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Ending our Medium integration

write.as

171–180 of 382 posts

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#171
post #69

Does 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.

I just started yesterday and wrote one post. I like it, it's markdown which I write in anyway, and it's open source at its heart.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#172
post #4

Personally, 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?

Oh I still remember the dawn of Medium: What a revelation this thing was! A wonderful platform, made for the reader! Nice typography, good layout, easy but pleasant on the eyes.

Oh what does Medium have become... Meanwhile it became the villain in the game. (The Batman quote would really place itself nicely here)

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#173
post #17
post #4

Personally, 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 feel like 95% of the Medium posts I find are some vague attempt to sell. Usually some company trashing a competitor for pages, and then the last paragraph is their call to action to try their new replacement to said competitor.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#174
Medium has a great low barrier to entry but if you're a developer looking to post your own content or are setting up a site for someone I seriously recommend looking into a static site set up.

With services like GitHub and Netlify (for hosting) and Contentful (as a content editing GUI) the day-to-day experience is seamless, you don't have to worry about security issues like you have with a traditional CMS, and you can make use of amazing tools like Gatsby.js (React based static site generator).

My colleague Khaled made a great tutorial specifically about Gatsby.js: https://www.contentful.com/blog/2018/02/28/contentful-gatsby...

Full disclosure: I work for Contentful

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why stay on Medium? Why not take total ownership and move to your own space?

It's a good partnership for us. - they handle distribution and are better at it than us. - they pay more than we'd make in ad rates or conversion to our own services. - it lets us focus on what we love doing, which is the writing and editing, without managing the other side of a publishing business. We have license to the copyright for most things we've done in the last 18 months, so it's not a full lock-in either.

I'd make sure you have good backups. Medium doesn't feel like it's going to be around for a long time.

One question though - what do you mean by distribution?

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once upon a time one didn't need to login to read Quora stuff.

Can you imagine if Stackoverflow did this? The tech world would grind to a halt.

I don't know, in the case of StackOverflow I think it's worth the registration vs going back to pounding your head against the desk.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#178
post #39

Earlier 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.

I use the Materialistic app on Android. Works great.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#179

Quora also started out as an awesome service just like Medium. Eventually though, the VC's need the promises they've heard during fundraising to be fulfilled. That's when the platforms start with the dark patterns. Non-VC companies are a longer and less glamorous slog to get off the ground but also don't come under pressure to compromise on their morals.

All the extra features interfering with my reading experience didn’t help, either. I just don’t read articles on Medium.

Indeed, when your reading experienced is interrupted immediately on page load by asking you to sign up I think you can argue its not a good experience at all. I stopped reading articles on Medium as well.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Around 1997 or so, I got called into a meeting with my boss, director, and head of IT security. I worked night shift in a wafer fab, and someone was accessing the computers in the office, and visiting inappropriate sites at night (that their new sophisticated monitor found). I was young, and into computers, I guess they assumed it was me. I pointed out that I didn't have a keycard that gave me access to the office ar…

I had a similar experience during school. One real life troll told a substitute teacher I was accessing porn sites. Teaching sub only looked at the website url before kicking me off the computer. Unfortunately there was no follow-up for me to call them out on being lazy/ignorant. Funny thing was the "troll" did get banned later for accessing porn sites on the school network.
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