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Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
Let me put this as simple as I can:
Writing tutorials on Medium means you are putting them behind a paywall, thus restricting learning opportunities.
Medium is not StackOverflow, it limits the number of articles that can be freely read.
If you ever learned something from a blog or from stackoverflow do contribute back by sharing your knowledge open on the internet not behind a paywall.
- zsellera 6y agoI recently took an email-course on blogging for devs. One of the key points were to use your own domain, and the course showed a few tricks about creating traffic there. If you're interested, here is it: https://bloggingfordevs.com/ https://bloggingfordevs.com/
- muse900 6y agoAlthough I use incognito mode as a workaround (if you open the article on incognito it shows it without the paywall, at least it does for me), I find Medium tutorials badly written or written by people with limited technical knowledge. I'd say 95% of my process with medium goes like this: 1) Finds a blog with a tutorial or something relevant. 2) Opens it and sees a paywall 3) Opens it in incognito mode 4) Browses through the article 5) Leaves the page and learned nothing
- marvinblum 6y agoIt's like when searching images on Google, you'll find a significant part of them behind Pinterest. I keep hitting Medium when I search and cannot access whatever it is because it's behind their paywall... frustrating.
- gtirloni 6y agoAren't the writers consciously choosing to monetize their content?
- vladvasiliu 6y agoDoes that mean that anyone who publishes something on Medium can potentially get paid for it? I'm not familiar with the workings of Medium, aside from the fact that there's a limit on the number of articles one can read for free each month.
- nip180 6y agoMedium pays authors for their content.
- quicklime 6y agoI don't use Medium, but according to https://about.medium.com/creators/ https://about.medium.com/creators/ > You’ll be able to get paid for all of your writing, some of it, or keep everything free and accessible to all. The choice is yours. So it looks like the authors are the ones responsible for putting up the paywall.
- httpsterio 6y agoMedium still requires an account to read after a few free articles a month and that's what's pissing most people off. Myself included. This has nothing to do with the monetization of the articles, it's just medium and their arbitrary limit.
- gremlinsinc 6y agoI'm pretty sure, medium allows non-members to read a few Paywalled articles per month free, free articles are still free. The thing with medium is I can write a tech post, and I may not get good reach, but I can syndicate it to another medium blog like the startup, and then it gets mega reach and I make like $100 easy. I guess I could just repost my content on my personal blog and charge people like $10/month to access all my posts. Seems $5 though for a multi-publisher paywall is a lot more reasonable than say the wallstreet journal, or new york times.
- hmlongco 6y agoSo you read some articles, and apparently find them useful... except for that fact that Medium would like you to... create an account???? OMG! The horror of it all. ;)
- twox2 6y agoYes, the writers get paid for it, but they can select not to put their content behind the paywall and just use it as an open blogging platform.
- Kovah 6y agoYes. The author has to choose whether his article should be monetized or not. If someone chooses not to monetize them, they are not behind the paywall.
- gls2ro 6y agoBut still require an account to read it - of at least this is what sometimes happens to me. Others (like self-hosted blogs or Stackoverflow) don't.
- erikstrottmann 6y agoYou’re right. Medium articles are free by default, but authors can choose to join the Medium Partner Program [0] and put one or more of their articles behind the paywall. Then when a paid member reads an article, Medium shares a portion of the revenue from their membership with its author. [0]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115011694187-Getting-started-with-the-Medium-Partner-Program https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115011694187-Getti...
- bnt 6y agoFor the past ~3 weeks Medium has blocked virtually every article I wanted to read and is asking me to pay. Most of these are programming tutorials related to some obscure Rails features. Honestly, I feel like Medium is the worse place to put your content. EDIT: For context, I don’t mind people monetizing their content, but in that case I’d rather pay them directly (like GoRails), and not a “subscription” for something I might check once in a while.
- sas1ni69 6y agoIncognito mode works for me.
- tacker2000 6y agoYea but that cant be the real solution.
- nuker 6y agoIts the only solution for 2020 web. Plus, of course, vpn and adblocker.
- CarelessExpert 6y agoThe only solution? So... in 2020 the only place to publish long-form content is Medium? Well... TIL.
- zild3d 6y agono but some content is on medium, so it's helpful to know
- brianush1 6y agoIf you're using an adblocker, might as well add a paywall blocker to the mix: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
- platty 6y agoAs a writer, I believe you can just opt-out of the partner program and your content should be available to everyone, but will not be promoted by them.
- altvali 6y agoUser that right clicks Medium articles and opens them in incognito mode, here: what paywall?
