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Medium is a poor choice for blogging

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Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#291

Post by seddin »

foo101 wrote: post #150

Most of the popular online services have screwed up their interface. I think it started with Digg. It was once a loved website. The screwed up the interface and everyone ran to Reddit. Now Reddit has screwed up their interface too. We all used to love Google for its simple and elegant web interfaces. Look at what a mess GMail is now. If there is anything that more than 10 years of Web 2.0 teaches us, it is that once…

Gmails team should use low end computers to test new interfaces like the new one which is super slow even on my i3 with 8Gb of ram.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#292

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#293

Post by 3pt14159 »

ymolodtsov wrote: post #125
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...

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.

No. I started my own site around this time last year with a CSS / HTML template I modified and I did everything myself. I even wrote the static site compiler. This is really not hard.

I have somewhere between seven and nine[0] articles out and my work has been translated into French, Portuguese (twice), Russian, and Uzbek.

Medium isn't a source of traffic unless you're one of the very few writers they intentionally push. People share high quality work or new ideas, and audience engagement helps too, so link to your Twitter and share your email.

[0] Since starting the site I've started writing for other publications and the audience flows back and forth between the sites, so it depends on what you think counts as an article.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#294

Post by chaostheory »

danShumway wrote: post #251
chaostheory wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Again, I get it, and you're not wrong. In theory. But in practice, is Medium currently helping people build audiences in a significant way? My experience suggests no. It was easier for me to do that with a self-hosted site. I'm not sure exactly why this is -- maybe it's that Medium's discovery algorithms take into account correlations between existing readers, so if you don't already have a bunch of readers you'll ne…

> maybe it's that Medium's discovery algorithms take into account correlations between existing readers,

Yes, Medium takes into account who you follow and what subjects you've liked, which is one reason Medium article collections like HackerNoon exist.

I feel Medium is for writers who don't take the time and effort necessary to self market their own content, which is not easy for many people. The platform is just like everything else in life. Are you willing to make concessions for its benefits? I don't see anything wrong with it as long as people are aware of the price of the Faustian deals they make in exchange for a little magic. The same applies to Alexa, Facebook, Waze, etc...

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#296

Post by sergiotapia »

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…

Except I want to spend 0 seconds setting up some kind of blog system. I don't care about it whatsoever. So I use a hosted platform.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#297

Post by tonystubblebine »

tech_tuna wrote: post #220
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…

Wozniak vs Jobs.

I am/was pretty technical--wrote a programming book, was building and maintaining high traffic websites back in '03--and I still managed to screw up hosting a Wordpress site to the point of my blog going down on it's own, going down under load, going down because I missed a message about my credit card expiring. The difference between my technical ability when that's my job and when it's my hobby is huge. And so I'm a huge fan of not having to worry about any of the hosting, i.e. Medium looked great to me from day one.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#298

Post by specialp »

akho wrote: post #269
specialp wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

You are correct it isn't trivial but I'd argue some stuff is even easier than in the past. Like the whole responsive design (or a design at all) is already accomplished by using any one of many themes offered for Hugo. Then you don't even have to know HTML, you can have a one page Markdown reference to do almost everything. I might want to work on something like this to make it more accessible to others, but my main argument is that for tech people this is trivial and here they are still using Medium.

https://habd.as/zero-to-http-2-aws-hugo/ Is an example of how to do this. It has some steps but is not that hard. I think it can be even easier by scripting most of this out for less technical people.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#300

Post by tonystubblebine »

Counterpoint: Medium brings you readers and that's the most valuable feature

I've been running my own company since 2001 and been on Twitter since 2006 and I still don't have a readership that is anywhere near what I can get through the Medium algorithm.

I write to think. But I publish to get that thinking read. There really is no other feature that comes close to mattering more to me than Medium's network effects. I published something the other day that has 269K views with an additional 1k coming every day through the Medium network.

Medium's stats say they were directly responsible for 170k of those views.

Then when I look at the external views, I mostly see that those were driven by Medium as well. For example, 10k views came from Twitter, but those were Medium readers retweeting. I looked at my own promotion: Reddit, HN, newsletter, Twitter and can only count up about 10k views that I was directly responsible for.

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