Medium is a poor choice for blogging

Post by almostarockstar » Tue, Nov 13, 2018, 10:44 PM UTC

jasonlotito wrote: post #189

almostarockstar wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> people are more likely to open a Medium url when it shows up in link aggregators. People trust the familiar url far more than www.mypersonalblog.me I know this is just anecdotal, but I assume anything coming from Medium is usually less worthwhile. First, the author isn't important on a Medium article. Medium is the brand, the other is someone that doesn't matter. Secondly, it's not easy to follow the author, so eve…

Post by vanderZwan » Tue, Nov 13, 2018, 10:46 PM UTC

vanderZwan wrote: post #97

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…

Depending on how simple you want it, you could just use MarkDeep, TexMe or MdMe plus something like NeoCities or a Github repo. You'd miss out on some benefits of a full generator, like automatically creating an archive page and RSS feeds and stuff like that, but you'd gain that 90's simplicity. [0] https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/ [1] https://github.com/susam/texme [2] https://github.com/susam/mdme [3] https://n…

Post by ayoisaiah » Tue, Nov 13, 2018, 11:10 PM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #159

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…

Medium also liberates writers from social stuff. It has claps, comments, etc, but also when you share a Medium article on Twitter or Facebook you have all the meta-tags to make it look good. Also, no infrastructure headaches either.

Post by CM30 » Tue, Nov 13, 2018, 11:12 PM UTC

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…

Post by mcbits » Tue, Nov 13, 2018, 11:29 PM UTC

movedx wrote: post #313

mcbits wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stylus (not Stylish) can make sites like this readable enough if you visit them often enough to be worth a couple minutes to fix them. Here's a tiny bit of CSS: body { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.45; background-color: #ededed; margin: auto; padding: 0.5rem; max-width: 80ch; } .pd { padding-bottom: initial; } One point in favor of ultra-minimalism is that it's easier to add a few styles t…

This is an interesting point, actually. Should publication platforms be giving us two choices: their design and implementation; or raw text (HTML) we can style ourselves?