I started using ghostjs recently for personal writing. It's probably the most enjoyable writing experience I've ever had. Makes me want to come up with more reasons to write.
Ending our Medium integration
101–110 of 382 posts
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#102Medium == Not Well Done
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#103Personally, I was excited by Medium all those years ago. Now I think twice before clicking a medium.com link. I really hate the obnoxious UI and usually close the tab before reading the article. Anyone else feel this way?
While some interesting and insightful articles still exist on the site, the majority feels like someone trying to explain me what they read on Wikipedia this morning.
I don't know how many websites like Medium it will take for people to realize that for quality content a website needs:
1. Well-defined subject.
2. Some standard for quality.
3. Editors with a stake in the website who filter out things that do not fit 1 and 2 and deliberately cultivate the reader base and frequent writers. (I.e. not Wikipedia-style "editors".)
It doesn't have to involve money. It doesn't have to be closed for the public to submit content. It doesn't have to mimic old media in any fashion.
Websites like that used to exist in late 90s early 00s. Web 2.0 movement waged a war against all 3 bullet points above for the benefits of technocrats at the expense of everyone else. Now we're enjoying the consequences.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#104What a surprise: developers getting screwed by big centralized companies. Nowadays wasting time and money building anything on the shoulder of another company is crazy. It's not if but when are you getting screwed: Twitter, Facebook, Apple, this is history repeating itself plenty fold. I'm just surprised nobody mentioned any decentralised, blockchain-based platform where spending time and money building on it is just…
Agreed, glad to see Steem get some love on here.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#105I started writing blog posts on Medium around 1,5 years ago. Some got pretty popular with 6k+ claps and many shares.
But almost exactly when I started everything went downhill:
- viewership dropped
- shares dwindled
- short, copy & paste non-valuable content flooded everything.
In 1,5 years it went from "pretty cool" to "not publishing there ever again".
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#106Does anyone here use Write.as for blogging? This is the first time I've seen them and the simplicity look appealing to me. For the record I was really excited when Medium came out and loved the simple, open, no-clutter style it had. But fast-forward to today and it's now very different.
Yes, I just started this month with a paid account ($1 a month) and it's basically what medium was supposed to be - custom urls and rss.
See the dead simple layout: https://kemendo.com/
I do wish they allowed email subscriptions but from what I understand that is coming soon. I also don't love the "published with write.as" text at the bottom of every page for paid accounts but that's no big deal.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you describe what Quora did? I've heard a few reports that it's not like it used to be, but I've found it useful, and am curious as to what makes it worse than before.
Many dark patterns including forcing people to login to read content. Now it's a "modern" ExpertSexChange where "online marketing specialists" ask questions with one account and answer their own questions with another account. "Disclaimer haha I work for Bullshit.ly as a growth ninja but here's my response..." "In conclusion I'm not saying you should totally checkout our stuff ... but you totally should. just my 2 ce…
Long ago I was a consultant for a large church. One of their IT guys got a call from the pastor, who was worried about being hacked... The IT guy had been working on the desktop and had left up a browser window. The pastor read the URL as ExpertSexChange...
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel that way about most bloggish sites, until I hit the readability button. If they block that then I give up.
Funny how these things go in circles. I remember the time where many webpages were unstyled, letting you freely choose the font, size, colors, etc. in browser preferences. But that was considered ugly and non-user friendly. Now with various readability buttons we're just moving back to that.
Without custom CSS, you couldn't, however, fix the single most important readability issue about unstyled HTML: add reasonable margins and keep body width at the recommended 60–70em or so. Readability modes finally get that right.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#109Personally, I was excited by Medium all those years ago. Now I think twice before clicking a medium.com link. I really hate the obnoxious UI and usually close the tab before reading the article. Anyone else feel this way?
It's still the nicest, simplest web design I know that has any level of popularity for blogging. I'd still rather read on Medium than on Wordpress or Discourse or Blogger or Ghost or really any popular blog layout I've seen. I don't want to trivialize how annoying the login popups are, but ultimately I put up with them for the sake of a more readable article on the other side. What blog styles do you like reading?
The UI/UX for medium comments is so utterly horrible it makes me angry just thinking about it.
I was reading some interesting articles the other idea, and it was a painful, torturous struggle to read all of the comments and their nested responses.
The entire text of a comment should not be a clickable link! And you shouldn't have to go to a new page to read comment replies...
Sorry, just venting, not directed at you.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The UI isn't beautiful. I disagree. HN's UI is perfect.
Hard disagree. It's barely acceptable on desktop, but on a mobile device it's awful. All the links and buttons are tiny , and they're all so crowded together I frequently end up doing dumb things like tapping "flag" when I meant to tap "discuss." With just a little bit of work HN's UI could be so much better.
On mobile, try using https://hackerweb.app/
A much nicer mobile interface for consuming HN, but you'll have to go direct to the site to interact with it.