Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Medium is a poor choice for blogging

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 396 posts

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#261

Post by QML »

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...

Two years ago, I used to spend a lot of my free time browsing Medium, reading articles I otherwise would’ve never discovered. Now? Not so much the case—maybe it’s the degradation in quality or the number of badly written articles.

Maybe what we need for blogs isn’t a platform, where authors come on and content is hosted centrally; but an aggregator, where each author self hosts but content is still discoverable by a wider audience.

A good example of this would be Apple news.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#262

Post by type0 »

foo101 wrote: post #165
int0x80 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have seen a couple of good discussions on Lobste.rs The number of users is not very big- they're invite only. I know that some HN regulars are posting there so maybe you could ask for invite here or head over to their IRC and then try it out. I don't use it myself, HN is big enough time sink as it is.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#263

Post by superkuh »

amelius wrote: post #20

In any case, it is stupid to give one platform all the power (see YouTube). Internet should be decentralized.

Yup. These days most people have fast connections. Hosting your personal website from your home should be the default. Huge amount of storage, no changing terms of service, no perverse profit incentives, no third party doctorine problems, no deplatforming problems, and it cuts the gordian knot of deciding what is allowed and what isn't. Then people can associate however they want.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#264

Post by djhworld »

I think medium has some cool features like the "claps", comment boxes and story analytics. There's a lot of stuff that that just works out of the box

However I really dislike syndicating my blog to it because the formatting is so limited. You cannot do bullet point lists for example, which makes it a huge pain having to tinker with your existing post to reformat it for medium.

Nowadays I just syndicate an introduction to the post and a "click here to continue reading" hyperlink to my actual blog. Which is a rubbish experience for Medium users.

I'm wondering if there's a decentralised version of a blogging network, where users host their blog themselves, with the social features like claps/comments wrapped around it, plus a bit of a 'recommendation' system for other posts in the network to get that network of writers feel.

I know disqus exists but it's not quite the same

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#265

Post by coldtea »

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 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?

Medium put it in fronts of tons of other people though -- someone of which posted it here.

And I discover posts on Medium alone every day.

Plus, Medium posts don't feel like a wasteland -- they have a healthy number of comments.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#267

Post by wpietri »

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…

I am not. I'm just saying it's a platform for publishing in the same way HN is. If I want to reach Medium users, I'd post on medium. If I want to reach HN users, I post here.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#268

Post by supermdguy »

djhworld wrote: post #264

I think medium has some cool features like the "claps", comment boxes and story analytics. There's a lot of stuff that that just works out of the box However I really dislike syndicating my blog to it because the formatting is so limited. You cannot do bullet point lists for example, which makes it a huge pain having to tinker with your existing post to reformat it for medium. Nowadays I just syndicate an introductio…

You actually can do bullet points if you type '*' or '-' and then a space. For some reason, they have a few markdown-like formatting features that aren't shown in the popup editing bar.

Also, about the recommendation system for self-hosted content, I've seen a few sites that link to HN or Reddit for comments. Upvotes can stand in for "claps", and posting on HN or Reddit makes your article discoverable.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#269

Post by akho »

specialp wrote: post #155
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…

15 years ago there were plenty of people paying $5 a month for shared hosting FTPing hand made HTML over. Now it is way easier and even tech people aren't hosting their own in general which is bad. Right now there are great JAM stacks out there. You could have your markdown formatted content in Git, rendered by Hugo, and then pushed to Cloudfront backed S3 for literally pennies a month and CDN'ed all around the world…

FTPing HTML was infinitely easier than Git+Hugo+S3+Cloudfront.

And even if you can somehow cut through all the complexity of modern hosting — you still have to make those HTMLs. Only now they have to be responsive, look no worse than whatever is out there, look nice when posted on Facebook or Twitter, render well in various read later apps, and generally work with a wide ecosystem. And then you have to continue to make your site work with all the new stuff, preferably without breaking older pages.

You can indeed be simpler than most websites out there, and not lose anything important. But don’t kid yourself — the web is much more complex than it used to be.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#270

Post by djhworld »

supermdguy wrote: post #268
djhworld wrote: post #264

I think medium has some cool features like the "claps", comment boxes and story analytics. There's a lot of stuff that that just works out of the box However I really dislike syndicating my blog to it because the formatting is so limited. You cannot do bullet point lists for example, which makes it a huge pain having to tinker with your existing post to reformat it for medium. Nowadays I just syndicate an introductio…

You actually can do bullet points if you type '*' or '-' and then a space. For some reason, they have a few markdown-like formatting features that aren't shown in the popup editing bar. Also, about the recommendation system for self-hosted content, I've seen a few sites that link to HN or Reddit for comments. Upvotes can stand in for "claps", and posting on HN or Reddit makes your article discoverable.

Sorry, you are right, I misremembered, I think I meant further indentation of bullet point lists is not supported, so only 1 level of indentation is supported.

I think linking to HN/reddit is fine but that means leaving the original site where you were consuming the content. I was more thinking along the lines of the social features would be embedded in your blog, and would act as part of a bigger network.

Post reply on HN