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Fuck Medium

tengl.net

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Re: Fuck Medium

#21

Post by jansan »

taylodl wrote: post #13

I even signed up for a Medium account, figuring alright, they want some personal info in exchange for content. So now I get a daily digest of Medium articles - most of which I can't read because it requires "premium", i.e. paid, membership. Talk about a bait and switch! I've gotten to the point now where if I see an article is posted on Medium then I won't read it. It's better for my blood pressure that way. edit: s/…

I just recently realized that I don't read Mediom articles anymore. If I see Medium, it's a no-click. Not sure how that happened, but that slowly growing paywall was probably the reason. Also, I somehow never had a good feeling about Medium, but in theri early days I actually did enjoy reading a few of their articles.

Re: Fuck Medium

#22

Post by mrweasel »

While not a fan, I understand Medium, and the people posting on Medium (well some of them). Fair enough that you want to allow people to make money on their writing, but I'm unsure if Medium has the right solution. They've ended up as a source of annoyance, and that's not a good place to be as a platform. On the other hand I have no better suggestions.

The Medium writers I don't get are the corporate/startup blogs. You a company, you're blog isn't part of your revenue stream, hopefully, so why not just have an S3 bucket with a static blog, or a Wordpress installation. It is just convenience?

Re: Fuck Medium

#23

Post by Sanzig »

mrweasel wrote: post #22

While not a fan, I understand Medium, and the people posting on Medium (well some of them). Fair enough that you want to allow people to make money on their writing, but I'm unsure if Medium has the right solution. They've ended up as a source of annoyance, and that's not a good place to be as a platform. On the other hand I have no better suggestions. The Medium writers I don't get are the corporate/startup blogs. Y…

I think you nailed it.

Somebody trying to earn some money from their writing - yeah, I get why they choose Medium. It sucks, but there's not really a tremendous amount of better options.

But the majority of Medium articles aren't that. They're promotional personal blogs (so why not just put those on your personal site?) or more often they're technical blogs written as marketing material for a company. That can easily be hosted on a company's own site with little effort.

Re: Fuck Medium

#24

Post by afroisalreadyin »

What really amazes me is that there isn't a similar blogging platform that is open source, easy to deploy and at least a little visually pleasing. I'm a developer, so I could use a static site generator, but I would like to deploy a blog for my mother, and I just couldn't find anything that fits the criteria. My personal blog at okigiveup.net is running on a nearly 8-year-old version of Ghost, which I can't update, because (1) they dropped Postgresql support and (2) their new business model is not friendly to self-hosted. It's rather frustrating that there isn't an alternative for which I can say "it's the default OSS solution, so I'll just go with it".

Re: Fuck Medium

#25

Post by ageitgey »

Sanzig wrote: post #19

Maybe I'm just living in 2008, but... what's wrong with just self-hosting a simple blog? Wordpress gets a lot of well-deserved hate (especially regarding feature bloat and security), but it's also very simple to spin up. A VPS is a couple bucks a month, and many hosts have a preconfigured ready-to-rock Wordpress image for less technical users. It's obviously not the best solution if you want to monetize, but there ar…

I'm someone who has written a lot on Medium in the past and has grown a following in a niche because of that, so maybe I can explain the issue.

Originally, writing on Medium had nothing to do with making money from the writing. In the early days, just the fact that you were writing on Medium instead of your own blog gave you much better SEO and made you much more discoverable. It was much easier to reach a new audience vs. your own blog on your own new domain that will take 6 months for Google to rank in any search results. It was just a much more efficient way to actually have people read what you wrote.

The point where Medium became total trash is when they created an "optional" paywall, but they also made the paywall enabled by default and they give the author a bunch of scary warnings if they attempt disable it. Basically, they blackhole your content if you don't opt in and they won't ever recommend or promote it. So most people who don't care about making money still leave it on.

I still disable the paywall, but I imagine 90% of the content people hit that is paywalled is not because the author thinks they are going to make money. It's because Medium forced them down that path with dark ui patterns. It didn't used to be like that.

Re: Fuck Medium

#26

Post by ageitgey »

andrewtbham wrote: post #5

Medium is run by ev williams. He founded blogger and twitter. He is interviewed in Founders at Work. I actually paid for extra blogger features in the early 2000s during the .com bust. It's hard to express how disappointed I am in medium. I have written several very popular articles and I don't have a subscription and can't read hardly anything on there. Also I found it confusing to tell if your article is behind a p…

Yep, you really have to have been an author during the time the switched to the non-optional optional paywall to know how much of a bait-and-switch it has been.

