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Medium is a poor choice for blogging

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Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#321

Post by Kye »

munificent wrote: post #271
alanh wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It worked. Then someone wrote about it, and everyone did it. Then it became a negative signal. There seems to be a 5-10 year trend lag time on stuff like that where the least self-aware self-promoters don't realize it doesn't work. Eventually a new trend falls to their level, and the cycle begins anew.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#322

Post by alpaca128 »

On a related note, while scrolling towards the second half of the article, the site started breaking apart in front of me. By the time I reached the comments the whole article had become invisible, seemingly blocked by a pop-up background that wasn't removed by the adblocker.

And this is a trend I'm seeing more often recently. I've encountered multiple sites that start to fail on all sides once you use adblock, and I'm not talking about noscript or others where the site not working is already the default behaviour more often than not.

In fact some websites actually worked better in a purely terminal-based browser than on my current Firefox setup when I tried it a few weeks ago. Something is really going in the wrong direction.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#323

Post by writepub »

The criticisms here are regarding the end user's reading experience, which are all fair.

However, Medium's unique value propositions typically outweigh these concerns:

1. For creators wanting to monetize, Medium automagically promotes content that is getting engagement on their platform. Everything from emails to their huge user base and social media promotions can drastically amplify engagement.

2. For non-technical writers, it offers a great UI for writing and publishing, and tools for engagement and feedback (claps, comments, ....)

Highly technical people, like the founders of basecamp/inventors of ruby on rails, use Medium for these reasons

Until a viable alternative for these 2 emerge, it's just as valid to recommend rsync over dropbox

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#324

Post by andrew-dc »

I have a growing collection of resources under the title: "My Own Platform," and this is exactly why.

As many have mentioned, there are some awesome utilities out there for simple Markdown publishing -> Push to Github pages. Sure, you won't get all the interwoven clicks and promotion, but in my book, I think shooting for a smaller quality group of readers, then a huge mass of people is more where I am at. Milage may vary, I'm sure.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#325

Post by chimen »

bko wrote: post #6

Pretty convincing. I didn't notice how bad medium was since I'm always logged in and have an ad-blocker. I also don't think they do much in terms of discovery. My blog [0] has about 370 followers and my posts only get about 10 - 20 views unless I put them on social media. Then they'll get between 100 and 10k+. Does anyone have experience with an alternative platform? Preferably free and hosted. [0] https://medium.com…

I'll be launching Qards very soon. No servers, no databases, free, fast and modern.

https://qards.io

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#326

Post by zmix »

lazyjones wrote: post #288
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. It's 2018 and there's still no standardized format for a blog's complete content (text, images, comments/credentials for comment provider) that we could use to move quickly from one site/setup to another. It would be nice to just get all Tweets even into Hyde or whatever.

Could be done with XML easily. But someone needs to do it ;-) and even more would need to accept it.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#327

Post by projectramo »

munificent wrote: post #282

More and more, I find myself relying on "follow the damn money" to understand how increasingly weird the Internet is and how to unweird it. If you're a writer and you want your words to get in front of people, those words need to be on a server somewhere. Someone's gotta pay for the electricity and maintainance on that server. If you don't know who pays for that and what their motivation for doing so is, you don't ha…

I agree with you in general.

However, it feels there should be a "fair" amount to pay.

What is the fair amount to pay for blog hosting? Free is too cheap and surely subsidized by something else. $20/month seems like too much for a blog.

The odd thing is that the marginal cost goes down with the popularity of the site.

Something like $5 feels right (svbtle is at $6). I think if you hit scale you might be profitable at $3 or $4.

I am not talking about the value I get, but about the cost + profit threshold for the provider.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#328

Post by projectramo »

wcpines wrote: post #312

I like(d) Svbtle for both reading and writing. I'm sad it didn't catch on more.

It took me so long to find the pricing. I actually cannot find it anywhere on the site and had to give up and do a google search.

There is no reason for that. Why would anyone sign up without knowing the pricing?

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#329

Post by Kye »

thomasfedb wrote: post #169
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…

Maybe a middle ground that could work is Ghost? I use their hosted service and it works well.

$29+ a month is steep for a personal blog. They make it clear personal bloggers aren't their target audience on the pricing page by listing how many staff members you can have. It's B2B.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#330

Post by Wowfunhappy »

amelius wrote: post #273
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.

I've been using macOS X since Snow Leopard, and at no point were software updates delivered through iTunes. In fact, I have the (probably bad) habit of running sudo rm -rf /Applications/iTunes.app on all my new machines (alongside a lot of other default apps).
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