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Medium is a poor choice for blogging

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Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#101

Post by dbspin »

citilife wrote: post #58

"Hosting" your own blog takes around an hour of setup for wordpress or github pages. Personally, I use vultr + wordpress for my blog[1], but I have technical expertise - it took only 30 minutes to setup and transfer from my previous provider. Reason I like to host my own, is I control the content, the popups, the UI, etc. If you care about that, host it yourself. Medium is there to make money, we can't fault them for…

I hosted my own wordpress blog for several years on various virtual private servers, and was hacked multiple times. Just got to be way too much work to admin the site. I use wordpress.com currently. It's less than ideal, but I think you're underestimating the amount of work required to secure a site long term, rather than simply install one. For most lay users, insuring that their host is keeping python up to date, that the security permissions are correct on each file, and that every plugin installed is 'safe' is more time consuming than it's worth. I'm not up to speed on the state of static site generators, but that's got to be a better way to go for most users.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#103

Post by briandear »

lookforlight wrote: post #63
criddell wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some benefits to centralization. For example, if I want to watch a movie or TV show, I have to look for it on Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, HBO, and my cable box. I wish I could subscribe to a single mega-service that just covered everything.

I wonder if it would be possible to create a service (or if one already exist) where you could select which streaming sites you are subscribed to, and the service could search all those sites for the movie you want to watch, then redirect you to that site. Because it's hard to remember or to know which site has which movies/TV shows.

Apple TV’s TV app does that.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#104

Post by wild_preference »

tpaschalis wrote: post #33

It's funny, because some years ago when Medium blogs were starting to be posted left and right, people were praising the interface, and nobody listened to the few who objected. Now, we need all kinds of tricks, add-ons and blocks to just read five-minute posts during our commute. It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of your stuff. The next free framework that comes, which promises a cl…

> people were praising the interface, and nobody listened to the few who objected.

Or maybe objecting had the same effect it had back then as it does now: absolutely nothing.

It's like me saying "the government is corrupt!" and, any time something happens or some time has passed, "shoulda listened! ;)" -- Seems a bit masturbatory at best.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#105

Post by TheRealPomax »

almostarockstar wrote: post #88

This topic comes up fairly often. I think about it a lot - as a Medium user and as a person who has managed multiple wordpress blogs. ##Here's my thoughts on why Medium is so popular: 1. It's easy. We are all techies here. We often underestimate the weight of this. 2. It looks better than your average blog theme. (With 0 effort) 3. It promises the opportunity to access a larger audience. (Even if it does not deliver…

A small note on that very last one: RSS falls in the "you probably don't know about this, so let us tell you that you can reach more people with it" category. Any platform that doesn't offer it, or offers it "tucked away" is doing so intentionally, to keep traffic siloed, and keeping the posts from reaching external audiences. Not knowing what RSS is as a user is completely fine, and really:to be expected. But that's true for all technology: pick any tech you value and the majority of the world won't be familiar with it (case in point: I didn't know hackernews existed until my stuff got posted to it and people started yelling at me about it) so it's not a matter of "do people know about it" but "should there be a reasonable expectation that people are told about it when they start doing a thing that would greatly benefit from it".

Not offering RSS, when you're an online syndication platform, is a pretty clear sign that Medium made Medium to serve Medium first. Not to be the best experiences for readers and writers of blog posts and long reads. Which includes not informing people about things they could have had if Medium was a little less self-serving and actually cared about getting people's voices heard out there.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#106

Post by iaml »

marpstar wrote: post #64

I'm glad the author mentioned the thing that I dislike most about Medium: the "share" tooltip that appears any time you highlight anything in the article. I realize that they consider this a value prop (and it certainly hasn't hurt their ability to grow) but for those of us who highlight text as we read, it's incredibly annoying.

It's very annoying, but thankfully reader mode in every browser gets rid of it and every other annoyance medium has, including popups.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#107

Post by onemoresoop »

amelius wrote: post #17

Outline.com strips away all the distraction. Although in this case it duplicates all the images somehow: https://outline.com/uZc4XF

Thanks for posting, I'm going to give outline a test drive. It seems to be doing what I want. The redundant images are less intrusive than the bells and whistles on medium.
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