Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium

Not the best solution - but I post it on twitter and use that link to access the article(since Medium paywalled article is free through twitter) and delete the tweet in few seconds later.

I subscribed to Medium briefly during the lockdown and the content was truly, utterly, awful. Terrible writing drowned out the good and great, reams of tripe, inane nonsense everywhere, and advertised like crazy to me. After a few weeks of this, I cancelled and subscribed to some actual magazines with some actual experts.

So quite apart from the nagging annoyance of being unable to access various padded-out articles (tip: private browsing FTW), this has highlighted that a need from 20 years ago hasn't changed: the world still needs better editors.

If the bigger newspapers like NTY, WAPO, The Cardigan would get behind tech in this way AND provide editing and curation, it'd be amazing. Maybe.

Yes, I think you are spot on regarding the motivation of writers. This is why I was thinking to write this request here, where there are a lot of technical people who can run their own websites.

Regarding standardized format, yes this is true. I don't have a rebuttal. I think it depends on the job to be done by the reader. For me getting to the information is more important than the format.

I learn things even by reading text mailing-lists.

I strongly agree with the part about the purpose of sharing the information:

I am buying from time to time website-based tutorials or other type of content. I agree this creates a new problem: I don't even know what I bought in the last years, what kind of online live books with exercises I bought and from where. I try to keep them in a document, but sometimes I forget and search email to find out.

Still I would like to ask that if someone just wants to share information and it is not focused on monetization then please consider other options than Medium.

A lot of newcomers will not make a subscription there.

Medium's popularity a few years ago prompted an idea for me. I wanted to be able to remove all links to domains I knew I never wanted to visit from all pages because I kept wasting time accidentally clicking them, not realizing where they were going.

I had hoped to pull it off with uBlock Origin but I couldn't get the filters to do what I wanted. I ended up making a Firefox add-on that takes a regex and some css, searches all attribute values and/or text for a match, and applies the css to the element with the match.

So, I have a regex for a handful of popular domains I never want to see and matched elements get "visibility: hidden". The result is that I never see a link to Medium. In fact, I usually forget the site exists until someone mentions it without linking to it, which is almost always a post about how Medium sucks :) Same for all the other domains in the list.

The plugin works on Firefox for Android, so I've enjoyed the benefits there as well. However, I expect that to be a problem soon. I don't do much browsing on my phone anyway.

It's only designed for personal use, so the interface is terrible, but I had to submit it to the official add-on repository because there's no reasonable way to run an add-on locally for practical every-day use, so it is available for anyone to use [1]. Source [2].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/

[2] https://github.com/7w0/ssure