7 ms·
Ask HN: Why are people publishing FAQs/articles on Medium instead of Gist?
I've noticed a trend in technical material being authored on Medium behind a registration wall. Are people really generating enough revenue to warrant publishing tech articles on Medium to offset the greater good of making the material broadly available?
Gist offers public visibility and commenting without the requisite barrier to entry.
Thoughts?
- uberman 6y agoI don't have a Medium account and I don't like running into paywalls but monetization could potentially have very little to do with the motivation to use a publishing platform like Medium over what is essentially an orphaned single public commit.
- mel_llaguno 6y agoI'm not sure I agree that Gists are `orphaned single public commits` as they have a number of features which encourage collaboration (commenting/stars/history/forking). My concern is that most tech articles represent a perspective at a point-in-time and that the broader community would benefit from a living document. YMMV ;-)
- frompdx 6y agoI like gists and I have used them for years for my (non-medium) blog. I usually break down whatever I am explaining piece by piece and then include a link to a gist with the complete code for the reader.
- mel_llaguno 6y agoInteresting. So how do you decide what to publish on Medium? Is it simply a distinction between `blog` content vs. technical docs, or something else?
- frompdx 6y agoI don't use medium. My blog is self hosted and if I am breaking down some code I usually include a gist with the complete code.
- lostintangent 6y agoI was asking a similar question for numerous use cases (e.g. code snippets, book reviews, notes). Gists are so broadly useful, but relatively few developers actually use them. Personally, I found that incorporating gists into my daily workflow just wasn’t very convenient, and so I ended up creating a VS Code extension that allowed me to create, edit, and comment on gists within the editor: https://aka.ms/gistpad https://aka.ms/gistpad. I’m not sure if ease-of-use is a reason for others to not use gists more frequently, but I’ve definitely become a bit of a gists “advocate”, after appreciating just how useful/flexible it is as a “developer cloud storage” solution.
- mel_llaguno 6y agoI use Obsidian and want to incorporate it in with my Gist usage. Found this which might be helpful: https://github.com/defunkt/gist https://github.com/defunkt/gist P.S. My biggest peeve with Gist is the missing dark mode :(. Otherwise, I find that the ability to use Markdown and embedded images in my gist's actually covers most of my documenting/blogging use case. Obsidian will hopefully address the dark mode issue.
- softwaredoug 6y agoIf the goal of a blog is to get people to know you better, not just share knowledge, then gist isn’t a great platform for that. People would rather have a blog with clearer branding and personality, that promises more polish, and an offers to give you many ways to get to know the blogger. I use gist for informal things I don’t have time to turn into a great blog article yet. Or half constructed notes that can live in a pastebin. I guess I’m curious why medium is the only alternate you list to gist as opposed to creating your own blog outside of medium?
- mel_llaguno 6y agoMostly a question of simplicity. I don't want to spend a tonne of time maintaining a personal blog site if I can find a quick way to publish material quickly using gists with an editor (like Obsidian) which is tolerable ;-). I've used Jekyll before on github.io, but am looking for an even lighter-weight solution (if possible).
- dahdum 6y agoYou can open an article for no paywall on Medium, but they purposely make it difficult by requiring you to sign up for their partner program (and provide all your taxpayer / payment information) to do so. So I think it's a split between people who want to try and generate some revenue, and those that don't want to sign up for that program and are too used to Medium to switch away.
- mel_llaguno 6y agoI'm just curious to know what the revenue accessibility trade-off is ;-). Exactly how much money does an article on Medium make for a writer?
- iandinwoodie 6y agoPersonally, I dislike how Gists are so isolated. I just created a public test Gist and can’t seem to find a way to navigate to it when I view my GitHub profile from a private browser session. From my Gists profile there is a “View GitHub Profile” button, but I do not see a button to do the reverse. I think adding a “Gists” tab to GitHub profiles would be a nice way to increase accessibility and exposure. Additionally, I think that edits to a Gist should count as contributions. The current arrangement disincentives those who are concerned with contribution counts.
- sitkack 6y agoSearching your own gists is harder than search for a public one. I think it might be easier to make a gist repo and use comments for gists or the inline editor.
- mel_llaguno 6y agoAgreed. That's where I was hoping Obsidian would be helpful in terms of providing a way to tag/index individual gists.
- akulbe 6y agoI know the gh cli tool helped me find some stuff a lot easier than pointy-clicky through the UI. Maybe it would work for this use case?
- sitkack 6y agoTiL, will check it out
- mel_llaguno 6y agoGreat suggestion! USAGE gh gist <command> [flags] CORE COMMANDS create: Create a new gist delete: Delete a gist edit: Edit one of your gists list: List your gists view: View a gist
- mel_llaguno 6y ago
- bjord 6y agoThere is a significant amount of content on Medium that's readable without an account. I think, if the goal is to get eyes on your content, Medium's recommendation of your stuff to other people is a great way to achieve that.
