12 ms·

Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

315 points by amaccuish 7y ago

zwaps 7y ago
I always thought it odd that a team like ElementaryOS with a clearly defined "ethical code and goal" would choose Medium, which is an anti-consumer and anti-privacy company (e.g. try accessing Medium on a mobile phone with a smaller screen). Good on them for changing.
- morganvachon 7y ago
  That is explained in the very first paragraph of the article (emphasis mine): "In 2016, elementary moved to a Medium publication to host our official blog. At the time, Medium was touted as a simple, clean, and reader-focused host for writers. They supported custom domains, a robust API, RSS, rich formatting, and great image embedding. We had been largely happy with the experience—as were our readers—but something changed in 2017."
- DaveWalk 7y ago
  Yes -- good on them changing, and bravo to them for calling it out and saying why. In my opinion they put a lot of effort into making this post, and it shows.
m52go 7y ago
Nice. I did the same exact thing last week with one of my own blogs. But I was disappointed a little with some quirks with Jekyll. For example, I really needed to list blog posts in categories separately. Turns out there's no built-in way to do that with Jekyll, so I had to find a third-party plug-in to do that. Then there were some changes didn't trigger a rebuild with the local development server running, which I (eventually) realized required stopping the server, deleting the _build directory, and then restarting the server. These things sound minor in hindsight, but they took a lot of time for me to figure out in the moment. "It's a static site...I picked a static site generator for simplicity!" I kept thinking, annoyed. I chose Jekyll in particular because it's been around forever and expected it to have little things like this figured out, but was slightly disappointed. Otherwise it's been good I guess. For what it's worth, I will occasionally repost articles on my Medium account too, to take advantage of my following there, with the appropriate rel=canonical tag. No reason not to take advantage of it while it lasts.
- augstein 7y ago
  I had the same problems with Jekyll and switched to Middleman (also Ruby based). Never looked back. https://middlemanapp.com/basics/blogging/ https://middlemanapp.com/basics/blogging/
- techntoke 7y ago
  I'd definitely recommend checking out Hugo too.
  - yoz-y 7y ago
    I second this. I migrated from Middleman a while back because I couldn't be bothered to handle ruby dependency conflicts during an update anymore. Hugo is what I use now and it's great. Migration from one to other was actually surprisingly easy too.
- meuk 7y ago
  Same here. Generating LaTeX statically is a pain in the ass.
- nickjj 7y ago
  I'm using Jekyll for my site[0] which currently has 240+ blog posts that are filtered by tag but I didn't have to use any plugins to get that functionality. It's really fast too. The way I set it up was with tags but that's really no different than a category. For example if you click the #docker tag, you get back a bunch of posts I tagged with #docker. Each post has a `tags` item in its front matter where I can pass a list of strings (a post can belong in 1 or more tags). It would be too much to type in here to cover everything but if you Google for things like "Jekyll filter posts by tag" you'll find a bunch of plugin-less examples. What's neat is you can also define a custom page title / meta description for each tag's index page using nothing more than what's built into Jekyll. [0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/ https://nickjanetakis.com/
kryptiskt 7y ago
Every time I follow a link to Medium they seem to get more and more pushy. I shy away from clicking on links there anymore, so news like this is welcome. I must say I don't get what unique value proposition Medium think they have that allows them to treat both publishers and readers like crap.
- bauerd 7y ago
  It's easy to build an audience on Medium, that's what draws authors there
  - r3bl 7y ago
    Predictable audience? Absolutely not. It's easy for a story or two to go viral (as in, slightly easier than on other platforms). What's not easy is to retain that viewership. Similarly to YouTube, you could put weeks worth of effort into one article just for it to flunk spectacularly simply because the recommendation algorithm didn't like it in the first 12 hours or so since you've clicked "publish".
- yoz-y 7y ago
  > I must say I don't get what unique value proposition Medium think they have that allows them to treat both publishers and readers like crap. My take is that they had a unique value proposition at the beginning: "YouTube for text: audience and authors all at the same place, with recommendations and unified comment platform". But then it became apparent that they will not magically become profitable or bought, so they started with the crap.
  - crtlaltdel 7y ago
    last-gasp monetization
  - sjamaan 7y ago
    It's not like Youtube is not annoying and filled with crap (ads).
cntlzw 7y ago
Many articles on Medium are of low-quality. It used to be different. Don't know if this is caused by the monetization efforts.
- seren 7y ago
  It is the fate of most platforms, initially there are only early adopters that are selected, hand picked or invited, and as the platform progress there is an influx or more mainstream content producer, and the quality tends to be more average.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- forgotmypwd123 7y ago
  It used to be possible to visit medium.com and quickly find a few articles worth reading for free. Now its almost impossible to find anything on the front page without a star (paid sub required)
- rchaud 7y ago
  You could say the same for YouTube or any other "user-generated" content platform. Back in 2006 or so, YouTube was the only way to view copyrighted music videos, famous speeches, official movie clips, etc. While those still exist, the content ratio is more like 99:1 in favor of awful clickbait, "reaction" videos, obviously fake prank videos and other lowest-common denominator content. Just check the "Trending" tab and you'll see what I mean.
alanfranz 7y ago