- ddevault 6y agoMore than just considering the reader's interests, it's also against the author's interests to use Medium. They've become more and more draconian, bloated, and, well, the same as any other venture capitalist ultra-growth-oriented company. The chickens will come home to roost, and if your content and your audience is on Medium, moving them elsewhere is going to become increasingly difficult over time. Ability to export your content always trends downwards as the desirability of doing so trends upwards - a business which is struggling is not going to make it easy for customers to leave. Always write on a domain you own. You don't necessarily have to own the server, but if you own the domain, you have the freedom of choice.
- coldcode 6y agoHardly anyone will find it. Writing for 10 people is not very interesting at all. I want a Medium that charges me to write, but anyone can read for free. I pay DO $5 a month to host something, why should I not be willing to gain a benefit of a medium with large SEO and strength in numbers, and pay that $5 a month, but still allow people to read for nothing? But no one wants to pay to read or write so you go alone and google ignores you.
- ddevault 6y agoGoogle does not ignore your website, what nonsense. I have always posted on my own domain and I have a strong readership. RSS exists, link aggregators exist (how did you find this article? On HN!), it's not all glum and woe.
- daveed 6y agoWhy not hackernoon or any other blogging platform, then? Stackoverflow is gatekept, not super friendly, and you can only share things in response to people's questions.
- devenblake 6y agoI believe StackOverflow is just listed as an example of decent site design, it's well-known to be a ludicrously terrible resource considering its popularity.
- gls2ro 6y agoYes, I just listed StackOverflow there as an example for two reasons: 1. It is public (you don't need a subscription) 2. It has a license for using the code there (https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing) I am not affiliated in anyway with StackOverflow and actually I created a new account because of some things I disagree with.
- christophilus 6y agohackernoon is on Medium, no?
- onion2k 6y agoThey used to be but they left. https://hackernoon.com/why-is-hackernoon-com-leaving-medium-9f563da701d3 https://hackernoon.com/why-is-hackernoon-com-leaving-medium-...
- ratww 6y ago> and you can only share things in response to people's questions It is ok to ask and answer your own question.
- qiqitori 6y agoYou can even write an answer for your question at the same time you're writing the answer (you may need 15+ reputation though).
- tacker2000 6y agoI wholeheartedly agree. Medium is a cancer in the programming tutorial/article front. Unfortunately, any such platform will be in due time be trying to seek income and will transform into such an ad-powered walled garden, whatever the good intentions in the beginning may have been. What could be the solution to this?
- geerlingguy 6y agoGoing back to blogging and not expecting any income for your writing, mostly.
- entitlementgl 6y agoOr just stop doing it and let people like op RTFM as we all did and are now expected to transfer knowledge for free.
- ffpip 6y agoThey are giving free, unlimited place to host all your articles, and putting it behind a poorly implemented paywall (disable javascript for medium.com, incognito, clear cookies, proxy...Literally anything works)
- hmlongco 6y agoWhat's your solution? Like it or not, websites cost money to run. The more popular they are, the more money it takes. So... what? Spend your own money? Ads? Paywalls? Sell t-shirts? Try Patreon and hope enough people throw a dollar or two into your hat?
- mrloba 6y agoI agree. Are there any good alternatives (except for personal blogs)?
- Kovah 6y agoI recommend dev.to for any programming-related stuff. If has far better support for markdown content and embeds like Codepen and similar media.
- coffeefirst 6y agoI've used github pages with a static build tool and would recommend it. It felt like it strike a good balance of having control and letting it hang out forever with no maintenance.
- dplgk 6y agoI find most Medium tech articles to be written poorly or outdated or written by juniors. They seem to be written by people that want to write an article just to write and article.
- slumdev 6y agoIt's cargo cult career management. People see successful programmers giving lots of talks and writing lots of articles. People want to be successful. Monkey see, monkey do.
- stefan_ 6y agoDing ding ding. Medium cultivated a Google presence and is now cashing in with crap content to rival Quora.
- Zelphyr 6y agoThis is becoming a problem Internet-wide. Too many people are more interested in becoming Internet Famous than becoming actually good programmers/engineers/etc...
- MattGaiser 6y agoBecause people see writing a blog or guest articles as a sign of possible expertise, but are generally too time crunches to check for themselves.
- Aachen 6y agoJust this morning I was thinking of making a search engine that only looks among personal blogs plus a whitelist of sites like stackoverflow and Wikipedia. Or something like the old web in general. Or it has to be non profit (no ads, no subscription options, no paid content, only donation/flattr if anything). I haven't decided on a good rule yet, it's quite tricky. At any rate, the idea is to somehow filter out all the garbage when I just want to know how to do something. Too often I have to find personal blog links on stackoverflow ("PS. I wrote more about it here") as opposed to that helpful article simply showing up in the search results by itself.
