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Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

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Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#61
post #11

I honestly don't get posts like these. IMHO the main selling point of Medium is not that you can easily set up a blog, there's plenty of platforms that let you do that easily, or great tools like OP's for setting up your own. The point is that there is already a large audience you can reach with your posts, and Medium actively works to distribute your posts to people who would be interested in them. The equivalent he…

The point is that there is already a large audience you can reach with your posts... There was a large audience. Medium have introduced a paywall that you could dismiss with a click, but now they've started enforcing that paywall and stopping you reading more than a couple of articles a month. The audience who have chosen not to pay will fall away precipitously over the next few weeks to the point where people are go…

This comment needs more visibility. Everyone is stumbling by this stuff and missing the context. I got a spat of emails about organizations leaving Medium and was like "okay whatever", but then I discovered that basically everything is now paywalled.

I had a subscription to Medium in the past, and if I knew they were paywalling articles in general, I would have canceled right away.

The point was for me to publish writings so they would be generally available (and not get bogged down in details). It seems that's no longer offered. The idea that someone would hit a paywall trying to get to my articles is infuriating.

I hate everything about this. We're constantly bombarded with unwanted sharing. I get advertisements based on websites I visit, and there's nothing I can do about it. My activity is just free for the taking for advertisers. But heaven forbid I try to share something constructive to the rest of the world.

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#62
post #16

I honestly don't get posts like these. IMHO the main selling point of Medium is not that you can easily set up a blog, there's plenty of platforms that let you do that easily, or great tools like OP's for setting up your own. The point is that there is already a large audience you can reach with your posts, and Medium actively works to distribute your posts to people who would be interested in them. The equivalent he…

The main selling point for Medium for a long time was "cool, minimalist blogging site without all the crap". Now they're not.

Like all blog platforms, they eventually realized that all the crap was there for a reason. And the wheel of reincarnation turns...

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#63
post #16

I honestly don't get posts like these. IMHO the main selling point of Medium is not that you can easily set up a blog, there's plenty of platforms that let you do that easily, or great tools like OP's for setting up your own. The point is that there is already a large audience you can reach with your posts, and Medium actively works to distribute your posts to people who would be interested in them. The equivalent he…

The main selling point for Medium for a long time was "cool, minimalist blogging site without all the crap". Now they're not.

Unfortunately that didn't translate into a "buying point" for advertisers and trackers.

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#64
post #9

Honestly I really appreciate tools like this exist but I'll probably keep using Medium out of laziness. I don't want to have to worry about maintaining my own blog and I'm cheap so I don't really want to pay for hosted Ghost/Wordpress since I'm not trying to make money off of my infrequent dumb blog posts. The cheapest Ghost plan is $29/mo :(

You can always use a Github Page. As long as you have a GH account, it will host the page for you.

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#65
Why? Sadly, there's not much motivation described in the README. You state "Let's move your Medium content to your very own website" and then you push it to Github and Netlify, which are yet another silos. Good work with the export, but migrating the content to the next vendor lock-in should be optional. Not to forget that these platforms also collect data about your visitors.

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#66

The cycle of these SV companies is interesting. They start off with a bang and become "darlings" in the initial stages, then they reach mass-market appeal, attempt to monetize (some of them do so in the most unethical ways) and start to become loathed by the very people who touted them in the beginning. Let's compile a list: - Facebook - Twitter - LinkedIn - Quora - Medium (You can add to it to see how far we go)

Does anyone really loathe LinkedIn? My inbox always has some spam, but it's by far the best way to get a quick summary of most peoples professional experience.

I loathe that lack of an account on an invasive, spammy tool is regarded as a valid reason to discard my application.

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#67

I honestly don't get posts like these. IMHO the main selling point of Medium is not that you can easily set up a blog, there's plenty of platforms that let you do that easily, or great tools like OP's for setting up your own. The point is that there is already a large audience you can reach with your posts, and Medium actively works to distribute your posts to people who would be interested in them. The equivalent he…

I would instead advocate open federated platforms like Plume [1] that have discoverability built into them. Medium obviously has more reach at the moment, but the only way to change that is for more people to start using open alternatives. The best part is that since ActivityPub is a standard protocol, all these platforms can talk to each other. So you don't have the fragmentation problem associated with closed solutions.

[1] https://joinplu.me/

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#68

The cycle of these SV companies is interesting. They start off with a bang and become "darlings" in the initial stages, then they reach mass-market appeal, attempt to monetize (some of them do so in the most unethical ways) and start to become loathed by the very people who touted them in the beginning. Let's compile a list: - Facebook - Twitter - LinkedIn - Quora - Medium (You can add to it to see how far we go)

Does anyone really loathe LinkedIn? My inbox always has some spam, but it's by far the best way to get a quick summary of most peoples professional experience.

It took numerous attempts over several years for me to fully close my account and stop receiving their spam emails. During that time I certainly loathed them, and now, I rarely think about them at all. Occasionally I’ll click a link to someone’s LinkedIn profile if they have it set as their website on Twitter or something. I’ll see the ludicrous login-wall, chuckle to myself, and close the tab.

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried doing this screen-capture-to-gif thing before but it was always frustrating. I'd love to hear about the workflow to make a gif like this.

For terminal based things I've been using `asciinema`. There are various options to play/render such recordings, such as to an interactive SVG. SVGs are lot smaller than GIFs in file size, and are even scalable. See one of my projects for example: https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend#ffsend-wip

Even better is ttyrec + tty-player for full self-hosting without a third party intervening. You get interactive playback controls and scroll buffer access while paused.

https://github.com/chris-morgan/tty-player

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#70

The cycle of these SV companies is interesting. They start off with a bang and become "darlings" in the initial stages, then they reach mass-market appeal, attempt to monetize (some of them do so in the most unethical ways) and start to become loathed by the very people who touted them in the beginning. Let's compile a list: - Facebook - Twitter - LinkedIn - Quora - Medium (You can add to it to see how far we go)

I think you specifically mean web companies that take VC money, and not just "SV companies". If you take someone else's money they probably want it back.. with interest. The unethical monetization just reflects the fact that the general public rarely pays for quality web offerings.
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