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Medium is not the home for your ideas

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Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#121

Post by radiKal07 »

detaro wrote: post #7

It's telling that Medium stopped allowing custom domains. Their brand over yours, and no way of cleanly migrating elsewhere when they start log-in walls etc. (Of course their brand is now kinda poisoned by "log-in wall" and lots of low-quality "think-pieces", so you don't really want to be associated with theirs - which was somewhat different when Medium started)

This is what I’m trying to fix with https://panakit.com

Use your own domain while still making it easy to publish blogs(eg. no servers, no code etc)

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#122

Post by Lammy »

jiggawatts wrote: post #55
joelrunyon wrote: post #16

I've been yelling about this for years, but please start & own your own blog. Use webflow, ghost or whatever you like, but wordpress is good enough for most people. HN audience can likely handle their own, but if ease-of-setup is an issue - I created StartABlog.com to help people do this (and we'll actually set up your site for you for free - https://startablog.com/start ). Own your platform. Own your content. Own yo…

What's the best static site generator that meets the following requirements: a) Doesn't use node.js. b) Has built-in syntax highlighting for C#, SQL, PowerShell and Rust at a minimum. c) Is also good at "photo journals" or galleries. I played around with Hugo, but the themes were ugly and it was very weak at managing pictures associated with an entry instead of the entire site.

I’m a big fan of Jekyll, and it meets your A and B requirements out of the box. Hugo lit a fire under them with regard to build speed, and the 4.x line is a huge speed boost. It does syntax highlighting with Rouge, and the default Markdown engine is Kramdown.

I never found a solution for requirement C that I liked, so I’ve been building my own. It’s still very rough and not exactly in shape to publish, but its capabilities already by far exceed my previous solution: https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD

I left my WIP site running (‘jekyll serve’ using WEBrick) on my laptop and I’m going to bed, so these links may get hugged or just crash and become unavailable, but here you can get an idea of what I’ve been playing with for multi-image layouts: https://beta.cooltrainer.org/distorted/

And on the index page is a random smattering of some other media types I’ve been testing, like support for image-rendering SVGs, TTFs, and old DOS-codepage Nfos, mbedding PDFs, etc: https://beta.cooltrainer.org/

Anyway, big Jekyll fan. Try it out :)

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#123

Post by jannes »

detaro wrote: post #33
tomc1985 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, was it? From the beginning everything on Medium seemed to be written by folks who styled themselves as "thought leaders," but clearly weren't

I think so. There was a phase where there was clean design + many high-profile users pushing it a bit above other platforms. Nowadays clean design is more commonplace, they ruined their own design, more low-quality content, ... push them far down.

I remember the clean design phase. It's easy to forget, but back then medium was really impressive. Their design team posted an article about quotation marks in 2015 and I still remember it today:

https://medium.design/quotation-marks-c8993b54417c

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#124

Post by syntaxing »

I'm surprised how little people run their own blog, especially since it's free, minus domain name cost. I run my own blog (shameless plug: https://www.powu3.com/) for free (thanks Netlify!) and it was relatively easy to setup, and this is coming from someone with a hardware background rather than software. I guess the biggest downside is that it's harder to get visibility and clicks from search engines. I know a lot of people use github pages which is fully free and a great alternative.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#125

Post by jasonkester »

cube00 wrote: post #62

There's something dishonest about your profile appearing normal only to yourself, while the rest of the world is getting a 404. If you're suspended, fine, but tell the user, but why the need to hide this from them?

Indeed. It seems shady until you realize why sites do this. Probably the only way to truly understand is to run a site with user generated content for a while.

There will be people using your site that just need to go away. They're different from your typical pharmaceutical spammer because they genuinely think they're not doing anything wrong. If you tell them to stop posting affiliate links to timeshares, they'll put themselves in this box of "banned for doing nothing wrong", and simply start a new account posting affiliate links to timeshares in a slightly different way that hopefully will get around your algorithm.

The worst part is that after enough time, and enough tries, you'l have given them (and the pharmaceutical spammers as well) detailed instructions for how to circumvent your spam protection. All every step of this does is add more work to you to run your site for the people who you want to have there.

So the simplest and most effective thing you can do is make those people think they have succeeded. Let them promote their timeshares (and v1agra) to their heart's content. Just don't show anybody but them.

Real people have friends who read their blog and will point this out if it happens by mistake, and you have a "fix" button in your admin console to hit a few times a year.

Trust me. Run your own blog host for a few months and you'll implement this too.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#126

Post by axegon_ »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #114
axegon_ wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some time ago I asked myself the same question. Ideally I wanted not so much a generator but rather something that is completely self-contained. Essentially add a markdown or html file, commit and move on. Surprisingly enough I couldn't find anything that does that so I ended up building one myself. Doesn't support syntax highlighting at the moment but I've considered looking into it. Perhaps I should open source it…

Pelican [1] works this way, and I love it for my blog/website. I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook. [1] https://blog.getpelican.com/

Um... No, it doesn't.

> I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook.

This is exactly what I don't want to deal with. Sure, I could use a ci service but this is a typical case of over-engineering a simple problem.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#127

Post by mindfulhack »

I want to run with this sentiment to a certain extreme:

This reminds me of Cloudflare blocking that pro-nazi website at the DNS level - not because the content was illegal, but because of social or other reasons.

What this means is even your own domain and web server can be censored in devastating ways, based purely on personal or cultural disagreement.

Of course I'm not supporting nazism, but it's a dangerous precedent for the free and open web to moderate and censor people when you are not legally compelled to. Even if you are, the laws of your country might be unjust.

Not blocking != endorsing, and to say it does is thought policing.

Thanks for this post. I won't be posting to Medium anymore.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#128

Post by austinpena »

OhSoHumble wrote: post #95

Something that wasn't mentioned is that there is a reading cap for Medium articles if the user doesn't pay. Something that is frustrating is finding some technical documentation for a project on Medium and being hit with "you hit your reading cap of 5 stories..." and having to open up an incognito window. That is dumb. I shouldn't have to pay money to get around a pay wall for a project's technical documentation.

Blocking cookies and never logging in has solved that problem for me.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#129

Post by kibwen »

jiggawatts wrote: post #55
joelrunyon wrote: post #16

I've been yelling about this for years, but please start & own your own blog. Use webflow, ghost or whatever you like, but wordpress is good enough for most people. HN audience can likely handle their own, but if ease-of-setup is an issue - I created StartABlog.com to help people do this (and we'll actually set up your site for you for free - https://startablog.com/start ). Own your platform. Own your content. Own yo…

What's the best static site generator that meets the following requirements: a) Doesn't use node.js. b) Has built-in syntax highlighting for C#, SQL, PowerShell and Rust at a minimum. c) Is also good at "photo journals" or galleries. I played around with Hugo, but the themes were ugly and it was very weak at managing pictures associated with an entry instead of the entire site.

Since you mentioned Rust and since this is turning into a "suggest a static site generator" thread, I'll mention Zola: https://github.com/getzola/zola , although I can't say how well it works for photo galleries.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#130

Post by zby »

xpe wrote: post #2

The core argument against Medium is: "Until you host your content on your platform, they will always live at the mercy of the company hosting the platform."

The question is what does it really mean to have 'your own platform'? Does it mean that you need to have your own server at your bedroom? Or is it enough to rent one at a server room, or a shared host or maybe just rent some web space? What with your internet connectivity? Or just electicity - do you need to generate your own? You always depend on someone and in theory that someone can take your blog down.

I think the reasonable answer is that you need to pay for all your needs and not rely on any free services. Then you can rely on your providers.

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