- x87678r 6y agoActually can we stop writing tutorials period. When you search for something I always get a bunch of old tutorials by people who are learning something and writing as they learn. If the official docs aren't great, contribute to them.
- kevincox 6y agoOfficial docs are great, but there is also a place for tutorials. They generally cover different styles of learning. For example the official docs should probably contain a bunch of "hello world" tutorials for using the features they offer. But often times once you are combining a couple of different tools it isn't clear if it should go into the official documentation for any one of them. ..and I especially don't want the maintainers of the official documentation acting as gatekeepers for what combinations of tools are "useful" enough to be allowed into the one source of information.
- entitlementgl 6y agoPeople like op don't want to contribute to things, they just want others do it and benefit from their time and skill for free.
- andybak 6y agoAre you genuinely arguing that the world would be a better place if there were only official docs and no tutorials? You must have a very different experience to me. I'd say the value is about 70-30% in favour of unofficial tutorials for the tech topics I've learned over the years.
- mywittyname 6y agoIt sounds like the OP was complaining about the bulk of tutorials out there are written by people without any real experience with a subject. It's a blind-leading-the-blind situation where you don't know enough to realize that these people have significant knowledge gaps.
- blunte 6y agoBut it is getting increasingly more time consuming to sift through the either outdated and misleading guides or the incomplete, inaccurate, or simply bad ones to get to a useful one. Even StackOverflow is reaching the point of net-negative value; far too many of its questions and answers are outdated, but the nature of their system means the older (first acceptable) answers tend to be promoted as current answers.
- yabones 6y agoI don't think there's anything inherently wrong with Medium as a platform for the space between amateur and professional writing, but I don't think it's right for most techie blogs. For people simply looking to spread ideas and neat little hacks, it's almost always going to be better using either a 'traditional' blogging platform or homebrewing a blog with one of the static site generators. There also seems to be some sort of 'style' that every Medium writer starts to take on that you don't see other places, I can't put my finger on it but there's a certain tone to many of the articles.
- lwigo 6y agoPretentiousness?
- coldcode 6y agoRight and how do you get people to read your blog? Ads? Billboards? No one will find a new blog with no Google juice. I used to get 300K a year but it took more than a decade to get to that level. I gave up on it (job burned me out). Now I get 100 readers a month. If I start up again, it will take years to get a decent readership (never did ads). At least with Medium someone would see it.
- yabones 6y agoIt entirely depends on what the goal of your blog is. Do you want to make money? Do you want to just post random thoughts online? Do you want to share solutions to interesting problems you've come across? I post maybe once a month tops, and for very specific niche queries I'm on the first page of results for the three main search engines. The goal for me isn't to make money or get famous, just to fill in some gaps where nobody's tried something before. I'm not a medium expert at all, but I would wager that most incoming traffic is going to be from google searches either way. The sad reality is that search & social is the only place traffic really comes from, practically nobody uses RSS or subscriptions anymore.
- gls2ro 6y agoHere is a questions: What happens if Medium decides to cut your blog from there? I am not saying they are doing, but what happens with all this knowledge when Medium decides to pivot (I am not saying they do) or to close (hope this will not happen). I see better chances for the content to outlive when it is spread in separated smaller blogs. Not all of them will close, maybe some of them will be archived, maybe moved to other domains, maybe cached somewhere. But having a lot of content under paywall, without any license on the code shared (or at least I don't know about it) is not creating a comfortable feeling for myself. Of course if the purpose is to monetize then maybe Medium is the right place.
- earth2mars 6y agoI concur. why not use github itself?!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ffpip 6y ago> it limits the number of articles that can be freely read. It's literally right click, 'open in private tab'
- entitlementgl 6y agoPlease could you stop “demanding” free software, free tutorials, free everything? People put effort and time in writing good tutorials and software. You complain about “free” platforms selling your data, and about paid articles that they are “restricting learning opportunities”. How are they meant to support themselves if they service entitled people like you? You are restricting your own learning opportunities by not rewarding good content and people for their time and effort.
- yters 6y agoI also request free access to everyone's hard earned knowledge. I deserve it afterall because information wants to be free.
- andybak 6y agoMost people started writing on Medium before the payway and probably would reconsider if they realised the current impact on potential readers. In addition - does anyone make money worth mentioning from Medium? I thought they were the Spotify of blog payouts. We're funding them, not the writers.