I was so mad, I made a python script to copy my medium posts to a Ghost blog instance: https://github.com/ageitgey/medium_to_ghost

Re: Fuck Medium

#27

Post by johnonolan »

afroisalreadyin wrote: post #24

What really amazes me is that there isn't a similar blogging platform that is open source, easy to deploy and at least a little visually pleasing. I'm a developer, so I could use a static site generator, but I would like to deploy a blog for my mother, and I just couldn't find anything that fits the criteria. My personal blog at okigiveup.net is running on a nearly 8-year-old version of Ghost, which I can't update, b…

Founder of Ghost here - not sure how our business model (which has not changed) is unfriendly to self-hosting? Extensive docs and tools here: https://ghost.org/docs/install/

But let me know if there's anything I can help with

Re: Fuck Medium

#28

Post by wayneftw »

I think this entire line of reasoning eventually boils down to: Fuck capitalism.

That's fine with me.

Not sure what the hate for "Chrome users on Mac" is for though. Why not "Fuck Mac users" for supporting a company that is actively trying to bring down general purpose computing and user control over their own computing devices in the name of "security" but really for profit?

Personally, the way I deal with capitalist parasites is to put aside all desire and avoid getting locked into their crap. Outside of utility bills, taxes and mortgage - no product or service can hold me prisoner. If the leeches start sucking too hard, I simply drop them and find something else to do.

Re: Fuck Medium

#29

Post by afroisalreadyin »

johnonolan wrote: post #27
afroisalreadyin wrote: post #24

What really amazes me is that there isn't a similar blogging platform that is open source, easy to deploy and at least a little visually pleasing. I'm a developer, so I could use a static site generator, but I would like to deploy a blog for my mother, and I just couldn't find anything that fits the criteria. My personal blog at okigiveup.net is running on a nearly 8-year-old version of Ghost, which I can't update, b…

Founder of Ghost here - not sure how our business model (which has not changed) is unfriendly to self-hosting? Extensive docs and tools here: https://ghost.org/docs/install/ But let me know if there's anything I can help with

There is the mentioned dropping of Postgres support. Postgres is much more popular than MySQL in open source circles, which makes me wonder why go with the latter. Sqlite is still supported, which makes this even more strange. Also, Ghost used to be a single-site publication platform: You would set up a blog with an admin user, and that would be it. Now it's a platform for creating multiple sites, and anyone can do it once you have installed Ghost. The default installer does not ask you a question to turn this off; I couldn't find it in the configuration options, either. The last time I was updating to current version of Ghost, between trying to figure out MySQL and finding out where to customize the site & user options, I gave up.

Thanks for putting the hard work into Ghost, but in the last couple of years, it went from "easy to use self-hosted blogging software" to "publishing platform with highly specific requirements", which is quite a change.

Re: Fuck Medium

#30

Post by johnonolan »

afroisalreadyin wrote: post #29
johnonolan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Founder of Ghost here - not sure how our business model (which has not changed) is unfriendly to self-hosting? Extensive docs and tools here: https://ghost.org/docs/install/ But let me know if there's anything I can help with

There is the mentioned dropping of Postgres support. Postgres is much more popular than MySQL in open source circles, which makes me wonder why go with the latter. Sqlite is still supported, which makes this even more strange. Also, Ghost used to be a single-site publication platform: You would set up a blog with an admin user, and that would be it. Now it's a platform for creating multiple sites, and anyone can do i…

We dropped Postgres (7 years ago) because pretty much nobody was using it, and it was causing lots of bugs and issues in our upstream ORM layer, which has great and working support for MySQL and SQLite. Ghost is open source, and we put out multiple calls for help with Postgres issues - but nobody contributed. So that's how open source goes.

> Now it's a platform for creating multiple sites, and anyone can do it once you have installed Ghost. The default installer does not ask you a question to turn this off; I couldn't find it in the configuration options, either.

There is no way to create multiple sites with Ghost, and never has been, which is why there is no option to turn it off.

Overall, I think if you try using the product I think you might get a more realistic idea of what it does and doesn't do. But I'm not here to sell you anything, so I'll leave it at that :)

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