was right.

whydoineedthis 7y ago

manigandham 7y ago

> When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play? That's what happens when there are no ads. This is what the HN majority keeps saying they want.

Vordimous 7y ago

So I have been putting together a way for people to more easily make their own blogging platform. It would kind of mimic a social media platform, but since everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack it could easily be converted to a full website. Any feedback would be wonderful. https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ Everything is owned by the end user. This is only providing a recipe for people to use. I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.

rchaud 7y ago

A big chunk of the comments are about the problems of self-hosting video. The reality is that if you're not hosting on Youtube, or aggressively promoting the video via FB Ads or something, you will never get anywhere close to the number of views that would necessitate thinking about "video at scale".

ga-vu 7y ago

Had a friend lose hundreds of posts after he complained on Twitter about the company's annoying popup. They deleted his account within hours.