At this point Medium looks like a dumpster fire.
I even have a subscription, but will cancel it.
Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
11–20 of 136 posts
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#12Another not surprising shift away from Medium. When starting my own blog this year, I was debating between Medium and self-hosting solutions like WordPress and Ghost. When asked “why not Medium?” My answer was usually “I don’t want my content behind a paywall, I don’t like it when I’m a reader and I wouldn’t want the same experience for others.”
The other reason to me, is that you lose your own brand since your editing options are limited in terms of fonts, colors, domains etc.
I wonder now, how many blogs will follow suit? I like a lot of the content on Medium, but I don’t like the platform. It’s positive (to me) to see others migrating off.
I, personally, eventually settled on Ghost, hosted on DigitalOcean. WordPress felt frustrating to work with and something like Jekyll just wasn’t “enough” for me. My day job is writing code all day, a platform that is just text editing in the browser is a nice relief.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#13I never understood the hype of Medium. If I want to have a clean blog, there is plenty of off-the-shelve software to do so, especially free and open source ones.
Why did IT-affine people (i.e. people who can easily manage their own installations or which can easily move to other hosters) use Medium in the first place? Maybe [because] they never used the platform without being logged in? Because that's where all the cruelity ("you already read your 3 free articles this month...") starts.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#14Every time I follow a link to Medium they seem to get more and more pushy. I shy away from clicking on links there anymore, so news like this is welcome. I must say I don't get what unique value proposition Medium think they have that allows them to treat both publishers and readers like crap.
It's easy to build an audience on Medium, that's what draws authors there
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#15Many articles on Medium are of low-quality. It used to be different. Don't know if this is caused by the monetization efforts.
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Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#16Many articles on Medium are of low-quality. It used to be different. Don't know if this is caused by the monetization efforts.
It used to be possible to visit medium.com and quickly find a few articles worth reading for free. Now its almost impossible to find anything on the front page without a star (paid sub required)
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#17I liked that RSS support tops Elementary requirements list.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#18> While we understand and empathize with the struggles of ethical monetization—and applaud Medium for refusing to monetize via intrusive ads and trackers
This part is interesting. Assuming it isn't just polite PR-speak, what is Medium being applauded for, here? Trying to use user accounts openly and directly, instead of cookies and other tracking elements to track everyone? I've always thought of these Sign in prompts on Medium (and on Quora) as just an annoyance to get past, not a possible means to "ethical monetization somehow.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#19Every time I follow a link to Medium they seem to get more and more pushy. I shy away from clicking on links there anymore, so news like this is welcome. I must say I don't get what unique value proposition Medium think they have that allows them to treat both publishers and readers like crap.
It's easy to build an audience on Medium, that's what draws authors there
Predictable audience? Absolutely not.
It's easy for a story or two to go viral (as in, slightly easier than on other platforms). What's not easy is to retain that viewership. Similarly to YouTube, you could put weeks worth of effort into one article just for it to flunk spectacularly simply because the recommendation algorithm didn't like it in the first 12 hours or so since you've clicked "publish".
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#20My problem with Jekyll (or other static generators) is that it's not as straightforward as anything with a web gui, like wordpress or ghost (or medium or tumblr or...). You still need to handle things manually (e.g. the yaml front matter), the preview is not "out of the box", different plugins/extensions may add unpredictable behaviour, you need to setup a build/deploy pipeline, etc. - the experience is just not stre…
> Of course I'd like a static website for deploying, but I'd love a web gui which acts as a frontend for such generators.
We used to have that with MovableType and (less known) Bricolage.
Today there is Lektor (does it support Python 3?) and that's about it.