Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#171

Post by jlgaddis » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 3:53 AM UTC

rattray wrote: post #114

vilmosi wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Commenting on articles is a terrible method of interaction. Anti-spam is hard, and spammers always win. Trolls always win. But that's practically what HN is, yet I like to believe it's a good platform without too much spam or trolls.

That makes me curious as to the mechanisms hn employs to combat spam. I've never seen a comment I've been able to tell was spam, which is impressive.

There's a lot of self-policing here. If a comment or submission is obvious spam, I am very quick to flag it (as are many others, apparently).

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#172

Post by bhalp1 » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 3:58 AM UTC

At https://dev.to we have a similar product to Medium in a lot of ways. One thing we try to do is offer the benefits of Medium in terms of distribution, but also encourage users to easily make their own site the canonical source, because we don't want to force vendor lock in when you get to this point.

I'd like to think we also do a good job dealing with a lot of the UX issues that the author outlines :)

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#173

Post by owens99 » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:01 AM UTC

Medium is blocked in China. And there are as many people learning English in China as the entire US population.

That's the biggest deal breaker for me.

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#174

Post by jsjohnst » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:31 AM UTC

rattray wrote: post #114

vilmosi wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Commenting on articles is a terrible method of interaction. Anti-spam is hard, and spammers always win. Trolls always win. But that's practically what HN is, yet I like to believe it's a good platform without too much spam or trolls.

That makes me curious as to the mechanisms hn employs to combat spam. I've never seen a comment I've been able to tell was spam, which is impressive.

It's heavily stepped up lately, folks are just good at policing it. I have dead posts turned on and I usually see at least 2-3 "work from home" scam comments per article.

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#175

Post by erikb » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 4:49 AM UTC

I find the first part particularly interesting. I always contemplated of whether or not I should start blogging. And for me it always seemed an obvious choice between whether or not I want to host my own blog, which would mean a lot of energy and money investment, or if I should start a medium page, possibly losing control over my texts and page views.

When you now say that it's a hassle to setup and even costs money, why should anybody use Medium? Do people not know how much you already gift a page if you let them host your content? They should pay you and not the other way around.

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#176

Post by Tehnix » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:00 AM UTC

rattray wrote: post #114

vilmosi wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Commenting on articles is a terrible method of interaction. Anti-spam is hard, and spammers always win. Trolls always win. But that's practically what HN is, yet I like to believe it's a good platform without too much spam or trolls.

That makes me curious as to the mechanisms hn employs to combat spam. I've never seen a comment I've been able to tell was spam, which is impressive.

If you have showdead on, lately has been awful with comments about “I make $$$ from home” or some shit. I regularly read dead comments, because HN has a tendency to downvote even valid comments from time to time, but lately has been rough -.-

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#177

Post by zabil » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:10 AM UTC

It's not easy to run a team (engineering) blog with static site generators. Authoring in markdown, reviewing, external contributions etc takes up a lot of time.

With medium we've encouraged the team to run personal blogs and add interested articles to the team publication. It's a bottom up approach.

In return, we get viewer-ship when medium recommends our articles on other (medium) blogs or via tags. Medium has a sense of community. Speaking strictly for myself, running your own site is tad selfish, it lacks as sense of community. Right now medium does that, We'd only move out of medium if there's something that does it better.

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#178

Post by soulwatcher » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:12 AM UTC

cupcakestand wrote: post #85

giobox wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had largely the same experiences. Recently I decided to challenge myself to instead keep it simple, rather than treat the whole thing as a "learn some new thing along the way" type exercise. The end result is I actually have a blog I'm actually writing on that is absurdly easy to maintain, rather than the usual (for me anyway!) 75 percent complete side project in some new technology I'll never get around to fini…

> Simple VPS, webserver, letsencrypt, static site generator, cloud flare for CDN duties and a little CSS. Why didn't you host on Github Pages and you could have saved all that but having the same flexibilty regarding a SSG use case?

GitHub suspended my account because I used it to host a "for-profit" website, which led to the website being down for several days before I checked.

I believe the last time I checked the TOS, no such mention was made for Github pages.

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#179

Post by abiox » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:34 AM UTC

i generally avoid medium.com blogs because the ui is bad. i hate the comments system.

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#180

Post by vit05 » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:38 AM UTC

ageitgey wrote: post #12

JoshMnem wrote: post #6

I don't understand why people write programming blogs on Medium. I think that managing a live website with its own server (rather than only working on other people's projects) is a very important skill. If you don't want to manage WordPress, try a static site generator like Metalsmith: https://github.com/segmentio/metalsmith Deploy on Digital Ocean or Linode for $5/month. Free hosting options include Github Pages and…

Some people (like me) write programing blogs on medium because it's much easier to get an audience there then on your own domain. It has nothing to do with technical issues. Like it or not, often more people will discover and share medium articles than posts on a no-name domain.

I think that is the main reason for most of the non-technical people too. Medium started as a great way to be discovered. They have a minimal style that makes people compare the text and content. Is something totally different from host a weblog.