8 ms·

Yes, but only because they are aggressively making their reading experience terrible. I'd argue that a WordPress site with the default template is less offensiv

Yes, but only because they are aggressively making their reading experience terrible. I'd argue that a WordPress site with the default template is less offensive at this point. The typography and layout on Medium is fine, it's the popups, nags, paywall, and the like. For a while there was a lovely extension called "Make Medium Readable Again" but they aggressively broke that too. I'm happy to let Medium fall off the tech community radar.

tonystubblebine 4y ago
Medium CEO here. I saw this thread too late for many people to see my response. I love that the result is basically unanimous. I agree with nearly everything here. I am a programmer, I've written a programming book, I used to work at a tech publisher (O'Reilly). From O'Reilly, I know a lot about how to build a system around programmers that puts out important and accurate information. Medium started in the ballpark of that and then went in the wrong direction. I think we can do a lot to change that. For me, change is less about changing our reputation and instead just getting the utility right. We have syntax highlighting coming out in a week or so and I'll do a bigger post then about what is changing for technical readers and authors.
Jamie9912 4y ago
Medium works completely fine with Javascript disabled ;)
- ectopod 4y ago
  Somebody at Medium must have been reading! Two days later and it's completely broken without js.
- generationP 4y ago
  Doesn't that disable all images too?
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    When's the last time a Medium article had useful and relevant images? I usually just see some generic stock art from Unsplash.
    - naikrovek 4y ago
      they often have useful and relevant images.
    - Akronymus 4y ago
      I frequently see code embedded as images...
      - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
        Good enough reason to close and go elsewhere.
- ectopod 4y ago
  It varies. Some articles are fine. Some only show a couple of paragraphs.
PaulHoule 4y ago
Culturally I think it is pretty bad. Writers on medium are lazy and they frequently have very little to say other than to assert their membership into a tribe. That’s par for the course on many subjects but for technical subjects it’s like a joke that blasts through the set-up at 200% speed and then misses the punch line entirely. I remember talking to somebody who was so impressed that he got 70 views on an article on Medium and having to break it to him that I thought a blog post was a big hit if it got 70,000 views back in the day. Perhaps it is as simple as this: any author who is exposing their readers to the awful experience is contemptuous of their readers and not really serious about blogging.
- germandiago 4y ago
  FWIW i wrote occassionally and I do not care where. I just cared that it worked. I do not write articles for a living or make money out of them. So no tribe stuff in my case. I just did it out of enjoying it
  - underyx 4y ago
    So I assume you would’ve avoided Medium which was limiting how many articles a user could read for free, since then it literally wouldn’t work for many.
gnull 4y ago
I also heard some shallow marketing people saying how great it is and how everyone should be going to medium to promote their personal brands and increase visibility. This is an immediate red flag for me. It means that even if Medium is fine now, it's going to get populated by these types soon.
mmaunder 4y ago
Or a WordPress site with a nice looking theme on your own domain with total control over your own publishing platform, with portability. WordPress is the Linux of publishing. Publishing on Medium or Substack is like building apps on the iPhone or applications on Windows: you’re there by the good graces of the platform owner and if you’re ever a strategic risk or opportunity to them, you’re dead.
- huijzer 4y ago
  For developers, static site generators are the better choice IMO.
  - peatfreak 4y ago
    Why is this? I'm drawn to WP for my own personal site, because there is a critical mass behind WP, it's a transferable skill, there's a lot of nice stuff that comes out of the box, there's a well established web design community around it, etc. I've seen so many static site generators come and go over the past decade that the number of options now is just dizzying. From what I've seen, they all try to be "minimalist"... until the developer realizes there's a lot more work and expertise involved in "minimalist" design than they originally thought, and they grow, bit by bit by bit, etc, ... Then somebody sees these "bloated" SSG's and decides to reinvent the wheel by creating their own "minimalist" SSG with no baggage and thus the cycle starts all over again.
    - huijzer 4y ago
      > Why is this? Because why put your admin interface out to the web if you can also just send some HTML files to a static site hoster. The static hosters are nearly impossible to hack and they can be heavily optimised because they only serve files. As another argument, software engineers are used to Git meaning that you’ll have a proper backup for your site.
  - mmaunder 4y ago
    I disagree. They’re fashionable but are more work and don’t provide benefits that justify the additional work. Just install WP out the box and let it run on the latest version of PHP which is blazingly fast. Get all the ease of use and flexibility that comes from default WP without the complexity.
rapnie 4y ago
> For a while there was a lovely extension called "Make Medium Readable Again" Use https://scribe.rip https://scribe.rip Just replace medium.com or other medium domain, and you get a clean representation with all cruft removed.
- worg 4y ago
  if you have libredirect extension installed you can also make use of multiple instances of scribe if one's down
WalterBright 4y ago
Sometimes people complain that my article presentations are so out of date, but I like it, and they load fast. They're just static plain old html. https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/index.html https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/index.html
- jimmygrapes 4y ago
  I am one who enjoys your articles and the simplicity of the display, but I do wish there was a little more love applied to the CSS styling for mobile. Sidebar cuts the display region of the text by a significant portion and line heights get a little messed up by some of the inline code segment things, minor nitpicks like that. Might wanna view them on a vertically oriented phone or emulate the display yourself to see what I'm talking about. Just my two cents!
  - silisili 4y ago
    Agreed on all counts. Mobile seems also not padded enough. Feels like the text is going to run off the right side, if that makes any sense.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Glad you enjoy them! Thanks for the tips.
  - hamandcheese 4y ago
    Reader mode on iOS seems to work pretty well.
peatfreak 4y ago
> I'd argue that a WordPress site with the default template is less offensive at this point. I wholeheartedly agree. And for this reason, and many others, I'm planning on setting up my personal website/blog using Wordpress. But as for the default template being "less offensive" than Medium, I'd like to do a little better than this. I've looked at other WP templates and I am happy to learn PHP and become a real WP developer just to make a good site (I'm already an experienced developer in other languages). I also get the impression that WP development is a highly transferable skill. I understand perfectly well that making a good, "minimalist" site takes a of expertise and effort. But I don't have the faintest where to being with this, as all my effort up until this point has been on the back end, data science computation, etc. Should I just start at the wordpress.{org,com} and follow my way from there? Is there some special resource that I should know about?
lamontcg 4y ago
Medium articles now are a major source of google spam on programming topics. They're churned out by people who are just learning a new language or whatever and don't have a lot of technical depth and they're people who are pretty desperately trying to push their own personal brand.
forgotpwd16 4y ago
>The typography and layout on Medium is fine Isn't there any Medium-like theme for WordPress? (Though maybe you frighten people thinking they ended up in a Medium blog.)
- pentagrama 4y ago
  You can check some good looking free Wordpress themes from Anders Noren https://andersnoren.se/teman/ https://andersnoren.se/teman/
  - forgotpwd16 4y ago
    Those are nice indeed. Seems like Nordic minimalism applied to web design.