My problem with Jekyll (or other static generators) is that it's not as straightforward as anything with a web gui, like wordpress or ghost (or medium or tumblr or...). You still need to handle things manually (e.g. the yaml front matter), the preview is not "out of the box", different plugins/extensions may add unpredictable behaviour, you need to setup a build/deploy pipeline, etc. - the experience is just not streamlined. I think that when you want to write, you shouldn't need to mess up with tech details of your system. It's distracting. Of course I'd like a static website for deploying, but I'd love a web gui which acts as a frontend for such generators. I think that Prose was something similar but I found it buggy/not updated, while another saas I tried(Forestry, I think?) was good but you couldn't customize everything. Ghost is my ultimate choice until an official, core-developers supported web gui is created for jekyll, hugo, or whatever static generator lies out there.
- Tomte 7y ago
  > Of course I'd like a static website for deploying, but I'd love a web gui which acts as a frontend for such generators. We used to have that with MovableType and (less known) Bricolage. Today there is Lektor (does it support Python 3?) and that's about it.
- softwarelimits 7y ago
  As a proud HN commentor you should have built your own static site generator long time ago. Preferably in Assembler or some esoteric unknown language!
- meerita 7y ago
  I use Jekyll + one admin plugin. Work locally, then do jk build and ./deploy.sh and everything goes smoothly. But well, it's not pretty interface to deploy.
- zubspace 7y ago
  I tried Hugo before but came to the same conclusion. The simplicity draw me into trying it, but in my opinion the solution is not streamlined. That's why i finally settled for a Flat File CMS [1], in my case Grav [2]. Like with hugo you get total control. And with most of them you get a single web interface to administrate the site, manage extensions and write blog entries. And you still have the possibility to git push everything on the dev server and git pull on prod, without managing a database. It's a dream. They are not without problems though. You need to host your php site somewhere. Sometimes it's necessary to dive into php to fix some problems and creating something unique still takes some web skills (in contrary to wordpress for example). [1] https://github.com/ahadb/flat-file-cms https://github.com/ahadb/flat-file-cms [2] https://getgrav.org/ https://getgrav.org/
coldtea 7y ago
At this point Medium looks like a dumpster fire. I even have a subscription, but will cancel it.
yakattak 7y ago
Another not surprising shift away from Medium. When starting my own blog this year, I was debating between Medium and self-hosting solutions like WordPress and Ghost. When asked “why not Medium?” My answer was usually “I don’t want my content behind a paywall, I don’t like it when I’m a reader and I wouldn’t want the same experience for others.” The other reason to me, is that you lose your own brand since your editing options are limited in terms of fonts, colors, domains etc. I wonder now, how many blogs will follow suit? I like a lot of the content on Medium, but I don’t like the platform. It’s positive (to me) to see others migrating off. I, personally, eventually settled on Ghost, hosted on DigitalOcean. WordPress felt frustrating to work with and something like Jekyll just wasn’t “enough” for me. My day job is writing code all day, a platform that is just text editing in the browser is a nice relief.
ktpsns 7y ago
I never understood the hype of Medium. If I want to have a clean blog, there is plenty of off-the-shelve software to do so, especially free and open source ones. Why did IT-affine people (i.e. people who can easily manage their own installations or which can easily move to other hosters) use Medium in the first place? Maybe [because] they never used the platform without being logged in? Because that's where all the cruelity ("you already read your 3 free articles this month...") starts.
- rchaud 7y ago
  Because of eyeballs and attention. Creating a brand new site and posting on it in this day and age is basically the equivalent of yelling into the void. No one is going to see it, and the only way to get it to come up on Google is by typing in "site:[myblog.com]), barring the few friends and family members who may give you a pity click when you post on your social media. Almost nobody is writing anything 'just because'. They're writing because they want to be noticed, either as a "domain expert" or "thought leader", or simply as a stepping stone to a writing gig at HuffPo, Forbes.com, Inc.com, whatever replaced Gawker and the various pipelines of formulaic listicle generators out there that might pay a few pennies for the next "Elon Musk's top 10 secrets for Productivity" gruel.
jesuslop 7y ago
I liked that RSS support tops Elementary requirements list.
sundarurfriend 7y ago
> While we understand and empathize with the struggles of ethical monetization—and applaud Medium for refusing to monetize via intrusive ads and trackers This part is interesting. Assuming it isn't just polite PR-speak, what is Medium being applauded for, here? Trying to use user accounts openly and directly, instead of cookies and other tracking elements to track everyone? I've always thought of these Sign in prompts on Medium (and on Quora) as just an annoyance to get past, not a possible means to "ethical monetization somehow.
isacikgoz 7y ago
I think this happens when you don't have clear monetization strategy from the beginning. Also, I always felt uncomfortable when reading a Medium post. It was always much more than a clear text that what I am interested.
meerita 7y ago
I commented this 3 days ago: Medium is not for writers. They struggle to do a good business model. hurting non-profesional writers, so, it's obvious they leave Middle-Earth. If Medium only works for proffesional writers, there will be a tiny tiny portion of content compared they have today.
agluszak 7y ago
Yeah, so basically modals, banners, reminders to use the app etc. (vide https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2019/06/Medium-Mobile-Popup.png https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2019/06/...) are new toolbars of the late 2010s (http://i.imgur.com/X7ipc.png http://i.imgur.com/X7ipc.png). I don't like the direction where the Web is currently heading. Shutting down open APIs, forcing users to use the one and only official app (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Reddit's starting to do so more and more), ubiquitous tracking, aggressive ad targeting and so on. How can we - users, programmers, hackers - fight this?