- yters 6y agowould their articles get much readership without medium? build it and they will come only works if people know about the thing
- andybak 6y agoWe seemed to manage quite well before Medium. It's not a portal in the sense that YouTube is. I got to YouTube to find content. I end up on Medium because I found content via some other means.
- yters 6y agoso people chose medium for no reason?
- andybak 6y agoI presumed it was mainly for ease of use. I might be wrong - anyone here write for Medium who can chime in?
- hmlongco 6y agoStarted writing on Medium a year or so ago, mostly on Swift, RxSwift, SwiftUI, Combine, dependency injection, iOS application architecture, and so on. Will probably make $5-6K this year, which is a heck of lot more I ever made trying to monetize standalone blogs. And since it's cumulative I'll probably do better next year.
- Areibman 6y agoThere's an interesting tradeoff here, to say the least. Writers want readers. So to some, it's worth sacrificing universal accessibility to gain all of the advantages Medium has to offer. There just aren't many reasonable, free alternatives for publishing written technical. Medium handles SEO and makes it super simple writers who don't know how to host their own content otherwise to get their ideas in public. Plus, readers who click on a Medium link know they'll see their content in a standardized format.
- gls2ro 6y agoYes, I think you are spot on regarding the motivation of writers. This is why I was thinking to write this request here, where there are a lot of technical people who can run their own websites. Regarding standardized format, yes this is true. I don't have a rebuttal. I think it depends on the job to be done by the reader. For me getting to the information is more important than the format. I learn things even by reading text mailing-lists.
- young_unixer 6y agoMedium, Twitter and other "dark pattern" companies are on my blacklist: I don't open any link that point to them. Life is slightly better this way.
- ta988 6y agoThe only problem with medium is that sometimes you don't know you are redirected to medium because of a custom domain...
- timvdalen 6y agoOn the other hand, there's no gatekeeping on custom domains, right? I have a custom Medium domain from back in the day when you could get them, and it doesn't suffer from any of the usability problems and dark patterns of the actual medium.com (though I should probably move away from it anyway).
- blunte 6y agoFacebook, Quora, and the list goes on. It's really a depressing state that the internet has evolved into.
- dfalzone 6y agoWhat's a "dark pattern" company? I've never heard that term before.
- young_unixer 6y ago"Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something."
- hmlongco 6y agoSo... it's a "dark pattern" to give you access to some articles for free and then, should you like them and want to read more, ask you to pay for them? IDK, but that seems pretty straightforward to me.
- burkestar 6y agoIf you find the content useful there, maybe consider paying the $5/month to get access? Sounds like you place enough value that it would be worth it to you, and you can feel good knowing you're helping contribute a small way back to the author (who gets small proceeds based on how long you read the article) and supporting one of the leading platforms for an ad-free experience to read interesting content without all the distracting popups.
- kevincox 6y agoThis! It is market dynamics. If the content isn't worth it to you, don't click the link (or don't read it). If everyone agreed there would be few readers and people would stop posting there. Personally I avoid Medium links, I find that it isn't worth it to me. But I guess for most people it is The main counter argument I see is that people aren't aware that viewing their content is painful for many. If that is the case then awareness is good. If authors are intentionally using the paywall so that they can get paid I think that is good! However if they think it is just an easy place to share information then I think it is good that we are asking them to reconsider.
- blunte 6y agoMost internet "content", including Medium articles, are definitely not worth money. Even worse, there seems to be a massive increase in "articles" coming from a particular part of the world that has churned out masses of sort-of-developers. I'm even starting to wonder if part of their pedagogical process includes "Every week you write an article". Perhaps by sheer number of posts, an individual has been trained to believe they will be more likely to get hired. So given that most content on the internet is garbage, I will never, ever pay for access to content before I can assess the value of it. I will (and do) subscribe to some writers/musicians on Patreon. Medium might as well be the next Experts-Exchange... cluttering up search results with paywalled trash.
- wadkar 6y agoCurious, would you care to explain a bit more about your thoughts on these sort-of-developers? How come you know so much about them? Do you often find yourself digging through medium articles?
- twox2 6y agoNot OP, but if you've lately found yourself trying to hire devs or technical folks in general, you will be inundated with resumes from current students and new grads that will illustrate the point.
- Zelphyr 6y agoMedium is not StackOverflow Maybe StackOverflow should add a Medium-like product where people can write tutorials?
- bichiliad 6y agoThey do give you the ability to post an answer along with your question. I've found that particularly useful in the private Stack Overflow instance my company uses.
- screamingninja 6y agoStackOverflow allows you to answer your own questions and a tutorial typically starts with a problem statement.
