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Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

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Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#181
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As many others indicated, static sites are much better unless you need dynamic features. Static sites make deployments much easier, doesn't depend on any OS/runtime, doesn't lock you in to a particular database. You just write markdown and with little to no modification, the same thing could just work on Hugo, or Jekyll.

I use Jekyll; I used Hugo and Pelican in the past. They solve a very specific use case. But if you want to allow guest posting on your blog, a static site will not do. You need something that has drafts, that has a proper editor, that has a UI you can add and invite people to. Ghost solves that.

It seems that all of those features are Git-features. The missing piece is a "git-aware" markdown editor, as in, an editor that knows about git branches, and can commit/push and be mildy helpful if there's a conflict.

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#182
post #139

I never liked medium, their comment UX is weird and annoying, the whole thing is just faceless, brandless and feels generic. Mabye I'm old, but I find shared hosting with one click deployment of wordpress a better choice, but heck, most of the blogs I end up reading nowdays are tech blogs written by bright people who for some reason will not 1. deploy an existing blog engine to a shared host 2. host a blog on a vps 3…

wordpress offers free hosting for unlimited traffic. You don't need to set up anything.

The smallest blog takes a long time to setup. I understand developers who don't want to run web services at work only to come home and run other web services.

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#183
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article you linked looks to be about how they banned someone who said that a shooting last month was a 'false flag' and the victims were paid actors... This is not the time this horrible false narrative has been applied to a shooting, alex jones promoted an identical story last year. These things are always actually about the alt-right getting kicked out of a service, they say the service is now dead and doesn't…

With the government is passing laws like FOSTA giving private platforms huge liability for allowing free speech, the alt-right was just the beginning. Now it’s moved on to sex workers, harm reduction communities, marketplaces, and more. If the next step is liability for “false narratives” and “disinformation”, open and free discussion is dead, under the boot of the arbiters of truth.

> open and free discussion is dead, under the boot of the arbiters of truth.

Next step: Ministry of Truth?!

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#184
post #42
post #9

A blanket statement like 'Medium is bad' does not have enough nuance. Medium is for profit centralized service. You are trading freedom for convenience and access to an audience. It is for you to decide if this tradeoff is profitable. For me, having Medium as the sole repository of my content does not seem like the right tradeoff. Maintaining a static site with a CDN costs less than 5$ a month. Having complete contro…

> Maintaining a static site with a CDN costs less than 5$ a month. That's putting it mildly! I host a (small) static webpage on AWS S3 + CloudFront, and my monthly bill is 56 cents.

56 cts until one of your article gets published on HN and you are billed for a TB of data transfer.

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#185
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we go by your definition, "true speech" is always intended to persuade others of your opinions or positions. I don't believe that to be the case. Your reference to the last presidential election is nonsensical, if you're attempting to claim that the Democratic candidate lost because of a few hundred thousand dollars in ad buys and thousands of Twitter bots. Clinton lost because the campaign was clumsy when it came…

Clinton certainly didn’t help her cause, but psychographic warfare absolutely had an impact, even if it’s not measureable. Ads/Stories were put in front of micro-targeted social media recipients with one of two goals. Increase fear/anger on right so people would vote. Increase apathy/disgust on left and with independents to discourage them from voting or to vote for a third party. If you micro-target even the smalles…

> Clinton certainly didn’t help her cause, but psychographic warfare absolutely had an impact, even if it’s not measureable.

Hillary spent quite a lot more than Trump[1] and had her own army on social media called Correct the Record. I believe it's now Share Blue?

The sad thing is that modern politics is based on who can make the other guy the most hated, as this seems to drive the most votes.

[1] http://fortune.com/2016/12/09/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-c...

