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Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

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

#181

Post by RodericDay »

DamonHD wrote: post #119
calcifer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing that HTTPS provides on non-sensitive, or even non-interactive sites is privacy; it hides the request URI from prying eyes (ISP, government etc.) That's worth a lot to me.

My sites are totally anodyne and not going to cause anyone any embarrassment; bank auditors tell me to relax a bit. The Chinese government was happy to grant me a site 'licence'. That's not worth a slow-to-load or even failing-to-load page.

If all inoffensive sites ditched HTTPS, merely making an HTTPS request would justifiably arouse suspicion.

It's important to make sure that inoffensive sites are behind the same barrier, to make that a poor signal.

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

#182

Post by ben_jones »

cupcakestand wrote: post #91
Entangled wrote: post #25

Medium is a blog platform and a news aggregator. I use it mostly for consuming news by using tags of interest. Good luck with that writing your own blog on your own server. Oh, and the daily newsletter is a delightful joy. Discoverability is key to the success of Medium. https://medium.com/tag/swift/latest https://medium.com/tag/kotlin/latest https://medium.com/tag/python/latest https://medium.com/tag/java/latest Or…

Why should I discover content on Medium? This job is done by HN and Reddit and unfortunately Facebook if I am on FB. I don't have time to get sucked in another feed.

Because most aggregators become biased and limited silos either intentionally to sell advertising or otherwise via community moderation, power users, etc. The same stuff always bubbles to the top or is buried at the bottom. Variety is key.

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

#183

Post by BinaryIdiot »

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…

> 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.

Because doing that yourself is a complete waste of time. Every web developer knows how to make a blog. All of them. So who cares if I make one or not to post my opinions online? No one.

So you can either spend the time dealing with server load, updates, maintenance, etc on a project everyone already knows how to develop and proves absolutely nothing about your skills or knowledge (not to mention being more expensive depending on provider and traffic) or you can let someone else handle it for you that may have multiple ways to accessing and publishing your content (medium, square space, wordpress, etc).

Managing your time is really important as a developer. Maybe managing a blog is a good use of your time but it certainly isn’t for me.

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

#184

Post by corobo »

ValentineC wrote: post #147
corobo wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why didn't you host on Github Pages Tried that once, fell down a 3 day rabbit hole trying all the static blog generators.. ended up picking WordPress.

> Tried that once, fell down a 3 day rabbit hole trying all the static blog generators.. ended up picking WordPress. I'm still falling through the very same hole. What made you pick WordPress?

Honestly no real reason other than it's the one I know and didn't want to spend any more time on finding software to write with instead of spending the time on writing

Essentially it was the default option

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

#185

Post by HappyTypist »

movedx wrote: post #130
loomer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the main reasons people use Medium is that their posts will be viewed by random Medium users in addition to their own fan base, thus growing their fan base and getting more views both in the short and long term. I'd compare it to YouTube. People could theoretically host their own videos, but the main reason people use YouTube is because it is so much easier for others to discover your videos. Also, +1 on using…

> I'd compare it to YouTube. People could theoretically host their own videos, but the main reason people use YouTube is because it is so much easier for others to discover your videos. I appreciate the effort to create a comparison or analogy here, but hosting video is a far, far bigger problem than hosting some text. Bandwidth costs will reach into the thousands of dollars per month video that gets a few thousands…

You are off by four orders of magnitudes

DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode: $0.02 per GB over your transfer limit

OVH $9/month VPS: 100mbps unlimited bandwidth, and yes, OVH doesn't care if you have 7x24 100% utilisation on your 100 mbps.

Let's say you have a 100MB video that gets 20,000 views, and half of the viewers end up streaming the full video.

BW incurred: 1 TB. Cost to you: $20

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

#186

Post by HappyTypist »

magic_beans wrote: post #86
addicted wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a reader I avoid Medium based articles. For one thing, the UI for wildly different blogs are the same. This means that I am unable to place anything I read in context. As a visual learner, one of the ways I remember stuff I read is by remembering the entire context (for blogs this is usually the look of the blog). Medium completely eliminates that crutch for me. I feel the overuse of annoying funny GIFs in the mid…

Medium blogs all have different colored nav-bars and logos.

That's so minute. Different fonts, typography, page layout, structure, etc all improve uniqueness and memorability.

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

#187

Post by hayleox »

tinalumfoil wrote: post #47
untog wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's because they didn't/don't want people to comment in the usual way - you can highlight text on an article and leave short comments in the relevant place if you want to do that. I think the comments section at the end was intended more as a place for lengthy reaction posts. It's why comments have "recommend" rather than "like" as a button. I might "like" someone saying "great post!" but I'm not going to…

I hate reaction posts in comments section. I see this mostly on reddit with posts simply saying "I agree" or "well said" and if your lucky quoting some interesting part of the article. I get the feeling these are up voted by people that just want the important quotes to save time and those that agree so much they want to drown out other conversation. Intended or not these comments kill all conversation. They add abso…

I agree, well said.

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

#188

Post by ship_it »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #183
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…

> 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. Because doing that yourself is a complete waste of time. Every web developer knows how to make a blog. All of them. So who cares if I make one or not to post my opinions online? No one. So you can either spend the t…

> So you can either spend the time dealing with server load, updates, maintenance, etc on a project everyone already knows how to develop and proves absolutely nothing about your skills or knowledge

Wait, what? The man just give you an option to use static site generator, and he even included the link of one. The cost of using this instead of Medium is absolutely nothing (Github account offer page hosting).

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

#189

Post by ship_it »

steventhedev wrote: post #96
copperx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same applies to GitHub pages.

GHP means you're subject to github's downtime, which tends towards more frequent than s3 (outside us-east-1). Worse, you can't run HTTPS with GHP and a custom domain. You could use CloudFlare's flexible TLS, but it's unsecured from their system to your site, which has resulted in carrier level content being injected[0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12091900

You can run GHP over HTTPS through services like e.g. Cloudflare.
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