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Medium is not the home for your ideas

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Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#341

Post by jedimastert »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #331
jedimastert wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother wanted to start writing about his recovery process[0] and asked me to help him make a blog. He said he wanted to learn a bunch of stuff so he could be self-sufficient enough to not have to ask me/"need my permission" to go from written post to publish. He had already bought a domain that came with some bottom-of-the-barrel free shared hosting service. I pointed him towards Wordpress, he set up the entire t…

The link to your blog gives an HTTPS error for me in Firefox.

That's embarrassing...I spelled it wrong

https://amtunlimited.github.io

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#343

Post by nullc »

jasonkester wrote: post #125
cube00 wrote: post #62

There's something dishonest about your profile appearing normal only to yourself, while the rest of the world is getting a 404. If you're suspended, fine, but tell the user, but why the need to hide this from them?

Indeed. It seems shady until you realize why sites do this. Probably the only way to truly understand is to run a site with user generated content for a while. There will be people using your site that just need to go away. They're different from your typical pharmaceutical spammer because they genuinely think they're not doing anything wrong. If you tell them to stop posting affiliate links to timeshares, they'll pu…

There is a real ethical peril here. You've just created a massive externalities-- the honest poster wasting their time without realizing it, hoping someone notices and tells them, and then having to take it up with you.

Shadown banning is an act of fraud against the user, with the hope that it's mostly against malicious already-banned users and that false positives will get it undone.

But since the cost of shadow banning is on the users and the benefit is on you, there isn't a particular incentive to not miscalibrate and cause a lot of damage to users.

The only backstop is that if you're very far into the false positive domain it'll kill your venue but because shadowbanning is invisible by its nature it requires a truly massive amount of false positives to have that effect.

There are also secondary damages that good users worry that they've been silenced and don't comment. E.g. after my last several submissions to HN received no comments I suspected I might be subject to some kind of shadow ban (since HN engages in that sort of thing) and stopped submitting.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#344

Post by hunter2_ »

jiggunjer wrote: post #305
hunter2_ wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying helps, but even then, they are usually terms against abusive behavior. It seems that what constitutes abuse reduces as you go up the chain (for example: perhaps a social network forbids false information and worse, perhaps a hosted CMS forbids hate speech and worse, perhaps a VPS/colo/residential forbids only very illegal activity) but it's always there to some extent. Maybe it's about human abuse and maybe it…

Sure. Just invent your own Internet.

Is this actually a valid (albeit not feasible, but theoretically valid) answer to the question though? I didn't capitalize the I in my question, but I should have, because I do mean for it to be interoperable / peered.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#345

Post by Apotheos »

jjcm wrote: post #45

Another thing I would echo here is that you don't necessarily need a CMS / WYSIWYG editor to run a great blog. A tiny script that dynamically compiles your markdown flavour of choice and has a nginx reverse proxy in front of it will be able to survive a reddit frontpage hit on a $5/mo vps, and it will be dead simple to set up. If you're looking to move off Medium, give it a try. If anyone is interested I'm happy to s…

Could you expand on how one would do this? I'm trying to figure it out but am a bit overwhelmed.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#346

Post by jjjbokma »

joelrunyon wrote: post #16

I've been yelling about this for years, but please start & own your own blog. Use webflow, ghost or whatever you like, but wordpress is good enough for most people. HN audience can likely handle their own, but if ease-of-setup is an issue - I created StartABlog.com to help people do this (and we'll actually set up your site for you for free - https://startablog.com/start ). Own your platform. Own your content. Own yo…

I strongly agree. I have a (mostly) link blog [0] (for which I wrote the SSG [1]) and do link to Medium articles but am getting more and more tired by the nag-screen that shows up every 5 or so posts after having deleted the medium cookies (again). I guess there is an extension for that, but I am too lazy to install it :-) But a bigger question is for those who publish on Medium: how many people get scared away daily from your articles after hitting the sign up nag screen?

[0] https://plurrrr.com/

[1] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog (as of today available under MIT license)

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#347

Post by lebaux »

dgellow wrote: post #56
vishnu_ks wrote: post #44

Folks looking for a Medium alternative, please checkout https://diff.blog . It's an aggregator of developer and engineering blogs I built an year back. It has been growing steadily since. The reason why I built this was to solve the problem of disoveralibilty of self hosted blogs. It's hard for bloggers with self hosted blogs to reach a big audience. So a lot of them end up moving to a platform like Medium which give…

Thanks for sharing, that's a nice project with a good user experience. That reminds me of the concept of blog "planet" that was somewhat popular in the Linux world a decade ago. Basically an aggregate of blog feeds loosely related to a given topic, you can follow it and have the feeling that you're following a community, without the drama that you have on social media. It's a great concept IMHO, and stupidly simple t…

This is actually kinda amazing. Am I too young? How did I missed this?

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#348

Post by resu_nimda »

mindfulhack wrote: post #127

I want to run with this sentiment to a certain extreme: This reminds me of Cloudflare blocking that pro-nazi website at the DNS level - not because the content was illegal, but because of social or other reasons. What this means is even your own domain and web server can be censored in devastating ways, based purely on personal or cultural disagreement. Of course I'm not supporting nazism, but it's a dangerous preced…

I think platform owners should have the right to decide what content they want and don't want on their platform, and I would say that not blocking can definitely amount to endorsing depending on the situation. When Reddit was under fire for the child porn flourishing on the site, if they hadn't taken action, they would have (rightly) been seen as endorsing it.

I don't see how this concept of a purely neutral platform that is adamant about allowing any kind of content is a necessary or useful thing. At the very least I don't think it should be mandated that platform companies meet that standard or even attempt to. The ones that do descend into toxicity very quickly. It's not clear to me what value is really being preserved there, and from my perspective the level of censorship in the US in 2020 is generally toeing a pretty good line, i.e. not sliding down a slippery Orwellian slope (though no doubt in a country of 300 million you can find a fair few concerning counterexamples).

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#350

Post by ralls_ebfe »

jedimastert wrote: post #297
joelrunyon wrote: post #16

I've been yelling about this for years, but please start & own your own blog. Use webflow, ghost or whatever you like, but wordpress is good enough for most people. HN audience can likely handle their own, but if ease-of-setup is an issue - I created StartABlog.com to help people do this (and we'll actually set up your site for you for free - https://startablog.com/start ). Own your platform. Own your content. Own yo…

My brother wanted to start writing about his recovery process[0] and asked me to help him make a blog. He said he wanted to learn a bunch of stuff so he could be self-sufficient enough to not have to ask me/"need my permission" to go from written post to publish. He had already bought a domain that came with some bottom-of-the-barrel free shared hosting service. I pointed him towards Wordpress, he set up the entire t…

Both URLs fail for me due to SSL issues.
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