Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by johnchristopher » Fri, May 31, 2019, 4:11 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #28

mathieudutour wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally, but that's what syndication is all about. The best is to have the original content on your own blog and then to cross post it to Medium, with the canonical link linking back to your blog. That way, if/when Medium is replaced by another platform, you don't loose your content and your have already build some SEO for your blog.

I've heard that Google deranks content it believes to have been duplicated, and I don't know if that's really true but I've been paranoid about copying my existing Medium content to my new blog; if it's true then Google will certainly give precedence to Medium.

Google is smart enough to handle duplicate content. It's a false problem.

From the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA

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

#72

Post by eugenhotaj » Fri, May 31, 2019, 4:15 PM UTC

jppope wrote: post #43

eugenhotaj wrote: post #7

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 honestly don't get comments like yours. The author of this repo built something to help people move off of medium (where their content is currently stored) to their own blog. This has become progressively more common and people might be putting it off because it takes too long. E.G. the basecamp blog moved in January ( https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/ ). Furthermore, it is super easy to be cr…

> or great tools like OP's for setting up your own

I don't see how I was trashing OPs hard work. I'm simply pointing out that there's more that Medium provides than just a way to host a blog. No need to read so much negativity into it.

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

#73

Post by filoleg » Fri, May 31, 2019, 4:19 PM UTC

bluetidepro wrote: post #54

phantom_oracle wrote: post #48

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)

To add to the list: - Instagram - Pinterest - most Google products

Out of curiosity, what happened to Pinterest? I was never an active user, and the only thing I observed was the mainstream interest in it fall, so it got out of spotlight, but i dont remember anything bad actually happening that triggered it.

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

#74

Post by rat9988 » Fri, May 31, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #45

eugenhotaj wrote: post #7

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…

Cloudflare recently posted about competing with GitHub. Maybe this is a better place to compete if they are hell bent on going wide vs deep? Medium, for me, is a weird shit show. There are people there I want to read, but I dislike the "medium". For a variety of valid reasons, ranging from page weight bloat, to killing the custom domain feature, and finally...to paywall experiments. I do recognize their strength in v…

Cloudflare isn't trying to compete with github, You have misread the news.

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

#75

Post by bluetidepro » Fri, May 31, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

filoleg wrote: post #73

bluetidepro wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to the list: - Instagram - Pinterest - most Google products

Out of curiosity, what happened to Pinterest? I was never an active user, and the only thing I observed was the mainstream interest in it fall, so it got out of spotlight, but i dont remember anything bad actually happening that triggered it.

A lot like Quora, I think a lot of people see their tactics as super hostile to users. Things like bait and switching to force you to sign up to see the content. Tons of spam on the site. I know a lot of people hate that they have just dumped so much trash into Google image results, again, forcing you to signup when you actually want to see the content. A lot of dark UX patterns like those seem to be the biggest complaint I've personally seen and experienced.

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

#76

Post by drngdds » Fri, May 31, 2019, 4:28 PM UTC

phantom_oracle wrote: post #48

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)

It's hard to actually make money as a free service on the internet without being evil and/or really annoying

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

#77

Post by detaro » Fri, May 31, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #62

detaro wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Which is why you should use your own domain. What's a good offer today might not be in a few years, make sure you can move.

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

#78

Post by blocked_again » Fri, May 31, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

Honest question. Do people still read blog posts these days? I feel like twitter has made me so lazy that I can hardly consume any long content. I hardly even read the articles posted in HN but do go through the comments since they are easily digestible. Is it just me?

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

#79

Post by topynate » Fri, May 31, 2019, 5:07 PM UTC

eugenhotaj wrote: post #7

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…

"Medium actively works to distribute your posts to people who would be interested in them"

I let Medium email me suggestions. Almost without fail, both the "Today's highlights" and "Based on your reading history" sections of the email are hard left or "woke", while I am neither. I think that if Medium were actually doing as you were saying, it would be taking the same sort of heavy criticism that Facebook and Youtube have for "suggesting" various right-wing figures. Medium has clearly taken deliberate measures to avoid this.

Maybe Medium works well for other people. I don't know. I do think that Medium is promoting the idea that it distributes your posts to the people interested in them, but I'm not really sure if it actually does so.

(Edited to add: Medium was not so obnoxious in the past: maybe it's trading on a reputation for content promotion that it no longer deserves.)

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

#80

Post by ryanisnan » Fri, May 31, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

mathieudutour wrote: post #32

ravenstine wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that Google deranks content it believes to have been duplicated, and I don't know if that's really true but I've been paranoid about copying my existing Medium content to my new blog; if it's true then Google will certainly give precedence to Medium.

It is true yes, that's why the generated blog have a canonical link to medium so that the SEO isn't impacted. So you won't get any SEO for the articles that have been created on Medium but if you create one on your blog first and then import it on Medium (using the import tool, not copy pasting the content), Medium will be nice and put a canonical link pointing to your blog. Unfortunately, it's not possible to set a…

I don't believe your blog would get any improved SEO benefit from having canonical links to Medium - IIRC, Medium would get the juice.

Furthermore, I don't know how Google handles cross-domain canonical reporting, but if I were writing a search engine, I would treat it as highly suspect.