Medium is a poor choice for blogging • Hacker News Board

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#91

Post by how_to_bake » Tue, Nov 13, 2018, 3:38 PM UTC

harveylord wrote: post #10

bko wrote: post #6

Pretty convincing. I didn't notice how bad medium was since I'm always logged in and have an ad-blocker. I also don't think they do much in terms of discovery. My blog [0] has about 370 followers and my posts only get about 10 - 20 views unless I put them on social media. Then they'll get between 100 and 10k+. Does anyone have experience with an alternative platform? Preferably free and hosted. [0] https://medium.com…

There is a freemium service called Write.as [0]. It might not be the exactly same kind of thing as Medium, but, personally, I appreciate its ultra-simplicity. Since I have never went as far as starting my own blog, I occasionally host text content there that I want to share. [0] www.write.as

According to the creator's blog, he intends to complete a whole suite of products that all work together.

As of now, normal people will have difficulty understanding how Read.as, Write.as, Snap.as all work together.

Looking forward to when I can get a full Facebook replacement for like $3/month subscription.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#92

Post by crazygringo » Tue, Nov 13, 2018, 3:38 PM UTC

No site has perfect UX, but some of these complaints don't seem true, e.g.:

> No, those do not go away as you scroll. They literally (yes, literally) take up 25% of your vertical space

On my computer the bars do go away the instant I scroll down (Chrome on a Mac, and logged-in, not sure if those matter), and 25% is a made-up exaggerated number for a window the author has made much shorter than any reasonable person would be browsing with, even on a small laptop.

Yes, Medium strongly nudges you to have an account and be logged-in, and if you do a lot of the other complaints go away. Because it's inherently a social blogging platform, not a static blogging platform. And the social aspect helps spread your audience and build engagement... that doesn't make it a "poor choice". To the contrary, it's a great choice to have.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#93

Post by jypepin » Tue, Nov 13, 2018, 3:38 PM UTC

I'm amazed at how many people here say that people should simply use a static site generator instead of wordpress or medium.

Does anyone else understand that probably 99% of Medium traffic (both reader and writer) don't even understand those words and would have no idea even where to begin? Most of them probably had trouble just signing up on Medium and already forgot their passwords.

This is where Medium wins. It looks ok, makes posts look professional, and doesn't give any choices. You don't have to choose a theme, or setup anything. Signup (or even, login with twitter/facebook) and just write. Done.

You can't possibly hope that any writer on Medium is ready or interested in a static site generator.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#94

Post by briandear » Tue, Nov 13, 2018, 3:39 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #62

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

Is anyone aware that using code formatting for non-code is extremely annoying because, on mobile, it’s almost impossible to read because of the necessity to side scroll.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#95

Post by onemoresoop » Tue, Nov 13, 2018, 3:39 PM UTC

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.

Same here, highlighting the text helps me keep track of the paragraph i'm reading and I was annoyed by this feature as well. On a related note, I've been looking for a plugin that highlights lines/paragraphs of text and is controlled by the cursor keys up/down (for desktop viewing only) but haven't been able to find such a thing yet. I keep on hoping that one day somebody would come up with such a thing.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#96

Post by msadowski » Tue, Nov 13, 2018, 3:39 PM UTC

I started modestly blogging on Medium in 2016. The same year I moved away from the platform to a Github Pages + Jekyll combo (https://msadowski.github.io/). I'd never go back to hosting my content on external platform.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#97

Post by vanderZwan » Tue, Nov 13, 2018, 3:40 PM UTC

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…

Depending on how simple you want it, you could just use MarkDeep, TexMe or MdMe plus something like NeoCities or a Github repo. You'd miss out on some benefits of a full generator, like automatically creating an archive page and RSS feeds and stuff like that, but you'd gain that 90's simplicity.

[0] https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/

[1] https://github.com/susam/texme

[2] https://github.com/susam/mdme

[3] https://neocities.org/

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#98

Post by chenshuiluke » Tue, Nov 13, 2018, 3:40 PM UTC

Do any of you guys know how I can downvote posts or let Medium know that I'm not interested in having articles like x on my feed?

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#99

Post by maxxxxx » Tue, Nov 13, 2018, 3:40 PM UTC

tpaschalis wrote: post #83

esotericn wrote: post #61

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…

Yes, this a thousand times. One example, Dan Luu [1] gets this absolutely right . His blog would probably look similar on Lynx, or any text-only browser, yet is better than 99.99% of stuff "out there". [1] https://danluu.com/

It's funny how something as old fashioned as this blog feels like a breath of fresh air.

That's how Google design used to be but is not anymore.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#100

Post by how_to_bake » Tue, Nov 13, 2018, 3:40 PM UTC

arkitaip wrote: post #72

gureddio wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm expecting downvotes, but self hosted wordpress could work for you.

Unfortunately you got downvoted because HN is obsessed with static site generators. Meanwhile, Wordpress offers a superior writing and reading experience which you, the owner, totally control.

Wordpress seems to be objectively bloated and messy in terms of the website code that is generated. You can run wordpress blogs through a website speed analyzer and compare it with a static gen site and see this.

The "hate" isn't based solely on being hip.