- LandR 6y agoI blocked medium results in my DDG settings.
- atum47 6y agowell, I was not going to say anything, but I think this applies to every other type of post. Lately every third link I click there's this HUGE div blocking the content and I need to pay or sign in to read. It's very frustrating and I leave immediately.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoOh, for a moment I thought you were arguing people to stop writing those notoriously low-effort, beginner level tutorials which Medium is filled with. I guess I'll have to do it myself: dear beginners! We don't need your (n+1)-th "how to do [basic thing] in React" tutorials. Please stop polluting our search results.
- judge2020 6y agoAFAIK This is happening due to people enrolling in the partner network to get paid per view. https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115011694187-Getting-started-with-the-Medium-Partner-Program https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115011694187-Getti...
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoI write everything initially on my own site[0]. I will often (but not always) mirror the article on Medium[1]. I'll often post links, here, to the Medium articles, because I have had my site get the "hug of death" a few times. In the old days, that was cool (The term "slashdotted" came from that). These days, it doesn't really mean much; except that the server goes down. I don't get any real advantage from it. I think Medium kind of butchers my work. I have full control of presentation, and whatnot, on my site, and I can do series. There are always links to my original articles, because I don't really trust Medium. I could see them try to claim ownership of my work; simply because it's on their server. As for people applying value judgements on me for using Medium? Eh. Whatever. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/ https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/ [1] https://medium.com/chrismarshallny https://medium.com/chrismarshallny
- ghaff 6y agoI used to mirror some of my more general interest stuff on Medium. I actually found the formatting pretty nice and figured there was 1.) Some discoverability and 2.) Some people, possibly out of ignorance, associate/associated Medium with more credibility than a random personal blog. I do use Blogger, so load isn't actually an issue. Since the paywall became increasingly obtrusive I stopped mirroring and just use my own blog or one of the numerous other publication channels I write for.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoI suspect that my site may be more robust, in the future. It's hosted on a server that a friend of mine runs, and he moved to a better LiquidWeb server.
- darksaints 6y agoYou should try a static site generator, and then get your site hosted via CDN. No hug of death and extremely fast. It will take you an afternoon or so to figure out how things work if you haven't done it before, but it is time well spent.
- jaclaz 6y agoWhat I always wondered about is why the (good) people that publish free content on Medium actually publish on Medium. I mean, talking of technical article/tutorials, it is not like nowadays (and in the last - say - 10 years) there are not other ways (personal site/blog or if the issue is expected huge traffic other free hosting sites, like - still say - github). What is the perceived "added value" by Medium (in case of free content)? Better visibility?
- wasyl 6y agoI'd say visibility and it's super easy to start. Even if you want a simple github-hosted static blog, there's just a lot more to do than just opening a website and writing in simple markdown
- artistminute 6y agoMake an account just to upvote this. Fkn preach brother.
- avthar 6y agoWriting on your own domain and blog, and then re-publishing on places like Medium and dev.to etc seems to be the best combination. You get the ownership of your own site, and the reach and SEO of medium and 3rd party publications.
- niksmac 6y agoI have tweeted the same a few days back, I found this very irritating. https://twitter.com/niksmac_/status/1317859294465830912?s=20 https://twitter.com/niksmac_/status/1317859294465830912?s=20
- odshoifsdhfs 6y agoBut then how does a bootcamp graduate with no experience whatsoever writes and article about some basic shit that takes 5 minutes in the official documentation to grasp can pretend to be a subject matter and get a high paying senior job? /s
- johnmurch 6y agoJust use https://sugoidesune.github.io/readium https://sugoidesune.github.io/readium - Paywall solved :P
- pachico 6y agoI agree. I use Google for news/article recommendations and I ended up banning medium.
- Grimm1 6y agoMedium does help with a lot of distribution through internal members. That's really nice when you're trying to get an article to many people quickly but, point taken. We'll be reblogging all our content on a self hosted Jekkyl instance and Substack from now on.
- rawoke083600 6y agoTHIS !
- stared 6y agoWell, Medium has higher quality/$ ratio than virtually any other journal I know. Yes, it has its issue but for many it is an easier writing experience than setting up one's own blog. In fact, a few people I mentored started writing precisely because there is Medium. (I subscribe them. I wrote a few article on Medium. Yes, if for one there is no difference, I suggest GitHub pages a way to disseminate knowledge.)
- mhinton 6y agoMost technical content on Medium is a waste of time. It's now mostly shallow and low quality. If you are a developer you should have your own blog or write on a platform that's not paywalled. If you are writing to share information do where it will be publicly accessible.
