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Medium is a poor choice for blogging

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Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#391

Post by Digit-Al »

egypturnash wrote: post #284
Digit-Al wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

> Firstly, I hate sites that use such a narrow column on the screen. FWIW most professional typographers recommend a column width of 30-40em. Much more than that seriously increases the distance the eye has to travel from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, and makes it harder to keep track of where you are. The max-width of this blog's main column is... 40em. And now you know why so many sites do this…

I am familiar with em thanks. I am a software developer and have done some web development in the past.

Far be it from me to argue with professional typographers, but do you hear anyone saying "oh, the line lengths on paperbacks are far too long, I can't scan them"?

Maybe it's just me but I'm a little tired of always having to cater the the very lowest common denominator. That narrow width seems almost ludicrously too narrow to me, it's like a childrens book.

There has been research that suggests that most people don't finish articles, so it seems to me that maybe making columns so narrow is catering to the audience most likely to have such a short attention span that they probably won't finish your article anyway.

Or maybe I'm just a moany old git :-)

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#393

Post by nomadicnotes »

fabrixxm wrote: post #181
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...

tbh, often when I get interrupted by the "sorry to interrupt you" I just close the tab. and if I'm on mobile and link says "medium" I don't even bother to click. but that's me.

If I'm on my mobile and it's something I want to read I save it to my Pocket account, where articles are formatted for a clean reading experience.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#394

Post by curlypaul924 »

projectramo wrote: post #327
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…

I think $5/year feels about right for a low-traffic personal blog.

I also think free makes sense, if the business model is to get people using the tool for personal projects, hoping they will recommend it at work.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#395

Post by dredmorbius »

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…

Worse, for Reddit: there is no sustained discussion. I've been thinking and working a lot on discussion (first law: conversation scales poorly), and what sites do and don't work.

G+, for its many, many, many flaws, could keep a discussion going on those rare instances where it started in the first place. In ways few other sites do.

The fact that all members of a conversation (up to a point) are informed of new posts, helps. That's a two-edged sword: low-value comments, if left standing, merely annoy others, and tend to cause them to mute out of the discussion.

But it's a dynamic few other sites match.

I've also been using Reddit as a blogging platform (not simply syndicating content) for several years. I'd already been in the process of moving that elsewhere when the G+ shutdown announcement hit -- I've been somewhat engaged in that over the past month or so. I do plan to continue syndication, though I moderate strongly for quality.

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