- Santosh83 7y ago
  By use a diverse set of browsers and minimally using apps, we can slow down the silo'ing of the Internet. If users don't blindly buy into every app out there, big corps will have little choice but to interoperate on the open web.
  - sjamaan 7y ago
    Also by setting good examples and not using this shit ourselves, even if it's the expedient option.
  - agluszak 7y ago
    But the big companies do everything that's possible to stop us from using browsers and plain, old websites. Users are not blind, but choosing not to conform to corps' will requires knowledge (why and how, because dark design patterns are called dark for a reason)
    - batat 7y ago
      I quit using Imgur because of agressive promotion of their app. Actually you can't even upload an image, neither view a full-size image on mobile version now.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  As users, a step in the right direction would be to vote with your wallet, not use nasty services and prefer respectful services wherever possible. As engineers & designers, we need to stop being complicit and building this shit nor working for such awful companies. If the majority of engineers become ethical then companies like Facebook, Google, etc will have a hard time hiring people to do their dirty work.
NKosmatos 7y ago
I can understand Medium wanting to make a profit but they've taken the wrong path (IMHO). Too many popups, distractions and recently reading limits. I know I'm going to be downvoted for this but I'll give it a try :-) Can we please-please have a native dark theme for Hacker News? Without plugins, browser specific hacks or other gimmicks, just a simple "Light|Dark" option.
Alir3z4 7y ago
You know what's creepy ? "You read a lot. We like that." Or install our mobile app and get more content, or signup and get more content we figured with our fancy algorithm for you. Here's the thing, Medium never worked for me. I had over ~300 followers and if I published something none of them would see it, no reaction, no visit, no read at all and I repeated the same thing over and over again with no luck. I'd only get visits and reads on my articles when I shared the articles on social networks. It seems your followers, real or fake don't matter are spammed with Medium algorithm to read "recommended" content. I'm a developer, I like simple thing, but I don't like using static site generators to build a blog out of rst or md files and push to github etc. I want a community around my blog, I wanna nice simple UI, a simple commenting solution, a place to upload my files and attach in posts optimized for web. Plenty of blogging platforms may or may not provide all of it out of the box, but each with their own weird ToS and privacy policy. I simply had enough of it and created my own blogging platform, https://www.gonevis.com https://www.gonevis.com where I have my own blog https://alireza.gonevis.com https://alireza.gonevis.com I'm done with weird platforms where things are shiny and promising until they're not.
- itronitron 7y ago
  All they would have to do, in order to have a functional and transparent recommender 'algorithm' is to rank order articles by how many of your followers liked, or read, an article... so if you have 100 followers and 50 of them happened to like another article 'B' then that article would be highly recommended to people reading your article. If they knew who was reading the article (logged in) then they could simply exclude articles from the list which the person had already viewed. That would help people browse through groups that shared similar interests.
  - Alir3z4 7y ago
    Thing is they want to put more recommended content to your face as much as possible without knowing much about you, otherwise your scroll bar will hit the bottom quickly. The recommendation engine from technical point of view is not a rocket science, they're just simply trying to tune for maximum engagement even if it costs them repeated nonsense content you don't like which tbh defeats the purpose of "recommendation". It seems there's not much of community in Medium. All viral articles are the ones that the author had a good influence over their twitter of facebook etc audience. If you already have 10s thousands on your twitter follower list that you worked hard to find and bunch of people know you for some of your other work, no matter Medium or a static generated blog, your article will go hand to hand and viral in many cases.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Proven 7y ago
Why X ditched Y... Why we left Python Why we switched to GCP Why I dumped Netflix These used to be comments in community forums that one could easily scroll past after reading the first sentence (yeah, doesn't apply to me), now each one is a Medium blog post and requires a click and another tab. Maybe viewing an add or two. The world is suddenly supposed to pay attention to these opinions based on niche preferences and circumstances... But the thing is, a lot people still use (say) Python, and whatever reasons somebody had, it's more likely than not that you'll use it too. Most of these posts are highly irrelevant and don't apply to more than 80% of readers but for some reason people still pay attention to them...
strenholme 7y ago
I myself have left Medium and cancelled my subscription. When asked, I told them it was annoying to see the modal popup asking me to sign in every time I looked at Medium from my work computer. The popups, as mentioned in the linked article are annoying. As is the increase in the number of articles you have to pay to read. Not to mention the fact that the trolls have discovered Medium, and the quality of writing there has gone down (One article prominently linked was about how one needs to “ditch loyalty” to have a healthy relationship). For my personal blog, https://samiam.org/blog https://samiam.org/blog, I use a homegrown CMS that makes static content I wrote using UNIX shell scripts, with a bit of Perl and PHP, about a decade ago. I updated it to use web fonts once those became viable about five years ago, and updated its color scheme based on my wife’s wishes after she passed away. For reading stuff online, I have a subscript to the New York Times which keeps me up to date on the news; I also read articles linked to here (and I haven’t seen Hacker News link to a Medium article in a while).
