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

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171–180 of 259 posts

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

#171
post #22

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with Medium as a platform for the space between amateur and professional writing, but I don't think it's right for most techie blogs. For people simply looking to spread ideas and neat little hacks, it's almost always going to be better using either a 'traditional' blogging platform or homebrewing a blog with one of the static site generators. There also seems to be som…

Right and how do you get people to read your blog? Ads? Billboards? No one will find a new blog with no Google juice. I used to get 300K a year but it took more than a decade to get to that level. I gave up on it (job burned me out). Now I get 100 readers a month. If I start up again, it will take years to get a decent readership (never did ads). At least with Medium someone would see it.

Here is a questions: What happens if Medium decides to cut your blog from there?

I am not saying they are doing, but what happens with all this knowledge when Medium decides to pivot (I am not saying they do) or to close (hope this will not happen).

I see better chances for the content to outlive when it is spread in separated smaller blogs. Not all of them will close, maybe some of them will be archived, maybe moved to other domains, maybe cached somewhere. But having a lot of content under paywall, without any license on the code shared (or at least I don't know about it) is not creating a comfortable feeling for myself.

Of course if the purpose is to monetize then maybe Medium is the right place.

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

#172
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its the only solution for 2020 web. Plus, of course, vpn and adblocker.

The only solution? So... in 2020 the only place to publish long-form content is Medium? Well... TIL.

no but some content is on medium, so it's helpful to know

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

#173
post #12

Why not hackernoon or any other blogging platform, then? Stackoverflow is gatekept, not super friendly, and you can only share things in response to people's questions.

I believe StackOverflow is just listed as an example of decent site design, it's well-known to be a ludicrously terrible resource considering its popularity.

Yes, I just listed StackOverflow there as an example for two reasons:

1. It is public (you don't need a subscription) 2. It has a license for using the code there (https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing)

I am not affiliated in anyway with StackOverflow and actually I created a new account because of some things I disagree with.

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

#174

Personal websites are great and I’ve been trying to put more content on my own personal website (I made nine decent-size posts this month, and I’m happy with that). HOWEVER, Running a personal website is a time sink and it can become a real pain as time goes on. It’s not a problem to create a personal website and shove a few HTML files on there, or set up a Wordpress installation, or create something with Jekyll. Tha…

I'm with you on this, and I started using https://dev.to/ instead of wasting my time maintaining my own personal website that nobody reads anyway in the hope that maybe, someday people will start reading it.

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

#175
post #20

Actually 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.

If anyone reading this does write a tutorial, _please_ put the date on it. Or at least the year.

This is a great great advice.

I think - in case of tutorials about programming languages/frameworks/libraries the bare minimum should be:

- Date

- Language Version

- Framework Version

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

#176

Personal websites are great and I’ve been trying to put more content on my own personal website (I made nine decent-size posts this month, and I’m happy with that). HOWEVER, Running a personal website is a time sink and it can become a real pain as time goes on. It’s not a problem to create a personal website and shove a few HTML files on there, or set up a Wordpress installation, or create something with Jekyll. Tha…

After moving my blog to Hugo and a custom CI/CD pipeline for it (that is in serious need of refactoring, but it works), writing and publishing new blog posts with SEO is very, very easy. Writing the damn thing is the hardest part of publishing now. All I have to do is commit and push, and now that CloudFront updates your local POP super quickly, new articles usually appear within minutes.

I used to host my blog on Wordpress, and I agree; massive timesink.

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

#177
post #19
post #2

Aren't the writers consciously choosing to monetize their content?

Yes. The author has to choose whether his article should be monetized or not. If someone chooses not to monetize them, they are not behind the paywall.

But still require an account to read it - of at least this is what sometimes happens to me.

Others (like self-hosted blogs or Stackoverflow) don't.

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

#178
post #5

For the past ~3 weeks Medium has blocked virtually every article I wanted to read and is asking me to pay. Most of these are programming tutorials related to some obscure Rails features. Honestly, I feel like Medium is the worse place to put your content. EDIT: For context, I don’t mind people monetizing their content, but in that case I’d rather pay them directly (like GoRails), and not a “subscription” for somethin…

The author decides whether the article is accessible for free or not. If the author is not in the partner program, even all of his articles are accessible for free.

Read https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018677974 section What does the checkbox do

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

#180
post #163

Personal websites are great and I’ve been trying to put more content on my own personal website (I made nine decent-size posts this month, and I’m happy with that). HOWEVER, Running a personal website is a time sink and it can become a real pain as time goes on. It’s not a problem to create a personal website and shove a few HTML files on there, or set up a Wordpress installation, or create something with Jekyll. Tha…

Congrats on creating content on your personal website. I am trying with my own but I still dont have a good habit in place to write. I agree that running a personal website is a time sink. But there are many other options like: Github/Gitlab Pages, Medium .... Persoanlly, I prefer simple HTML pages or Markdown. Plain HTML will render easy many years from now. They are easy to transfer and hard to get lost between mig…

GitHub pages is really just a hosting service for Jekyll. My website is getting close to the maximum size for GitHub pages anyway (the limit is only 1 GB). Medium is unworkable for too many reasons.

I started out writing my webpage in HTML, and if you dig around you can find my old GeoCities page, but plain HTML suffers from some problems that make it high-friction for posting frequent updates. So you start adding a simple templating system. Maybe at first it’s just a header and footer you stick on to every page. Then you start adding indexes so you don’t have to update index.html every time you write a blog post. Your plain HTML starts getting more and more complicated, and it starts relying on some kind of library of scripts which you are now maintaining.

That’s what happens if you dive straight into it and use whatever technology is simplest to understand. I think most people would be better off picking a static website generator, to be honest.

(Also: When I started posting content to my website, Jekyll didn’t exist.)

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