Live data from Hacker News

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

mastodon.xyz

171–180 of 255 posts

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

#171

I 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.

It's called syndication. You still own your stuff and still get the exposure.

Very little risk.

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

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One lightweight solution I've found great for blogs is Pelican with m.css, it's really nice and could be served even from a toaster.

Pelican? Is that a cms?

It's a static site generator: https://blog.getpelican.com

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

#174
post #59

This is why I use Publii https://getpublii.com It's open source, free static CMS with GUI and free themes. You can easily sync your website with Netlify, GitHub Pages, Google Cloud, S3 or SFTP.

Is there a facility that Publii supports, to easily sync locally, before an edit/push (eg if you are using different client systems a lot), either with Google Drive or Git (preferably) ?

I never saw this feature listed when looking at Publii, which kept me from trying it.

Note, please don't say just sync down from the server before doing anything locally; I don't want that to be the point of record. I'd rather that be Git.

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

#175
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…

You're not missing much. The content on medium is consistently low quality.

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

#176
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Publii is fishy, they dont have public repos

Fishy? :) Next month should be released the first stable version with rewriten backend (based on Vue) and GitHub repo.

Are there any plans for Linux release?

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

#177
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If more speech was the remedy to hate speech, then we would expect platforms with the most speech and least censorship would have the least hate. But compare well moderated social discussion sites like MetaFilter, HN, Fark to "anything goes" places like Twitter, 4chan, Reddit, etc. and the opposite is true.

What is hate speech, given it’s been systematically used to censor political opponents...

It's whatever the people who are not in power say it is.

Which doesn't make the concept any more valid than if the opposite were true.

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

#178
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always afraid that those free services start to change their policies and suddenly your site doesn't work without you knowing. The 60 cents for hosting it somewhere I have a business relationship with, rather than a simple ToS, are easily worth it.

Then setup a monitor: https://uptimerobot.com/ If they change the ToS then move. That's the great thing about static sites, you just plonk it anywhere and you're good to go.

Maybe the 56 cents is worth more for them than the possibility of some hours of downtime to set up the site on another server.

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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 Cloudflare in front with aggressive caching? What you're generating essentially is a static site, so it's safe to do that. If your S3 static site gets hugged to death, you won't go offline but you will pay an unexpectedly larger bill, so you should be setting up Cloudflare in front eith…

But that's no longer (non-technical) user friendly. Ghost is on the other end where they host it for you and if you get reddit or hn hugged it's still going to take your site offline, you just won't pay for it, but you get a pretty heavy charge for the convenience. None of these solutions would work for me.

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Democracy. Real democracy....dies.

I disagree -- I think what we saw in 2016 was democracy. We saw the effect of giving stupid people the same amount of political power as everyone else.

It's indisputable that some people are more easily gathered and led than others. We can borrow the term "network effect" to describe how these people come to wield excessive power in a democracy. But these voters don't serve their own interests. They are the players in a competition among billionaires, religious leaders, and state-level actors to see who can raise the biggest army of intellectual zombies and herd them to the polls.

At some point there will have to be a conversation about how sustainable this practice is.

Post reply on HN