6 ms·

Ask HN: Why does anyone still use Medium?

• rodneyg_ 7y ago
  As a writer on Medium I didn’t know it requires sign in for free content. I plan to move my content to a personally hosted blog but haven’t got to it yet. I also get a lot of views (10k+ mon) with no real effort on my part.
  • ben11kehoe 7y ago
    I don't think it requires sign-in for content that's not behind the paywall. I think it occasionally prompts the user to sign up or sign in, but you can click outside the box to move past it. It's hostile that they don't exclude an explicit "dismiss" button, though.
    • rgovostes 7y ago
      They have gotten more aggressive (and will continue to do so). I have been recently told I've run out of free articles, and if I switch to private browsing mode, it will tell me I've only got one left.
    • hopia 7y ago
      I don't think clicking outside of the box works anymore. You really have to reopen the page in incognito mode in order to read it, if you don't want to register & sign in.
      • Ntrails 7y ago
        That appears to be untrue, given I read the post today by clicking on the link and never got so much as asked to sign it
• swiftcoder 7y ago
  Almost all Medium articles can still be viewed in incognito Firefox (you get "1 free article" in each new incognito session). The gradual paywalling of the web continues apace, however. Medium is just the latest in a long trend of content moving onto walled platforms (first social media, then news sites, now blogging)...
  • makeavish 7y ago
    You can always clear your Medium cookies to get more free articles in your normal tab.
• ben11kehoe 7y ago
  I think people don't realize that Medium doesn't require articles to be behind the paywall. There are two ways an article gets paywalled: 1. You opt-in to getting paid for views. 2. If you put your article up for curation AND it gets picked. If it gets picked to be shown in curated feeds, it goes behind the paywall, but if it doesn't get picked by a curator, it's openly accessible. If you don't select getting paid for views or put it up for curation, it's always openly accessible. I use Medium because hosting my own blog would be too much of a hassle. I never put my articles behind the paywall; my aim in writing is not to get paid, and I don't put them up for curation because I don't have an explicit goal of increasing my readership. I'm also a Medium member, because I do think we need ways of paying for content, and paying for good content (the curation part). Maybe Medium's model is not the best way to do that, but I'd rather support a company that's trying to find the right balance than declare that all content should be free.
  • detaro 7y ago
    The alternative to Medium isn't necessarily "hosting your own", they are not the only blog hosting service around. I personally would suggest at least going for your own domain, so you can switch providers if they turn worse, if you're ok with spending some money on it.
• crawftv 7y ago
  Exposure is one reason. Two of my articles have over 3k views. On medium you can make good content and get a decent amount of views much easier than hosting own blog and growth hacking.
  • pier25 7y ago
    It's super easy to get 10k views on an article. My most read article has over 100k views. Probably less than 10% of the views come from Medium itself or Google so there is really no benefit in using Medium. You could use a static host and give your readers a better experience.
    • kick 7y ago
      It's definitely not hard to get eyes on an article, but you're probably underestimating the amount of views that Medium brings. It has excellent discovery, and based on anecdata from friends who have tried A/B testing this stuff, 90%+ easily come from Medium, especially in the 100,000+ view-range, unless you're intentionally going out of your way to spam the link to your personal site everywhere. Also, a substantial amount of views come from search engine traffic with almost every bit of content on the internet, unless you're doing it wrong. Your most recent post is full of frequently-searched terms. It seems unlikely that little of it is coming from search engines, and almost impossible that most of that viewership is coming from something other than Medium's discovery. Maybe try A/B testing with your next article? I think we'd all be interested in that.
      • pier25 7y ago
        You can easily see where the traffic comes from in the stats for each article. I just checked it and my most read article has about 170k views. About 50% of that came from HN and direct URL. Only 8% from Medium. See for yourself: https://imgur.com/BAICxnm https://imgur.com/BAICxnm
• tcgv 7y ago
  I have always been able to just close the (anoying) Sign In popup and read the article without loging in. Probably one of the main reasons people use it is because it's convenient and easy to use. Not everyone wants, or has the required skils, to configure/manage/monitor a custom blog.
  • makeavish 7y ago
    And you can always clear your Medium cookies to get more free articles.