- mel_llaguno 6y agoUnfortunately, reading Medium articles (even free ones) after a certain number of visits drops the registration banner and prevents you from continuing/reading without an account as a reader. To me, this engagement model is parasitic and suggests that their valuation/monetization strategy is "eyeballs". Not sure this necessarily helps writers but it certainly helps Medium to drive sign-ups with free content. Gists do not require an account/login for readers AFAIK.
- D2187645 6y agoYou can make a solid chunk of passive income thru medium.
- PikachuEXE 6y agoI post on https://dev.to https://dev.to Gist is not very good for publishing articles in my eyes
- glaucon 6y agoI was interested in this but my first thought was "what happens the day that dev.to gets monetized ?" and my second one was "who owns dev.to ?". WRT the first one "Yes, you own the rights to the content you create and post on dev.to and you have the full authority to post, edit, and remove your content as you see fit." which on the surface seems a lot better than many crowd contributer situations. WRT the second one I still don't know and if there's a wikipedia page for dev.to I can't find it. On the whole dev.to seems better than medium, for now at least, and more approachable than using gists.
- glaucon 6y agoActually this https://dev.to/about https://dev.to/about describes the "leadership" although it doesn't say straight out who owns it.
- toper-centage 6y agoBut dev.to already is monetized? They are not a charity. They are open source a d make money with job postings, sponsorships and sponsored posts.
- Moody_10001 6y agoYes, from membership, shops and sponsorship. DEV.to are selling nice stuffs btw.
- gohbgl 6y agoBetter yet, post to your own blog and have it get automatically added to dev.to.
- Goosee 6y agoProtip: Copy the link of any blog post written ontop of the medium platform and send it to yourself as a dm over twitter. Unlimited access to articles & acts as a nice repo of the things you read. This works because twitter owns medium and uses a special link shortener afaik. I'm guessing there is also a 3rd party website that will do this for you.
- kirubakaran 6y agoGreat tip, but just fyi, Medium is not owned by Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_(website)
- michaelgiba 6y ago+1, same founder tho
- villgax 6y agoIf gists had a UI update to even look like a decent Jekyll like blog it would be used, the UI also could gain a lot by improving on Medium's editor Anyone interested in getting this built?
- fy20 6y agoI absolutely detest finding Medium articles in search results. Often they contain good knowledge which confuses me even more. For anyone unaware - it seems a lot of people must be, otherwise I don't understand why anyone would choose to publish there - this is the flow for most users trying to read your articles: - See a Google search result that goes to Medium - Click the link and start reading - Read the first two paragraphs, then see a popup saying you need to login to continue reading for free (the rest of the page isn't rendered, so you can't just block it with adblock) - Reluctantly decide to login, waiting a few minutes for the email link to click on to do so - Log in, then have to navigate your history back to the article, as they take you to a different page - Start reading again, and after the first two paragraphs get a popup saying you need to pay $5/mo to see the rest of the article - Rage quit your job and go live in the forest I understand there are ways around the paywall, but that's not what most users are going to do.
- mel_llaguno 6y agoHave you tried accessing a Medium link in Incognito mode?
- toper-centage 6y agoThat's a workaround for a terrible user experience. The fact that you need to suggest that at all is telling. Wait until they start blocking private session users like some news papers...
- oliverx0 6y agoThey used to do this at some point. I remember medium telling me I could not proceed in incognito. I wonder why they rolled that back.
- atmosx 6y agoI don’t login. I just skip the article.
- veramani 6y agoGbduhs SD gsjsfduhsffsgsdcddbdffdggdgdggddhddd. CVS be good.
- zhte415 6y agoIf a technical article/blog, and thus assuming one has some technical understanding and cares sufficiently to spend 10 minutes per day maintaining it, why not setup a VPS and brand it under yourself (or company) which I'd imagine is well worth the $5 per month that Linode, DO, or others charge.
- mel_llaguno 6y agoFrom the replies given, it seems that Medium facilitates monetization. I'm just curious to know how much that's actually worth vs. the public good.
- gbrindisi 6y agoMedium allows you to set a canonical tag, so authors can direct SEO juice towards their own websites. Github/gist doesn't have that. In practice 99% of what you read on Medium is syndicated, they are in the business of trading an audience for content (that in turn will grow their audience).
- XCSme 6y agoBut then why does the Medium article still have better SEO than the original one? You are still directing more traffic to Medium instead of your site.
- LinuxBender 6y agoI agree, a git repo would be a good place. Another option if you are just creating a blog is NeoCities [1] [1] - https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/