I have never understood tech blogs on Medium. Surely if you’re writing about a technical subject, especially programming, you have the skills to setup a quick Jekyll blog? It’s what I did, and I have no idea why I’d hand control of my user experience over to Medium, no idea whatsoever.
Ditching Medium
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Re: Ditching Medium
#12I have never understood tech blogs on Medium. Surely if you’re writing about a technical subject, especially programming, you have the skills to setup a quick Jekyll blog? It’s what I did, and I have no idea why I’d hand control of my user experience over to Medium, no idea whatsoever.
1) Built-in recirc
2) SEO optimized
3) Better tech than you'd get on your own platform -- e.g. the ability to act as an oEmbed consumer.
The trade off is that you don't have as strong a relationship with your subscribers. But considering that 100k page views probably only gets you 100 subscribers, most bloggers have basically zero chance at getting any real number of subscribers to begin with so for them using a platform like Medium is all upside.
Re: Ditching Medium
#13Either I or the Author are confused about how Medium works.
> A blog, to me, was a place for someone to put their thoughts up onto the internet and have anyone who wanted to come and read - for free.
But you can still do this, no? You can write articles on Medium that can be read for free.
> Medium relies on user-submitted content and then charges those same users for access to their content.
My experience is that Medium charges only for access to "premium" articles, submitted through their partner program, no?
Can somebody please clear these up for me?
On a slight off-topic, my biggest issue with Medium is no math formatting support. MathJax has been around for years now. Are there just not enough scientists writing on Medium?
Re: Ditching Medium
#14It's funny that you can clear cookies and reset the limit counter. Kind of annoying to have to do it often though.
Most of us read it on our mobile devices. You can't clear the cookies on your device.
Re: Ditching Medium
#15A downside of a pure growth first, monetization second strategy.
I mean this is as much bad behavior on the part of users as it is bad behavior on the part of publishers. Users flock to products that are super polished and have tons of celebrity users (both made possible by huge fundraises), but then flip out when they're asked for $5 a month to pay for the service they're getting.
It's not fair to blame it on users. This is businesses playing bait-and-switch. No person would like it if all of a sudden they had to pay for something they were getting for free before.
It's the business's job to charge a fair price upfront (or, at the very least, give the user some hint of its future plans so they're mentally prepared).
Re: Ditching Medium
#16slightly off-topic but i hope a UX person from medium would stumble upon this. medium posts have a terrible UX -- for me at least. i tend to set my fonts to be 125%-150% larger. it gives me an easy-to-read feeling on most blogs. especially when fonts are chosen carefully. but this breaks medium blogs so bad i often gave up on many articles. the header usually takes 40% of the viewport height. and there's always a "get updates" footer which also takes about 20%. so yes... what you care about fits in less than half the space. and on posts with many big pictures, it just gets worse.
btw, my phone also has larger fonts but the reading experience is so much better! but ofc that too is ruined by the constant nagging about getting the "real app" (when all i did is click on your own digest which opened in the browser...).
i mean i understand why you guys are doing all that but i certainly share the sentiment of OP here that the combination of all that makes medium look somehow annoying...
Re: Ditching Medium
#17It's funny that you can clear cookies and reset the limit counter. Kind of annoying to have to do it often though.
Most of us read it on our mobile devices. You can't clear the cookies on your device.
Sure you can.
Tap the lock next to the URL, tap on 'SITE SETTINGS', then tap on 'CLEAR & RESET'.
Re: Ditching Medium
#18It was never a go to platform for programmers blogs. It’s the worst platform for programming blogs. The way comments work makes it impossible to have kind of coherent conversation.
I don’t have an issue with medium for things that don’t involve discussion but for anything that should have discussion. Ahhhhh
Re: Ditching Medium
#19I developed an aversion to medium well before the paywall went up. Most articles involved a novice doing preliminary research about something they had limited prior experience with, coming up with a toy solution and then lambasting the experts for having not seen said solution. (Granted, my route to Medium was mostly through HN.)
Re: Ditching Medium
#20slightly off-topic but i hope a UX person from medium would stumble upon this. medium posts have a terrible UX -- for me at least. i tend to set my fonts to be 125%-150% larger. it gives me an easy-to-read feeling on most blogs. especially when fonts are chosen carefully. but this breaks medium blogs so bad i often gave up on many articles. the header usually takes 40% of the viewport height. and there's always a "ge…
Overuse of white space, really weird comment/reply system and more.
It's nice on the eyes purely from an aesthetic perspective, but I agree it lacks on the X in UX. It's a few shades form over function.
Side note: Apple's new Swift documentation feels like this to me. It was designed to look and read like a novel. Full of prose, lack of use of colour, wrong fonts, way too big. The 'parent class' is down at the bottom of the document! So many things like that. It looks great a first glance but it really lacks in X.