Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 259 posts

Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium

#191

Post by toastercat »

533474 wrote: post #190
toastercat wrote: post #185

If 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…

Why not provide a static hosted mirror of the article?. Medium is bloated and slow. I miss the days when people had personal blogs

That is a good option as well, if you're concerned about discoverability.

Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium

#192

Post by gremlinsinc »

httpsterio wrote: post #96
quicklime wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use Medium, but according to 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.

Medium 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.

I'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.

Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium

#193

Post by SilasX »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #183
vorpalhex wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to sell your tutorial for a few dollars, actually sell it for a few dollars and don't force me to play subscription games with Medium.

So you're saying, you'd rather pay me $19 for my tutorial, than pay $5 for all tutorials on medium's platform?

For the tutorial quality and UX scumminess typical of Medium, no, I don't want the $5(/month?) option. I'd prefer any of these options:

1) Free, non-scummy tutorial sample, with the rest offered for money, or

2) Free full tutorial with non-scummy ads/UX, or

3) Free full tutorial with the understanding that this is self-promotion and I should raise my evaluation of the author and seek to hire their other work.

Which of those do you feel is unjustifiably entitled?

Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium

#194

Post by rawfan »

Rochus wrote: post #178
bnt wrote: post #5

For 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 somethin…

The author decides whether the article is accessible for free or not. If the author is not in the partner program, even all of his articles are accessible for free. Read https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018677974 section What does the checkbox do

That is not correct. I've had people complain they couldn't read my articles on Medium and I never took part in the partner program.

Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium

#196

Post by yters »

andybak wrote: post #159
yters wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would their articles get much readership without medium? build it and they will come only works if people know about the thing

We 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.

so people chose medium for no reason?

Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium

#197

Post by slumdev »

dplgk wrote: post #17

I 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.

It'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.

Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium

#198

Post by Rochus »

rawfan wrote: post #194
Rochus wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author decides whether the article is accessible for free or not. If the author is not in the partner program, even all of his articles are accessible for free. Read https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018677974 section What does the checkbox do

That is not correct. I've had people complain they couldn't read my articles on Medium and I never took part in the partner program.

> That is not correct

That's an official publication of the company behind medium. Maybe they had some bugs in the past or the people who complained or the author just made mistakes.

Try to access this article: https://medium.com/@rochus.keller/implementing-call-by-refer...

Can you access it or not?

Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium

#199

Post by screamingninja »

Zelphyr wrote: post #49

Medium is not StackOverflow Maybe StackOverflow should add a Medium-like product where people can write tutorials?

StackOverflow allows you to answer your own questions and a tutorial typically starts with a problem statement.

Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium

#200

Post by roryokane »

Aachen wrote: post #93
Zelphyr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is becoming a problem Internet-wide. Too many people are more interested in becoming Internet Famous than becoming actually good programmers/engineers/etc...

Just 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 t…

You'll probably like Million Short (https://millionshort.com/) then, a search engine that can filter out the most popular websites.
Post reply on HN