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Why Medium Sucks

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Re: Why Medium Sucks

#131

Post by tonystubblebine »

jklepatch wrote: post #53
wuliwong wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was recently thinking about why I've made any posts on Medium. I'm also going to launch a product soon and have been kicking around whether to create our own blog, use Medium, or use some other option. I think there are two main reasons I'm interested in Medium: 1. It's easy. Any self-hosted solution will more be up-front work. 2. Because other companies use it as their blog platform, it should still allow us to se…

I am also interested in medium for similar reasons but i am hesitant for 2 reasons: - No access to google analytics tools (search console and analytics) - emails capture is more difficult. You can still embed widget but user has to opt in.

For both of you, I think you should also factor in the previous companies you're seeing originally also got the benefit of the Medium network effect and you won't.

With the switch to paywall focused incentives that went away. The value exchange for free articles is pretty minimal: easy and simple web hosting in exchange for letting them run "read next" links which are essentially ads for their subscription service. That's a huge step down from the old value exchange which had them also sending you readers and subscribers in exchange for giving them the opportunity to burn their own cash. IMO, the step down in value is severe, but also fair.

To get the readers and subscribers, you'd have to publish within their paywall. I don't think that makes sense at all for your main company blog. Easy and simple is good though, so maybe Medium still makes sense. It's just not as good of an option as it used to be.

However, I do think you could make the case that engineering blogs or other recruiting oriented efforts would benefit from focusing on distribution through cross posting or guest posting. I know the pubs that are focusing on Medium's subscribers would happily put an article from one of your engineers in front of as many subscribers as they could.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#132

Post by trustfundbaby »

duxup wrote: post #2

I know SEO and visibility is high on Medium. I'm still a bit amazed that so many people, many of them who aren't short on visibility, chose to host their content on that site. Most of it i would have rather read on someone's personal site as IMO that adds a lot of character and context.

> Most of it i would have rather read on someone's personal site as IMO that adds a lot of character and context.

And there are probably LOTS of people who don't care. Feels like folks on HN miss this important point.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#133

Post by simplecomplex »

TechFinder wrote: post #118
vishnu_ks wrote: post #83

I don't think we need a centralised publishing platform like Medium ever again. Anyone can create a blog for free using Wordpress. RSS feeds are amazing and it can easily serve the job of subscribing to these blogs. Look at the podcasting community for example. It's built on top of RSS feeds and it is thriving. Nobody needs a Medium.com in Podcasting world. What we need in the blogging world are more platforms and ap…

Well decentralization is mostly a sham in its current state. You think people will care about Block.One's Voice app? Steemit more or less died. Hacker Noon got greedy. Wordpress blogs are dead.

Wordpress blogs are not dead. 30% of websites are WordPress.

Are you sure it's not your reading habits that have changed? For example, I wake up and check my RSS reader (feedbin) where I subscribe to hundreds of individual blogs (many powered by WordPress). Actually this article was in my feed because I subscribe to HN RSS with a "Blog" keyword filter!

I don't have numbers but my anecdotal experience is that more blog articles I read are on WP blogs than not. Ghost is probably the other major platform I see along with static site generators.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#134

Post by tonystubblebine »

fuzzybeard wrote: post #113
simonsarris wrote: post #66

I think Medium is great. I pitched an article to an online magazine, about UBI. They said they ran one too recently, so I figured I'd self publish. I could have put it on my site, read by zero people, but I figured a medium.com URL would get farther wherever I submitted it. I was right, but not only that, the Medium twitter account tweeted my article, and Medium asked if they could edit it and make an audio version.…

That sounds like a great outcome, but it's predicated on having been hand selected by Medium to share your specific story. 99% of posts won't get that same treatment. Would your outcomes have been similar without that boost? That is, just by posting on Medium, would you have achieved a reasonable level of reach otherwise?

99% of posts don't deserve that treatment!

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#136

Post by Kye »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #59
overshard wrote: post #10

I feel like we are beating a dead horse here. Everyone I talk to knows Medium sucks. I personally hate the modal that comes up every time if I'm not logged in and how much of my screen is take up by fixed bars. Medium has a community though. Facebook sucks, but it has a community. Twitter sucks, but it has a community. You are going to get more people to see your post if you put it on Medium. You are going to get mor…

Finding a "non-suck' Medium is similar to some classic startup problems. Medium's tech complexity and operating costs are low (relative to web apps with similar scale). Totally agree the real problem is not technical, its reestablishing a community of significant size and quality, never an easy thing. For things like this, I wonder if the HN community has the characteristics to be a rallying point to build the moment…

Write.as and its self-hosted WriteFreely seems to be making some progress. They added ActivityPub support, so you even get the network effects.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#137

Post by neya »

There's an even major problem which the author hasn't mentioned. But I can understand if perhaps the author hasn't experienced it.

