21–30 of 35 posts
Well the short answer to this is that we are not all on medium.
I have a weird static blog that I almost never post to.
I looked at moving to jekyll recently since it was getting a lot of press. But felt it was too much work(I would rather work on other things), and wordpress was easier to use and has plugins. I expect people use medium for the same reason
Why are we all on HN and not Usenet, the original distributed link-sharing system?
That's a very good question actually. GNUS is so much better than any web interface for that.
Once upon a time I had a custom-coded blogging platform, a domain name, and a fairly frequently updated personal blog. And nobody read it. Once in a while I had a technical post that got a little attention, but it faded quickly. I'd mention posts to friends and their response was always "what's your LJ name? I'll friend you." And then I'd tell them about my self-hosted blog and they'd look at me like I was an alien.…
The biggest challenge for any long-form writer in 2016 is discoverability, assuming that you don't already have a huge audience and you do want people to read your writing.
That's why I, for example, tend to guest-post on friends' blogs with larger followings rather than posting on my own small blog.
With the near-death of RSS, vanilla blogs have almost no subscription mechanism, so you can't assume people will return to them. And people subscribe to / follow individual blogs far less often than they did circa 2002 / 2003
But Medium has bubble-up features enabling your writing to be discovered.
I'm not a huge fan of the platform, but that's why I use it from time to time.
Who wants to spend their time re-inventing the wheel? That said, I dont even know what medium is. Most bloggers are using Wordpress, if you look at the statistics of the web, and for good reasons. Anyone who's serious about creative control is operating their own blog. I think Twitter and Facebook's biggest contribution to social media will be the eventual resurgence of private blogs and RSS.
> Who wants to spend their time re-inventing the wheel? Ask any author of thousands of 'We reimplemented something in Go, Rust and Node.js'.
I am using my own home-cooked solution which is based on flask, flask pages for markdown and flask frozen to freeze everything into html files.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very good question actually. GNUS is so much better than any web interface for that.
"Better" in some sense. I've used Gnus a lot and I love it, but it's also very complicated, annoying to configure, hard to understand... and definitely doesn't work on iPhone. This web site is much, much easier to access than a newsgroup.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Better" in some sense. I've used Gnus a lot and I love it, but it's also very complicated, annoying to configure, hard to understand... and definitely doesn't work on iPhone. This web site is much, much easier to access than a newsgroup.
Alternatives did exists: I think I originally read newsgroups on Outlook Express and found it usable.
Basically I'm just pointing out that one of the reasons that we seem to congregate mostly on centralized web sites is that they're extremely convenient in specific ways: you already have the client on all of your devices, etc.
I feel like the most obvious answer was missed: People use Medium because there's an audience there and it mostly "just works." I don't personally care about organically building a brand for myself over the course of years. I don't want to write an article a week only to have it never see the light of day. All I want to do is jot down a few thoughts from time to time and have some people stumble upon it. Make the wor…