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Medium is a poor choice for blogging

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Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#161

Post by detaro »

keiferski wrote: post #144
entelechy wrote: post #139

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.

At least for me and some other people, medium.com is a negative signal of quality. Medium is full of low-quality and marketing articles, I'll associate your links with that, and me only seeing "medium.com" on e.g. HN means you don't have a chance of establishing a "brand" I trust by recognizing your domain as "good" after a few articles.

EDIT: adressing your edit, do you have any evidence they wouldn't be if they weren't on medium.com?

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#162

Post by guelo »

keiferski wrote: post #144
entelechy wrote: post #139

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.

I doubt that has any value. People blindly click things mostly based on the headline and the fact that it has been upvoted.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#163

Post by esotericn »

foo101 wrote: post #158
esotericn wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh.

I have a 40in monitor, a 13in monitor, and a 7in monitor.

It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page.

On the 40in screen it would be asinine for me to maximise it, for example.

It's completely unsurprising to me that I can resize the window into a state where the website becomes silly. I just don't do that.

Resizing a window is trivial, it's not that you can't, it's that you won't.

edit: Obviously I know what responsive design is. I'm on Hacker News. The author hasn't done it (probably because they have better things to do), you have a trivial option to work around it.

The contrast to be drawn is with a site like Medium that deliberately goes out of its' way to be annoying and harder to use for some vague profitability goal.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#164

Post by athenot »

petetnt wrote: post #118
tpaschalis wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

On my regular browser size this looks something like this [1], which is borderline unreadable due to the width alone. Sure I can resize the browser at least, but even then I am finding the posts hard to read due to the font-size, letter spacing and line-height. The browser default styles did work perfectly in the 90's, but they didn't evolve when the devices use to browse the pages did. And yes, you can always use Ly…

Here's the thing: your browser has a handy tool to increase/decrease font size. Usually it will also scale the images in sensible ways. And it's available via keyboard shortcuts, so it's easy to zoom in/out.

Also this format works great with the browser's "Reader" function.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#165

Post by foo101 »

int0x80 wrote: post #69
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.

I have found Reddit to be a very hostile place to post content. You post your blog post. Regardless of how much hard work you put into your content, the first few comments on Reddit are going to be a snarky one that attacks some trivial point and adds nothing to the discussion. I don't know why people do that.

HN, on the other hand, feels like a more matured community. Any other such matured communities where one can feel comfortable about posting their blog posts?

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#166

Post by indogooner »

wlesieutre wrote: post #148
coldtea wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Do many people browse Medium like this? I read a decent number of posts there, but only because someone sends me a link or shared it on another platform.

Yeah but maybe (cannot be sure on this) other people are sharing the links because they browse Medium

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#168

Post by djmashko2 »

ymolodtsov wrote: post #125
coldtea wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

That’s actually a great question — does Medium truly gives you that many readers that it makes sense to live in the closed ecosystem? I have its app installed and subscribed to a bunch of people but I still only go there via the links on the web and I feel like a lot of people do just like me.

As some anecdotal evidence, I get about half of my Medium views from people browsing the Medium app/feed. That's definitely been the number one reason I've stayed on the platform.

Perhaps someone should develop a platform that creates the same discoverability, but while allowing people to retain control of the content?

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#169

Post by thomasfedb »

jypepin wrote: 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…

Maybe a middle ground that could work is Ghost? I use their hosted service and it works well.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#170

Post by asdff »

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…

> It's like the whole web has turned in to this pool of mud and no-one realises what it was like before.

Every website is trying to reinvent the wheel. Foolish! I hate the grid/huge amount of white space layout that is so pervasive now. Websites that have their information in a nice and clean, condensed list view are unicorns now. Condensed lists are literally the best layout to convey information in a given space, take a look at how outlook or apple mail gives you the exact same information in their super condensed list views as they do in the 'mobile friendly' expanded view, except they give you much more information at a time without having to endlessly scroll. It would be acceptable if I was literally using my elbow to tap on a touchscreen, but I'm using a mouse and keyboard and I can comfortably click on something 10 pixels wide.

Take a look at any of the half dozen or so food delivery service websites. On my 13" screen on grubhub, I can see 5 search results at a time. 5! Each result takes up 1 full inch of screen real estate when it could be one single line of text. If it was single spaced, that would be 40 lines and therefore 40 results I could view at a time. But because the modern web is designed to be accommodating for a 500lb gorilla to poke at a touchscreen, I have to deal with only being able to see 1/8 the information that I could potentially see.

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