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Medium is a poor choice for blogging

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Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#181

Post by fabrixxm »

coldtea wrote: post #117
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…

> 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...

tbh, often when I get interrupted by the "sorry to interrupt you" I just close the tab. and if I'm on mobile and link says "medium" I don't even bother to click. but that's me.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#182

Post by alanh »

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/

He took it way too far. Long lines are unreadable and 50 more bytes of CSS would fix it.

I humbly submit my own blog as being pretty darn readable without bloat. It’s responsive and simple. https://alanhogan.com

Edit: Here’s a relevant article: The problem with new blogging platforms https://alanhogan.com/the-problem-with-new-blog-platforms

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#183

Post by paraditedc »

esotericn wrote: post #119
vlaaad wrote: 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.

> Hey, I like this chair, but it's too small, do you have one that is bigger?

> Just get a smaller house.

---

> Hey, we are going to launch our product in a country that doesn't speak English but we don't have i18n ready.

> Just ask the users to use Google translate.

And you wonder why we can't have nice things.

Also, obligatory link: https://thebestmotherfucking.website

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#184

Post by eksemplar »

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 think it goes for any topic. I’ll use food as an example. I’ve been on a lot of food blogs, I end there from DuckDuckGo or google, mostly google.

I only remember a handful of them, one in particular that is now a regular bookmark of mine (it’s https://www.valdemarsro.dk and in Danish so likely uninteresting to most), and the one thing that the ones I remember have in common is that they are their own things.

I don’t think there is anything beneficial to being a medium blog for this exact reason. I may read your article, I may even really like it, but it takes more than one article to get me to stick around, and because every medium article looks the same I can easily end up reading more than one without noticing it.

Having a unique domain helps as much as having a unique look.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#186

Post by astura »

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…

> 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.

Your memory is very, very different from mine. I remember Medium being heavily criticized by (sorry, lack of a better term) "tech nerds" for stuff like the article brings up when it first came out. People complained about it not working when Javascript was disabled and bloat for a text website, load times, etc., all sorts of stuff. People said they refused to visit Medium. In fact, it was so negative I'm a bit surprised it got as popular as it did with tech blogs.

>Now, we need all kinds of tricks, add-ons and blocks to just read five-minute posts during our commute.

Only "tech nerds" care about those sorts of things. Joe User reads Medium just fine without any tricks, add-ons and blocks.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#187

Post by reaperducer »

nindwen wrote: post #132
iaml wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very annoying, but thankfully reader mode in every browser gets rid of it and every other annoyance medium has, including popups.

Reader mode is definitely a very important part of the modern web experience. A rather sad truth. I recently also found a Firefox extension [1] I'd been looking for a some time: a way to automatically enter reader mode on some URLs, such as medium.com. This makes browsing Medium much nicer. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...

a way to automatically enter reader mode on some URLs, such as medium.com

Safari has this built-in.

Enter reader mode on a web page, then right-click on the reader icon and you can set every page in the domain to automatically display in reader mode.

Safari isn't usually the first with new features, so it might be available in other browsers, as well.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#188

Post by jonahx »

coldtea wrote: post #117
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…

> 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...

You can post self-hosted articles on HN, reddit, etc. I doubt that "You might like this..." clicks on Medium would add significant eyeballs to an independent author's articles.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#189

Post by jasonlotito »

almostarockstar wrote: post #51
wpietri wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not just a platform, it's an audience. If you want to reach the audience, you have to use the platform. And the audience most in need of this message are definitely the people publishing on Medium.

Are you referring to platform generated content? The thing is, Medium doesn't do very well at that either. I have a medium blog. I've had a few posts got >10k reads within a month. Almost none of those reads came from Medium itself, but rather from the various outlets that have linked to my post, and Google. The only reason I currently use Medium is that people are more likely to open a Medium url when it shows up in…

> people are more likely to open a Medium url when it shows up in link aggregators. People trust the familiar url far more than www.mypersonalblog.me

I know this is just anecdotal, but I assume anything coming from Medium is usually less worthwhile. First, the author isn't important on a Medium article. Medium is the brand, the other is someone that doesn't matter. Secondly, it's not easy to follow the author, so even if I did read the author bio at the bottom, following the author is a pain. Finally, everything the above article mentioned. Medium articles are all about playing SEO games and "Growth hacking" before good content (literally). I'll ready Medium articles, but personal blogs are far more credible every day of the week in my book.

That being said, I would be interested in how you reached the conclusion that people are more trusting of medium articles?

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#190

Post by sarthakjain »

coldtea wrote: post #117
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…

> 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...

Medium also gets you really good seo
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