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Medium bans user for Chrome extension that opened articles in incognito mode

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Re: Medium bans user for Chrome extension that opened articles in incognito mode

#51

Post by judgardner »

paulgb wrote: post #23
donatj wrote: post #2

Medium lived long enough to become the villain. It was honestly quite the heel turn, but they’re all in. As far as I am concerned everyone should just move to substack at this point.

The problem all these sites have is that the domain starts as a signal of high quality — either because they are initially exclusive like Medium, or pay high-quality writers to move over. Over time, they regress to the mean and the domain becomes a signal of mediocrity. I understand the need for things like substack to grow an audience, but I maintain that someone who really wants to run a blog for many years should…

Google results will also rank these “high quality” sites above a self hosted domain. To the point where even a direct string search on an indexed page will never return on Google. Kagi and Brave search do a better job here if you’re looking for content on someone’s self hosted blog.

Re: Medium bans user for Chrome extension that opened articles in incognito mode

#52

Post by Brajeshwar »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #16

If you are a builder/creator (even hobbies, with 2 users) and generate contents, please get your own domain. Either you use a service/tool or otherwise but own the content. If you use a service and is important enough, take backups. Own your content, use eveything else as tools. These days, the question I usually ask is, "Can I walk out of this and what do I have to do if I need to?"

I would like to clarify that I'm not against Medium or any other tool/platform. In fact, I'm a pro subscriber so I can read some of the nice people writing there and I hope I'm helping them. And, some of my writings were pretty circulated and my account has over 4,500 followers. I have disabled few other accounts (company) that were not so bad.

Re: Medium bans user for Chrome extension that opened articles in incognito mode

#53

Post by Veen »

drcongo wrote: post #24
james_pm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why move from one corporate entity to another? Substack will end up going down the same road in time. Get your own domain, fire up a CMS and start publishing on something you control and own.

Quoted post unavailable.

You could say the same of Medium, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and everywhere else people post content that’s wrong/politically unpalatable.

Re: Medium bans user for Chrome extension that opened articles in incognito mode

#54

Post by bluGill »

mcv wrote: post #19
jbaber wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hard for non-technical people and I want to hear what they have to say. The only thing I like about twitter/facebook/medium/etc. is that I get to see what the whole world would do if they knew how to `vim index.html`. In this case, it's even harder because it's about maintaining a website synchronized with a mailing list. Make something open source and ad-free and they'd all run to it, I'm sure.

> This is hard for non-technical people and I want to hear what they have to say. I agree, so maybe we should work towards making it easier for them. I was thinking about spending my Christmas break fixing Friendica bugs, but now I'm suddenly thinking about building my own ActivityPub blogging platform (though no doubt one already exists). But of course that's not going to be enough; it needs to be trivial to deploy…

Please avoid building another platform. Odds are there is something that is close that needs a lot of help.

I know sometimes there is a project that looks good but the maintainers are impossible to get along with. Thus there is sometimes a need to start over. Most of the time though what platforms need is more people to help out: fix bugs, write documentation, translate the UI, run UX tests. That is all the thankless unseen when it works work that makes good commercial projects more polished than most open source projects.

Re: Medium bans user for Chrome extension that opened articles in incognito mode

#57

Post by onionisafruit »

ncphil wrote: post #28
gumboza wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I'm not sure why the hell anyone would do anything else to be honest. It has been an insane proposition putting content on something you don't control.

Seems an odd choice for a developer, for sure. I'm with all those who also have pointed out that self-hosting is the better route. Heck, as mentioned here, a compromise for this particular user would be to host the code on github and then use github pages for a nice companion site.

I typically go the github pages route. I used to buy domains for every project I spun up, but the collective bill started to add up for a bunch of very low traffic sites for projects that didn’t pan out. Now I just use github.io.

The other concern is legacy. I’m getting up there in age. I would like some of my work to continue to be useful after I retire without me paying for domain renewals or worrying about hosting. Without my intervention a github.io site will probably outlast a onionisafruit.com site.

Re: Medium bans user for Chrome extension that opened articles in incognito mode

#58

Post by onionisafruit »

mrzool wrote: post #41
gumboza wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I'm not sure why the hell anyone would do anything else to be honest. It has been an insane proposition putting content on something you don't control.

> This. You're not on Reddit, pal.

“This” is fine as long as it isn’t the only content of the comment. It is simply a signal that the following text isn’t meant to contradict what they are replying to. It’s a simple shorthand for “I wholeheartedly agree, and furthermore …”

Re: Medium bans user for Chrome extension that opened articles in incognito mode

#59

Post by 411111111111111 »

weberer wrote: post #43
Brajeshwar wrote: post #16

If you are a builder/creator (even hobbies, with 2 users) and generate contents, please get your own domain. Either you use a service/tool or otherwise but own the content. If you use a service and is important enough, take backups. Own your content, use eveything else as tools. These days, the question I usually ask is, "Can I walk out of this and what do I have to do if I need to?"

I like Nearlyfreespeech.net for stuff like this. For $1.50 per month, they let you easily host static HTML files. You don't have to learn about servers or routing or anything. https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing

Why not just use GitHub pages or it's equivalent gitlab alternative when you're already going static files?

Super easy to maintain as publishing is always just a commit away and if you're feeling fancy you can pivot to your static site generator of choice later

Re: Medium bans user for Chrome extension that opened articles in incognito mode

#60

Post by mcv »

djbusby wrote: post #25
mcv wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is hard for non-technical people and I want to hear what they have to say. I agree, so maybe we should work towards making it easier for them. I was thinking about spending my Christmas break fixing Friendica bugs, but now I'm suddenly thinking about building my own ActivityPub blogging platform (though no doubt one already exists). But of course that's not going to be enough; it needs to be trivial to deploy…

That used to be a thing they offered. A dial-up or DSL connection and like 25MB of web-hosting.

That's true. In fact, I recently got an email from mine asking if I still wanted to keep my webhosting, because they wanted to get rid of it. I used to have a lot of stuff there, but it got deleted when they mixed something up about my account.
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