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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
by 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 agoYour 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 agojust out of curiosity, which chemical did you write about?
- xkcd-sucks 7y agoHaha you now know how they maintain their SEO -- by purging the politically incorrect stuff. BTW only druggies say "research chemicals", academic researchers just use "drugs"/"compounds" or maybe "fine organics" or the actual name of whatever it is. "Research chemicals" is basically "SWIM" in terms of being a "druggie heuristic"
- fwip 7y agoWhat is SWIM?
- xkcd-sucks 7y ago"Someone Who Isn't Me"
- azimuth11 7y ago“Someone who isn’t me”, a term used when discussing something (usually illegal) the poster did or has experience with, but is using this term to hide that fact.
- senorjazz 7y agoAn annoying term that has no meaning and is completely pointless and would have no bearing in a court of law at all and everyone knows what you are saying is "I"
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoFor some while (maybe still), there was a common belief that talking about your drug experiences online couldn't be used against you in court if you pretended it was someone else. This could be done semi-convincingly if you talked about, say, your "roommate" using drugs, but pretty quickly people started saying shit like "my cat" or "someone who isn't me" and, finally, abbreviated that to "SWIM." Like, "SWIM wants to know where to buy LSD in Seattle." Yeah. At least some forums are discouraging that now because it obviously won't hold up in court and provides a false sense of security, but I imagine some people are still attached to it.
- KingMachiavelli 7y agoI wonder if anything has changed since GDPR passed as I am pretty sure you are suppose to be able to download your content but I'm not sure how that works when accounts are deleted and/or banned. Regarding your situation and concerns of other comments... Many people in this thread point out that marketing and creating an audience is difficult work. But I think obvious-in-hindsight solution is to always keep a backup of your own content no matter what platform you publish it on. I'm not sure how Medium interprets their rules exactly but I would be suprised if you couldn't at least link every post back to a mirror on your own blog which would let you both generate an audience and prevents you from loosing everything is medium goes nuclear on you. As always, back up any content that you care about. Don't just backup your own content but also that of others - ever relize a youtube video you like has been taken down by a bogus DMCA claim?. Online services may have their own redundency but that doesn't matter if they decide to delete (your) content.
- ahje 7y agoGDPR covers personal data -- not content.
- Udik 7y agoHm hm, are you sure? And what is the difference between personal data and content? My pictures are pd or content? And if I publish them?
- ahje 7y agoSource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation#Right_of_access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... Now, obvliously, the content may contain personal data, or possibly be personal data (if it's pictures of people) and in that case I assume it would be covered.
- orbat 7y agoI'm not convinced your interpretation is correct. GDPR Article 4[1] states that "personal data" means "any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’)", so it covers anything you produce that's somehow related to you. [1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
- auct 7y agoIn google search cache or in web archive cache can be your content.
- manub22 7y agoIt's better to create your own blog, and get traffic overtime. Why they earn money on your content?
- Vinnl 7y agoIf I use Medium, they might earn money with my content. My blog, on the other hand, costs me money. I do have a personal blog instead of Medium. But it's definitely not about the money.
- collyw 7y agoPersonally, depending on my mood, if I have the obnoxious "sign in" prompt that medium and others give I'll maybe just not read the blog at all 1 time in 4. I am sure I am not the only one that gets put off by that crap.
- type0 7y agoThere's a shifting demographic of medium readers that occurred with the recent introduction of more and more nagging on their site and plenty of blogs that moved away from medium mention it. You might still get your deserved readers if you target social medium experts and marketing managers, so good luck to those who's willing to circleyank with this.
- thecatspaw 7y agoYeah, why should I log in with google just to read a random blog? There's not even an explanation for it, just a login prompt.
- provolone 7y agoIf they had a simple sign in/sign up/dismiss prompt I wouldn't avoid it as readily. Instead they have "pardon the interruption" and "Let's make this official". The "pardon me" politeness doesn't fly, because they recognize it as an interruption. If they are aware, then the polite thing would be to not interrupt. And let's not make this official. I don't want to sign up to read an article. I don't want the clap. I don't want to vote. I don't want to share my data. I just want to view the article. Maybe half way through I might even decide that the author has nothing interesting to say. 50% chance I don't want to read the full article.
- house_atr 7y ago"I have no doubt if an alt-right voice wrote on Medium and were controversial enough in their views they'd be deplatformed." What's the problem, again?
- Jerry2 7y ago>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. Same can be said about other platforms like YouTube etc. When you produce content for all these mega-platforms, you're nothing more than a sharecropper... a digital one. [0] You really have no rights and you're at the whim of the 'feudal lord' who doesn't care about you and can take all your work away in an instant. Since there's thousand others that will take your place, they really don't care about what your losses are. They hold all the power and you have absolutely no chance of remedy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping
- fiala__ 7y agoThe problem with YouTube specifically, is that while blog posts are easy to host on pretty much anything that has a CPU, self-hosting videos at scale is essentially impossible. So while Medium only added a marginal amount of convenience for your average blogger, YouTube straight up enabled the kind of content it hosts.
- fghtr 7y agoWe now have peertube, which uses p2p to decrease the load on your server.
- dingo_bat 7y ago> The thing is, the thing I wrote about isn't illegal. Even if it were illegal that wouldn't be a reason to delete it.
- chdaniel 7y agoI understand your POV, at the same time it was free to sign up, no time investment, no yearly costs for you etc. I know how it is to be banned overnight for something that you didn't expect (and without being malevolent). I myself write my articles on my blog and then copy them over to Medium. A bit more work but might pay off in an event like this one
- apatters 7y ago> I was writing on Medium because it ranks well in Google Is this the main/only reason people blog on Medium, or are there others? It seems like something that would be easy enough to develop an open source, self hostable version of, but with Google now deranking small, independent sites, Medium would be hard to beat from an SEO standpoint.
- Kye 7y agohttps://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/ It even federates with ActivityPub.
- sci_c0 7y agoHi, wanted to offer a little help! You can still use The Internet Archive (or the WayBack Machine, as it is popularly called) [https://archive.org/web/web.php https://archive.org/web/web.php] to find and download your articles. It is very helpful and I once used it download some articles/pages for my friend from her blogging website. The website had got blocked as it was a paid domain, which she purchased from GoDaddy and her 1 year subscription got over.
- the_other 7y ago> I was writing on Medium because it ranks well in Google. This highlights one of the ways Google has gone off-piste. The host or platform shouldn't affect your ranking/SEO this much. The same article on two platforms show rank side-by-side when searching by content. There's no reason to trust Medium above other platforms.
- speedplane 7y ago> The host or platform shouldn't affect your ranking/SEO this much. This is true for medium, but not universally true. It's pretty reasonable to rank an article in a well known credible publication than a random blog, as there is likely some editorial quality checks in the publication. However, with medium, there is no editorial check, they just know how to game the system better than a casual blogger.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Kirth 7y agoYes. Of course, now all we're getting at the top of google search results are bland and uninformative "ads" pushed out by copywriters.
- thefounder 7y ago>> 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. Well fuck alt right too! They can get their own website after all. Why should Medium or any other company have to host their shit? People act like they have some kind of right to have their crap hosted by someone else. Companies are not public services after all.
- __HYde 7y agoWhat if they host their own shit on a VPS but the hosting provider bans them. What if their domain name gets revoked by the registrar?
- zamadatix 7y agoYou can either make things a public service, try to codify into law what content a business must and must not engage in faster than content changes, or have some content businesses are not going to host. And it doesn't have to be universal. E.g. you could decide DNS and internet access need to be a public service but since those two are always available you don't need to try to regulate the content on VPS since self hosting is an option.