Ditching Medium • Hacker News Board

Re: Ditching Medium

#61

Post by travisgriggs » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 3:55 AM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #40

Kye wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$72 a year is a lot of money. [1] The thing that made Medium special was that anyone could post about something that mattered to them and get noticed no matter their background. WordPress, Blogger, and other free things cost energy in place of money because they're top-heavy with features and weak accessibility. That's as much a blocker as a recurring charge. [1] "But it's $70 if you pay the full year!" That's not mu…

$72 a year is not a lot of money. If you got a $1.00 coffee every other day from McDonald's it would be twice that. The main reason why the web is such a sight for sore eyes in 2019 is that people seem to think $72 a year is a lot for having a voice. People can find 10x that for a new iPhone or spend that much on beer in a month or on a cable subscription but having a blog sure can't be worth much to most people. For…

Perhaps it’s related to the tangibility factor. We do pay a lot (grumble, too much) for a new iPhone. But I have a reasonable confidence, that I can get 2+ good years out of that device. It may even have some resale value. The bi-daily coffee is something I pay a little for, but I can bet I’ll still like coffee at the end of the year. And if I decide to kick the habit, I can just quit paying at any time since each coffee transaction stands on its own.

Sites like Medium though are a place where people go to experience networking effects. Thinking about it in the long term might be like buying into a year’s subscription of speed dating at the local bowling alley. It may be all the rage with all the types of people you want to be with this week, but what does next week bring? The hot speed dating activity might move somewhere else. Or the group of people you want to hang out with there might be replaced by a different group of people.

Years ago, Brad Cox (of Objective C fame) wrote a great essay on micropayments and the Internet. I can’t find it right now, but IIRC it talked about why micropayments might be the way to go to fund intenert related activities. Unfortunately, my observation of MBA business models is that they have never wrapped their heads around how to implement micropayment models that reach that happy point where consumers benefit as well as producers.

Re: Ditching Medium

#62

Post by Haydos585x2 » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 3:56 AM UTC

opportune wrote: post #46

tomc1985 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely feels like the bloggers on Medium are considerably more self-indulgent and considerably less intelligent.

I think it went through a similar transition as Quora where it was known as a place for smart people to blog, and as it grew it then attracted a bunch of users who wanted to be seen as smart

Absolutely, it used to be a place for pretty in-depth and well thought out writing. It began attracting a lot of people that wanted to be seen as that kind of writer while not being that kind of writer. I bailed once it just became lists and lists and clickbait with more clickbait. I think it's gone through what TEDx has gone through. Their latest strategy to try and get my money has been the nail in the coffin for my use of the platform.

Re: Ditching Medium

#63

Post by npunt » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 3:56 AM UTC

tedmiston wrote: post #37

azhenley wrote: post #23

So we are back to running our own blogs again? What are the alternatives to Medium if you don’t want to self-host? Ghost?

FWIW you can trivially self-host Ghost these days with an official one-click droplet on DigitalOcean. https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/ghost/ https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/one-clicks/ghost/

Perhaps if you're doing this type of work frequently, but if you're just a regular person who wants a blog it's not trivial nor advisable. Configuring your DO instance can be a pain and you have to manually keep Ghost up to date by SSHing in. Definitely not set and forget.

Re: Ditching Medium

#64

Post by burlesona » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 3:57 AM UTC

I think the author makes a giant mistake when he says the following:

“For the foreseeable future, it looks like independent blogs are back. Still, there’s a good business opportunity waiting for someone, as Medium seem intent on squandering the potential they had.”

I would argue the problem is that making a free blogging network like medium is NOT a good business idea. The reason things like Wordpress, Ghost, etc. work as a business is they have figured out a customer (bloggers) and something to charge them for (their paid blog hosting features).

The reason those sites don’t work as great discovery networks is it turns out their customers are possessive of their audiences and don’t really want the platform to be directing them elsewhere.

Medium is now trying to figure out a way for the readers to be the customers, which is just a really hard problem in the era of the internet and almost infinite free reading material.

Not a good business opportunity at all.

Re: Ditching Medium

#65

Post by village-idiot » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 4:00 AM UTC

tedmiston wrote: post #44

village-idiot wrote: post #11

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.

Not for technical reasons, for distribution. A lot more people subscribe to Medium publications for instance than my personal blog.

Handing control of distribution to one company is always a dicey proposition.

Re: Ditching Medium

#66

Post by godzillabrennus » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 4:12 AM UTC

SamWhited wrote: post #50

Not to mention that it drives your users away and reduces your conversion rate by showing them a big full-screen banner in front of your posts every single time they visit the site unless they sign up for Medium themselves. Who wants to have to log in just to read some blogs? And then there's the lack of RSS feed, so I have to actually visit each individual blog to see if there are updates instead of having them drop…

If you reblog your content on a Medium blog to take advantage of their user base it can be a great tool. Don't use it for a primary blog.

Re: Ditching Medium

#67

Post by tehjoker » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 4:18 AM UTC

Hosting blogs is cheap and everyone should be able to have one. However, if we leave it to the corporate sector, they'll either need a subscription or ads, neither of which are conducive to public discussion. Since serving blogs is so cheap, why doesn't the government offer a free service where you can host a text website? Kind of like a university webpage for all students, but for everyone?

You would then have a financially stable organization backing the pages, have democratic input into the hosting process, and probably less censorship than a private company would apply for those that care about that sort of thing (since private companies need literally no reason to do so whereas a public enterprise would need a court order or some such).

Re: Ditching Medium

#68

Post by hadsed » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 4:23 AM UTC

Well the medium partner program is meant to enable people to earn money from their writing, no? As an author you have to make a choice to do that. I don't see a problem with this and if anything it's a great innovation.

My problem is that I'm subject to the kind of writing I'd rather avoid. Perhaps if they were better able to segment their user bases and make their feeds and recommendations better tailored to them the experience could actually be decent. But as a modeling problem I appreciate that it's probably pretty difficult to tell a BS article about Bitcoin (or whatever) from one with substance.

Re: Ditching Medium

#69

Post by DoreenMichele » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 4:39 AM UTC

SoulMan wrote: post #60

DoreenMichele wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blogspot.

I am on blogger. But what I don't like about it is 1. It only uses a narrow column for content. 2. No code highlighting or snippets embedding support

There are multiple layouts, all further customizable. If you can edit HTML, you have access to the code. If you can't, there are myriad user-friendly options for making the interface do what you want.

I actually help people with that for pay if you want assistance.

The code snippets are a real issue. I'm not sure how much code you could even show because I don't show code snippets on any of my blogs.

Maybe screenshots would work. It's also possible that writing it in the "compose" interface would work.

I usually write in the HTML interface, but I use the app on my phone. When I copy and paste, it shows up differently depending on which interface I'm using.

It's possible that blockquoting it in the compose interface and then adding HR tags top and bottom to help set it off would get you satisfactory results. You can also add custom CSS to any layout. This has allowed me to get effects not natively supported by the user-friendly customization options without digging around in the code per se, which I'm not confident enough to do. I know a little HTML and CSS, but not so much that I'm comfortable going directly into the code. I tried it once and couldn't figure out where the thing was that I wanted to edit.

Re: Ditching Medium

#70

Post by concurrency » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 4:45 AM UTC

Recently decided to self-host as well, and used it as an excuse to build a command line controlled cms with Sublime-esque syntax highlighting for the code snippets. https://synref.com/ It's been a lot of fun, and I'd encourage anyone that's considering going the self-hosting route to do so.