Medium embraces censorship. Medium has a content policy that's allows it to take sides. For example, Medium is very pro towards certain topics and anti against some. Eg. writing anything anti-feminism will get your account banned (even if presented with logical arguments, stats and facts). Medium will ban you for some dumb reason if you write anything pro-white people, Trump, Taiwan and sometimes Hongkong.

I know this because my friend wrote a stellar piece about a professor who openly expressed hatred towards males and who held a senior position in a university [1] and her account was banned the very next day.

To me, this seems like a strategy for Medium to become profitable by controlling/swaying people's opinions which is a much larger business than hosting blog content.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men...

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#138

Post by tonystubblebine »

gowthamgts12 wrote: post #130

Part of public domain now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_(website)#Criticism_and...

Oh brother. An alternative take on that criticism is that FCC pulled off a huge copyright heist: https://dev.to/ben/i-m-concerned-with-the-move-that-freecode...

I'm pretty sure that what FCC calls extortion was actually just the end of a free ride. Based on what I know of the ecosystem and the offer that was made to me as a publisher, I think the content of the Medium's approach would have been along these lines:

"For the past several years, you've been getting a free ride where we gave free hosting, free traffic, free readers and created a situation where most programming authors on our platform looked to you as the first place to publish, i.e. you got free authors. That free ride is over. We think you have these options:

A) We have pivoted to a subscription business. Do you want to pivot with us and publish within our paywall? If so, we'll continue giving you readers and authors, along with an editorial budget and a page-view based performance bonus. Also we'll start paying your authors out of our end.

B) Stay on our free platform. You'll still get the benefit of the SEO traffic from the articles you've already published and you can continue to publish as much as you want. We won't algorithmically promote your articles though and that will probably mean that fewer authors will choose you as their publisher.

C) You can leave. The problem with leaving though is that you don't own the copyright to any of the articles in your publication or your subscribers. So you can ask your current readers and authors to move with you, but on the surface it looks like this will cost you quite a bit of traffic."

I'm not sure about FCC's actual numbers, but I imagine the option A would have paid $20-50k/month in "profit" after costs of editing, authors, etc. It also would have significantly improved the quality of the articles. Not that the articles were bad, but a bigger editorial budget would have made them even better.

What it looks like FCC actually did was option D. Copy all of the articles in their pub (clear copyright infringement), taking a few million views per month in SEO traffic and then basically dare Medium to sue them. But Medium doesn't have standing because they don't own these copyrights either, so Medium's not doing anything. Instead, it's up to about 1k FCC authors who each individually are having to decide whether to take legal action (usually a DMCA complaint to FCC's hosting provider) or jump through FCC's hoops. FCC didn't even auto-create accounts for the authors, so in order to reclaim control of their article authors are having to either get on the phone with FCC or go through Twitter DM. However, if the author does that work, it does appear that FCC is willing to delete the article and/or give control back to the author.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#139

Post by vishnu_ks »

simplecomplex wrote: post #133
TechFinder wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well decentralization is mostly a sham in its current state. You think people will care about Block.One's Voice app? Steemit more or less died. Hacker Noon got greedy. Wordpress blogs are dead.

Wordpress blogs are not dead. 30% of websites are WordPress. Are you sure it's not your reading habits that have changed? For example, I wake up and check my RSS reader (feedbin) where I subscribe to hundreds of individual blogs (many powered by WordPress). Actually this article was in my feed because I subscribe to HN RSS with a "Blog" keyword filter! I don't have numbers but my anecdotal experience is that more blo…

Since you mentioned you read 100s of individual blogs what do you think of https://diff.blog. Its a side project that I have been working for a while. Do you see yourselves using something like this?

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#140

Post by mixmastamyk »

grecht wrote: post #94
mixmastamyk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you dissing Word Perfect and edit for DOS?

No, those are mostly fine, but a blog has different requirements than a text editor. I just find it a bit hard to read, because for example bright pictures really stand out, and I think he’s using different shades of white (or grey) for the font in different elements (like a paragraph or a quote). I just discovered that it’s possible to switch to a light theme, which is much more readable. Still would’ve preferred a…

Yep, it was a comment in jest.

I use the readability button and "Dark Background/Light text" on Firefox when things get a bit too wild and bright for me.

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