- turtleturtle 6y agoI agree on contributing back to a community and there's many ways to do that. That's not every producer's motivation though. Some do this to get paid and it makes sense to publish behind a paywall to do so. Follow up question. What are opinions on publishing technical books?
- gls2ro 6y agoThis is a great followup question. I don't have an opinion on technical books. I buy them. I have ebooks from Amazon to iBooks, to Manning, Apress, Pragprog .... I don't have something against paying. I have something against subscription paywall. I pay this month and I read something. Then next month if I want to read my subscription needs to be valid. A book once bought I can read it anytime I want. Also my main thing is not even with paywall. It is a trend I saw which I think it makes the path of self-through beginner harder. Also Medium started to appear from time to time higher than other resources. I am working with some people who are trying to switch to IT and I usually need to explain to them either how to open Medium to read the article or how to go to next resources. I am pretty sure some of them are spending time navigating information. Yes, maybe the solution is to say: go and make a subscription to Medium, but it just raises the bar of entering the IT. Then my second thing is this: what happens with all that content when Medium decides to go away (pivot, close ...)? It will vanish like many other great content online.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoI think it's interesting how quickly this posting dove down the rankings, even though it has over 300 upvotes. Seems to be hitting some nerves.
- mekoka 6y agoI don't even know if some of the authors are aware that their contents are now behind a paywall. Yet, people keep recommending those articles as if they're openly accessible (because for some reason they have access). Yesterday someone linked to this series from Guido van Rossum https://medium.com/@gvanrossum_83706/peg-parsers-7ed72462f97c https://medium.com/@gvanrossum_83706/peg-parsers-7ed72462f97.... I opened and was greeted with this message: Not every story on Medium is free, like this one. Become a member to get unlimited access and support the voices you want to hear more from. Upgrade Read any story. Access everything on Medium across all your devices with no limits or ads. Reward great writing. A portion of your membership fee will go toward the writers you read most. Considering the author you have to wonder.
- bichiliad 6y agoAs someone who used to run a WordPress blog as a kid and taking a long hiatus from blogging, I'm really happy about all the options there are today. I spun up a blog using 11ty and netlify, and it was just as easy as all the blog posts about them say it would be. I don't think there's a better time to try to self-host a blog if you are at all inclined. I've also been excited about Dev.to (although I haven't dug too deep into it). * Shameless plug: my blog lives at salem.io, and I'm more than happy to answer blog-related questions (or any other, honestly) if you're interested in starting but need a little push. My email is in my profile.
- TimSchumann 6y agoIs it just me, or did this rise to the top of and drop off the front page incredibly quickly?
- montzark 6y agoNo it was not just you, same here.
- dietrichepp 6y agoPersonal websites are great and I’ve been trying to put more content on my own personal website (I made nine decent-size posts this month, and I’m happy with that). HOWEVER, Running a personal website is a time sink and it can become a real pain as time goes on. It’s not a problem to create a personal website and shove a few HTML files on there, or set up a Wordpress installation, or create something with Jekyll. That’s easy enough. The problem is that 10 years later, your HTML files are sprawling, or you rely on Wordpress plugins that are no longer maintained, or you’re fighting against your generator for whatever reason. I’ve somehow managed to get my personal website into a state where posting a new article is little more than adding a file to a Git repo and then running a command to deploy it, but I always feel like I need to modify the scripts, and I always want to revisit choices I made when building the website.
- gls2ro 6y agoCongrats on creating content on your personal website. I am trying with my own but I still dont have a good habit in place to write. I agree that running a personal website is a time sink. But there are many other options like: Github/Gitlab Pages, Medium .... Persoanlly, I prefer simple HTML pages or Markdown. Plain HTML will render easy many years from now. They are easy to transfer and hard to get lost between migrations.
- dietrichepp 6y agoGitHub pages is really just a hosting service for Jekyll. My website is getting close to the maximum size for GitHub pages anyway (the limit is only 1 GB). Medium is unworkable for too many reasons. I started out writing my webpage in HTML, and if you dig around you can find my old GeoCities page, but plain HTML suffers from some problems that make it high-friction for posting frequent updates. So you start adding a simple templating system. Maybe at first it’s just a header and footer you stick on to every page. Then you start adding indexes so you don’t have to update index.html every time you write a blog post. Your plain HTML starts getting more and more complicated, and it starts relying on some kind of library of scripts which you are now maintaining. That’s what happens if you dive straight into it and use whatever technology is simplest to understand. I think most people would be better off picking a static website generator, to be honest. (Also: When I started posting content to my website, Jekyll didn’t exist.)
