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Medium is a poor choice for blogging

medium.com

151–160 of 396 posts

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#151
Honestly I don't bother with Wordpress and the like anymore.

I simply write what I want to publish in org-mode then export it to HTML or PDF and that's it...

My data is no longer tied to anything like a database or some specific framework so its easier for backups and moving it to new servers when needed.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#154
post #93

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 lo…

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Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#155

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…

15 years ago there were plenty of people paying $5 a month for shared hosting FTPing hand made HTML over. Now it is way easier and even tech people aren't hosting their own in general which is bad. Right now there are great JAM stacks out there. You could have your markdown formatted content in Git, rendered by Hugo, and then pushed to Cloudfront backed S3 for literally pennies a month and CDN'ed all around the world but hardly anyone does it. As tech people I think we are the most to blame posting to Medium because it is technologically easier than ever before to self host, yet most are too lazy.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#156
post #43
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github Pages + something like disqus if you need comments? Add in a simple enough theme like http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ , and that'll probably do the job. The main downside is having to use social media for discovery, but in that regard it doesn't sound too much worse than medium by your reckoning. You can even use your own domain. Myself, I'm using a VPS (5€ a month, but 10€ a year goes to the OpenBSD fo…

Disqus is really bad in terms of privacy of users [0] (that article was from 2014, now I guess it's on par with most other sites). I'm not really sure what the answer is as if it's going to work on a static site, the comments need some sort of backend. Most people aren't going to host it themselves, so that leads to these issues, as nobody will pay for a commenting system. [0] https://chrislema.com/killed-disqus-comm…

> nobody will pay for a commenting system

What if it costs $0 per year, if one gets (I'm developing a no-tracking and no-ads commenting system, + open source, SaaS hosting, link in my profile.)

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#157

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…

> It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of your stuff. But zero ways to get people to read it. I only read his post because it's on HN. And I read Medium stuff regularly on Medium. The chances of most people discovering some random blog? Not so much. Whereas Medium has concentrated eyeballs and knows their preferences to serve them stuff that's close to their tastes...

Nothing prevents you from hosting your content on your domain and publish it also on medium, blogger and all other kind of platforms.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#158
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that it still has tracking and is painful to read on the desktop because of full-width lines of text.

On the latter point, just resize the browser window. Pow, you have a choice about how wide the lines are.

I know people keep saying this, but resizing the browser is not really a viable solution with today's messed up web. Sure, I can resize the browser for this blog using full width lines but then I have to resize my browser again for another website because the other website chooses to waste half of the horizontal real estate with meaningless stuff. As a user, I can't keep resizing the browser for every site I visit.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#159
post #93

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 lo…

Medium also liberates writers from social stuff. It has claps, comments, etc, but also when you share a Medium article on Twitter or Facebook you have all the meta-tags to make it look good.

Also, no infrastructure headaches either.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our data doesn't support that. Most of our traffic comes from hackernews, reddit and similar. However because our blog is too niche? https://medium.com/@buckaroo.pm

You’re discounting the security/authority that “medium.com” brings over a random domain name. You might get less traffic from HN and Reddit if you weren’t on Medium. Edit: just because a few people (myself included) have a negative reaction to a Medium link doesn’t change the fact that many Medium links are upvoted on HN.

Doubtful. I for one am less likely to click medium links because I know they'll be more bloated on average than the average person's self-hosted blog.
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