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Can we all stop using Medium now?

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171–180 of 341 posts

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#171

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For some while (maybe still), there was a common belief that talking about your drug experiences online couldn't be used against you in court if you pretended it was someone else. This could be done semi-convincingly if you talked about, say, your "roommate" using drugs, but pretty quickly people started saying shit like "my cat" or "someone who isn't me" and, finally, abbreviated that to "SWIM." Like, "SWIM wants to…

That is similar to the stupid IANAL preface people insist on including. Quite frankly you can literally make a post stating you are a lawyer and the following is legal advice and there would not be a single repercussion.

I always assumed that preface to mean "I'm not a lawyer, please check with one before _you_ get into trouble", more so than "I'm not a lawyer, here's my opinion and don't sue _me_ over it".

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#172
post #144

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It's better to create your own blog, and get traffic overtime. Why they earn money on your content?

If I use Medium, they might earn money with my content. My blog, on the other hand, costs me money. I do have a personal blog instead of Medium. But it's definitely not about the money.

Jekyll + Github Pages / Netlify / Surge is free with subdomain. Or you could buy .dev (or anything else) for minimal price. Personally i bought 1$ .xyz domain. Its not that “costy”.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#173

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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.

Domain authority has some importance, but my understanding is that backlinks work per page, not per domain. Your newly published Medium article has the same back link profile as a newly published page on an owned blog.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#174
post #7

I don't publish anything ever really so I don't understand the appeal of using Medium. Can anyone explain it to me? Is it just the ease of use? Write some text, click button, it's available online?

I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as good. The stats are also incredibly well done. Some people are saying authors use it for the built-in audience. I can't say that was an appeal for me—or that I got very many readers from within medium anyways. I started my own blog with hugo/netlify (though notably I don't post things very often). The main reason I switched is because so many…

Lot of these can be done with simple open source blogging tools like Hugo combined with analytics. The main value of Medium in my mind is the amount of default “trust” that Google places on the content hosted on Medium. Your article on arcane topic on Medium will typically out rank other web sites who might have existed forever.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#175
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Domain authority has some importance, but my understanding is that backlinks work per page, not per domain. Your newly published Medium article has the same back link profile as a newly published page on an owned blog.

Doesn't Medium suggest articles, thus passing links to new pages? You wouldn't get this benefit on your own blog.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#176
post #148
post #145

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Hm hm, are you sure? And what is the difference between personal data and content? My pictures are pd or content? And if I publish them?

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... Now, obvliously, the content may contain personal data, or possibly be personal data (if it's pictures of people) and in that case I assume it would be covered.

I'm not convinced your interpretation is correct. GDPR Article 4[1] states that "personal data" means "any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’)", so it covers anything you produce that's somehow related to you.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#177
post #151

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> 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 th…

The problem with YouTube specifically, is that while blog posts are easy to host on pretty much anything that has a CPU, self-hosting videos at scale is essentially impossible. So while Medium only added a marginal amount of convenience for your average blogger, YouTube straight up enabled the kind of content it hosts.

We now have peertube, which uses p2p to decrease the load on your server.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#178

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If someone can find your work on medium, why would the bother to find your site and read it there instead?

Your content is backed up. In addition to Medium, your own blog can also attract users. Your website is much more customizable. With some luck and work, your website may perform better in google search.

That's what archive.is is for(as a reader). if i share an article i usually back it up on archive.is first just in case. your hosted website can go down at any time as well sadly(i see this a lot for ms hosted content)

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#179
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…

Wordpress has an app store for plugins. I installed a popular statistics plugin and it seems to be doing well. I think it is pretty amazing, actually (the app store). https://wordpress.org/plugins/

Hosting my blog costs me 5€/month, though. Not sure if I have the cheapest option. On the upside, it also supports multiple email accounts, so I am in the process of moving all emails (also family) over there, saving on extra costs for email.

I think attracting viewers is the only real issue. That's why social media, Tumblr and Medium took over from blogs. Because they have the recommendation and sharing features that bring viewers to people's postings.

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