- vr46 6y agoI subscribed to Medium briefly during the lockdown and the content was truly, utterly, awful. Terrible writing drowned out the good and great, reams of tripe, inane nonsense everywhere, and advertised like crazy to me. After a few weeks of this, I cancelled and subscribed to some actual magazines with some actual experts. So quite apart from the nagging annoyance of being unable to access various padded-out articles (tip: private browsing FTW), this has highlighted that a need from 20 years ago hasn't changed: the world still needs better editors. If the bigger newspapers like NTY, WAPO, The Cardigan would get behind tech in this way AND provide editing and curation, it'd be amazing. Maybe.
- Rochus 6y ago> you are putting them behind a paywall Read this: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018677974 https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018677974 Quote: If you are a writer enrolled in the Partner Program, when you click Publish on a story, you will be prompted to choose whether to make your post eligible to earn money as part of Medium’s metered paywall. [...] Only writers in the Partner Program see this checkbox. Stories from writers who are not enrolled in the Partner Program will no longer be part of the metered paywall. So authors obviously have the choice whether their tutorial is behind the metered paywall or not. Here an example of a free article: https://medium.com/@rochus.keller/implementing-call-by-reference-and-call-by-name-in-lua-47b9d1003cc2 https://medium.com/@rochus.keller/implementing-call-by-refer.... Can you access it or not?
- kgwxd 6y agoMedium's popularity a few years ago prompted an idea for me. I wanted to be able to remove all links to domains I knew I never wanted to visit from all pages because I kept wasting time accidentally clicking them, not realizing where they were going. I had hoped to pull it off with uBlock Origin but I couldn't get the filters to do what I wanted. I ended up making a Firefox add-on that takes a regex and some css, searches all attribute values and/or text for a match, and applies the css to the element with the match. So, I have a regex for a handful of popular domains I never want to see and matched elements get "visibility: hidden". The result is that I never see a link to Medium. In fact, I usually forget the site exists until someone mentions it without linking to it, which is almost always a post about how Medium sucks :) Same for all the other domains in the list. The plugin works on Firefox for Android, so I've enjoyed the benefits there as well. However, I expect that to be a problem soon. I don't do much browsing on my phone anyway. It's only designed for personal use, so the interface is terrible, but I had to submit it to the official add-on repository because there's no reasonable way to run an add-on locally for practical every-day use, so it is available for anyone to use [1]. Source [2]. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/ [2] https://github.com/7w0/ssure https://github.com/7w0/ssure
- bor100003 6y agoMy mail issue with Medium, except the paywall, is the clutter. It feels like all the articles are having big, usually unrelated images that make the whole site inclined toward sensationalism.
- keb_ 6y agoIf you're a techie, you are likely capable enough to learn and use a static-site gen and host your blog on Github Pages, Vercel, Surge, Netlify, etc. If you're a techie, you probably also care enough to not inundate your readers with a crapton of intrusive trackers and weird browser hacks/overrides that Medium employs. If you don't want to use an SSG, or if you're not a techie, you can use or self-host: https://write.as/ https://write.as/, https://bearblog.dev/ https://bearblog.dev/, https://rwtxt.com/public https://rwtxt.com/public, https://the-federation.info/plume https://the-federation.info/plume The downside of the above options is that they are nowhere near as prominent and thus don't provide the same level of discoverability as Medium -- in which case, if you're really hurting for cash and are trying to make a career of writing, maybe it is in your best interest to stick to platforms like Medium, despite how intrusive and reader-unfriendly they are. EDIT: I am hesitant to recommend https://dev.to/ https://dev.to/ because I have this sinking feeling that it will eventually become like Medium. Also, semi-related, but Dev.to uses endless scroll, which I think is very bad for readers (also it makes it impossible to click links in the footer).
- nojvek 6y agoI’ve moved to substack. Medium is very aggressive about their sign in to read tactics. I just want a platform where I blog once in a blue moon and want my subscribers informed. Medium is pretty awful for that.
- mam2 6y agoHave you heard of anonymous windows ? "Ctrl shift p"
- aristofun 6y agoLearn to use private browser window, man And don’t spoil market valuation for good guys :)
- twox2 6y agoYou can publish on medium and chose not to be behind the paywall. The thing is that most individuals that publish on there want to get paid for it, hence paywall.
