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Can we all stop using Medium now?

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Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#251

Post by dickeytk »

nickjj wrote: post #227
dickeytk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as good. The stats are also incredibly well done. Some people are saying authors use it for the built-in audience. I can't say that was an appeal for me—or that I got very many readers from within medium anyways. I started my own blog with hugo/netlify (though notably I don't post things very often). The main reason I switched is because so many…

> I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as good. What about a local code editor with live reloading on a local copy of your site running in a browser? This is what I do in Jekyll. I write everything in the same code editor I wrote code in, and on save, I see a 100% replicated live view of my site in about 1 second (even with 200+ posts). Both windows sit side by side. To me this beat…

It’s good, still not as good as medium. Especially being able to copy and paste YouTube/gist/etc links in and have them auto-embed.

I can still embed with Hugo, but not as quickly and this does impact my writing flow.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#252

Post by dickeytk »

sytelus wrote: post #174
dickeytk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as good. The stats are also incredibly well done. Some people are saying authors use it for the built-in audience. I can't say that was an appeal for me—or that I got very many readers from within medium anyways. I started my own blog with hugo/netlify (though notably I don't post things very often). The main reason I switched is because so many…

Lot of these can be done with simple open source blogging tools like Hugo combined with analytics. The main value of Medium in my mind is the amount of default “trust” that Google places on the content hosted on Medium. Your article on arcane topic on Medium will typically out rank other web sites who might have existed forever.

That’s not at all why I used it. And the analytics medium has (even though it’s basic) are better than any third-party tools I’ve used.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#253

Post by apk-d »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #241
john-radio wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad this exists, and very impressed with how front-and-center their source code is, but I decided a while ago that I'm not installing random add-ons unless I have a very high level of trust in their integrity.

This looks mostly like CSS hack (even the little bit of JS there seems to mainly query the DOM and apply styles). Such things should IMO be packaged as userstyle files. I think people need to be reminded of the concept of userstyles, and how useful they are to remove the garbage web designers produce. Stylus is a godsend: https://github.com/openstyles/stylus . Sad thing is, this used to be a built-in browser feature.

As a counterpoint, I find userstyles far less convenient than extensions. In my experience, they are more difficult to install, they work less often and break more easily (because of the "put this thing I hacked together on the internet and forget about it" mindset), don't auto update, are more difficult to find or discover, and the UI for managing/customizing them is horrible.

Sure, there's advantages too, and I like the idea of user styles/scripts, but after wasting some time on trying (and failing) to use them to customize my browsing experience on a few sites, I settled on a Dark Reader + Auto Reader Mode + uBlock combo that makes all of the internet nice and readable with almost no extra hassle.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#254

Post by robsun »

I can remember praising Medium as the ultimate solution for professional bloging. I stopped using Medium when a pay wall was introduced. I didn't follow what happen since then with the platform. Can someone shortly introduce me to the topic why Medium is considered now as evil corp?

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#255

Post by dickeytk »

sdan wrote: post #124
robjan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you have just identified the reason that most people won't use it

Use DigitalOcean One-click instances, and it essentially makes it for you with all the necessary steps. It's super simple. I used that a while back and now run it on Docker on GCP since DO was a bit expensive.

Which costs money, and medium does not.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#256

Post by slig »

Grustaf wrote: post #238

Seems like you can have the cake and eat it too by posting to Medium AND your own domain, or wherever you want.

Do you mean using your own domain on a Medium blog? If so, that was disabled a while ago. Or do you mean cross posting the same content on Medium and your blog? That's tricky, how do you tell Google that it should consider your blog as the owner of the content? Otherwise you can get punished for duplicated content.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#257

Post by coldtea »

teh_klev wrote: post #249
coldtea wrote: post #219

> When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play? At the moment authors wanted to get paid. When did somebody else's writing became a free for all? If, as you say, that [Medium] is where "all your favourite content lives" (which means you appreciate the content), then it's troubling that you don't want to pay for it. > Just so we are clear. Medium takes your content, rolls it up into a pretty SEO friendly packa…

> We've only read your blog because it was picked by an aggregator (HN) But then I only read articles on Medium because they're picked up by an aggregator (HN). After I've read the article I rarely find any of the suggested/related articles of any interest. I never head over to Medium to find stuff to read because I find quite a lot of the content is just puff, fluff and bad writing. It's kinda like Quora, mostly uni…

>But then I only read articles on Medium because they're picked up by an aggregator (HN) (...) I never head over to Medium to find stuff to read(...)

You don't, but millions do -- and that's people post their stuff there.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#258

Post by irrational »

ralphstodomingo wrote: post #190
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.

This. And even if you manage to somehow self-host your videos, YouTube is also a discovery service for these videos. Think about how many times you looked for a video on a certain topic in YouTube's search bar itself, the recommendations and the Trending tab.

>if you manager to somehow self-host your videos...

Wait, we've been self-hosting our own videos for years. It's not exactly rocket science. YouTube is convenient, but what it is doing from a technical standpoint isn't that difficult to do on your own server.

Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?

#259

Post by senorjazz »

azimuth11 wrote: post #83
fwip wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is SWIM?

“Someone who isn’t me”, a term used when discussing something (usually illegal) the poster did or has experience with, but is using this term to hide that fact.

An annoying term that has no meaning and is completely pointless and would have no bearing in a court of law at all and everyone knows what you are saying is "I"
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