- lethologica 7y ago
  Your blog is a huge breath of fresh air. I genuinely miss blogs of this style. Easy to navigate, easy to read, quick to load. Love it.
  - strenholme 7y ago
    I’m quite proud of it. Not only does it use 100% open source fonts for the rendering, it also renders on pretty much any browser made. The stylesheets are set up so the same HTML + CSS looks good on both desktop and mobile browsers (we use different CSS for mobile, but there’s no nonsense like m.samiam.org). The webfonts have been carefully hinted and subsetted to be of minimal size, and look good on pretty much any browser (I made sure they look good in Chrome + Windows, even on a low DPI display, which has had a lot of font rendering issues). For example, the http → https redirect is set up so the redirect is not done in browsers which do not support Javascript (and may not support HTTPS); older versions of Internet Explorer which do not support modern TLS encryption also remain on the http website. The stylesheets do not “gracefully degrade” (in the sense I don’t try to have the site look mostly the same in antiques like IE6, IE7, or IE8), but the site is fully compatible with Internet Explorer 9 and above and any other mainstream browser from 2010 on. It is still completely readable (albeit with a different look) in older versions of Internet Explorer and in browsers without any CSS support (and, of course, it also can be read in the Lynx text-only browser). I have tested it in Internet Explorer 5 and above, Opera 12 (the last version to use the Presto rendering engine before they moved on to WebKit), Dillo (depending on the version, it may need to have CSS disabled), Chrome, Firefox, Safari, you name it. It can be read by pretty much any browser that exists (the Unicode will look a little strange in stuff like Mosaic from 1994, but the site is still readable).
SahAssar 7y ago
Medium is surprisingly usable if you turn off all JS (and I'm not usually part of the no-js crowd).
fmajid 7y ago
Good for them. A thousand deaths are not enough for Medium.
asd 7y ago
Don't get me wrong, I'm on the Medium Hate Train along with many others here on HN, but aren't these stories getting a bit monotonous? https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ACYBGNQoux3i-UEEDHgCPFksuM1327CV7w%3A1566302844719&ei=fOJbXc6-K4OItQXm2LiwBw&q=left+AROUND%284%29+Medium+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com&oq=left+AROUND%284%29+Medium+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ACYBGNQoux3i-UEEDHgCPFks...
panpanna 7y ago
I thought this would be another rant, but this post was actually very well written and really informative. Key points are: * Medium policy changes and how they affected readers and authors * The importance of "owning" your own posts * Possible alternatives to medium * Issues with CDN wrt privacy * Issues with commenting services * Use of custom fonts * Sharing to social media without being privacy invasive * Google AMP, and how Google strong arms you into using their tech ... and much more. Highly recommended!!
Yuioup 7y ago
I hope that the Angular Blog will follow suit.
bovermyer 7y ago
I love the shout-out to Write.as. More people should check out that platform/software.
skilled 7y ago
Medium is an absolute disease and it makes no sense that anyone would use that platform for blogging. Its enforced and aggressive layers of pop-overs is a disgrace to the community.
sigzero 7y ago
Thank goodness. I avoid Medium like the plague.
bogomipz 7y ago
Aside from the aforementioned aggressive tactics of Medium, the reading experience is degraded by Medium's insistence of claiming a disproportionate amount of screen real estate for themselves. Scrolling between an oversized header and footer that promotes Medium is a miserable reading experience. Kudos to ElementaryOS. I look forward to keeping up with you in this improved reading experience and hope other follow suit. Cheers.
agustif 7y ago
Well looking at the bigger picture it's not just Medium as a platform, but News/Writing/Journalism as a profession that's going hillside here. I've long dreamed of a kind of Unsplash for news/text. Just don't have time/or care enough to do it, just would be great to have it available as a user.
topicseed 7y ago
The one problem I have with Medium is the same as with YouTube. I have an account with both. Whenever I click an article or watch a video, that must trigger such a strong certainty signal in their system that I then receive a lot (TOO MANY) related articles/videos as suggestions. YouTube recently fixed that, but Medium has not. So I just don't click anymore. And I read a lot less on there.
pmlnr 7y ago
> Write.as excels as a way to painlessly publish thoughts to the Internet—anonymously or otherwise. If you’re an individual looking for a clean, reader-friendly Medium-like experience, Write.as is a perfect fit. That's the very same thing Medium took people away with from self-hosted. Rinse and repeat?
druvisc 7y ago
Why should everyone care why X left Medium? There's at least a couple of articles like this every month. If you're not happy with a service, just stop using it.
- rikroots 7y ago
  Personally I like it when people and/or companies announce they've switched from service (architecture, etc) A to service B and then give a good account of why they made that decision, how they then established themselves on B, etc. Reading such articles helps broaden my knowledge about both A and B. Seeing responses to such articles on places like HN helps me deepen that knowledge. I've seen Medium post links on various social media, clicked on them and read the articles (or got the paywall nag thing), but I never went beyond the articles to investigate what Medium itself was all about. Now - thanks to this article, and the comments it's generated on HN - I know everything I want to know about Medium, alongside some useful pointers for possible tools to set up my own static-site blog. "Don't announce; just flounce" is often good advice for people who want the world to know what they're up to, just because they think they're important. But I'm happy to see people ignore that advice if they offer me a compelling backstory to go alongside their announcement.
artsyca 7y ago
Up next: the .io domain

