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Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

mastodon.xyz

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Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#11

Post by djsumdog »

GenYCubeJockey wrote: post #10

Happy Medium user here for several years. Even have been paid >$5 USD for work hosted there. Yes, I have skin in the game, and yes I'm positioning myself as a semi-advocate. Today's better lesson: LibraPay is too cheap to fork over money for effective legit marketing, so they're going the GoldiBlox route and trying to pick a fight to make themselves look good and get press. I mean they can totally respond to this pos…

Did you get paid directly by medium? I know they hired people for things like The Nib. I feel like they hired some people to get initial content, but then expected other people to contribute for free.

It feels like Huffington Post all over again, except more accessible I guess.

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#13

Post by Hedja »

Always publish on your own platform then syndicate it across all the relevant social media providers to get exposure.

It's a huge pain, especially now that most platforms are closed and don't provide automation (APIs, RSS), but it's really the most flexible solution.

It also makes syndicating to new providers a lot less painful since you'll have some standard raw form (e.g. Markdown) which you can create a manual or automated pipeline for.

Considering Liberapay is using Mastodon, I expected them to already know what they're getting themselves into. Especially with Medium's thickening walls.

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#14

Post by api »

smg wrote: post #9

A blanket statement like 'Medium is bad' does not have enough nuance. Medium is for profit centralized service. You are trading freedom for convenience and access to an audience. It is for you to decide if this tradeoff is profitable. For me, having Medium as the sole repository of my content does not seem like the right tradeoff. Maintaining a static site with a CDN costs less than 5$ a month. Having complete contro…

Why do you even need a CDN? GitHub will host static sites for free and updating is a git push. S3 will as well for pennies a month unless your site is huge.

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#15

Post by bmarquez »

I never understood why people who can use self-hosted wordpress and domain names would decide to give up control and put content on Medium. The stories featured on the front page seem a bit of an ideological bubble (I doubt any conservative bloggers would get any traction there.)

And the whole "log in to your email to log on" is IMO horrible design. I put Gmail in a separate browser to mitigate cookie tracking, having to log on to email then copy the login link to my main browser is much more annoying than using a password manager like every other site.

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#16

Post by EGreg »

etattva wrote: post #3
Shywim wrote: post #2

I don't even understand why someone who has a hosting would want to write on medium when they can host their own blog, especially when in the case of liberapay and mastodon they say they are fighting for freedom but choose to wirte their posts in a closed, centralized service which also has user-hostile behavior.

because they can get access to audience which could take years to get on your blog

How exactly does that happen btw? What are all the discovery mechanisms? Once the network is saturated like the Web, what does it do to allow new blogs to be discovered, besides just a "new on X topic" section and stuff people can do anyway to share urls?

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#17

Post by detaro »

Hedja wrote: post #13

Always publish on your own platform then syndicate it across all the relevant social media providers to get exposure. It's a huge pain, especially now that most platforms are closed and don't provide automation (APIs, RSS), but it's really the most flexible solution. It also makes syndicating to new providers a lot less painful since you'll have some standard raw form (e.g. Markdown) which you can create a manual or…

Medium even has options to import copies of posts from your main site and an API for it, which they haven't gotten rid of yet.

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#18

Post by alanh »

I expected the other side of this link to be a thinkpiece that maybe having one company host and track all of our blog reading activity isn't smart in a post-Cambridge Analytica world (or even a post-Snowden world, but whatever).

It’s actually saying that maybe giving a company control over your own blog isn’t always so smart. True.

For these reasons it seems dumb to me that Mastodon itself (not the author of this post on mastodon) blogs on Medium. Like a global warming activist jetting around a lot, it just shows one not putting their money where their mouth is.

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#20

Post by greyman »

smg wrote: post #9

A blanket statement like 'Medium is bad' does not have enough nuance. Medium is for profit centralized service. You are trading freedom for convenience and access to an audience. It is for you to decide if this tradeoff is profitable. For me, having Medium as the sole repository of my content does not seem like the right tradeoff. Maintaining a static site with a CDN costs less than 5$ a month. Having complete contro…

> You are trading freedom for convenience and access to an audience.

While this is certainly true, the understanding of platforms like Medium had been that they will not censor people for ideological reasons, or will do so only if the content is clearly illegal or disturbing. If they will freely censor people, there's not much point of their existence.

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