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

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

#31
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…

> Always publish on your own platform

What does "your own platform" mean? Without relying on things like Tor, I don't believe it's possible to publish anything without relying on some large corporation who can pull your content with a day's notice. If not Medium, it'll be AWS or Google Cloud or your domain registrar. Anyone who cares about an open web should be, at minimum, calling out those who take down content on short notice without reason.

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

#32
post #19

Medium is a magazine with unpaid writers.

That's not true. I made about $200 from a Medium article published last month to their membership program. It's not an amazing amount of money, but better than I expected for a single post.

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

#33

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…

Complaining about an unfair (or at least perceived as such) account deletion is now "marketing"? And how convenient that you define at the same time how they can absolve themselves of that claim: by demonstrating how much money a non-profit project financed by donations has spent on paid advertising...

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

#34
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.

>the understanding of platforms like Medium had been that they will not censor people for ideological reasons

They threw out their integrity as a publishing platform when they updated their ToS a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16431403

Indeed, there is not much of a point to their existence when they throw this away, other than being a virtue signalling magazine with unpaid authors that doesn't even follow their own vague ToS.

This week has been horrible for speech and freedom on the web. But surely a much needed reminder that suppressing speech does not work. The remedy is more speech, not less: http://prospect.org/article/remedy-more-speech

Without holding this uncompromising stance, I'm of the opinion that one cannot call themselves a liberal, in a liberal democracy. It is the cornerstone of a functioning, modern liberal democracy, and the recent trend of this self-censorship by big technology companies is worrying.

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

#35
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…

> Always publish on your own platform What does "your own platform" mean? Without relying on things like Tor, I don't believe it's possible to publish anything without relying on some large corporation who can pull your content with a day's notice. If not Medium, it'll be AWS or Google Cloud or your domain registrar. Anyone who cares about an open web should be, at minimum, calling out those who take down content on…

The source at least should not be on the platforms: I shouldn't need a web connection to work on my content

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

#37
Hey everyone, if you're looking for a fantastic blog engine, I want to tell you about Ghost: https://ghost.org

I found Ghost while looking for a new blog engine for my company. My first instinct was to use Medium as well, but I ended up hitting a lot of issues because it was impossible for us to customize it (add custom javascript, charts, disable the lame "highlights", custom domain was not free, etc...).

1. Ghost is open source, developed by a foundation in the open. They make their revenue open, their issue tracker, their code, everything.

2. Ghost is self-hostable, as well as hosted on a paid plan. The paid plan is a little pricy (https://ghost.org/pricing/) but I recommend it if this is for a company blog.

3. Ghost is beautiful out of the box. Here is the default theme: https://blog.ghost.org -- Here is a slightly customized theme: https://articles.hsreplay.net

4. Ghost has an excellent featureset. It's powered by Markdown and has a wonderful markdown editor in its admin/authorship interface. It also supports authors, editors, contributors, drafts, publishing schedules, tags, etc.

Seriously, try it out. I'm not affiliated, just a huge fan. I want to see more people use and support these fantastic open source tools, rather than complain about Medium like there's no alternative.

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

#39
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…

> Always publish on your own platform What does "your own platform" mean? Without relying on things like Tor, I don't believe it's possible to publish anything without relying on some large corporation who can pull your content with a day's notice. If not Medium, it'll be AWS or Google Cloud or your domain registrar. Anyone who cares about an open web should be, at minimum, calling out those who take down content on…

Your own domains are orders of magnitude safer from that in general, so I think "our own domain + content in a form we can quickly mirror to another provider" qualifies as your own platform.

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

#40

Hey everyone, if you're looking for a fantastic blog engine, I want to tell you about Ghost: https://ghost.org I found Ghost while looking for a new blog engine for my company. My first instinct was to use Medium as well, but I ended up hitting a lot of issues because it was impossible for us to customize it (add custom javascript, charts, disable the lame "highlights", custom domain was not free, etc...). 1. Ghost i…

We use ghost as well, can't say enough good things about it. Digital Ocean also has a pre-configured droplet for it that makes installation / testing pretty seamless.
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