• stevekemp 7y ago
  For the future you should say "piqued my interest". As for Medium, it has a lot of people using it because it was popular, fashionable, and free for a long time. These days as a reader it is terrible - I don't bother clicking medium links, and as an author I'd want to host my own content, not get it mixed in with the other noise hosted nearby.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • 6502nerdface 7y ago
    > For the future you should say "piqued my interest". Classic example of a common eggcorn. More details at https://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/86/peak/ https://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/86/peak/
• archsurface 7y ago
  What was the attraction to Medium in the first place? As someone who doesn't write article I wouldn't have noticed if all the Medium articles I'd read had been on Wordpress.
  • jadbox 7y ago
    It's all about exposure and discoverability, as Medium does as good job of effectively giving your blog 'free advertising' by recommending your posts to other users. It would be great if there was a decentralized way of doing this somehow.
    • rocky1138 7y ago
      We should link to each other's sites and form a sort of web ring.
    • pier25 7y ago
      These are the stats of my most read article: https://imgur.com/BAICxnm https://imgur.com/BAICxnm As you can see only 8% came from inside Medium.
  • wostusername 7y ago
    I think the attraction for writers were network effects. It's kind of like YouTube for text content. Recently, I watched a video about the game Crokinole on YouTube. Afterwards I got a bunch of suggested videos: other videos about Crokinole, videos about other board games, videos about making your own Crokinole board ...etc. Medium does (or was supposed to) do something similar for articles, which in turn should lead to more views on your content.
  • smitty1e 7y ago
    As a technical matter, the interface is posh. But with the departure of https://hackernoon.com https://hackernoon.com there just isn't much geeky content to motivate visiting, and I never cared to subscribe.
  • x3haloed 7y ago
    I never wrote on Medium, but having been a reader on Medium back before the rebrand and business model pivot, my impression is that it provided the entire platform at a time when it otherwise would take a lot of work to build, host, and maintain proprietary solutions to achieve the same thing. I saw a lot of companies moving their blogs to Medium, and they got to keep their domain name and branding, but you could tell it was hosted on Medium, because of the feature set. I think that the name 'Medium' really illustrates that. Medium was supposed to be the medium of choice to publish content on the web. It was everything you needed to get your message onto the web - serving the needs of content creators and consumers. Apparently that wasn't making any money. Now they are just predatory. Edit: and I agree with what some others are saying. By hosting content from multiple publishers, they were able to provide some unique features for both publishes and consumers. Publishers benefitted from discoverability because Medium would surface related content around the platform to consumers, and they also benefitted from readers having platform-wide accounts where they could interact frictionlessly with blog content and kind of give content upvotes. On the consumer side, it kind of made Medium a good feed to watch for personalized blog content as well as the frictionless interactivity.
• raverbashing 7y ago
  Press 'esc' and the popup disappears
• riskneutral 7y ago
  I found some good articles by real people about real life things that I don’t think I would ever have read in another publication. I paid and bought a subscription to Medium after that. I like the idea of paying writers for their work and if I ever get around to writing myself I would use Medium for the same reason.
  • beatgammit 7y ago
    Please don't. Medium is a very annoying platform and pushes away a significant portion of readers just because of the hosting. I only click through to a medium article as a last resort. That being said, I also believe authors should be paid for their work. I pay for news subscriptions for precisely this reason, and I'm considering using scroll[1], which seems to be a simpler way to subscribe to a large number of information sources without having to have a subscription for each one. I'm not going to support a product that I find annoying. - [1] https://scroll.com/ https://scroll.com/
    • iamhamm 7y ago
      Interesting opinion.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
• cellar_door 7y ago
  What I find quite annoying is that Medium has clearly spent a lot of effort on SEO. Whenever I Google a technical topic, the top results always include poorly written Medium articles.
  • ogre_codes 7y ago
    If someone built a search engine with a blacklist feature I’d switch to it and Medium would be on the blacklist. Annoying default behavior and it does something to make images look like hell in reader view. I have no idea why it gets bumped up in SEO, content on Medium is very hit or miss.
    • prab97 7y ago
      +1 for search engine with blacklist feature. There are some annoying sites (like GeeksForGeeks) with substandard content that come in top results of Google when I search for programming topics, for instance some language's specific API or method signature.