tonystubblebine 4y ago

Medium CEO here. I saw this thread too late for many people to see my response. I love that the result is basically unanimous. I agree with nearly everything here. I am a programmer, I've written a programming book, I used to work at a tech publisher (O'Reilly). From O'Reilly, I know a lot about how to build a system around programmers that puts out important and accurate information. Medium started in the ballpark of that and then went in the wrong direction. I think we can do a lot to change that. For me, change is less about changing our reputation and instead just getting the utility right. We have syntax highlighting coming out in a week or so and I'll do a bigger post then about what is changing for technical readers and authors.

Jamie9912 4y ago

Medium works completely fine with Javascript disabled ;)

ectopod 4y ago
Somebody at Medium must have been reading! Two days later and it's completely broken without js.
generationP 4y ago
Doesn't that disable all images too?
- cratermoon 4y ago
  When's the last time a Medium article had useful and relevant images? I usually just see some generic stock art from Unsplash.
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    they often have useful and relevant images.
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    I frequently see code embedded as images...
    - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
      Good enough reason to close and go elsewhere.
ectopod 4y ago
It varies. Some articles are fine. Some only show a couple of paragraphs.

PaulHoule 4y ago

Culturally I think it is pretty bad. Writers on medium are lazy and they frequently have very little to say other than to assert their membership into a tribe. That’s par for the course on many subjects but for technical subjects it’s like a joke that blasts through the set-up at 200% speed and then misses the punch line entirely. I remember talking to somebody who was so impressed that he got 70 views on an article on Medium and having to break it to him that I thought a blog post was a big hit if it got 70,000 views back in the day. Perhaps it is as simple as this: any author who is exposing their readers to the awful experience is contemptuous of their readers and not really serious about blogging.

germandiago 4y ago
FWIW i wrote occassionally and I do not care where. I just cared that it worked. I do not write articles for a living or make money out of them. So no tribe stuff in my case. I just did it out of enjoying it
- underyx 4y ago
  So I assume you would’ve avoided Medium which was limiting how many articles a user could read for free, since then it literally wouldn’t work for many.