315 points by amaccuish 7y ago

I always thought it odd that a team like ElementaryOS with a clearly defined "ethical code and goal" would choose Medium, which is an anti-consumer and anti-privacy company (e.g. try accessing Medium on a mobile phone with a smaller screen). Good on them for changing.

morganvachon 7y ago
That is explained in the very first paragraph of the article (emphasis mine): "In 2016, elementary moved to a Medium publication to host our official blog. At the time, Medium was touted as a simple, clean, and reader-focused host for writers. They supported custom domains, a robust API, RSS, rich formatting, and great image embedding. We had been largely happy with the experience—as were our readers—but something changed in 2017."
DaveWalk 7y ago
Yes -- good on them changing, and bravo to them for calling it out and saying why. In my opinion they put a lot of effort into making this post, and it shows.

m52go 7y ago

Nice. I did the same exact thing last week with one of my own blogs. But I was disappointed a little with some quirks with Jekyll. For example, I really needed to list blog posts in categories separately. Turns out there's no built-in way to do that with Jekyll, so I had to find a third-party plug-in to do that. Then there were some changes didn't trigger a rebuild with the local development server running, which I (eventually) realized required stopping the server, deleting the _build directory, and then restarting the server. These things sound minor in hindsight, but they took a lot of time for me to figure out in the moment. "It's a static site...I picked a static site generator for simplicity!" I kept thinking, annoyed. I chose Jekyll in particular because it's been around forever and expected it to have little things like this figured out, but was slightly disappointed. Otherwise it's been good I guess. For what it's worth, I will occasionally repost articles on my Medium account too, to take advantage of my following there, with the appropriate rel=canonical tag. No reason not to take advantage of it while it lasts.

augstein 7y ago
I had the same problems with Jekyll and switched to Middleman (also Ruby based). Never looked back. https://middlemanapp.com/basics/blogging/ https://middlemanapp.com/basics/blogging/
techntoke 7y ago
I'd definitely recommend checking out Hugo too.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  I second this. I migrated from Middleman a while back because I couldn't be bothered to handle ruby dependency conflicts during an update anymore. Hugo is what I use now and it's great. Migration from one to other was actually surprisingly easy too.
meuk 7y ago
Same here. Generating LaTeX statically is a pain in the ass.
nickjj 7y ago
I'm using Jekyll for my site[0] which currently has 240+ blog posts that are filtered by tag but I didn't have to use any plugins to get that functionality. It's really fast too. The way I set it up was with tags but that's really no different than a category. For example if you click the #docker tag, you get back a bunch of posts I tagged with #docker. Each post has a `tags` item in its front matter where I can pass a list of strings (a post can belong in 1 or more tags). It would be too much to type in here to cover everything but if you Google for things like "Jekyll filter posts by tag" you'll find a bunch of plugin-less examples. What's neat is you can also define a custom page title / meta description for each tag's index page using nothing more than what's built into Jekyll. [0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/ https://nickjanetakis.com/

kryptiskt 7y ago

Every time I follow a link to Medium they seem to get more and more pushy. I shy away from clicking on links there anymore, so news like this is welcome. I must say I don't get what unique value proposition Medium think they have that allows them to treat both publishers and readers like crap.

bauerd 7y ago
It's easy to build an audience on Medium, that's what draws authors there
- r3bl 7y ago
  Predictable audience? Absolutely not. It's easy for a story or two to go viral (as in, slightly easier than on other platforms). What's not easy is to retain that viewership. Similarly to YouTube, you could put weeks worth of effort into one article just for it to flunk spectacularly simply because the recommendation algorithm didn't like it in the first 12 hours or so since you've clicked "publish".
yoz-y 7y ago
> I must say I don't get what unique value proposition Medium think they have that allows them to treat both publishers and readers like crap. My take is that they had a unique value proposition at the beginning: "YouTube for text: audience and authors all at the same place, with recommendations and unified comment platform". But then it became apparent that they will not magically become profitable or bought, so they started with the crap.
- crtlaltdel 7y ago
  last-gasp monetization
- sjamaan 7y ago
  It's not like Youtube is not annoying and filled with crap (ads).

cntlzw 7y ago

Many articles on Medium are of low-quality. It used to be different. Don't know if this is caused by the monetization efforts.

seren 7y ago
It is the fate of most platforms, initially there are only early adopters that are selected, hand picked or invited, and as the platform progress there is an influx or more mainstream content producer, and the quality tends to be more average.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
forgotmypwd123 7y ago
It used to be possible to visit medium.com and quickly find a few articles worth reading for free. Now its almost impossible to find anything on the front page without a star (paid sub required)
rchaud 7y ago
You could say the same for YouTube or any other "user-generated" content platform. Back in 2006 or so, YouTube was the only way to view copyrighted music videos, famous speeches, official movie clips, etc. While those still exist, the content ratio is more like 99:1 in favor of awful clickbait, "reaction" videos, obviously fake prank videos and other lowest-common denominator content. Just check the "Trending" tab and you'll see what I mean.

alanfranz 7y ago

My problem with Jekyll (or other static generators) is that it's not as straightforward as anything with a web gui, like wordpress or ghost (or medium or tumblr or...). You still need to handle things manually (e.g. the yaml front matter), the preview is not "out of the box", different plugins/extensions may add unpredictable behaviour, you need to setup a build/deploy pipeline, etc. - the experience is just not streamlined. I think that when you want to write, you shouldn't need to mess up with tech details of your system. It's distracting. Of course I'd like a static website for deploying, but I'd love a web gui which acts as a frontend for such generators. I think that Prose was something similar but I found it buggy/not updated, while another saas I tried(Forestry, I think?) was good but you couldn't customize everything. Ghost is my ultimate choice until an official, core-developers supported web gui is created for jekyll, hugo, or whatever static generator lies out there.