    • waterbadger 7y ago
      There’s actually a Chrome plugin you can use to blacklist certain domains from search results! It’s called “Google Search Filter” (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-search-filter/eidhkmnbiahhgbgpjpiimdogfidfikgf?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-search-filt...)
    • pier25 7y ago
      I agree. I'd also love to block Pinterest from the image search results.
      • ogre_codes 7y ago
        Oh god yes. Really any site that paywalls or limits content viewing to their app should be Auto-excluded from search results.
    • Lammy 7y ago
• estomagordo 7y ago
  Because the vast majority of internet readers have no such ludicrous lines they won't cross for arbitrary reasons.
• epanchin 7y ago
  Ask HN: why does HN allow moans disguised as questions? Nothing productive will come of this topic.
  • zzo38computer 7y ago
    It is also still a question, which could be answered.
  • oblib 7y ago
    >>Ask HN: why does HN allow moans disguised as questions? That's a perfect oxymoron. But, to answer your question, learning more about this subject is exactly why I posted the question here, and it wasn't moaning. I have nothing personally against people that publish or read stuff on Medium, or Medium as a company. I'm truly curious about why people use it. I learned quite a bit from the responses in fact. Several people wrote about why they still use it, several others offered alternatives to Medium. Others pointed out their own experiences publishing on Medium and several why they stopped. Most the responses were very informative and insightful.
• aeturnum 7y ago
  I have used Medium and would consider using them in the future. Basically, Medium is at a sweet spot of pleasant presentation and zero maintenance. I don't write things to make money and don't particularly care that Medium can make money off my "work." I am also not at a place where I want to actively maintain a self-hosted solution (which is totally possible, I just don't want to keep it up). All the downsides of the service are real, but they're in line with other services that people use (facebook, etc) and I've generally been skeptical that they're worse. That said, they recently started having much more aggressive "log in" popups and I'm once again interested in alternatives.
  • basch 7y ago
    If you dont care about discoverability, and the social network side of Medium, https://telegra.ph/ https://telegra.ph/ is a great alternative.
    • aeturnum 7y ago
      Yah, that actually looks great. Thank you for the suggestion!
    • oblib 7y ago
      Wow... love the simplicity of telegra.ph. That's just sweet.
    • wholien 7y ago
      how do you use it? Just type and publish, that's it, though?
      • basch 7y ago
        More or less. Theres a way to use a Telegram account to log in and save your articles, allowing you to edit them later from other machines.
• lloydde 7y ago
  https://nomedium.dev/ https://nomedium.dev/ is a new site, where the author describes what he doesn’t like about Medium including “ When sharing a Medium article, there is a high degree of uncertainty that the person opening the link will be asked to pay money to read the content.” I learned about it at https://mobile.twitter.com/ChrisShort/status/1218491955149185029 https://mobile.twitter.com/ChrisShort/status/121849195514918...
  • snarfy 7y ago
    "...there is a high degree of uncertainty that the person opening the link will be asked to pay money to read the content.” I feel the same way about clicking links on hacker news.
• benjaminsuch 7y ago
  They don't require it. At least I have an "X" Button.
• geofft 7y ago
  Medium doesn't actually require you to sign in (for free content, at least). It just asks you to, but you can dismiss the dialog. That said, I think you're right that people get confused about this more than authors think and close the site without reading the page.
• arikr 7y ago
  Medium provides a lot of value to both readers and writers. I think people don't like signing up or paying because they're not used to having to do that, so it feels unfair. But if you look at the trade-off objectively, it's very worth it. Medium adds much more than $10/month of value to my life, just in terms of the articles I read there. That's perhaps two coffees. Just another perspective. I think we often have unreasonably high standards for what we're owed by software companies, that we don't have when those companies make hardware and physical goods.
  • leotaku 7y ago
    I find it interesting you say that Medium provides +10€ value to you every month. I'd say the writers that choose to be on Medium and would otherwise use another platform, provide that value to you. Be realistic, how many of the writers you enjoy actually benefit from the affiliate program? I would guess not many. (I could be wrong of course) For the "high expectations" argument I'd say there are other options that match those expectations. Of course we should be able to say Medium is worse than them.
