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Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

blog.elementary.io

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Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#31

Post by nickjj »

m52go wrote: post #3

Nice. 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'm using Jekyll for my site[0] which currently has 240+ blog posts that are filtered by tag but I didn't have to use any plugins to get that functionality. It's really fast too.

The way I set it up was with tags but that's really no different than a category. For example if you click the #docker tag, you get back a bunch of posts I tagged with #docker. Each post has a `tags` item in its front matter where I can pass a list of strings (a post can belong in 1 or more tags).

It would be too much to type in here to cover everything but if you Google for things like "Jekyll filter posts by tag" you'll find a bunch of plugin-less examples.

What's neat is you can also define a custom page title / meta description for each tag's index page using nothing more than what's built into Jekyll.

[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#32

Post by Alir3z4 »

You know what's creepy ? "You read a lot. We like that."

Or install our mobile app and get more content, or signup and get more content we figured with our fancy algorithm for you.

Here's the thing, Medium never worked for me. I had over ~300 followers and if I published something none of them would see it, no reaction, no visit, no read at all and I repeated the same thing over and over again with no luck.

I'd only get visits and reads on my articles when I shared the articles on social networks.

It seems your followers, real or fake don't matter are spammed with Medium algorithm to read "recommended" content.

I'm a developer, I like simple thing, but I don't like using static site generators to build a blog out of rst or md files and push to github etc.

I want a community around my blog, I wanna nice simple UI, a simple commenting solution, a place to upload my files and attach in posts optimized for web.

Plenty of blogging platforms may or may not provide all of it out of the box, but each with their own weird ToS and privacy policy.

I simply had enough of it and created my own blogging platform, https://www.gonevis.com where I have my own blog https://alireza.gonevis.com

I'm done with weird platforms where things are shiny and promising until they're not.

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#33

Post by Santosh83 »

agluszak wrote: post #25

Yeah, 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),…

By use a diverse set of browsers and minimally using apps, we can slow down the silo'ing of the Internet. If users don't blindly buy into every app out there, big corps will have little choice but to interoperate on the open web.

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#35

Post by Nextgrid »

agluszak wrote: post #25

Yeah, 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),…

As users, a step in the right direction would be to vote with your wallet, not use nasty services and prefer respectful services wherever possible.

As engineers & designers, we need to stop being complicit and building this shit nor working for such awful companies. If the majority of engineers become ethical then companies like Facebook, Google, etc will have a hard time hiring people to do their dirty work.

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#36

Post by sjamaan »

Santosh83 wrote: post #33
agluszak wrote: post #25

Yeah, 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),…

By use a diverse set of browsers and minimally using apps, we can slow down the silo'ing of the Internet. If users don't blindly buy into every app out there, big corps will have little choice but to interoperate on the open web.

Also by setting good examples and not using this shit ourselves, even if it's the expedient option.

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#37

Post by Proven »

Why X ditched Y...

Why we left Python

Why we switched to GCP

Why I dumped Netflix

These used to be comments in community forums that one could easily scroll past after reading the first sentence (yeah, doesn't apply to me), now each one is a Medium blog post and requires a click and another tab. Maybe viewing an add or two. The world is suddenly supposed to pay attention to these opinions based on niche preferences and circumstances...

But the thing is, a lot people still use (say) Python, and whatever reasons somebody had, it's more likely than not that you'll use it too. Most of these posts are highly irrelevant and don't apply to more than 80% of readers but for some reason people still pay attention to them...

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#38

Post by sjamaan »

yoz-y wrote: post #24
kryptiskt wrote: post #4

Every 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…

It's not like Youtube is not annoying and filled with crap (ads).

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#39

Post by ben_jones »

agluszak wrote: post #25

Yeah, 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),…

Disincentivize company founders from cashing out to the detriment of their users by moving the cradle of these technologies to a place where you can respectably buy a house and raise kids without millions of dollars.

We did this to ourselves through decades of equating personal wealth to community and social value.

Which is ironic given the economic purpose of hacker news.

Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium

#40

Post by itronitron »

Alir3z4 wrote: post #32

You know what's creepy ? "You read a lot. We like that." Or install our mobile app and get more content, or signup and get more content we figured with our fancy algorithm for you. Here's the thing, Medium never worked for me. I had over ~300 followers and if I published something none of them would see it, no reaction, no visit, no read at all and I repeated the same thing over and over again with no luck. I'd only…

All they would have to do, in order to have a functional and transparent recommender 'algorithm' is to rank order articles by how many of your followers liked, or read, an article... so if you have 100 followers and 50 of them happened to like another article 'B' then that article would be highly recommended to people reading your article. If they knew who was reading the article (logged in) then they could simply exclude articles from the list which the person had already viewed. That would help people browse through groups that shared similar interests.
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