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Medium is a poor choice for blogging

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Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#231

Post by tpaschalis »

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…

Oh, and since everybody seems to post their personal blogs for critique, shameless plug in adding a link to my own, which I think gets the minimalism aesthetic sooomewhat right.

It still needs some more slimming down, and small aesthetic changes would be welcome, but here it goes.

[1] https://tpaschalis.github.io/

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#232

Post by esotericn »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #209
esotericn wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page. max-width: a bunch of ems;

Okay, so on my screen that means 80% of the window is whitespace and it burns my eyes. background-color: black, I guess?

Responsive design is a thing, yes, but ultimately on a desktop computer you're always going to be able to choose a browser size that breaks a site.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#234

Post by joeax »

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.

Ha! I've tried that. Write an article and post to HN, then watch it fall off the New page in 20 minutes without a single vote. I'm sure one day I'll crack the code, but for me, engagement is hard. For all its faults, Medium provides an instant audience with feedback/commenting mechanisms.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#235

Post by Alex3917 »

danShumway wrote: post #222
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...

> I only read his post because it's on HN. And I read Medium stuff regularly on Medium. I totally get where you're coming from, but I'm not convinced that Medium helps at all. I mean, this article was posted to Medium. Medium didn't put it in front of you. So how is Medium helping? I used to cross-post everything I wrote to Medium, because I thought it was a good reader acquisition strategy. But posting on Medium doe…

> I mean, this article was posted to Medium. Medium didn't put it in front of you. So how is Medium helping?

Medium has a ton of recirc features that drive page views within the ecosystem. That is the entire reason why Ev started Medium, it wasn't about giving people better typography or whatever.

The reason the product is kind of messed up is because they made some financing decisions that may have not been correct in retrospect, so now they've had to go back and try to retroactively design the product to match their capital structure. But it's not like they wouldn't have had tons of other problems if they were bootstrapped, the reality is there just aren't any good financing options for consumer web startups right now.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#236

Post by TeMPOraL »

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...

HN, Reddit, social media. You read this post because someone posted it here.

Getting other people to read your post is as difficult as getting other people to read other people's content - you post it where you frequent, and if people like it, they'll reshare it. Building a larger audience requires work, and any attempt at cheating that is unsustainable at scale.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#237

Post by type0 »

gus_massa wrote: post #229
wild_preference wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really are. Does HN not do anything against accounts that so obviously advertise?

The mods can't see everything. It depends how evident it is and if the comments are relevant [1] and if the if the only purpose of the user is to make adds. My guess is that this user only makes a comment per month, so it's not so easy to remember. For an official reply, you can send an email to the mods hn@ycombinator.com and they can take a look at the history of comments of the user. [For example, this is an examp…

I agree. I'm okay with people promoting their stuff as long as it fits in the discussion and has proper disclosure that it's their project. But it's not very nice when almost every post is like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16961492

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18032223

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16400684

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#238

Post by s17n »

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...

No they don't. If you want your Medium post to get read you have to promote it on HN, reddit, facebook, twitter, etc exactly as you would with a self-hosted post.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#240

Post by chaostheory »

danShumway wrote: post #222
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...

> I only read his post because it's on HN. And I read Medium stuff regularly on Medium. I totally get where you're coming from, but I'm not convinced that Medium helps at all. I mean, this article was posted to Medium. Medium didn't put it in front of you. So how is Medium helping? I used to cross-post everything I wrote to Medium, because I thought it was a good reader acquisition strategy. But posting on Medium doe…

> Medium didn't put it in front of you.

It does through emails and their homepage, which is one major reason people publish on Medium despite the downsides

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