Tomte 7y ago
> Of course I'd like a static website for deploying, but I'd love a web gui which acts as a frontend for such generators. We used to have that with MovableType and (less known) Bricolage. Today there is Lektor (does it support Python 3?) and that's about it.
softwarelimits 7y ago
As a proud HN commentor you should have built your own static site generator long time ago. Preferably in Assembler or some esoteric unknown language!
meerita 7y ago
I use Jekyll + one admin plugin. Work locally, then do jk build and ./deploy.sh and everything goes smoothly. But well, it's not pretty interface to deploy.
zubspace 7y ago
I tried Hugo before but came to the same conclusion. The simplicity draw me into trying it, but in my opinion the solution is not streamlined. That's why i finally settled for a Flat File CMS [1], in my case Grav [2]. Like with hugo you get total control. And with most of them you get a single web interface to administrate the site, manage extensions and write blog entries. And you still have the possibility to git push everything on the dev server and git pull on prod, without managing a database. It's a dream. They are not without problems though. You need to host your php site somewhere. Sometimes it's necessary to dive into php to fix some problems and creating something unique still takes some web skills (in contrary to wordpress for example). [1] https://github.com/ahadb/flat-file-cms https://github.com/ahadb/flat-file-cms [2] https://getgrav.org/ https://getgrav.org/

coldtea 7y ago

At this point Medium looks like a dumpster fire. I even have a subscription, but will cancel it.

yakattak 7y ago

Another not surprising shift away from Medium. When starting my own blog this year, I was debating between Medium and self-hosting solutions like WordPress and Ghost. When asked “why not Medium?” My answer was usually “I don’t want my content behind a paywall, I don’t like it when I’m a reader and I wouldn’t want the same experience for others.” The other reason to me, is that you lose your own brand since your editing options are limited in terms of fonts, colors, domains etc. I wonder now, how many blogs will follow suit? I like a lot of the content on Medium, but I don’t like the platform. It’s positive (to me) to see others migrating off. I, personally, eventually settled on Ghost, hosted on DigitalOcean. WordPress felt frustrating to work with and something like Jekyll just wasn’t “enough” for me. My day job is writing code all day, a platform that is just text editing in the browser is a nice relief.

ktpsns 7y ago

I never understood the hype of Medium. If I want to have a clean blog, there is plenty of off-the-shelve software to do so, especially free and open source ones. Why did IT-affine people (i.e. people who can easily manage their own installations or which can easily move to other hosters) use Medium in the first place? Maybe [because] they never used the platform without being logged in? Because that's where all the cruelity ("you already read your 3 free articles this month...") starts.

rchaud 7y ago
Because of eyeballs and attention. Creating a brand new site and posting on it in this day and age is basically the equivalent of yelling into the void. No one is going to see it, and the only way to get it to come up on Google is by typing in "site:[myblog.com]), barring the few friends and family members who may give you a pity click when you post on your social media. Almost nobody is writing anything 'just because'. They're writing because they want to be noticed, either as a "domain expert" or "thought leader", or simply as a stepping stone to a writing gig at HuffPo, Forbes.com, Inc.com, whatever replaced Gawker and the various pipelines of formulaic listicle generators out there that might pay a few pennies for the next "Elon Musk's top 10 secrets for Productivity" gruel.

jesuslop 7y ago

I liked that RSS support tops Elementary requirements list.

sundarurfriend 7y ago

> While we understand and empathize with the struggles of ethical monetization—and applaud Medium for refusing to monetize via intrusive ads and trackers This part is interesting. Assuming it isn't just polite PR-speak, what is Medium being applauded for, here? Trying to use user accounts openly and directly, instead of cookies and other tracking elements to track everyone? I've always thought of these Sign in prompts on Medium (and on Quora) as just an annoyance to get past, not a possible means to "ethical monetization somehow.

isacikgoz 7y ago

I think this happens when you don't have clear monetization strategy from the beginning. Also, I always felt uncomfortable when reading a Medium post. It was always much more than a clear text that what I am interested.

meerita 7y ago

I commented this 3 days ago: Medium is not for writers. They struggle to do a good business model. hurting non-profesional writers, so, it's obvious they leave Middle-Earth. If Medium only works for proffesional writers, there will be a tiny tiny portion of content compared they have today.

agluszak 7y ago

Yeah, so basically modals, banners, reminders to use the app etc. (vide https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2019/06/Medium-Mobile-Popup.png https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2019/06/...) are new toolbars of the late 2010s (http://i.imgur.com/X7ipc.png http://i.imgur.com/X7ipc.png). I don't like the direction where the Web is currently heading. Shutting down open APIs, forcing users to use the one and only official app (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Reddit's starting to do so more and more), ubiquitous tracking, aggressive ad targeting and so on. How can we - users, programmers, hackers - fight this?

