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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

#71

Post by Retr0spectrum »

gnbfulbvgjbvv wrote: post #63
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…

What about github pages plus cloudflare? 100% free

That doesn't really solve the problem, it just moves it to github. At least you have a clearer path to move your content to another platform, if needed.

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

#72

Post by minimaxir »

rcthompson wrote: post #67
minimaxir wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medium has a policy on cryptocurrency? Given the amount of problematic thought pieces submitted to HN from it (and the no-so-subtle advertisements for the author’s own crypto), you wouldn’t know it.

Here's the post where they quote the message Medium sent them: https://mastodon.xyz/@Liberapay/99744414079487371 And here's the policy page it links to: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000646167

Ah, that policy page was added a week ago (the update date is visible on the mobile site). Even if that policy was violated, it’s a jerk move to ban for infractions prior to that date.

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

#73

Post by srslack »

pjc50 wrote: post #45
srslack wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> more speech, not less When speech can be automated, this turns into a question of who has the largest promotional bot army. True speech can be drowned out with an infinite array of conflicting lies.

If we go by your definition, "true speech" is always intended to persuade others of your opinions or positions. I don't believe that to be the case.

Your reference to the last presidential election is nonsensical, if you're attempting to claim that the Democratic candidate lost because of a few hundred thousand dollars in ad buys and thousands of Twitter bots. Clinton lost because the campaign was clumsy when it came to image management (which you really need when it comes to the skeletons surrounding both her and her husband), and the campaign ignored flyover states and the electoral college, and even outright insulted voters. You can't rely on California to get elected, sorry.

The real victim, when bots run rampant, is platforms. Not democracies.

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

#74

Post by froindt »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #66
scrollaway wrote: post #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 i…

I'll add my recommendation here too. You can get going with it over at digital ocean with one of their single click images, whatever you call them, and run it fine for $5-$10 per month. I recommend $10, but I believe it'll still install and run fine for low traffic sites on the cheapest tier. It's also really easy to install yourself. They've done a great job on it all around. If you have a blog, give it a shot. It's…

DO recently upped their specs. Now you get 1 GB ram for $5/month, which are the specs of their previous $10/month tier. I'm going through this weekend and switching my $10 instance to a $5.

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

#75

Post by markbnj »

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.

I've got access to GCP and AWS, and a private account at a VPS provider with a server I can put anything on, and I still publish technical articles on medium for the simple reason that I get far more readers than I do when writing on my own blog.

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

#76

Post by Zak »

tinalumfoil wrote: post #31
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…

> 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…

Domain registrars are orders of magnitude less likely to censor content than user-generated content sites. Hosting providers vary on this issue, but they're a commodity and some do take a hard non-censorship line.

I agree we should call out sites for censorship, but there's a strong case for people taking more control over their publishing.

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

#77

Post by Zak »

pmarreck wrote: post #28
forgotmypw wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are some use cases for which SPAs are a huge leap forward, greatly improving the user experience. A lot of modern web applications don't and shouldn't behave like a collection of pages, after all.

A blog is not one of these use cases; it is exactly a collection of pages.

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

#78

Post by ryandrake »

It's getting harder and harder for me to muster any sympathy for these "Company X suspended my account and now I can't do Y" sob stories. As long as it's not your server, running software you control, you are taking the risk that whoever is providing that service will go out of business, capriciously close your account, censor you, ban you, etc., whether or not you're paying for it. Moreover, if your business actually relies on this service and you haven't accounted for this risk or prepared a mitigation plan? WTF!

How many examples of this happening do we need before we start acknowledging and taking the risk seriously, rather than crying about it after it happens? The sooner self-hosting comes back into fashion, the better.

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

#79

Post by ChicagoDave »

srslack wrote: post #73
pjc50 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more speech, not less When speech can be automated, this turns into a question of who has the largest promotional bot army. True speech can be drowned out with an infinite array of conflicting lies.

If we go by your definition, "true speech" is always intended to persuade others of your opinions or positions. I don't believe that to be the case. Your reference to the last presidential election is nonsensical, if you're attempting to claim that the Democratic candidate lost because of a few hundred thousand dollars in ad buys and thousands of Twitter bots. Clinton lost because the campaign was clumsy when it came…

Clinton certainly didn’t help her cause, but psychographic warfare absolutely had an impact, even if it’s not measureable.

Ads/Stories were put in front of micro-targeted social media recipients with one of two goals.

Increase fear/anger on right so people would vote.

Increase apathy/disgust on left and with independents to discourage them from voting or to vote for a third party.

If you micro-target even the smallest group of people thousands of times, the emotional impact will lead to some percentage of success.

That small percentage may absolutely have turned the election.

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