gnull 4y ago

I also heard some shallow marketing people saying how great it is and how everyone should be going to medium to promote their personal brands and increase visibility. This is an immediate red flag for me. It means that even if Medium is fine now, it's going to get populated by these types soon.

mmaunder 4y ago

Or a WordPress site with a nice looking theme on your own domain with total control over your own publishing platform, with portability. WordPress is the Linux of publishing. Publishing on Medium or Substack is like building apps on the iPhone or applications on Windows: you’re there by the good graces of the platform owner and if you’re ever a strategic risk or opportunity to them, you’re dead.

huijzer 4y ago
For developers, static site generators are the better choice IMO.
- peatfreak 4y ago
  Why is this? I'm drawn to WP for my own personal site, because there is a critical mass behind WP, it's a transferable skill, there's a lot of nice stuff that comes out of the box, there's a well established web design community around it, etc. I've seen so many static site generators come and go over the past decade that the number of options now is just dizzying. From what I've seen, they all try to be "minimalist"... until the developer realizes there's a lot more work and expertise involved in "minimalist" design than they originally thought, and they grow, bit by bit by bit, etc, ... Then somebody sees these "bloated" SSG's and decides to reinvent the wheel by creating their own "minimalist" SSG with no baggage and thus the cycle starts all over again.
  - huijzer 4y ago
    > Why is this? Because why put your admin interface out to the web if you can also just send some HTML files to a static site hoster. The static hosters are nearly impossible to hack and they can be heavily optimised because they only serve files. As another argument, software engineers are used to Git meaning that you’ll have a proper backup for your site.
- mmaunder 4y ago
  I disagree. They’re fashionable but are more work and don’t provide benefits that justify the additional work. Just install WP out the box and let it run on the latest version of PHP which is blazingly fast. Get all the ease of use and flexibility that comes from default WP without the complexity.

rapnie 4y ago

> For a while there was a lovely extension called "Make Medium Readable Again" Use https://scribe.rip https://scribe.rip Just replace medium.com or other medium domain, and you get a clean representation with all cruft removed.

worg 4y ago
if you have libredirect extension installed you can also make use of multiple instances of scribe if one's down

WalterBright 4y ago

Sometimes people complain that my article presentations are so out of date, but I like it, and they load fast. They're just static plain old html. https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/index.html https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/index.html

jimmygrapes 4y ago
I am one who enjoys your articles and the simplicity of the display, but I do wish there was a little more love applied to the CSS styling for mobile. Sidebar cuts the display region of the text by a significant portion and line heights get a little messed up by some of the inline code segment things, minor nitpicks like that. Might wanna view them on a vertically oriented phone or emulate the display yourself to see what I'm talking about. Just my two cents!
- silisili 4y ago
  Agreed on all counts. Mobile seems also not padded enough. Feels like the text is going to run off the right side, if that makes any sense.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Glad you enjoy them! Thanks for the tips.
- hamandcheese 4y ago
  Reader mode on iOS seems to work pretty well.

peatfreak 4y ago

> I'd argue that a WordPress site with the default template is less offensive at this point. I wholeheartedly agree. And for this reason, and many others, I'm planning on setting up my personal website/blog using Wordpress. But as for the default template being "less offensive" than Medium, I'd like to do a little better than this. I've looked at other WP templates and I am happy to learn PHP and become a real WP developer just to make a good site (I'm already an experienced developer in other languages). I also get the impression that WP development is a highly transferable skill. I understand perfectly well that making a good, "minimalist" site takes a of expertise and effort. But I don't have the faintest where to being with this, as all my effort up until this point has been on the back end, data science computation, etc. Should I just start at the wordpress.{org,com} and follow my way from there? Is there some special resource that I should know about?

lamontcg 4y ago

Medium articles now are a major source of google spam on programming topics. They're churned out by people who are just learning a new language or whatever and don't have a lot of technical depth and they're people who are pretty desperately trying to push their own personal brand.

forgotpwd16 4y ago

>The typography and layout on Medium is fine Isn't there any Medium-like theme for WordPress? (Though maybe you frighten people thinking they ended up in a Medium blog.)

pentagrama 4y ago
You can check some good looking free Wordpress themes from Anders Noren https://andersnoren.se/teman/ https://andersnoren.se/teman/
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  Those are nice indeed. Seems like Nordic minimalism applied to web design.