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Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

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Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#61

Post by strenholme »

joelrunyon wrote: post #29

Just roll your own blog already. If there's one thing these services reinforce over and over again - it's that they'll change their terms over time. Own your site. Own your data. Put it all on your own terms. If you need help setting one up (unlikely for this crowd), you can have one made for you for free here. https://StartABlog.com/free-blog

There are a lot of blog hosting platforms. The most popular is Wordpress (which, yes, needs a database back end), whose source code can be downloaded at https://wordpress.org/download/source/

One way to create a static site is with GatsbyJS: https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby Or Jekyll: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#62

Post by all2 »

whsheet wrote: post #45
all2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High SERP ratings come from multiple things: 1. If you use Google signed in, they know (I assume) you preference technical material (which is the bucket Medium falls in) 2. On-site links; one of the most powerful (and underutilized methods of SEO) is interlinking pages on a site. I'm not sure why this is the case, but it can be a determining factor in top-ranked sites (see Wikipedia as the canonical example of onsite…

Thanks for giving us a 101 lesson on the basics of SEO and SERP. Glad that we have some witty minds on HN. You forgot one thing though: This modal is unnecessarily hiding content and pissing off everyone. It is reason enough to give Medium a heavy SERP penalty for many months.

You asked why. I answered. I don't think that merits a personal attack.

As for modals, that's UI. Google's algorithm doesn't care that I've seen.

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#63

Post by close04 »

whsheet wrote: post #50
zschuessler wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great advice for those who don't want discoverability. However, for everyone else, Medium going to the dark side was a huge pain because there was no alternative. They had a monopoly on the "write articles and get discovered" market. Maybe some here don't care about discoverability, but most writers do. To Able: thank you so much for trying to fill this void. I would recommend that you not focus solely on dev…

> hit the casual crowd Forget the casual crowd. First reason: It’s always good to start with one demography and fulfilling their requirements. Second and TBH, the casual crowd sucks steel when creating short-form blog content. Go to the Linkedin blogs, all non-tech Medium blogs, TED talks, Facebook: 99% is useless, already seen, self-help-type advice covered with click-baity titles. Every Reddit post has more substan…

> all non-tech Medium blogs

> link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog

I agree with the first part of your comment. Narrowing the focus to a specific demo makes it far easier to provide exactly what your target audience needs, thus a higher quality product/service.

But I have doubts about the second part. You're classifying everything in 2 categories, "tech" and "non-tech" (I assume non-IT here) so this particular thing or absolutely everything else all in one bag. How qualified are you to judge the dozens of non-tech fields out there, say psychology, economics, marine biology, or agriculture? Is this a bit of (reverse?) Gell-Mann amnesia effect where you can accurately judge a tech blog on LinkedIn as being good but when it comes to something outside of your field of expertise you assume low quality?

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#65

Post by vfc1 »

joelrunyon wrote: post #29

Just roll your own blog already. If there's one thing these services reinforce over and over again - it's that they'll change their terms over time. Own your site. Own your data. Put it all on your own terms. If you need help setting one up (unlikely for this crowd), you can have one made for you for free here. https://StartABlog.com/free-blog

This is so true, Medium started paywalling free content a couple of months ago. This means people leading on your blog, wanting to read your content and being prevented to do so unless they pay Medium.

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#67

Post by whsheet »

all2 wrote: post #62
whsheet wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for giving us a 101 lesson on the basics of SEO and SERP. Glad that we have some witty minds on HN. You forgot one thing though: This modal is unnecessarily hiding content and pissing off everyone. It is reason enough to give Medium a heavy SERP penalty for many months.

You asked why. I answered. I don't think that merits a personal attack. As for modals, that's UI. Google's algorithm doesn't care that I've seen.

Apologies for the attack, couldn’t resist. However, what you wrote is common sense and you should assume that anyone lurking around on HN knows that stuff. I mean you actually described the page rank algorithm which was the foundation of Google but there are many more signals nowadays. So your post felt like a (small) attack too.

FYI, Google runs quite a large spam team which flags scammy sites manually. Sites with such a modal are usually rather on the spammy side of life and gets flagged by the team. If you get too many flags you get severe penalties slowly eating your traffic in a way that it’s not clearly obvious and it can take years to recover.

But since it’s Medium such UI seems to be tolerated.

If I ran that team I would have killed Medium's, Quora's and Pinterest's search traffic. And soon maybe StackOverflows as well.

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#68

Post by 1337shadow »

georgeoliver wrote: post #25

It's always seemed odd to me that there isn't a hosted service with a headless web/mobile CMS, compiling to a static site, that saves to a few common backends (s3, etc.), with reasonable pricing (i.e. not $10+/mo). Let the user pay for their own storage.

Gitlab does that for free, with free storage. Just fork any of the existing example projects: https://gitlab.com/pages

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#69

Post by ellinokon »

georgeoliver wrote: post #25

It's always seemed odd to me that there isn't a hosted service with a headless web/mobile CMS, compiling to a static site, that saves to a few common backends (s3, etc.), with reasonable pricing (i.e. not $10+/mo). Let the user pay for their own storage.

Doesn't several services like this exist already? Siteleaf should somewhat fit the bill. Webhook, now defunct, also did something similar.

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#70

Post by LordDragonfang »

close04 wrote: post #63
whsheet wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hit the casual crowd Forget the casual crowd. First reason: It’s always good to start with one demography and fulfilling their requirements. Second and TBH, the casual crowd sucks steel when creating short-form blog content. Go to the Linkedin blogs, all non-tech Medium blogs, TED talks, Facebook: 99% is useless, already seen, self-help-type advice covered with click-baity titles. Every Reddit post has more substan…

> all non-tech Medium blogs > link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog I agree with the first part of your comment. Narrowing the focus to a specific demo makes it far easier to provide exactly what your target audience needs, thus a higher quality product/service. But I have doubts about the second part. You're classifying everything in 2 categories, "tech" and "non-tech" (I assume non-IT here) so this p…

If we expand "tech" to mean "technical" rather than "technology", those statements become much more likely to be true. People who have skills in some sort of technical background seem much more likely to have interesting insights than people who do not. HN loves to post Slate Star Codex, for example, and I doubt most here have the skills in psych to effectively evaluate his writings as correct.
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