Most technical content on Medium is a waste of time. It's now mostly shallow and low quality. If you are a developer you should have your own blog or write on a platform that's not paywalled. If you are writing to share information do where it will be publicly accessible.
Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
121–130 of 259 posts
Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
#122Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incognito mode works for me.
It doesnt work for everyone, I always use firefox auto-mulitcontainers where each tab has its own container with no history and cookies and I still get blocked by medium
Often when using incognito doesn't work for "limited free articles" paywalls it is because you haven't restarted your browser in a while and have had incognito windows open for a time too. Session cookies happily persist in incognito windows while you have them open and are shared between such windows.
Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
#124I agree on contributing back to a community and there's many ways to do that. That's not every producer's motivation though. Some do this to get paid and it makes sense to publish behind a paywall to do so.
Follow up question. What are opinions on publishing technical books?
Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you prefer ads or paying writers through Medium?
If you want to sell your tutorial for a few dollars, actually sell it for a few dollars and don't force me to play subscription games with Medium.
How do you get the reach? Reach is worth something.
Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
#126I write everything initially on my own site[0]. I will often (but not always) mirror the article on Medium[1]. I'll often post links, here, to the Medium articles, because I have had my site get the "hug of death" a few times. In the old days, that was cool (The term "slashdotted" came from that). These days, it doesn't really mean much; except that the server goes down. I don't get any real advantage from it. I thin…
You should try a static site generator, and then get your site hosted via CDN. No hug of death and extremely fast. It will take you an afternoon or so to figure out how things work if you haven't done it before, but it is time well spent.
Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most programming tutorials are effectively ads for the author. "Want to get hired? Write a programming blog" is advice I've received many times.
Okay, but I have no problem with people sharing useful knowledge as personal advertising, so long as it's actually useful and not otherwise scummy (e.g. the Medium UX).
But you're not ok with somebody selling you their useful knowledge?
Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Usually if you save to Pocket it will open fine.
Suggesting a workaround is not addressing the root cause. Please don't.
Of course it's a workaround and it would be better if the content would be freely available. I don't know the business model of Medium, don't know if contributors are getting paid, but I only suggested a way to read the articles without having to pay, before the issue gets resolved.
Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
#129I find most Medium tech articles to be written poorly or outdated or written by juniors. They seem to be written by people that want to write an article just to write and article.
This is becoming a problem Internet-wide. Too many people are more interested in becoming Internet Famous than becoming actually good programmers/engineers/etc...
Yep. The genuinely useful stuff is never coming from Medium/Twitter personalities. Instead I often find it on obscure Blogspot sites with a few posts per year, with archives going back to 2006 or so. That's where you find content from actual good engineers. Leave the Twitter e-celeb drama to the plebs, and Medium to the CV-filler fluff.
Re: Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
#130Actually can we stop writing tutorials period. When you search for something I always get a bunch of old tutorials by people who are learning something and writing as they learn. If the official docs aren't great, contribute to them.
That's a chronic issue. It's even worse, with printed materials.
Things move so quickly, in tech, that something is out of date, almost as soon as it's published.
I've been training for years, and setting up a syllabus/course is a big job. Often, my subject matter may be "old hat," by the time I am ready to give the course.
That often means that I don't teach "bleeding edge" stuff. When I take those courses, they tend to be mighty "scruffy," with ill-prepared instructors, and lots of "Well, it worked this morning..." stuff.
The same goes for topical material in walkthroughs and tutorials. If they are relevant, they are likely to be "scrappy." If they are good, there's a fairly high degree of confidence that they will be out of date by the time I see them.
Nonetheless, I have gotten fairly adept at translating "dated" stuff to my current circumstances.