Live data from Hacker News

Ditching Medium

joshjahans.com

101–110 of 125 posts

Re: Ditching Medium

#101
I wonder how easily people bind themselves to a certain provider. Since the appereance of Medium I waited for the day they try to monetize it and people would leaving for better options. The possibility to move away should probably considered before starting to use such a service.

My own website is based on Hugo. While the usage (especially the template syntax) is not exactly a joy to use, it works fine and fast for years now. The only thing I need is some web space to drop static files, so it would be really easy to move to another provider. However I wouldn't recommend Hugo to non-technical writers, since the configuration and template syntax would scare them probably away.

The world needs more "static CMS" software (instead of just "static site generators")!

Re: Ditching Medium

#102
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…

Just use the reader mode in your browser.

Re: Ditching Medium

#103
post #81

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.

I host on github for nothing.

Re: Ditching Medium

#104

I wonder how easily people bind themselves to a certain provider. Since the appereance of Medium I waited for the day they try to monetize it and people would leaving for better options. The possibility to move away should probably considered before starting to use such a service. My own website is based on Hugo. While the usage (especially the template syntax) is not exactly a joy to use, it works fine and fast for…

I evaluated Hugo and went with Lektor for the reasons you mention. I haven't regretted it, Lektor is much more sane.

Re: Ditching Medium

#105

I wonder how easily people bind themselves to a certain provider. Since the appereance of Medium I waited for the day they try to monetize it and people would leaving for better options. The possibility to move away should probably considered before starting to use such a service. My own website is based on Hugo. While the usage (especially the template syntax) is not exactly a joy to use, it works fine and fast for…

I evaluated Hugo and went with Lektor for the reasons you mention. I haven't regretted it, Lektor is much more sane.

While Lektor doesn't look bad, I doubt it would be attractive for non-technical persons. I'm thinking of something more like Ghost, WordPress (with less features), but with static files as output.

Re: Ditching Medium

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I evaluated Hugo and went with Lektor for the reasons you mention. I haven't regretted it, Lektor is much more sane.

While Lektor doesn't look bad, I doubt it would be attractive for non-technical persons. I'm thinking of something more like Ghost, WordPress (with less features), but with static files as output.

Lektor includes a very nice publishing interface. Only deployment is "hard", in that it needs you to run a command, AFAIK.

Re: Ditching Medium

#108

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…

Interesting. I said this about Medium when articles from there began showing up here a couple years ago. I didn't like their politics, but then again, I don't like the politics of most SV companies these days. I can't believe how a new technological frontier got turned into an echo chamber for big government whack job collectivists. We were on our way to something brighter for humanity and then fucking Google and Facebook fucked it all up. Thanks CIA.

Re: Ditching Medium

#109
post #95
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is so bad and so obvious that I have a hard time seeing how this isn't "supporting RSS" (for goodwill) while making sure no one uses it (for lock in).

Anyone wants to defend Medium on this one?

Re: Ditching Medium

#110
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…

I've never heard as much about UX as now and never before has software been so broken.

Or maybe I'm just getting old.

Post reply on HN