Does anyone else believes that social publishing should be operated by a non-profit foundation - in an open-source sort of way both for the use of tech (be that Ghost, Hugo, or whatnot) and for the social review/promotion/editing apparatus?
Medium is a poor choice for blogging
171–180 of 396 posts
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#172I just use Hugo for my personal blog. I use medium to post snippets to help attract traffic.
I have taken it a step further.
I started with Blogger (blogspot), then Medium, then Jekyll, then Hugo. Even with self hosted Jekyll/Hugo, I never felt comfortable about the tooling dictating how my directory structure should be.
Now I have my own static site generator written in Python. It is based on https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite that was posted to HN sometime back.
What I like about generating my blog with pure Python is that I can control every aspect of my blog just the way I want it.
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#173Sometimes 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…
"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: " Don't be surprised if someone has this "idea" soon and makes a killing with it. A lot of people seem to get tired with the current stream of "innovation" that makes the web slowe…
Already happened. ~ clubs.
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#174Earlier 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.
I think the main avenue for exploration in Medium are the article recommendations at the bottom of the page, above the comments.
I personally rarely click on them, but I can imagine some titles can be hard to resist. That make interaction-driven recommendations, which are becoming the dominant way of content exploration, a bit of a dark pattern.
Perhaps we're only an inch away from 'article autoplay'.
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#175Earlier 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.
The "See also" links at the end of Medium posts, and the weekly "interesting for you" mail list were rather relevant to me, that is, often had links I was willing to click, and under those, sometimes were articles I was willing to read.
I stopped doing both, though: you can't read too much for free, but more than half of the content was not worth reading (for me), except maybe for quick skimming. There definitely are articles on Medium that are gems (again, from my POV), but I hope them to be brought to me by social networks anyway.
For authors, though, Medium must be pretty valuable, bringing relevant readers, and maybe some ad revenue. It does have a discovery feature which may be not brilliantly great, but is still quite OK, especially if you have time to spend on lighter reading.
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Good point, that would be tough to measure.
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#177Disabling JavaScript and cookies for medium.com domain, and a bunch of uBlock rules [1] should do the job [1] Here's mine: medium.com##.metabar medium.com##.js-stickyFooter medium.com##.js-postAttributionFooterContainer medium.com##.js-postActionsFooter .buttonSet medium.com##.button--follow
There are also dedicated extensions for this [0] [0]: https://makemediumreadable.com
Thank you for this.
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#178Earlier 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.
Just have your narrow width as your second browser size. One double click on the tab bar in firefox and you are there. I have a big monitor too but I kinda hate full screen browser windows just because no website is really made for it. Either the line width gets out of control, or it just wraps anyway and I have two huge swaths of blank space on each side of the content.
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#179Earlier 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.
For real? For me, the Medium domain signals a high likelihood that the piece is poorly written and entirely unedited.
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#180It'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…
Noone reads my blog anyway, but I also import my posts into Medium so people can read it there if they choose. Medium sets the canonical URL to the hosted version on my own site so SEO shouldn't take a hit.