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Medium is a poor choice for blogging

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Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#191

Post by alexandre_m »

tpaschalis wrote: post #83
esotericn wrote: post #61

Sometimes I read articles like this and think I'm past it. It's like the whole web has turned in to this pool of mud and no-one realises what it was like before. A blog is a text file on a screen. There's really no need to do it on a proprietary system, you can literally upload a text file to your own host, but if you can't be bothered, somewhere like GitHub Pages. You want an image? Here's a tag: If the idea is that…

Yes, this a thousand times. One example, Dan Luu [1] gets this absolutely right . His blog would probably look similar on Lynx, or any text-only browser, yet is better than 99.99% of stuff "out there". [1] https://danluu.com/

There's also Pocket that'll happily keep a nice formatted copy of the article from that site, regardless of the current ugliness, making the reading experience on mobile quite pleasant.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#192

Post by detaro »

jypepin wrote: post #93

I'm amazed at how many people here say that people should simply use a static site generator instead of wordpress or medium. Does anyone else understand that probably 99% of Medium traffic (both reader and writer) don't even understand those words and would have no idea even where to begin? Most of them probably had trouble just signing up on Medium and already forgot their passwords. This is where Medium wins. It lo…

It's not surprising that people on a fairly technical site recommend solutions for fairly technical users - that doesn't mean they mean that everyone should go there. There's tons of other hosted blogging platforms out there for people who don't want to take care of hosting, and which offer basic features Medium doesn't, e.g. the ability to use your own domain.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#193

Post by Pxtl »

keiferski wrote: post #144
entelechy wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our data doesn't support that. Most of our traffic comes from hackernews, reddit and similar. However because our blog is too niche? https://medium.com/@buckaroo.pm

You’re discounting the security/authority that “medium.com” brings over a random domain name. You might get less traffic from HN and Reddit if you weren’t on Medium. Edit: just because a few people (myself included) have a negative reaction to a Medium link doesn’t change the fact that many Medium links are upvoted on HN.

Yes, but I'm happy to see a ".github.io" domain which hosts a static blog site just fine and tells me the site is fully static.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#194

Post by enz »

coldtea wrote: post #117
tpaschalis wrote: post #33

It's funny, because some years ago when Medium blogs were starting to be posted left and right, people were praising the interface, and nobody listened to the few who objected. Now, we need all kinds of tricks, add-ons and blocks to just read five-minute posts during our commute. It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of your stuff. The next free framework that comes, which promises a cl…

> It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of your stuff. But zero ways to get people to read it. I only read his post because it's on HN. And I read Medium stuff regularly on Medium. The chances of most people discovering some random blog? Not so much. Whereas Medium has concentrated eyeballs and knows their preferences to serve them stuff that's close to their tastes...

If you write about tech, you can cross-post your article on dev.to and set a canonical link for SEO. I don't know if Medium offers this kind of option. So you have people reading your content while you keep your personal blog.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#195

Post by detaro »

almostarockstar wrote: post #51
wpietri wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not just a platform, it's an audience. If you want to reach the audience, you have to use the platform. And the audience most in need of this message are definitely the people publishing on Medium.

Are you referring to platform generated content? The thing is, Medium doesn't do very well at that either. I have a medium blog. I've had a few posts got >10k reads within a month. Almost none of those reads came from Medium itself, but rather from the various outlets that have linked to my post, and Google. The only reason I currently use Medium is that people are more likely to open a Medium url when it shows up in…

in my experience, myname.com domains I encounter in the wild are less likely to have the kind of low-quality/marketing content medium often has. And if one posts good content, I might actually recognize their domain again (and probably follow their feeds, if they have them), whereas in Medium they'll stay stuck in the association with Medium. And Medium took the option for custom domains away again, so no chance of fixing that while still using it.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#196

Post by mcbits »

shadowfacts wrote: post #131
tpaschalis wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this a thousand times. One example, Dan Luu [1] gets this absolutely right . His blog would probably look similar on Lynx, or any text-only browser, yet is better than 99.99% of stuff "out there". [1] https://danluu.com/

Dan Luu's blog is almost there, but personally I'd prefer if there was just a tiny bit of CSS that capped the width of the text. With full width paragraphs, it's not the most pleasant to read.

Stylus (not Stylish) can make sites like this readable enough if you visit them often enough to be worth a couple minutes to fix them. Here's a tiny bit of CSS:

    body {
        font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
        line-height: 1.45;
        background-color: #ededed;
        margin: auto;
        padding: 0.5rem;
        max-width: 80ch;
    }
    
    .pd {
        padding-bottom: initial;
    }
One point in favor of ultra-minimalism is that it's easier to add a few styles than to undo layer upon layer of Bootstrap. (Only undid one declaration here and that wasn't strictly necessary.)

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#197

Post by lifeformed »

esotericn wrote: post #163
foo101 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people keep saying this, but resizing the browser is not really a viable solution with today's messed up web. Sure, I can resize the browser for this blog using full width lines but then I have to resize my browser again for another website because the other website chooses to waste half of the horizontal real estate with meaningless stuff. As a user, I can't keep resizing the browser for every site I visit.

Eh. I have a 40in monitor, a 13in monitor, and a 7in monitor. It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page. On the 40in screen it would be asinine for me to maximise it, for example. It's completely unsurprising to me that I can resize the window into a state where the website becomes silly. I just don't do that. Resizing a window is trivial, it's not that you can't, it's that…

Or the website could just set a width on the text column. Why are we pretending this website is some paragon of design? Simple is good but there are still basic readability standards that are important and can be achieved with one or two lines of css.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#198

Post by komon »

nine_k wrote: post #175
wlesieutre wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do many people browse Medium like this? I read a decent number of posts there, but only because someone sends me a link or shared it on another platform.

The "See also" links at the end of Medium posts, and the weekly "interesting for you" mail list were rather relevant to me, that is, often had links I was willing to click, and under those, sometimes were articles I was willing to read. I stopped doing both, though: you can't read too much for free, but more than half of the content was not worth reading (for me), except maybe for quick skimming. There definitely are…

What is the limit for free reading? I've heard this a few times now from a few different sources, but I've never run into it myself.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#199

Post by _coveredInBees »

thrower123 wrote: post #82
yitianjian wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users actually discover/browse Medium, and will hit content that isn't directly searched through their explore features/algorithms. Hosting your own site means relying on cross-posting/SEO/etc.

This is a thing that people actually do? Who are these people, and what other interesting things do they do? I have never gone to medium.com directly, I have only ever wound up there through an article being crossposted on this site, Twitter, FB, or the rare case that one of my email newsletters links to something on there.

Even if that were the only way people got to medium posts, when you finish a post, you see recommendations for other related medium posts/articles. Writing posts/articles on Medium means that a lot more people could still find their way to your article when they didn't intentionally go to medium specifically for your article.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#200

Post by [deleted] »

paraditedc wrote: post #183
esotericn wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the latter point, just resize the browser window. Pow, you have a choice about how wide the lines are.

> Hey, I like this chair, but it's too small, do you have one that is bigger? > Just get a smaller house. --- > Hey, we are going to launch our product in a country that doesn't speak English but we don't have i18n ready. > Just ask the users to use Google translate. And you wonder why we can't have nice things. Also, obligatory link: https://thebestmotherfucking.website

[deleted]
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