Can we all stop posting articles from Medium on HN? While we're at it let's stop posting articles residing behind paywalls. That'd be great.
Can we all stop using Medium now?
281–290 of 341 posts
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#282I 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.
https://writefreely.org/
It even federates with ActivityPub.
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#283> 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…
Except the problem is that 99% of authors on medium dont get paid. So it's not really about authors wanting to be paid.
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#284I 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 have no doubt if an alt-right voice wrote on Medium and were controversial enough in their views they'd be deplatformed. But also the way they handle it is just rude. Fuck them. Well fuck alt right too! They can get their own website after all. Why should Medium or any other company have to host their shit? People act like they have some kind of right to have their crap hosted by someone else. Companies are not…
What if they host their own shit on a VPS but the hosting provider bans them. What if their domain name gets revoked by the registrar?
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author has complete control over it.
Sort of. If you opt out of their paywall nagware stuff your posts don’t appear anywhere on the site other than your own feed. Technically you can opt out. Realistically if you do then you lose all of the benefits of being on medium
The biggest benefit of being on medium is that I can just write some words and push the button and I get a nice-looking web page I can share with my friends. I don't care about google rank or more eyeballs or whatever. But I'd rather focus on writing better words than worrying about the words -> website process. Give me something that's as easy to work with (log in, type stuff in the in-browser editor, push publish - no renting a server or installing ruby or whatever) and looks as good at the end, and I'll happily use that.
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair comment. Unfortunately (for me!) I'm going to have to look like a bit of a wally. I can't elaborate on it and my stance has changed in the time since I posted (while looking up my former 'facts'). 1) Based on the GDPR comment. If you're really careful with how you do things the IP address could be argued to not be personal information (never let a user associate IP with any other PI - e.g. if a user can ban anot…
> If you're really careful with how you do things the IP address could be argued to not be personal information Current guidance (from the legal profession, not the HN peanut gallery) is that IPs are standalone personal data.
In which jurisdiction? i.e. That's a hell of a generalisation.
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>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.
You've left several comments in this thread talking down to people as if they're ignorant about how to write an HTML5 tag on their own web server.
I wasn't the one that downvoted your comment but for some reason, a lot of technical folks like you misunderstand Youtube and how it enables video uploaders. (A previous commenter misunderstands Youtube the same way and my previous reply to it.[0])
There is no self-hosting web server stack to serve videos that charges $0 to the content creator whether it gets zero or 1 billion views. Therefore, repeatedly recommending "self-host your videos" -- completely misses the point.
Consider a corporate giant like Microsoft. Several years ago, they used to self-host their tech videos on channel9.msdn.com.[1] Now they're hosted on Youtube.[2] Obviously, MS is not so technically inept that they don't know how to stream their own videos! They also have billions in cash to prevent "server bandwidth exceeded" errors so cost isn't the issue.
Stop and think about why Microsoft switched to Youtube instead of using their own MS Azure infrastructure. As for the other metaphor of "sharecropper" for Youtube that seems popular... is Microsoft a "sharecropper"? Why or why not?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488275
[1] clicking any of the new videos on Microsoft's front page will play embedded Youtube videos: https://channel9.msdn.com/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/user/Microsoft/search?query=build
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#288Earlier 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...
It's better to keep in mind that promises of unlimited traffic usually countered by fine text provisions, which your hosting company will invoke once your website starts to be a nuisance for them. Various companies have different levels of tolerance, and actually it's a sort of problem with these "unlimited" offers that you won't know when it hits.
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought some about this, and I am a bit afraid about "feudal lords" of some other kind: I'm starting to self-host my content and services as I am starting to have some income (beginning of my career). However, I have to pay for a domain name, internet access, etc. I can afford to pay all of this right now, but I have no guarantees that the content will remain available in the future. The biggest unknown for me is t…
There are specific measures in place to protect you from your registrar closing or refusing to do business with you. If you can't afford a few dollars a year for your domain name, you likely have bigger problems. If ICANN disappears, we all have bigger problems. Your solution is interesting, however hosting other people's content is fraught with danger. If I ran such a host, I'd assume within minutes I'd be hosting p…
I agree with your answers, but I would like to point out that a few dollars per year isn't necessarily a trivial amount depending on who you ask. And top-level domain fees are more or less flat across countries, besides a few exceptions.
I had never heard about geocities, that's interesting, thank you for sharing this.
Now, to elaborate a bit more about what I said, I don't think there is a lack of technical solutions for this, but rather a fully integrated solution is missing. I would like to be able to "seed"/mirror specific content, like articles that I find interesting. Of course, that wouldn't help with content I (or others) haven't read already, but you would be responsible for the content you host, as you pick it (unlike ipfs or freenet, AFAIK). Integrated in a web browser, I suppose it could also "mirror by default", though I would be concerned about leaking user-specific content (so maybe a spec/protocol extension would be necessary for html/http to tell what could be mirrored?).
It occured to me that this was a bit like "boosting" a post in mastodon. Indeed ActivityPub could be an interesting transport mechanism for this, and could be a way to propagate update notifications back. Though I am not sure the content itself is mirrored with the current mastodon "boost" implementation. A mirror index could also be ran over DHT, while a "search engine" could provide the post hashes, and let clients fetch the content from the DHT.
The whole idea is still quite a bit rough, but it surprises me that in 2019, hosting plain text content (more or less a few images) in a future-proof way isn't a solved problem, and we still have to rely on the Web archive. Applying trusted timestamping (by a few trusted third-parties) to the web archive content would be a good start, to trust mirrored content.
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#290Not everyone has the time to create their own platform and curation network. That's the reason why people will keep using Medium. We need to stop acting like it's easy to build these types of platforms.
The struggle for me in understanding why people use Medium is that I am a reader of Medium articles, but I only find them when posted on Reddit, HackerNews, or when they come up on a Google Search. So as far as I can tell it wouldn't matter if it was posted on Medium or a personal blog on their own site.
> So as far as I can tell it wouldn't matter if it was posted on Medium or a personal blog on their own site.
Indeed it doesn't matter. Medium is just the quickest/easiest/nicest way to write something and get a nice webpage out. Compared to wordpress/blogger/... the UX is just that little bit nicer, and the resulting web page is nicer on the reader (at least, the reader who doesn't mind pushing the login button once at some point) too.