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Ditching Medium

joshjahans.com

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Re: Ditching Medium

#91

Post by rococode »

burlesona wrote: post #64

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. wo…

From a business perspective Medium is more of a magazine or newspaper than a blogging platform. They have a bunch of readers and try to get them to stay on their site by pushing interesting posts from their other writers. The problem is that their writers seem to just want it to be a blogging platform.

Re: Ditching Medium

#92

Post by TeMPOraL »

newsbinator wrote: post #72
tehjoker wrote: post #67

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 fin…

> why doesn't the government offer a free service where you can host a text website It's debatable whether this is the sort of thing governments exist to do.

It is debatable, and I think it's really worth considering the argument for it.

Out of all the indirect ways of paying for something, getting it funded by the government is probably the least user-hostile solution possible - it could be set up as just another public service, with zero incentive to milk people in some nonobvious way.

Re: Ditching Medium

#93

Post by TeMPOraL »

michaelpinto wrote: post #88
blondin wrote: post #16

slightly 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…

a ux designer would tell you to not trust your own experience, but to measure the experience of others.

Hopefully, a UX designer would consider comments here as data points, or at least as a source of ideas for experiments to run.

Re: Ditching Medium

#94

Post by ChicagoDave »

I’m happy to pay $5/month. The content I receive far outweighs the content I create and I’ve learned so much from others. The servers aren’t paying for themselves.

Re: Ditching Medium

#95

Post by anonred »

Volt wrote: post #78
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…

Medium does have RSS feeds: " rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/feed/

Medium’s RSS feeds include comments made by the user, and there isn’t a way (I found) to only get posts.

Re: Ditching Medium

#96

Post by jamietanna »

sergiotapia wrote: post #55
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?

I've moved to: https://dev.to Solid platform, discoverability baked in, great writing tools. They do need to polish their UX though as I wrote a lengthy article for about an hour and then clicked on "Write a Post" instead of Save to publish. This wiped my editor clean with no way to recover what was lost. Horrible experience there. They should at least autosave for you on every keystroke. No reason not to.

Have you reported these as issues /feature requests?

Re: Ditching Medium

#97

Post by rhizome »

colordrops wrote: post #4
rhizome wrote: post #3

Programming blogs are kind of meh to me in general, and will be until the code-display aspects finally get ironed out.

Could you elaborate on the problems of displaying code in blogs?

broken font size, running off the edge of the page. pretty much everything outside of the first 40 characters of any line.

Re: Ditching Medium

#98

Post by msadowski »

I've left medium about 2 years ago after using it for 8 months. I never felt in control there.

After moving from medium I created my blog using jekyll and hosted it on GitHub pages and never looked back.

Re: Ditching Medium

#99

Post by SllX »

tehjoker wrote: post #84
slowmovintarget wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it wouldn't be a free service. It would be funded by your money. How mad are you going to get when your money goes to host those views you find repellent? When the inevitable happens and the content needs to be monitored (can't have government funds used to host things like doxing blog posts, for example), then how much will you pay? Governments don't hand out free stuff. They take your stuff to pay for it.

Right, of course it's not free, but it would be cheap to provide and a universal good for all US residents. I also don't really mind the taxes they can come from the rich anyway. So long as the views expressed don't cross the line into violence or ethnic cleansing, I'm in favor of the first amendment. Yes, some manual curation will be necessary, but it's irrelevant to me if society as a whole pays for it or a company…

No. It probably won’t have knock on benefits for public debate. The government already has channels for expressing your views to them, and society has always shouldered the distribution cost of their own views.

Making hosting free is unlikely to benefit anyone and more likely to actually hurt the First Amendment. Just like we have a division of Church and State, we are better off having a division between Blog and State.

Re: Ditching Medium

#100

Post by wtmt »

jlebar wrote: post #81
tehjoker wrote: post #67

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 fin…

I host my (static site, very-low-traffic) blog with nearlyfreespeech.net for less than $10/yr. My hosting costs are less than domain-registration costs. Highly recommended, I've had zero problems with them.

And if you use Cloudflare in front of NFSN, the costs would be even lower.
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