I think this happens when you don't have clear monetization strategy from the beginning.
Also, I always felt uncomfortable when reading a Medium post. It was always much more than a clear text that what I am interested.
Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
21–30 of 136 posts
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#22My 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…
As a proud HN commentor you should have built your own static site generator long time ago. Preferably in Assembler or some esoteric unknown language!
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#23I commented this 3 days ago: Medium is not for writers. They struggle to do a good business model. hurting non-profesional writers, so, it's obvious they leave Middle-Earth. If Medium only works for proffesional writers, there will be a tiny tiny portion of content compared they have today.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#24Every 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.
> 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.
My take is that they had a unique value proposition at the beginning: "YouTube for text: audience and authors all at the same place, with recommendations and unified comment platform". But then it became apparent that they will not magically become profitable or bought, so they started with the crap.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#25Yeah, so basically modals, banners, reminders to use the app etc. (vide https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2019/06/...) are new toolbars of the late 2010s (http://i.imgur.com/X7ipc.png).
I don't like the direction where the Web is currently heading. Shutting down open APIs, forcing users to use the one and only official app (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Reddit's starting to do so more and more), ubiquitous tracking, aggressive ad targeting and so on.
How can we - users, programmers, hackers - fight this?
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#26Nice. I did the same exact thing last week with one of my own blogs. But I was disappointed a little with some quirks with Jekyll. For example, I really needed to list blog posts in categories separately. Turns out there's no built-in way to do that with Jekyll, so I had to find a third-party plug-in to do that. Then there were some changes didn't trigger a rebuild with the local development server running, which I (…
I'd definitely recommend checking out Hugo too.
I second this. I migrated from Middleman a while back because I couldn't be bothered to handle ruby dependency conflicts during an update anymore. Hugo is what I use now and it's great. Migration from one to other was actually surprisingly easy too.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#27My 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…
I use Jekyll + one admin plugin. Work locally, then do jk build and ./deploy.sh and everything goes smoothly. But well, it's not pretty interface to deploy.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#28Every 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.
> 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. My take is that they had a unique value proposition at the beginning: "YouTube for text: audience and authors all at the same place, with recommendations and unified comment platform". But then it became apparent that they will not magically become profitable or bought, so the…
last-gasp monetization
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#29I can understand Medium wanting to make a profit but they've taken the wrong path (IMHO). Too many popups, distractions and recently reading limits.
I know I'm going to be downvoted for this but I'll give it a try :-)
Can we please-please have a native dark theme for Hacker News? Without plugins, browser specific hacks or other gimmicks, just a simple "Light|Dark" option.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#30My 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…
I tried Hugo before but came to the same conclusion. The simplicity draw me into trying it, but in my opinion the solution is not streamlined.
That's why i finally settled for a Flat File CMS [1], in my case Grav [2]. Like with hugo you get total control. And with most of them you get a single web interface to administrate the site, manage extensions and write blog entries. And you still have the possibility to git push everything on the dev server and git pull on prod, without managing a database. It's a dream.
They are not without problems though. You need to host your php site somewhere. Sometimes it's necessary to dive into php to fix some problems and creating something unique still takes some web skills (in contrary to wordpress for example).