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Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

arslan.io

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

#201

Post by AYBABTME »

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…

Fatih works at DigitalOcean and absolutely knows how to manage a server.

People write blogs on hosted platform, despite being fully capable of hosting it themselves, because they don't want to be managing a server when they set themselves up to write something.

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

#202

Post by dredmorbius »

sah2ed wrote: post #116
rattray wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Visit your HN profile then set "showdead" to "yes" to see some of such comments.

There's some stuff that shows up there, but surprisingly little.

I've been browsing "showdead" for quite some time. My main complaint is that there's no obvious way to tell if an account has been shadowbanned or not. I'll report questionable instances to hn (via email), and on something like 3/4 of cases, the account has been, though it's not clealry evident.

I'll vouch for some flagged items. Flag others. Generally I think the comment ranking is pretty good. There's a tendency for somewhat fluffy comments to be excessively highly rated, but as compared to other systems (say, Reddit), HN compares favourably.

There's also a slight tendency for the hivemind to punish critical, but valid, comments. But again, compared to most other systems I've seen, not particularly, and the situation often evens out.

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

#203

Post by dredmorbius »

tyingq wrote: post #2

"Writing comments to Medium posts feels awkward because each comment is treated as a blog post." This is also awkward from the reader point of view. Trying to follow a comment chain on medium is frustrating as it only shows the first level, diving in switches pages, and often, a need to press a second "load all comments" button. Then the back button to wind your way back up. Is there some sound reasoning for why it w…

Treating individual contributions on a discussion as atomic-but-related strikes me as a good design move. Trending a bit toward Usenet.

(That said, I find Medium increasingly annoying.)

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

#204

Post by fredsted »

Someone wrote: post #81
gboudrias wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which blog system should we use? Hosting your own WordPress site? It's simple and easy. Why did anyone ever want to be on Medium in the first place? Most likely for the name association and the visibility that comes with it. I think we have a responsibility to promote self-reliance as part of technological culture. If we want people to move away from centralization (which I do), we have to teach by example (which I…

"Hosting your own WordPress site? It's simple and easy." I would think that, for at least 90% of those publishing on Medium, that's neither simple nor easy. Even ignoring that, hosting your own Wordpress site means taking responsibility for keeping it up to date, security-wise. That hurdle alone probably makes most bloggers use some third-party blogging provider.

WP can update itself though.

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

#205

Post by drieddust »

tyingq wrote: post #2

"Writing comments to Medium posts feels awkward because each comment is treated as a blog post." This is also awkward from the reader point of view. Trying to follow a comment chain on medium is frustrating as it only shows the first level, diving in switches pages, and often, a need to press a second "load all comments" button. Then the back button to wind your way back up. Is there some sound reasoning for why it w…

I wrote one line comment and started getting these notifications as if I wrote a post. I felt embarrassed for misleading the reader with one line post.

Confused the hell out of me.

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

#206

Post by wyclif »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #128
cupcakestand wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, it's hard to imagine that such people exist but I believe what you say. You are right, they should rather use Medium.

I'll use my Father as an example. He works for Autodesk, before that he worked for Revit (when they were a tiny startup before Autodesk bought them out). He writes code in C++ mostly (I think some C# these days). He doesn't use HTML or CSS, and has never learned either. Not because he can't, just because there's not been any point and because the amount of effort that would take is large enough to not be worth it. Wh…

I don't understand this, because C++ or C# are both high-level programming languages. HTML, on the other hand, is simple markup language. I'd think it would take somebody on that level a weekend to learn it, possibly a few weeks or a month to be confident writing it.

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

#209

Post by bschwindHN »

cookiecaper wrote: post #163
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.

Same. For all the times this is recommended, I haven't found a static blog generator that really works well. WordPress is still the easiest and most flexible to get running, but it's a PITA to keep it maintained. After trying Lektor (fine for general use, but hard to theme; no pre-baked templating/theming system at all) and Hugo (tbh I don't remember the exact thing here, but I got really frustrated trying to do some…

Write your own generator, it's pretty easy! Blogs don't have to be fancy, most programming blogs need just paragraphs, images, and code blocks. Then you can add fancier features (interactive diagrams, fancy animations, a nice deployment pipeline, etc.) as you go along.

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

#210

Post by styfle »

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.

This is precisely why I created a medium account-- because there is already an audience that is reading, liking, and commenting on articles. I tested this theory by cross posting articles to both my domain[0] and to Medium[1]. The Medium article has thousands of views in a month and my domain gets maybe 20 views a month. This is partly because "publishers" pick up articles on Medium which shows it to a new audience.

[0]: https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2017-05-09-nodejs...

[1]: https://medium.com/front-end-hacking/promises-in-node-js-8-x...

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