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Medium is a poor choice for blogging

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Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#241

Post by TeMPOraL »

Confiks wrote: post #174
wlesieutre wrote: post #148

Earlier 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.

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'.

> Perhaps we're only an inch away from 'article autoplay'.

Have you ever seen news sites that let you seamlessly scroll to the next article, by dynamically appending it at the bottom of the one you're reading, and updating your URL as you enter it? The ones where it's ridiculously easy to get lost, because scroll space keeps expanding (sometimes both ways) and the URL keeps changing?

Someone's gonna figure out soon that the code for loading those articles could use a recommendation engine.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#243

Post by sctb »

RobGav wrote: post #71
sodosopa wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Jekyll and Forestry.io for my site but I’m also realistic and know that solution is a little too complicated for a lot of WordPress and Tumblr folks. The uptake in these tools are because of their simplicity, which honestly the design patterns haven’t changed in almost 20 years.

There is a great solution Publii - works like WordPress but generated static files. Great tool for beginners or developers. https://getpublii.com

We've banned this account for spamming, but if you'd like to participate as intended you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#244

Post by sctb »

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…

Yes! All: please email us when you see stuff like this. We read emails.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#245

Post by basch »

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…

if you just need to publish something quick, and don't need the rest of the blogging features.

https://telegra.ph/

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#246

Post by sebringj »

Maybe a different paradigm to blogging would be bring your own cloud, put in your cloud creds, then it does the beauty work for you in publishing static stuff to those cloud providers like AWS S3. You just pay a minimal fee to use it ad hoc or something as you would need a way to keep it running. Wouldn't need to store creds, just client-side signing to upload. It then updates its "home page" to list your articles recently for SEO. Have community plugins etc you can use etc. Kind of like a modern wordpress but without the terrible code. I don't have time to do this but thought it might be a good idea to flip it based on what we have now. I guess an issue could be broken links if people flop on their cloud payments but seems pretty light weight to build.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#247

Post by PavlovsCat »

esotericn wrote: post #232
PavlovsCat wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Apart from calibrating the room lighting and monitor brightness, one can still have a dark background for the body but not for the wrapper that has max-size on it.

E.g. http://camendesign.com/ here you would have white that burns your eyes if it was done without max-size, as is it's much better. [edit: just noticed that blog actually doesn't use max-size, it doesn't shrink; but it easily could]

> 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.

Only if you make it too small.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#248

Post by drdeadringer »

FiveSquared wrote: post #221
gerbilly wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> except they give you much more information at a time without having to endlessly scroll. I think getting people to scroll isn't an accident, they want you to have to scroll. Scrolling a website makes you physically interact with it, and I bet that has some psychological effects that work out in favour of the content creators. Whenever I am in a place where you have to wait a lot, like at a bus station, nearly every…

But who tf wants to wait for a bus? And its hella awkward talking to strangers.

That's why they are scrolling on a phone or tablet.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#249

Post by smacktoward »

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...

> I only read his post because it's on HN.

Well, yeah, but a post on a self-hosted blog can be posted to HN just as easily as a post on Medium can. And it's not like having "(medium.com)" next to the submission is going to drive upvotes any more than having "(yourdomain.xyz)" would. (For me it actually has the opposite effect; there's so much empty "thought-leader" drivel posted at Medium that seeing that domain next to an HN submission makes me less likely to click through.)

So I guess the question becomes: does Medium function well enough as an aggregator of its own content to make posting there worth the tradeoffs? Does it drive enough traffic from other Medium readers to your own Medium posts to justify giving up everything you have to give up to use the platform? (That's the theory behind Medium, of course, but what I'm wondering is how well it actually works in practice.)

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#250

Post by type0 »

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…

Do medium posts show up more often as a search engine result? This has to be the same sort of reason some SEO "optimizers" use amazonaws.com domain to put their spammy blogs because the domain itself has some weight that is crucial for search discoverability.
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