Santosh83 7y ago
By use a diverse set of browsers and minimally using apps, we can slow down the silo'ing of the Internet. If users don't blindly buy into every app out there, big corps will have little choice but to interoperate on the open web.
- sjamaan 7y ago
  Also by setting good examples and not using this shit ourselves, even if it's the expedient option.
- agluszak 7y ago
  But the big companies do everything that's possible to stop us from using browsers and plain, old websites. Users are not blind, but choosing not to conform to corps' will requires knowledge (why and how, because dark design patterns are called dark for a reason)
  - batat 7y ago
    I quit using Imgur because of agressive promotion of their app. Actually you can't even upload an image, neither view a full-size image on mobile version now.
Nextgrid 7y ago
As users, a step in the right direction would be to vote with your wallet, not use nasty services and prefer respectful services wherever possible. As engineers & designers, we need to stop being complicit and building this shit nor working for such awful companies. If the majority of engineers become ethical then companies like Facebook, Google, etc will have a hard time hiring people to do their dirty work.

NKosmatos 7y ago

I can understand Medium wanting to make a profit but they've taken the wrong path (IMHO). Too many popups, distractions and recently reading limits. I know I'm going to be downvoted for this but I'll give it a try :-) Can we please-please have a native dark theme for Hacker News? Without plugins, browser specific hacks or other gimmicks, just a simple "Light|Dark" option.

Alir3z4 7y ago

You know what's creepy ? "You read a lot. We like that." Or install our mobile app and get more content, or signup and get more content we figured with our fancy algorithm for you. Here's the thing, Medium never worked for me. I had over ~300 followers and if I published something none of them would see it, no reaction, no visit, no read at all and I repeated the same thing over and over again with no luck. I'd only get visits and reads on my articles when I shared the articles on social networks. It seems your followers, real or fake don't matter are spammed with Medium algorithm to read "recommended" content. I'm a developer, I like simple thing, but I don't like using static site generators to build a blog out of rst or md files and push to github etc. I want a community around my blog, I wanna nice simple UI, a simple commenting solution, a place to upload my files and attach in posts optimized for web. Plenty of blogging platforms may or may not provide all of it out of the box, but each with their own weird ToS and privacy policy. I simply had enough of it and created my own blogging platform, https://www.gonevis.com https://www.gonevis.com where I have my own blog https://alireza.gonevis.com https://alireza.gonevis.com I'm done with weird platforms where things are shiny and promising until they're not.

itronitron 7y ago
All they would have to do, in order to have a functional and transparent recommender 'algorithm' is to rank order articles by how many of your followers liked, or read, an article... so if you have 100 followers and 50 of them happened to like another article 'B' then that article would be highly recommended to people reading your article. If they knew who was reading the article (logged in) then they could simply exclude articles from the list which the person had already viewed. That would help people browse through groups that shared similar interests.
- Alir3z4 7y ago
  Thing is they want to put more recommended content to your face as much as possible without knowing much about you, otherwise your scroll bar will hit the bottom quickly. The recommendation engine from technical point of view is not a rocket science, they're just simply trying to tune for maximum engagement even if it costs them repeated nonsense content you don't like which tbh defeats the purpose of "recommendation". It seems there's not much of community in Medium. All viral articles are the ones that the author had a good influence over their twitter of facebook etc audience. If you already have 10s thousands on your twitter follower list that you worked hard to find and bunch of people know you for some of your other work, no matter Medium or a static generated blog, your article will go hand to hand and viral in many cases.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Proven 7y ago

Why X ditched Y... Why we left Python Why we switched to GCP Why I dumped Netflix These used to be comments in community forums that one could easily scroll past after reading the first sentence (yeah, doesn't apply to me), now each one is a Medium blog post and requires a click and another tab. Maybe viewing an add or two. The world is suddenly supposed to pay attention to these opinions based on niche preferences and circumstances... But the thing is, a lot people still use (say) Python, and whatever reasons somebody had, it's more likely than not that you'll use it too. Most of these posts are highly irrelevant and don't apply to more than 80% of readers but for some reason people still pay attention to them...

strenholme 7y ago

I myself have left Medium and cancelled my subscription. When asked, I told them it was annoying to see the modal popup asking me to sign in every time I looked at Medium from my work computer. The popups, as mentioned in the linked article are annoying. As is the increase in the number of articles you have to pay to read. Not to mention the fact that the trolls have discovered Medium, and the quality of writing there has gone down (One article prominently linked was about how one needs to “ditch loyalty” to have a healthy relationship). For my personal blog, https://samiam.org/blog https://samiam.org/blog, I use a homegrown CMS that makes static content I wrote using UNIX shell scripts, with a bit of Perl and PHP, about a decade ago. I updated it to use web fonts once those became viable about five years ago, and updated its color scheme based on my wife’s wishes after she passed away. For reading stuff online, I have a subscript to the New York Times which keeps me up to date on the news; I also read articles linked to here (and I haven’t seen Hacker News link to a Medium article in a while).

