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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

#131

Post by x0x0 »

scrollaway wrote: post #109
alpb wrote: post #103

Earlier 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.

We use butter [1] for that, and we're liking the product so far. The various nontechnical people (ceo, writers) have been fine with it. Butter build and distribute a gem that just drops into rails and displays your posts. You have to style it, but you get the erb files.

They do have some support for local caching, but investigating that is on my todo list.

One big upside of this design is seo: your blog isn't on blog.domain.com, but wherever you want it on your main site.

[1] https://buttercms.com/

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

#132

Post by neya »

scrollaway wrote: post #109
alpb wrote: post #103

Earlier 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 + Jekyll can get this done with some amount of customization. Static, but using Netlify's identity service. This has worked well for me for many clients.

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

#133

Post by lazycouchpotato »

fyfy18 wrote: post #84
ssimpson wrote: post #43

Static site generator + static site hosting + JavaScript based comment system like disqus is a great combo. You can generate in a container off markdown using something like Hugo and host on S3. I’ve got free tier werker pulling my repo, building it, then deploying it to CloudFiles. All I do is commit the markdown changes to github.

If you are concerned about the privacy of your readers, using Disqus probably isn't such a good idea: https://replyable.com/2017/03/disqus-is-your-data-worth-trad...

Disqus isn't the best with security either.

https://blog.disqus.com/security-alert-user-info-breach

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

#134

Post by bookofjoe »

Am I the last TypePad user? I never see it mentioned anywhere, including this entire comment thread. Based on my blog traffic in recent years, it would appear that, like De Niro rants in "The Deer Hunter" — "I'm the only one here."

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

#136

Post by ChicagoDave »

rock_hard wrote: post #104
ChicagoDave wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 smalles…

Have we seen proof for this to be the case? I see people make that argument all the time...it’s a good sounding hypothesis...but does it actually work? Is there data that shows that this was done and that it was impactful?

It's hard to measure this in hindsight. Someone would have to do a controlled study.

That said, Given the number of voters that stayed home in 2016 (over 10% in the key states of WI, MI, OH, and PA) and the number of people who voted "against Clinton" suggests it was highly effective.

Cambridge Analytica and similar firms have a data set of how emotions can impact certain kinds of people. They have openly admitted they do this for conservative causes. Their patent company is seeded financially by some of the most conservative people with wealth and now we know they are also supported by conservative British politicians.

This is a massive conspiracy to undermine governments that are supposed to be for and by the people. This is what happens when dark money is allowed unfettered access to elections.

Democracy. Real democracy....dies.

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

#137

Post by shaqbert »

scrollaway wrote: post #109
alpb wrote: post #103

Earlier 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.

You need a headless CMS like Contentful[0]. They have a free developer tier which is great for static sites, especially when you pair it with the super awesome React based static site generator GatsbyJS[1].

[0]: https://www.contentful.com/ [1]: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/gatsby-starters/

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

#138

Post by intopieces »

Zak wrote: post #70
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.

Suppressing an automated service disruption or preventing the spread of spam is different from policing content on topical or ideological grounds. Looking at reddit as an example, I don't like where this is headed. First they came for pedos and creepers, and I said nothing because ewww. Then they came for assholes and trolls, and I said nothing because good riddance. Now they've come for gun coupons, and I don't want…

>I don't want to flee to Voat because it's dominated by assholes and trolls.

It’s exactly this sentiment that prompts services like Reddit to censor. They need users; it’s no use being a bastion of free speech if you are hemorrhaging ad dollars because assholes and trolls ruin your platform.

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

#139

Post by xab9 »

I never liked medium, their comment UX is weird and annoying, the whole thing is just faceless, brandless and feels generic.

Mabye I'm old, but I find shared hosting with one click deployment of wordpress a better choice, but heck, most of the blogs I end up reading nowdays are tech blogs written by bright people who for some reason will not

1. deploy an existing blog engine to a shared host

2. host a blog on a vps

3. write a rudimentary blog engine

4. write a static generator (how much time could that be? a day?)

Yep, searching may be tricky, especially with rendered sites, but it's doable and I literally never used the search function on medium... but whatever. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.

If you really want to publish something and you're a lazy bum, just throw up a github repo, or a gist, it's still 100% more flexible than medium.

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

#140

Post by chiefalchemist »

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…

Agreed. But I think you can do both. That is have your own self-hosted and then __occasionally__ do a Medium post for audience, etc.

If it helps, envision Medium as a social network. You share to FB, TW, etc. Medium would be a slightly longer post.

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