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

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21–30 of 255 posts

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

#21
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…

Standard reminder that Markdown, while pleasant to author in, is perhaps one of the least standard formats ever (every implementation does things their own way; see Babelmark 2) and not a great archive format, largely as a result. (Markdown files don’t have version or flavor information embedded)

I hear org-mode is a good alternative. In the mean time, consider storing a permanent .html version upon publication of markdown

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

#22
post #14
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.

There is some bandwidth limit, though, and with CDN your site could also get better response times, since they will serve content from a server with better proximity to visitors.

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

#23
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…

The question is what is your platform? Does it require running your own server in your bedroom, hiring a virtual machine, or maybe even anything like hosted WordPress counts as yours, because you pay for it directly? And you know even if you run your own bedroom server - even then you still rely on some companies, be it your internet provider or even electricity provider, and theoretically you can be switched off if you offend them enough. This is a complex world.

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

#24
post #21
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…

Standard reminder that Markdown, while pleasant to author in, is perhaps one of the least standard formats ever (every implementation does things their own way; see Babelmark 2) and not a great archive format, largely as a result. (Markdown files don’t have version or flavor information embedded) I hear org-mode is a good alternative. In the mean time, consider storing a permanent .html version upon publication of ma…

Commonmark is a wonderful and well defined markdown standard (ie the one GitHub uses)

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

#25
post #22
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is some bandwidth limit, though, and with CDN your site could also get better response times, since they will serve content from a server with better proximity to visitors.

Is there a practical limit for gh-pages though? I think you get flagged for manual review if you're high traffic; but as long as you're serving content I don't know of anyone being taken down (and I have heard about some great lengths gone to to keep things up).

And you can put a CDN in front of gh-pages too! I have done that with cloudflare a couple of times for relatives that want to run a static site and super low cost.

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

#26
post #14
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.

Netlify does all this for free IIRC.

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

#27
post #20
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.

There is a point for the vast majority of people who are unlikely to be censored. Don’t be a fatalist.

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

#28
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.

I rarely click medium.com links, or any of their associated domains, hackernoon.com, etc. The website sucks . It's crippled without JS, and squirmy and laggy when JS is enabled. Either way, it's very heavy on the network pipe. Medium is in business of driving traffic, which means the content is likely to be mediocre. It's content that is looking for an audience, as my comment's sibling states. Which means that it is…

> It's crippled without JS

It's an SPA. What did you expect? That's the new M.O., unless you're a 90's relic like myself, in which case I appreciate your point but times change.

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

#29
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There is a point for the vast majority of people who are unlikely to be censored. Don’t be a fatalist.

Something can be both bad (in a moral sense) and useful. In fact, most bad things are useful.

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

#30
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a point for the vast majority of people who are unlikely to be censored. Don’t be a fatalist.

Something can be both bad (in a moral sense) and useful. In fact, most bad things are useful.

But certainly even a bad thing can have a point to it’s existence.
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