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Why Medium Sucks

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Re: Why Medium Sucks

#151

Post by roybahat »

overshard wrote: post #10

I feel like we are beating a dead horse here. Everyone I talk to knows Medium sucks. I personally hate the modal that comes up every time if I'm not logged in and how much of my screen is take up by fixed bars. Medium has a community though. Facebook sucks, but it has a community. Twitter sucks, but it has a community. You are going to get more people to see your post if you put it on Medium. You are going to get mor…

Communities supporting products that the community dislikes are like restaurants with a good location getting away with crappy food.

The product is only as good as it needs to be to serve the community -- if the community's stuck with it, then the product has no gravity pulling it to get better. That said, I happen to think Medium is just fine. The complaints in the article seem (a) to apply only to some uses, really and (b) fall into the "if you dislike it so much, make your own damn mousetrap" camp?

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#152

Post by busymom0 »

jeena wrote: post #116
busymom0 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally hate the modal that comes up every time if I'm not logged in and how much of my screen is take up by fixed bars. Regarding this, you can block these UI elements using content blockers. I have used uBlock Origin to block these on my Safari Mac and AdGuard to block them on iOS. I am sure similar equivalents exist for other browsers too which you might use. I shared a few examples on how to do that on a r…

> Regarding this, you can block these UI elements using content blockers. Oh, wow, this is kind of a revelation to me, I can block the overlay, the bottom fixed banner and the top fixed header and suddenly even medium is a decent reading experience. Thanks for the tip, I'll be using it on other sites too!

Yep, I have been using it to block many things on different sites. On Youtube, I have blocked the "recommended" videos section for example.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#153

Post by caspervonb »

octref wrote: post #115

> Let's start with something simple, like syntax highlighting. I built a syntax highlighter, Shiki, that allows you to use any theme from VS Code to color your code [0]. It works great with Node now as a static website generator plugin, but with some effort you can run it all in client side as well. TypeScript's new handbook is using Shiki [1]. I can't really believe how it's 2019 and Medium and Slack still can't syn…

Syntax highlighting add any information tho, without it it's easier to bring focus to elements that matter with emphasis.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#154

Post by smitty1e »

I'm allergic to paywalls.

While I can't fault their capitalism, life is just too short. There isn't ANY lack of diversion elsewhere, for example, here.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#155

Post by dredmorbius »

rinze wrote: post #108

I don't want to violate the Prime Directive, but quoting from $that_site: "The idea that someone could just rent space in a colocation facility, install a web server, and start posting information onto the internet is, sadly, one hundred percent impossible, and can never happen." So we have to go to Medium to publish. Not even Wordpress.com. ( gasps ) Blogspot!

"That site" == n-gate.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#156

Post by yakubin »

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #30
amelius wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HOW to get communities onto better platforms Well, we had a pretty good platform that had one big community and it was called the internet.

Unfortunately the discoverability isn't that great and mostly ruled by one company (Google).

With blogs using Wordpress there was this thing called trackbacks and blogrolls. And you know... hyperlinks (I know, sick, right?) in the content itself pointing to related content. Sometimes, someone makes a blog post recommending things they read. And sometimes you find a link on a forum. The better, old web.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#157

Post by scarface74 »

overshard wrote: post #10

I feel like we are beating a dead horse here. Everyone I talk to knows Medium sucks. I personally hate the modal that comes up every time if I'm not logged in and how much of my screen is take up by fixed bars. Medium has a community though. Facebook sucks, but it has a community. Twitter sucks, but it has a community. You are going to get more people to see your post if you put it on Medium. You are going to get mor…

Creating your own blog will now result in you having to manage your own hosting and possibly even do some "development".

Blogger.com is still a thing, until Google kills it, but if you have your own domain name it’s not that much of a risk. You don’t have to manage anything.

You can still post links to all of the other popular forums.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#158

Post by mariushn »

overshard wrote: post #10

I feel like we are beating a dead horse here. Everyone I talk to knows Medium sucks. I personally hate the modal that comes up every time if I'm not logged in and how much of my screen is take up by fixed bars. Medium has a community though. Facebook sucks, but it has a community. Twitter sucks, but it has a community. You are going to get more people to see your post if you put it on Medium. You are going to get mor…

Perfect! What can we do to make an alternative such as https://reader.booxia.com/ better?

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#159

Post by munificent »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #148
munificent wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the person you're replying to but... > With all due and sincere respect, have you ever tried to build an audience or community from zero without partners, a leverage point, or an ad budget? Yes. > Even getting a quality audience of thousands is non-trivial or costs money or needs a clever strategy. That hasn't been my experience. I started with a blog. Then I wrote a book which I published online a chapter at a t…

>> [getting a quality audience of thousands of people is non-trivial , costs money, or needs a clever strategy] >That hasn't been my experience... It's kind of begging to differ with...yourself? There are some contradictions here. You say you did it in part by writing books, yet typically writing books is considered non-trivial . If these books are trivial to write that doesn't make them bad. However, it could give t…

Sorry, I guess I glossed over the "non-trivial" part on first read.

I certainly have put a lot of effort into this, but all of that effort went into the thing itself that the audience was consuming. It's not like I wanted an audience for X and then had to put non-trivial effort into Y. By analogy, bands makes much of their money from selling T-shirts, which is effort unrelated to making the music that people want to listen to.

I didn't spend a lot of time making T-shirts. I just made the best music I could and it turned out in my case to be sufficient.

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