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Can we all stop using Medium now?

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Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#151
post #65

I was writing on Medium because it ranks well in Google. I wrote nearly a dozen really great articles on primarily health and dietary supplement topics. After 2 months they started to rank well and were getting daily readers, as the content was really great. Then I wrote an article on a 'research chemical' and they banned my account overnight. I lost the final edited versions of all content. They did not send me a zi…

>When you write articles on Medium keep in mind you're writing on someone else's website and they don't give a damn about you. You are subject to their opinions about what is appropriate and what isn't.

Same can be said about other platforms like YouTube etc. When you produce content for all these mega-platforms, you're nothing more than a sharecropper... a digital one. [0]

You really have no rights and you're at the whim of the 'feudal lord' who doesn't care about you and can take all your work away in an instant. Since there's thousand others that will take your place, they really don't care about what your losses are. They hold all the power and you have absolutely no chance of remedy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#152
g-d forbid writers find a way to be compensated, eh? I despise medium, it sucks as a platform, it sucks to read, and 99 times out of a hundred if I'm on an aggregator or twitter and I see a medium link to a piece that sounds interesting I skip it, because medium sucks. But christ does that post reek of entitlement. On top of that, maybe learn to put words together a bit better if you want people to read your blog over another platform

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#153

I'm writing on Medium because its rank well on Google. I have several articles about the product I'm selling that rank 1-5 on Google and it gives me a lot of customers. It'll take me a lot of time to build my own website and content that gives me the same result. So, there's that. Sorry, not a native speaker.

Your English is great, and it’s great that you prioritize shipping over worrying about which blogging platform to use. Shipping is very important. That being said, I do think a small investment into moving onto your own platform may be worth it, and that might kick in much earlier than you’d think. I use Hugo and a fork of hugo-minimo-theme for my technical and personal writing, and it took maybe three days to set up…

> If you paid a contractor to spend a week setting up a statically compiled site with a CMS, you may get competitive SEO

Sorry, but that's just not how it works. The technical part is easy and certainly once piece of the puzzle, but without a certain website age and tons of good backlinks you will never be able to compete with medium.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#154
post #124
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you have just identified the reason that most people won't use it

Use DigitalOcean One-click instances, and it essentially makes it for you with all the necessary steps. It's super simple. I used that a while back and now run it on Docker on GCP since DO was a bit expensive.

Right, I’ll also teach my mom some DevOps and Kubernetes along the way since she has to use Digital Ocean and Docker for her knitting blog.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#155
post #100

I wrote one article on Medium. I ended up writing my own little version using open source markdown rendering to see how hard it would be to roll my own, https://jott.live From what I found, there is a lot of stuff Medium does well that is hard to recreate by one's self. Super simple features, like - rich text editing that isn't ugly - caching what you're currently working on - tracking views and who has viewed your a…

You don't necessarily have to build it yourself to have control over it though. I mean, WP isn't the dream you've always looked for, but it (+ a plugin or five) can do that and is pretty much set up in an hour. With wordpress.com, you'll get that without running it yourself.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#157
post #17

I know this doesn't justify all the issues but I'm at least a little excited that someone is trying to create a media/news service that isn't ad based. Seems like we have a way to go but at least this is a start. I'm a little surprised that there are so many complaints here - I bet a lot of the same people complaining also complain about ad based services and now they create news / journalism / articles designed for…

Ever since we switched our app from ads to ad-free soft paywall with daily limited content, we get a lot of hate and negative reviews on the App Store from our users. Some even said quite directly "bring back the ads".

This is so strange. What this kind of people don't understand is, we all buy products whose prices include advertisement costs. Eventually we pay for everything anyway, there is no charity (unless something is explicitly charity). Let alone cases where ads make us buy things we don't need. And not to mention the rabbit hole behind the seemingly free services like Google Search/Maps.

I don't get all the hate here. Paywalls are at least honest, clear and upfront about how the business makes money. We should support this type of businesses. It's usually the switch that triggers a lot of hate: businesses should probably be cautious about it.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#158

Funny how from "All to Medium, ditch WordPress and personal blogs" now people want to go the way around because of metered views and other limitations imposed by Medium popularity. I say it since ever: own your own content.

But you don't really own your WordPress. No way to get around using their services if you want to have proper spam filtering.

Sure you can. There are multiple anti-spam plugins out there, and unless you're running a super large high value target, most spam won't be custom made, so very simple things like hiding the "URL" field with CSS and marking as Spam when something has been entered will get rid of 95% of it.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#160
post #65

I was writing on Medium because it ranks well in Google. I wrote nearly a dozen really great articles on primarily health and dietary supplement topics. After 2 months they started to rank well and were getting daily readers, as the content was really great. Then I wrote an article on a 'research chemical' and they banned my account overnight. I lost the final edited versions of all content. They did not send me a zi…

just out of curiosity, which chemical did you write about?

asking for a friend?
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