Medium is not the home for your ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#251

Post by rpastuszak » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 12:01 PM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #149

MangoCoffee wrote: post #141

"It’s always better to own your platform" - 100% i listen to some Joe Rogan's podcast when he got some interesting guests. i don't remember which one but Joe mentioned Twitter ban Zuby for a reply to someone with "OK, dude". i look up Zuby and yup. Twitter ban Zuby for saying "OK, dude" to someone. how the fuck is "OK, dude" hateful? Joe said Zuby is the nicest guy that he ever meet and Joe is right. they come for Zu…

> the current Western society is in a very sad state. To play devils advocate, when was ‘western culture’ great? Pretty much any time period that comes to mind has a rather large set of inconvenient exceptions.

As a member of the so called I think it’s funny/ironic that your comment has been flagged.

Also, “West” is an inherently racist term.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#252

Post by vikramkr » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 12:03 PM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #176

axegon_ wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the content is of any real value, I'd be more than happy to pay for it with money. 10 bucks? Sure, here you go. A much better option than getting emails such as "20 lessons I learned from my job interview" or whatever.

Everyone says they'd do that, but I find really hard to believe. I create rare, valuable information that saves people money and headaches. On a good month, 2% of my revenue will come from donations. Usually, it's 0%. At best, it pays for a meal and a beer. This website has 135k page views per month. If that's how much I get from teaching people how to navigate German bureaucracy, I doubt you'll make anything from yo…

I dont think you can make money by sharing information to individuals in that sort of way today. There are people that manage to do it (self help books and all) but I dont think people will pay for online content. I can think of 3 ways that this might be monetize able. The first is to put it into a book. People will buy books. The second is targeting businesses. They'll pay for market research etc. And the third is offering consulting services to navigate the beuorocracy based on your expertise. Even if the info is free amd online, some people want to pay, and you'd be making money off of sharing that information.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#253

Post by bleuarff » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 12:11 PM UTC

gwd wrote: post #142

OhSoHumble wrote: post #95

Something that wasn't mentioned is that there is a reading cap for Medium articles if the user doesn't pay. Something that is frustrating is finding some technical documentation for a project on Medium and being hit with "you hit your reading cap of 5 stories..." and having to open up an incognito window. That is dumb. I shouldn't have to pay money to get around a pay wall for a project's technical documentation.

> I shouldn't have to pay money to get around a pay wall for a project's technical documentation. But that's on the project, not Medium; and if they want to be paid for the work that goes into their documentation, what's the problem? I mean, seriously, Medium is $5/month, for loads of advertising-free content. Why not just subscribe?

Has the project team any say in this, or is it just Medium doing their thing?

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#254

Post by beervirus » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 12:12 PM UTC

gwd wrote: post #142

OhSoHumble wrote: post #95

Something that wasn't mentioned is that there is a reading cap for Medium articles if the user doesn't pay. Something that is frustrating is finding some technical documentation for a project on Medium and being hit with "you hit your reading cap of 5 stories..." and having to open up an incognito window. That is dumb. I shouldn't have to pay money to get around a pay wall for a project's technical documentation.

> I shouldn't have to pay money to get around a pay wall for a project's technical documentation. But that's on the project, not Medium; and if they want to be paid for the work that goes into their documentation, what's the problem? I mean, seriously, Medium is $5/month, for loads of advertising-free content. Why not just subscribe?

Why not just reward this user-hostile behavior??

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#255

Post by non-entity » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 12:17 PM UTC

Alir3z4 wrote: post #54

I have gone through the same phase myself. Not only Medium but many other platforms as well. The algo based recommendation that force feed you the content that "they" think you should read and constant trackers all over the place that profiles everyone with heavy ads scripts with tons of js css files just to read a simple text from someone. I've built what I had in mind (_sort of_) for myself and many others. Anyone…

> The algo based recommendation that force feed you the content that "they" think you should read.

This is probably one of the things I hate most about the modern web. There are a ton of situations where I want raw, un-autofiltered results from something and I can't get it.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#256

Post by lawik » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 12:17 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #215

jiggawatts wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the best static site generator that meets the following requirements: a) Doesn't use node.js. b) Has built-in syntax highlighting for C#, SQL, PowerShell and Rust at a minimum. c) Is also good at "photo journals" or galleries. I played around with Hugo, but the themes were ugly and it was very weak at managing pictures associated with an entry instead of the entire site.

> What's the best static site generator that meets the following requirements: a) Doesn't use node.js. So even if a node.js solution would be the best solution, you would still not want to use it? Why? Anyway, I'd recommend to write a static site generator yourself. It isn't very difficult, you get exactly what you need, and you never get stuck because someone abandoned their project or doesn't want to fix the bugs y…

Not the author. But my main concern would be maintainability issues from package churn. But also that I don't enjoy working with JS and its tooling. It is so common a choice now so it might be worth calling out explicitly.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#257

Post by onion2k » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 12:17 PM UTC

axegon_ wrote: post #244

onion2k wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're overestimating Netlify's build tooling. It literally just spins up a virtual machine with Node on it, clones your repo, and does an `npm install && npm build`. When that finishes it copies the output directory to a server to host. Moving to a different host is a case of finding something that will let you do the `npm install && npm build` bit, which practically every modern hosting company does these days. Net…

Which brings us back to my original question: Why????? Why bother doing all that and relying on third party tooling, regardless of how simple it is to run a command? If this is what I wanted, I could write a 5 line shell script on a raspberry pi which can do just that. I DON'T want to do either of that. Add a file, push it and know everything has worked.

The reason I have things set up to deploy from github to Netlify is mainly because I'm not the only contributor to things I work on. As soon as you work in a team it's far simpler to have a central service that people push to doing the builds, especially if you don't want contributors to have access to the host server.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#258

Post by XCSme » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 12:25 PM UTC

I already had a PHP site so I wanted an easy way to integrate a blog in my site. I ended up creating a micro-blogging library[0], which just renders markdown as blog posts. The advantage is that there is no build step, you only write markdown files (VSCode has live-preview by default for markdown) and you get easy versioning as markdown is just plain text. [0]: https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#259

Post by neya » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 12:32 PM UTC

What I find funny in this post is it goes to great lengths to encourage you to stay off walled gardens and then there's this:

"The web is meant for free speech. Your content shouldn’t be jailed for being controversial."

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#260

Post by edsimpson » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 12:40 PM UTC

badsectoracula wrote: post #24

joelrunyon wrote: post #16

I've been yelling about this for years, but please start & own your own blog. Use webflow, ghost or whatever you like, but wordpress is good enough for most people. HN audience can likely handle their own, but if ease-of-setup is an issue - I created StartABlog.com to help people do this (and we'll actually set up your site for you for free - https://startablog.com/start ). Own your platform. Own your content. Own yo…

Another easy solution, both for hosting and ownership, is using a static site generator/editor. I like desktop-based visual WYSIWYG tools so i use Publii[0] (example[1], though i really need to write something more :-P or at least move some older articles i had in now-defunct blogs that were hosted by others). I'm not a big fan of the program though (i dislike how it is based on Electron while not even taking advanta…

+1 for Publii. I struggled to get non-technical users to use a static site generator like Hugo but the WYSIWYG tools of Publii made it very easy to move users over.