lethologica 7y ago
Your blog is a huge breath of fresh air. I genuinely miss blogs of this style. Easy to navigate, easy to read, quick to load. Love it.
- strenholme 7y ago
  I’m quite proud of it. Not only does it use 100% open source fonts for the rendering, it also renders on pretty much any browser made. The stylesheets are set up so the same HTML + CSS looks good on both desktop and mobile browsers (we use different CSS for mobile, but there’s no nonsense like m.samiam.org). The webfonts have been carefully hinted and subsetted to be of minimal size, and look good on pretty much any browser (I made sure they look good in Chrome + Windows, even on a low DPI display, which has had a lot of font rendering issues). For example, the http → https redirect is set up so the redirect is not done in browsers which do not support Javascript (and may not support HTTPS); older versions of Internet Explorer which do not support modern TLS encryption also remain on the http website. The stylesheets do not “gracefully degrade” (in the sense I don’t try to have the site look mostly the same in antiques like IE6, IE7, or IE8), but the site is fully compatible with Internet Explorer 9 and above and any other mainstream browser from 2010 on. It is still completely readable (albeit with a different look) in older versions of Internet Explorer and in browsers without any CSS support (and, of course, it also can be read in the Lynx text-only browser). I have tested it in Internet Explorer 5 and above, Opera 12 (the last version to use the Presto rendering engine before they moved on to WebKit), Dillo (depending on the version, it may need to have CSS disabled), Chrome, Firefox, Safari, you name it. It can be read by pretty much any browser that exists (the Unicode will look a little strange in stuff like Mosaic from 1994, but the site is still readable).

SahAssar 7y ago

Medium is surprisingly usable if you turn off all JS (and I'm not usually part of the no-js crowd).

fmajid 7y ago

Good for them. A thousand deaths are not enough for Medium.

asd 7y ago

Don't get me wrong, I'm on the Medium Hate Train along with many others here on HN, but aren't these stories getting a bit monotonous? https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ACYBGNQoux3i-UEEDHgCPFksuM1327CV7w%3A1566302844719&ei=fOJbXc6-K4OItQXm2LiwBw&q=left+AROUND%284%29+Medium+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com&oq=left+AROUND%284%29+Medium+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ACYBGNQoux3i-UEEDHgCPFks...

panpanna 7y ago

I thought this would be another rant, but this post was actually very well written and really informative. Key points are: * Medium policy changes and how they affected readers and authors * The importance of "owning" your own posts * Possible alternatives to medium * Issues with CDN wrt privacy * Issues with commenting services * Use of custom fonts * Sharing to social media without being privacy invasive * Google AMP, and how Google strong arms you into using their tech ... and much more. Highly recommended!!

Yuioup 7y ago

I hope that the Angular Blog will follow suit.

bovermyer 7y ago

I love the shout-out to Write.as. More people should check out that platform/software.

skilled 7y ago

Medium is an absolute disease and it makes no sense that anyone would use that platform for blogging. Its enforced and aggressive layers of pop-overs is a disgrace to the community.

sigzero 7y ago

Thank goodness. I avoid Medium like the plague.

bogomipz 7y ago

Aside from the aforementioned aggressive tactics of Medium, the reading experience is degraded by Medium's insistence of claiming a disproportionate amount of screen real estate for themselves. Scrolling between an oversized header and footer that promotes Medium is a miserable reading experience. Kudos to ElementaryOS. I look forward to keeping up with you in this improved reading experience and hope other follow suit. Cheers.

agustif 7y ago

Well looking at the bigger picture it's not just Medium as a platform, but News/Writing/Journalism as a profession that's going hillside here. I've long dreamed of a kind of Unsplash for news/text. Just don't have time/or care enough to do it, just would be great to have it available as a user.

topicseed 7y ago

The one problem I have with Medium is the same as with YouTube. I have an account with both. Whenever I click an article or watch a video, that must trigger such a strong certainty signal in their system that I then receive a lot (TOO MANY) related articles/videos as suggestions. YouTube recently fixed that, but Medium has not. So I just don't click anymore. And I read a lot less on there.

pmlnr 7y ago

> Write.as excels as a way to painlessly publish thoughts to the Internet—anonymously or otherwise. If you’re an individual looking for a clean, reader-friendly Medium-like experience, Write.as is a perfect fit. That's the very same thing Medium took people away with from self-hosted. Rinse and repeat?

druvisc 7y ago

Why should everyone care why X left Medium? There's at least a couple of articles like this every month. If you're not happy with a service, just stop using it.

rikroots 7y ago
Personally I like it when people and/or companies announce they've switched from service (architecture, etc) A to service B and then give a good account of why they made that decision, how they then established themselves on B, etc. Reading such articles helps broaden my knowledge about both A and B. Seeing responses to such articles on places like HN helps me deepen that knowledge. I've seen Medium post links on various social media, clicked on them and read the articles (or got the paywall nag thing), but I never went beyond the articles to investigate what Medium itself was all about. Now - thanks to this article, and the comments it's generated on HN - I know everything I want to know about Medium, alongside some useful pointers for possible tools to set up my own static-site blog. "Don't announce; just flounce" is often good advice for people who want the world to know what they're up to, just because they think they're important. But I'm happy to see people ignore that advice if they offer me a compelling backstory to go alongside their announcement.

artsyca 7y ago

Up next: the .io domain