- cblconfederate 6y agoI guess people in use medium for visibility? What does Medium offer? SEO? Brand recognition (by hosting a few well know authors)? Some special relationship with google? It s hard to tell why it became popular
- swatson741 6y agoI used to work as a professional tutor and, I think Medium's monetization strategy is overall a good thing for tutorial authors. My nuanced thoughts are pretty split though. I, personally, would never write on Medium. It doesn't fit the hacker ethos. I would roll my own blog and, try to make the content as accessible as possible. Despite this I still see the value in Medium over what I would do and over other options like blogger, quora, stackoverflow, etc. Medium's premium content ranges from horrible clickbait to significant thought pieces. It's all over the place but it's best content is pretty good and I think the reason why is because of their monetization strat.
- chenpengcheng 6y agoi stopped reading medium because of large amounts of click bait.
- firebones 6y agoMedium is not StackOverflow, it limits the number of articles that can be freely read. On the other hand, StackOverflow simply limits the number of interesting discussions that can be had.
- anupamchugh 6y agoHonestly, stackoverflow works but other than that, most bloggers end up putting ads on their website for monetisation. I'd rather pay a 5 dollar subscription than view ads that could possibly be tracking me.
- bobbydreamer 6y agoMedium is not stackoverflow, definitely. It's great for authors and getting to know new technologists and others. Ofcourse quality is going to differ but eventually people will improve, that's the idea. I would say medium has better way to identify content you like as well. And sort of introduce you non IT content at the end of this daily newsletters. I like that.
- pawurb 6y agoMedium is also terrible for SEO. Writing there is a waste of time and resources https://pawelurbanek.com/medium-blogging-platform-seo https://pawelurbanek.com/medium-blogging-platform-seo
- angin_topan 6y agothe author can turn off the paywall "feature" they consciously chose to use them, no?
- rw3iss 6y agoThanks for publishing. Have been wanting to say this for a while. Developers posting tech tutorials behind Medium paywalls is deplorable. Just use a different platform.
- kellet 6y agoMight I suggest publishing your articles over at DZone.com? It is free for anyone to publish there, and all of our content is free to access!
- ethanfinni 6y agoTo be frank, I could live without yet-another-half-cooked, tutorial on Python/ML/DL/Data Science anywhere, not just on Medium...
- rvprasad 6y agoI doubt paywall is true for all articles. I think paywall applies only to articles that the author elects to get curated by Medium team and gives up monetization opportunity. https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006543813-Friend-Links?source=post_settings_page-----295a7a91997c-------------------------------- https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006543813-Frien...
- alsargent 6y agoMaybe I missing something, but I've published several tutorials on Medium, all outside their paywall, and all appearing in google search results. It's a nice blogging platform. Not sure what the issue is. For instance, this article I wrote is still available outside their paywall: https://medium.com/@alsargent/monitoring-aws-with-telegraf-influxdb-cloud-e485c00389dc https://medium.com/@alsargent/monitoring-aws-with-telegraf-i...
- camamac 6y agoA useful tip that most people probably wont see, use notion's web scraper, it can get behind the paywalls. Or just set your cookies for medium to delete every time you close the window. I do the same thing for HBR.
- RobKohr 6y agoSo, you would prefer individuals who are the highest caliber in their technology specialty, along with the rare combination of also being an excellent writer, to take the time to write an article for you for free rather than getting paid. If they made it in book form, would that be ok, or is paying for learning material just not acceptable? Creators like to get paid, and if they are clicking that checkbox to make it so they get paid, there is a good chance that they wouldn't bother making that content for you if they weren't getting paid. Then the world would be worse off for the lack of their contribution. Medium is free for all articles in which the author chooses to give it to you for free. This is the same for news, or youtube, or music. Some stuff creators will give you for free just for the satisfaction of you enjoying their work, but usually the output in those cases are small, or just monetized in other ways. Regardless of if you are paying for a subscription or just voting up someone's question on StackOverflow, providing a positive incentive for creators to go on creating is essential if you want to have quality content and a steady stream of it. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
- StevenForth 6y agoThank you. Completely agree.
- nanospeck 6y agoThe way Medium works is impressive for those who wish to have some income writing. I wish there was a similar blockchain based / decentralized app where authors and editors would get their fair share and is not owned by just a company which could change policies at any time.
- devegpat 6y agoI dont remember when was the last time I read a tech article on medium as it keeps blocking me to read, I lost the habit of visiting medium and now I dont even think of clicking on medium links. I would suggest to checkout alternatives and more programming focused communities/blogging platform like Hashnode (https://hashnode.com https://hashnode.com)
- tfont 6y agoAgree! dev.to for example is a nice place. However, Medium is a like a book publisher for articles. It's a good way for simple and/or new articles to get an audience that wouldn't elsewise.