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article you linked looks to be about how they banned someone who said that a shooting last month was a 'false flag' and the victims were paid actors... This is not the time this horrible false narrative has been applied to a shooting, alex jones promoted an identical story last year. These things are always actually about the alt-right getting kicked out of a service, they say the service is now dead and doesn't…

If there are two platforms. One is high quality, polished and it allows everything except x. The other is lower quality, small budget, and it allows everything. Then guess what: everything that isn't x will be on the first platform.

i guess the problem is that there's no historical comparison for a social network. if you compare twitter or medium to a newspaper, well obviously it's not against the first amendment for them to stop people they disagree with from posting.

maybe it's more like a megaphone, a tool that allows you to communicate. a free megaphone, and there are competitors, but their megaphones are quieter...

it's an issue that's being debated every day now. without question it's stupid that obviously hateful yet popular propaganda platforms like donald trump's subreddit are allowed while hateful and less popular subreddits are banned.

just saying, it's not black and white. but by current us law this stuff is all legal.

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Jekyll; I used Hugo and Pelican in the past. They solve a very specific use case. But if you want to allow guest posting on your blog, a static site will not do. You need something that has drafts, that has a proper editor, that has a UI you can add and invite people to. Ghost solves that.

You need a headless CMS like Contentful[0]. They have a free developer tier which is great for static sites, especially when you pair it with the super awesome React based static site generator GatsbyJS[1]. [0]: https://www.contentful.com/ [1]: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/gatsby-starters/

would go with Ghost or Hosted Jekyll, `Contentful` is not a good solution for individual/small/medium teams.

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#188
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Always publish on your own platform What does "your own platform" mean? Without relying on things like Tor, I don't believe it's possible to publish anything without relying on some large corporation who can pull your content with a day's notice. If not Medium, it'll be AWS or Google Cloud or your domain registrar. Anyone who cares about an open web should be, at minimum, calling out those who take down content on…

Domain registrars are orders of magnitude less likely to censor content than user-generated content sites. Hosting providers vary on this issue, but they're a commodity and some do take a hard non-censorship line. I agree we should call out sites for censorship, but there's a strong case for people taking more control over their publishing.

> Hosting providers vary on this issue, but they're a commodity and some do take a hard non-censorship line.

Nearlyfreespeech and Gandi comes to mind here, I'm sure there are others who try to set as clear stance about their TOS. In general for web hosting though you should research that they have good connections, don't over-provision and have competent staff.

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#189

Hey everyone, if you're looking for a fantastic blog engine, I want to tell you about Ghost: https://ghost.org I found Ghost while looking for a new blog engine for my company. My first instinct was to use Medium as well, but I ended up hitting a lot of issues because it was impossible for us to customize it (add custom javascript, charts, disable the lame "highlights", custom domain was not free, etc...). 1. Ghost i…

1. You sound like an advertiser.

2. When I first discovered Ghost (last year) and I heard it's using NodeJS I was expecting a beautiful, responsive, SPA blog engine that is fast. After reviewing it and even trying to use it as a platform for a newspaper I found that (It's just wordpress and it's not using the power of javascript to it's full extent.)

Fast => I could and I did built a faster wordpress site.

SPA => Nope

Customizable => Nope.

For me it's not worth the extra capabilities instead of a static blog.

I found gatsby(1) great for all my use cases and with some extra work[2] is more dynamic that ghost.

1. gatsby - https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby

2. netlify + contentful - https://www.netlifycms.org/ + https://www.contentful.com/

(I would love to see a CMS that embraces SPA/PWA. On the other side I would hate to serve 1mb of JS just to show 4 paragraphs and 1 picture)

Re: Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Jekyll; I used Hugo and Pelican in the past. They solve a very specific use case. But if you want to allow guest posting on your blog, a static site will not do. You need something that has drafts, that has a proper editor, that has a UI you can add and invite people to. Ghost solves that.

You need a headless CMS like Contentful[0]. They have a free developer tier which is great for static sites, especially when you pair it with the super awesome React based static site generator GatsbyJS[1]. [0]: https://www.contentful.com/ [1]: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/gatsby-starters/

I want to upvote you more.
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