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Medium is a poor choice for blogging

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Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#61

Post by esotericn »

Sometimes I read articles like this and think I'm past it. It's like the whole web has turned in to this pool of mud and no-one realises what it was like before.

A blog is a text file on a screen. There's really no need to do it on a proprietary system, you can literally upload a text file to your own host, but if you can't be bothered, somewhere like GitHub Pages.

You want an image? Here's a tag:

If the idea is that it doesn't look pretty enough - well, a Medium blog doesn't look like anything at all because I've closed it after closing the first three popups.

Here is a link to my own personal blog: https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/blog.txt

You're reading this comment right now on a site that gets it right.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#62

Post by gruez »

ddevault wrote: post #11

So why the hell did you use it to write this article, then? I wrote a tool which converts your Medium blog into a Jekyll blog, for publishers hoping to migrate: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify

reminds me of all the snarky/satrical comments along the lines of

    iphone is the worst phone ever!

    -sent from my iPhone
from a decade ago

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#63

Post by lookforlight »

criddell wrote: post #31
amelius wrote: post #20

In any case, it is stupid to give one platform all the power (see YouTube). Internet should be decentralized.

There are some benefits to centralization. For example, if I want to watch a movie or TV show, I have to look for it on Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, HBO, and my cable box. I wish I could subscribe to a single mega-service that just covered everything.

I wonder if it would be possible to create a service (or if one already exist) where you could select which streaming sites you are subscribed to, and the service could search all those sites for the movie you want to watch, then redirect you to that site. Because it's hard to remember or to know which site has which movies/TV shows.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#64

Post by marpstar »

I'm glad the author mentioned the thing that I dislike most about Medium: the "share" tooltip that appears any time you highlight anything in the article. I realize that they consider this a value prop (and it certainly hasn't hurt their ability to grow) but for those of us who highlight text as we read, it's incredibly annoying.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#65

Post by opencl »

hobbescotch wrote: post #35
RobGav wrote: post #9

Best alternative are static generators like Jekyll or static CMS like Publii https://getpublii.com

Isn’t the main draw of medium the discussion? Static sites by their nature aren’t built for discussion considering the lack of a real database. Of course you could add a third party commenting system like discus, but then you relying on a third party service for comments and all the privacy and support concerns that come from that.

I think an extremely tiny minority of readers of most blogs ever leave comments.

IMO the best solution is to host your actual articles on a static site and host the discussion elsewhere with a link at the bottom of the page. Host your own forum, make a subreddit, submit links to HN, whatever.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#66

Post by criddell »

lookforlight wrote: post #63
criddell wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some benefits to centralization. For example, if I want to watch a movie or TV show, I have to look for it on Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, HBO, and my cable box. I wish I could subscribe to a single mega-service that just covered everything.

I wonder if it would be possible to create a service (or if one already exist) where you could select which streaming sites you are subscribed to, and the service could search all those sites for the movie you want to watch, then redirect you to that site. Because it's hard to remember or to know which site has which movies/TV shows.

Roku tries to do that, but it isn't super reliable and doesn't have access to everything (especially iTunes and YouTube).

There are sites that you can enter a title and it will tell you all the places it's available for streaming. I do use that once in a while, but it's still too much friction (IMHO).

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#68

Post by franciscop »

tpaschalis wrote: post #33

It's funny, because some years ago when Medium blogs were starting to be posted left and right, people were praising the interface, and nobody listened to the few who objected. Now, we need all kinds of tricks, add-ons and blocks to just read five-minute posts during our commute. It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of your stuff. The next free framework that comes, which promises a cl…

I am building my own Static Site Generator [1] similar to Jekyll for fun. It's so great to do this in 2018, compared to the first time I tried to manually build something similar around 2014. Now things are amazing, the npm libraries just seem to merge together nicely to build the whole thing.

I just need RSS and a decent data parser for the blog entries list and it'll be all set. Not recommended for you to use it, just build one, it's fun! And easy, and you'll learn a lot.

[1] https://github.com/franciscop/create-static-web

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#69

Post by int0x80 »

joeax wrote: post #42

This is an on-point rant, but what alternatives are there that combine clean, useful publishing tools with the ability to reach a wide audience? Sure I can host my own blog, but what good is it if I have no reader engagement. If there is a decent replacement, I'm all ears.

1- Host your blog.

2- Write post.

3- Post to multiple aggregators (HN, reddit, etc)

It can even be made (semi)automatic.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#70

Post by yeutterg »

marpstar wrote: post #64

I'm glad the author mentioned the thing that I dislike most about Medium: the "share" tooltip that appears any time you highlight anything in the article. I realize that they consider this a value prop (and it certainly hasn't hurt their ability to grow) but for those of us who highlight text as we read, it's incredibly annoying.

Tangentially related: Evernote Premium does this when you highlight-as-you-read on PDFs. They assume you want to annotate all the time. I would rather press a toolbar button or keyboard shortcut to bring up an annotation, like the way it works on Preview.app.
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