Can we all stop using Medium now? • Hacker News Board

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#191

Post by TomMarius » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:01 AM UTC

LolWolf wrote: post #137

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha you now know how they maintain their SEO -- by purging the politically incorrect stuff. BTW only druggies say "research chemicals", academic researchers just use "drugs"/"compounds" or maybe "fine organics" or the actual name of whatever it is. "Research chemicals" is basically "SWIM" in terms of being a "druggie heuristic"

RCs are a pretty common name, even among academics, at least in neurobiology (though it’s for sure recognized as “speaking in dialect/slang” as some would say... e.g., not everyone would immediately know what you’re saying). I do agree that “compounds” or 5-HT agonists, or whatever are far more neutral (if overly broad) terms and those should be used if you’re being careful (perhaps with some added description).

How would people look for that article on Google if it was named "compounds"?

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#192

Post by chdaniel » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:03 AM UTC

55555 wrote: 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…

I understand your POV, at the same time it was free to sign up, no time investment, no yearly costs for you etc. I know how it is to be banned overnight for something that you didn't expect (and without being malevolent).

I myself write my articles on my blog and then copy them over to Medium. A bit more work but might pay off in an event like this one

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#193

Post by apatters » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:05 AM UTC

55555 wrote: 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…

> I was writing on Medium because it ranks well in Google

Is this the main/only reason people blog on Medium, or are there others? It seems like something that would be easy enough to develop an open source, self hostable version of, but with Google now deranking small, independent sites, Medium would be hard to beat from an SEO standpoint.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#194

Post by CM30 » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:09 AM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #107

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever met someone who navigaed to medium.com to fin articles, or is this a matter of faith?

If one ever makes the mistake of giving Medium a valid email address, one's inbox will be 78% Medium article recommendations until one gets quite aggressive with the spam flags.

Of course, the majority of said articles the site recommends seem to be those by someone with an existing audience/fanbase, or which already got a ton of likes and shares.

As far as someone without an audience posting an article is concerned, the chances of Medium suggesting your work this way is pretty slim.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#195

Post by Theodores » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:13 AM UTC

srrr wrote: post #189

fiala__ wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it really Impossible to selfhost videos? My 5€ webhosting has 250GB storage and unlimited traffic and every decent CMS has video capabilities. I think the hosting is not the problem. But the social features that YouTube provides are not easily replaced...

Try it. Also there is Cloudflare doing a video CDN. I don't think they have a free plan with that, but it would be interesting to see what the costs actually are. There should not be a need for a CDN though if you are only showing a few videos to a few people. Video does the buffering thing so it should be possible to serve video half way across the world.

I would give it a go myself but I only have audio!

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#196

Post by amelius » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:13 AM UTC

valtism wrote: post #117

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's the same as those who believe that if you ask the person selling you weed if they are police, they are under obligation by law to tell you so. They are not.

How about "I will sell it to you only if your life depends on it"?

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#197

Post by amelius » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:17 AM UTC

What happens if you are a popular blogger, and one day you decide to take your business elsewhere, and make the announcement on Medium in your last blogpost there? Will they take that post or even your entire blog down?

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#198

Post by rvschuilenburg » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:19 AM UTC

ahje wrote: post #148

Udik wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 could be wrong (i'm no expert) but i remember part of the GDPR is about "data portability" and is exactly that: you should easily be able to export all the data you've provided. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ I would assume this includes articles you've written.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#199

Post by divanvisagie » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:22 AM UTC

superconformist wrote: post #106

But how will I "clap" for top-shelf webshit content if it's not on Medium?

Potential violation of the prime directive...

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#200

Post by myspy » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:24 AM UTC

He is right. Medium was cool around 2016. Before the content was behind a paywall and the free content was accessible in a visible way. They send you a mail with interesting stuff everyday and now it's dead to me. The mobile site is horrendous, a banner where it says to download the app which can't be canceled after five or so tabs. The asshole that designed it should never get a job in the business again.