Is there anywhere you can blog under a pseudonym?
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Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories
111–120 of 255 posts
Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories
#112Earlier 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.
>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…
Thank you for that great comment.
As expected on this site, most other commenters completely missed the point of the post, engaging in the usual trivia such as markdown vs RTF. Sad!
There’s dozen or so distributed blogging platforms now, I feel we’re close to the point where 1-2 could go mainstream. Maybe by this time next year?
Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
As many others indicated, static sites are much better unless you need dynamic features. Static sites make deployments much easier, doesn't depend on any OS/runtime, doesn't lock you in to a particular database. You just write markdown and with little to no modification, the same thing could just work on Hugo, or Jekyll.
I use Jekyll; I used Hugo and Pelican in the past. They solve a very specific use case. But if you want to allow guest posting on your blog, a static site will not do. You need something that has drafts, that has a proper editor, that has a UI you can add and invite people to. Ghost solves that.
Ghost has drafts, and the editor is fine for me (plain text markdown with instant preview). I think(?) it also supports multiple logins with permission management? I feel like adding a user requires an admin (no self sign up that I know of) but other than that, I think it might do what you’re talking about.
I use ghost for my personal site and I love it. (Not that I use multiple authors.)
Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I may have to check my droplets... do you know if the upgrades automatic by chance?
Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories
#115I 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, havin…
That is a bit like saying "I never understood why people who can self-host video put it on YouTube". Most times your content will never reach a significant audience (if this is your goal), platforms like Medium/YouTube/Flickr/500px make discovery easier.
Slightly better discoverability and easier “subscriptions” are the main values of Medium for me. I find syndication ok at attracting readers to specific posts but not great at getting people to keep coming back (even with rss available).
Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
As many others indicated, static sites are much better unless you need dynamic features. Static sites make deployments much easier, doesn't depend on any OS/runtime, doesn't lock you in to a particular database. You just write markdown and with little to no modification, the same thing could just work on Hugo, or Jekyll.
I use Jekyll; I used Hugo and Pelican in the past. They solve a very specific use case. But if you want to allow guest posting on your blog, a static site will not do. You need something that has drafts, that has a proper editor, that has a UI you can add and invite people to. Ghost solves that.
Netlify CMS solved the problem you described.
Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories
#117Happy 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…
$5 USD?? Is that a typo?
That's how much a soul costs these days. Millenials love dark rituals and demonic tutoring..
Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories
#118No one even considers that Medium might be right and we might be better off without Liberapay aka Gratipay aka Gittip. May I remind you of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7844457
Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories
#119Always 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 point is there are tons of cloud hosting / self hosting / hosting over tor... Do you think piratebay would have survived a medium take down if they centralized through a service like that.
Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The paid plan is a little pricy It's literally the only problem with Ghost. Wonderful product but boy... how many people are going to pay $29/month or $228/year to host their personal blog? Yeah, there's some serious added value: managed upgrades, managed backups, DDoS protection, CDN setup, etc., and that's wonderful, but still... if you're basically just writing as a hobby, it's too much. I really hope they look…
FWIW I don't think Ghost should be used on its paid plan for personal blogs. You can host it on a droplet or AWS free tier pretty easily, otherwise you can use Github pages. I hope Ghost will at some point have a "static site generation" mode though.
You can use a droplet or AWS free tier, you'll just go offline in the "just in case" situation that your site gets hugged to death. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather not plan for failure in the event of success.
Part of the value added in SaaS like Ghost(Pro) is that the infrastructure needed to deal with traffic spikes is built-in. There really ought to be a pricing model along the lines of "I really don't expect this site to get much traffic at all, so sell me a cheap plan for day-to-day expected usage, but just in case something I write happens to go viral, I pre-approve a charge of $100 (or whatever) to deal with the traffic spike, and in case there's new sustained traffic then I'll of course upgrade to a more expensive plan which covers a higher expected rate of day-to-day traffic."
Edit: let's put it another way: if you're publishing something to the Internet, it's because you want other people to read it. You therefore want other people to actually be able to read it in the rare but foreseeable circumstance that it becomes popular. If you didn't care about that, and you were really just writing for yourself, you'd just keep an offline journal.