  • oblib 7y ago
    I'm not arguing Medium doesn't have value. That's not what stopped me there. Personally, I love the design of the site and have found some great content there. It's been quite awhile since I've been to Medium and I was disappointed by the intrusion to access the content I was interested in but more put off with being asked to share data with Google and Facebook on what I read there. Had Medium asked me to pay for a subscription I would make my choice to pay or not, but being asked to let them tell Google and FB what I'm reading there just feels yucky. Thinking about my own reaction got me to wondering how others react to it and motivated to let others, and especially authors, know how I reacted and why. Startup school is big on user feedback. This post generated quite a bit, and most of it was pretty good.
• chirau 7y ago
  Medium does NOT require you to sign in. It asks you to, but you don't have to be signed in to read the posts. You can just close the prompt or click outside of it. Source: I have never signed up for Medium and. I have been able to read in full any article I click on up until today. As much as you may dislike it, I don't think you should spread misinformation when you could simply have investigated this first.
  • oblib 7y ago
    I went back to those articles and you're right, you can click through. But I did not "spread misinformation". The fact that I didn't know you can just click outside that login screen to read their content isn't because I was misinformed. It was because I was intentionally not informed. And I won't be patting myself on the back now that I know it's easy to get around either. I'd rather just avoid sites that play silly tricks like this in order to collect more data on me.
    • chirau 7y ago
      If you walk up to a bar, see a cash box at the door (maybe for a cover, maybe for donations) but no one asks you to pay and you choose not to enter and walk away because of the bucket, then you go around asking people why they would go to said club when it has a cover charge, I believe that counts as misinformation. If you tell people a site has a paywall when it doesn't, that is misinformation. If you tell people that a site requires login when it doesn't, that is also misinformation.
      • oblib 7y ago
        >>If you tell people a site has a paywall when it doesn't, that is misinformation I did not tell people here there was a "paywall". I told them Medium requires I ""sign in" with Google or Facebook". The truth is they don't, but they make it look like they do. So, are you deliberately trying to misinform others here now by claiming I said they have a "paywall"? That seems a lot closer to that line you've accused me of crossing than what I wrote here.
• pier25 7y ago
  I'm guessing Medium is burning money fast and hasn't found a way to generate revenue which is why they have become so aggressive now. I'm guessing they still have a couple of years before they run out of cash but I doubt they will be able to raise another series of funding. The subscription thing will not work because 1) there is no guarantee you will get good content from Medium and 2) people want to support content creators not faceless platforms (with questionable practices). Of course content creators should be able to monetize their content but Medium is certainly not the way to achieve that.
• BenGosub 7y ago
  If you have a user, after reading a few posts you are denied from reading if you don't get a subscription. The Practical Dev (dev.to) has been consistently growing, while adding incredible features and offering everything for free (and open source). My guess is that dev.to should create a similar amount of traffic as Medium and maybe outgrow it, since many writers/readers have migrated over there. My advice is to move to dev.to, it doesn't make sense to write on Medium anymore.
• y42 7y ago
  For authors the access barrier is pretty high, IMHO. It seems like there are millions of authors and posts fighting for the top home page position. I once wrote a post because I thought Medium is a great platform to reach a lot of readers. It isn't. It took around two weeeks until I got the notice that my post is eventually being ignored because there are to many posts to be reviewed. What I understand. But this also means, Medium is not the platform that gives you millions of impressions in the blink of an eye. Publishing on Medium on one side takes away the pain of hosting your stuff on your own premises. That's all. But - as far as I understand it - you need to put a lot of effort into writing dozens of posts before you are actually being considered from the "post-review-team". I would rather spend time and effort into SEO to push my self hosted content. Seems easier and more sustainable.
• zzo38computer 7y ago
  Somehow, I do not have that problem. I do not have an account with Google, Facebook, or Medium, but the article is readable for me anyways, if cookies are disabled. However, they use too big font and too narrow width; this can be avoided by disabling CSS as well.
• salamwaddah 7y ago
  I mostly get there by search results. I don’t specifically go to medium and search it.
• kyriakos 7y ago
  Why did medium become popular in the first place? What sets it aside from any other blogging platform?
• simonsarris 7y ago
  bane voice: "No one cared who I was until I put [it] on the Medium." It looks nice enough, people read the things I write. When the editors like the things I write they send it to lots of people. For people who don't already have any kind of following, these are big plusses.
• bsndev 7y ago
  just use incognito mode to read medium articles