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

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

#181

Post by dietrichepp »

nunez wrote: post #176
dietrichepp wrote: post #160

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 Wo…

My website is getting a bit big to shove the entire thing into a Git repo, unfortunately. At the very least I would want to have sparse checkouts.

I’ve thought about Hugo but it might require a serious migration effort. My current website is written in Go templates so I can do something like:

    {{.SrcFile "_src.c"}}
And it will read _src.c and set it up to be highlighted using C syntax rules. Leading underscore just means that the file doesn’t get deployed. This is just one example, there are a number of different things I’ve added to my website like this over the years.

Things would be different if I had chosen a static website generator from the start rather than letting things evolve naturally from hand-written HTML files. Currently, what I want to do is get rid of the templating and use DOM manipulation, so I’d write the above like
Just because it would make editing the files more convenient. Putting something like C source code directly in an HTML file is too much of a bother, and I put a lot of source code in my website, so anything I can do to save time here means I can write more articles. Markdown makes it easier to embed source code but it’s just not good enough to replace HTML for my use case.

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

#182

Post by gremlinsinc »

bioinformatics wrote: post #128
zepolen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use medium, as a freelancer, the extra little boost in cash helps during dry spells.

I mean, if people can't afford the $5 per month that it costs to read all medium posts, they really shouldn't waste the time complaining.

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

#183

Post by gremlinsinc »

vorpalhex wrote: post #46
dhimes wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.

So you're saying, you'd rather pay me $19 for my tutorial, than pay $5 for all tutorials on medium's platform?

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

#184

Post by gremlinsinc »

jwlake wrote: post #90
dhimes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you prefer ads or paying writers through Medium?

Medium doesn't actually pay writers does it?

Medium pays based on users subscribed who 'clap' on your articles, the more claps/views the more you make per article.

It's literally $5 a month to subscribe to all medium articles, I don't get the problem. That's less than a starbucks latte.

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

#185

Post by toastercat »

If you're a techie, you are likely capable enough to learn and use a static-site gen and host your blog on Github Pages, Vercel, Surge, Netlify, etc. If you're a techie, you probably also care enough to not inundate your readers with a crapton of intrusive trackers and weird browser hacks/overrides that Medium employs.

If you don't want to use an SSG, or if you're not a techie, you can use or self-host: https://write.as/, https://bearblog.dev/, https://rwtxt.com/public, https://the-federation.info/plume

The downside of the above options is that they are nowhere near as prominent and thus don't provide the same level of discoverability as Medium -- in which case, if you're really hurting for cash and are trying to make a career of writing, maybe it is in your best interest to stick to platforms like Medium, despite how intrusive and reader-unfriendly they are.

EDIT: I am hesitant to recommend https://dev.to/ because I have this sinking feeling that it will eventually become like Medium. Also, semi-related, but Dev.to uses endless scroll, which I think is very bad for readers (also it makes it impossible to click links in the footer).

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

#186

Post by gremlinsinc »

blunte wrote: post #62
andybak wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you genuinely arguing that the world would be a better place if there were only official docs and no tutorials? You must have a very different experience to me. I'd say the value is about 70-30% in favour of unofficial tutorials for the tech topics I've learned over the years.

But it is getting increasingly more time consuming to sift through the either outdated and misleading guides or the incomplete, inaccurate, or simply bad ones to get to a useful one. Even StackOverflow is reaching the point of net-negative value; far too many of its questions and answers are outdated, but the nature of their system means the older (first acceptable) answers tend to be promoted as current answers.

I think it's easy... I ALWAYS filter tech searches by date, anything over a year is outdated, usually. Esp. framework related as they change frequently.

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

#188

Post by alexgmcm »

armoredkitten wrote: post #139
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone told me that "It's called Medium because the articles are neither rare, nor well-done." That seems accurate in my experience.

That quote is definitely not original, and I believe was originally applied to TV (i.e., TV as a medium, singular form of media). (See the origins here: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/07/24/tv/ ) I mean, not knocking who told you that at all, I think it's funny that they applied it to Medium the website. Just a little tidbit of info about the quote's origins, in case you weren't aware!

Ah, I wasn't aware at all. I thought the joke was made about the website!

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

#190

Post by 533474 »

toastercat wrote: post #185

If you're a techie, you are likely capable enough to learn and use a static-site gen and host your blog on Github Pages, Vercel, Surge, Netlify, etc. If you're a techie, you probably also care enough to not inundate your readers with a crapton of intrusive trackers and weird browser hacks/overrides that Medium employs. If you don't want to use an SSG, or if you're not a techie, you can use or self-host: https://write…

Why not provide a static hosted mirror of the article?. Medium is bloated and slow. I miss the days when people had personal blogs
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