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Medium is a poor choice for blogging

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Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#271

Post by munificent »

alanh wrote: post #179
keiferski wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't forget that it also prominently features a large distracting photo that was just ripped from a royalty-free photo site and has nothing to do with the content.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#272

Post by munificent »

djmashko2 wrote: post #168
ymolodtsov wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s actually a great question — does Medium truly gives you that many readers that it makes sense to live in the closed ecosystem? I have its app installed and subscribed to a bunch of people but I still only go there via the links on the web and I feel like a lot of people do just like me.

As some anecdotal evidence, I get about half of my Medium views from people browsing the Medium app/feed. That's definitely been the number one reason I've stayed on the platform. Perhaps someone should develop a platform that creates the same discoverability, but while allowing people to retain control of the content?

Everything old is new again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#273

Post by amelius »

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.

It's the same with OSX, often praised but at some point the UX got so bad that you'd have to install system updates through their music player iTunes.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#274

Post by enraged_camel »

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…

>>A blog is a text file on a screen.

A blog used to be a text file on a screen. Like most words in the English language however, its meaning has changed overtime, as people's expectations have changed.

I personally like Medium because of its highlights feature and its unobtrusive comment system. In fact, I often scroll down to the comments first to see what people are saying, much like I (and many others) check the comments on HN submissions first before deciding whether to bother with the actual submission.

Don't get me wrong, medium has a lot of annoying issues. But this whole "let's go back to the stone ages" crap with regards to tech needs to stop.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#275

Post by RickS »

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…

I am as sad as anyone that medium sold out an began to intentionally mistreat their users for "engagement" (read: money).

But in their early days, their praise was well earned. I was a designer with a focus on typography at the time, and medium's defaults were an order of magnitude better than any other non-custom publishing platform at the time.

Big, readable serifs, intentionally constrained column widths (and corresponding line length), and lots of attention to the details and best practices that ease the pain of reading things on the web. They're cluttered now, but they were intentionally uncluttered then, which isn't exactly typographic but is worth a lot in terms of cognitive burden.

To the extent that this is table-stakes now, and no longer a differentiating factor, medium is mostly to blame IMO. They showed that doing web type the way typographers told you to got slam dunk results. Everyone copied their style and the web is vastly more readable for it.

So while they lived long enough to become the villain, there's some gratefulness due to their former selves as well.

----

I personally do things the way you've described (markdown > jekyll > GH pages), but I think medium's value prop now is ease of distribution. You get bolted onto the homepage and other people's articles as part of a graph of other people's work, and writers find that valuable.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#276

Post by mockingbirdy »

cpoile wrote: post #50
mockingbirdy wrote: post #25

Nice, everyone is posting their favourite CMS, again. I use https://getgrav.org because I like flat-file CMS. Maybe there are some photographers here: http://koken.me (CMS for photographers). Another idea: Use a static page generator and Amazon's S3 with this neat blackhat trick - https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-one-website-exploited-... (mildly joking). OT: I pay 0.19$/month for my blog hosting including domai…

What hosting provider do you use for $0.19/mo?

Netcup

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#277

Post by Digit-Al »

alanh wrote: post #182
tpaschalis wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I mostly like your design, a nice clean look, but I have a couple of comments and a suggestion that you are free to ignore completely.

Firstly, I hate sites that use such a narrow column on the screen. The wall of text from the previous post is obviously too much and is far too difficult to read and keep track of where you are, but using only a third of the screen seem far too little. I'm sure you could double the width of your text without affecting readability.

Secondly, I have really good distance vision but need reading glasses. I find the text on your site a bit small. From a distance it just a bit too small to read comfortably and from close with my reading glasses I feel like I need to get too close. Yes, I can increase the font size easily, but how about...

My suggestion: decrease the size of your borders by about 50% on each side and then increase the font size by 1 or 2 points. The increased column size will give more text on screen, but the increased font size will make sure it is not too much.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#278

Post by chrisweekly »

thanatropism wrote: post #255
danShumway wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> and making sure that I matched popular writing styles Maybe this is the problem. I'm sure as a professional writer you need to keep up with reader interests (rather than setting up to do the blog equivalent of Finnegan's Wake ), but you don't want to be too interchangeable either. It's like you had to decide each month from each cake you want to eat (there's an infinite row of cakes) and you vie for the huge ones -…

+1 for the apt cake analogy

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#279

Post by criddell »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #116
lookforlight wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it would be possible to create a service (or if one already exist) where you could select which streaming sites you are subscribed to, and the service could search all those sites for the movie you want to watch, then redirect you to that site. Because it's hard to remember or to know which site has which movies/TV shows.

Android TV has a unified search if you have multiple apps installed. It works very well - and on my SHIELD, highlights shows from multiple apps on the home screen with proper thumbnails etc.

I bought a Sony TV at the start of this year and it has Android TV. The Android TV stuff is slow and will throw out error messages that don't mean anything to me. Stuff lik "Huey module has stopped". Or it complains about a Samba issue. We ended up buying a Roku box and use that instead of the Android stuff.

The only thing we use Android TV for is the MLB app. I'd like to figure out some way to delete everything but that one app because I always have to search for it.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#280

Post by egypturnash »

jypepin wrote: post #93

I'm amazed at how many people here say that people should simply use a static site generator instead of wordpress or medium. Does anyone else understand that probably 99% of Medium traffic (both reader and writer) don't even understand those words and would have no idea even where to begin? Most of them probably had trouble just signing up on Medium and already forgot their passwords. This is where Medium wins. It lo…

I cannot upvote this enough. "Just write your posts in Markdown and publish to your site using Jekyll and Git!" is utter gibberish to the vast majority of people.
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