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Medium is not the home for your ideas

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Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#31

Post by throwaway8941 »

realusername wrote: post #10

Another reason I host my own articles is that Medium is very heavy to load. Yes their design is great, but it's something that is achievable with a very small amount of CSS. This might not matter for a lot of people but I don't like how slow their platform is.

>Yes their design is great

Is it? I had to write a bunch of µBlock and usercss rules to make their articles somewhat readable. The sticky bars waste a lot of screen estate. Firefox reader mode (Ctrl+Alt+R) is a wonderful thing, but it breaks on some pages (I guess due to Medium's incompetence or brain-dead priorities since they're still using gist for code snippets (every single snippet in a separate iframe!) instead of spending half an hour to integrate highlight.js)

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#32

Post by moonchild »

> Google might add negative signals for your website, thinking that you copy-pasted an article from Medium on your blog.

Can you get around this by posting the medium version later than the one on your own website? (Obviously, G crawls medium more frequently; so say, maybe, a week later.)

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#33

Post by detaro »

tomc1985 wrote: post #19
detaro wrote: post #7

It's telling that Medium stopped allowing custom domains. Their brand over yours, and no way of cleanly migrating elsewhere when they start log-in walls etc. (Of course their brand is now kinda poisoned by "log-in wall" and lots of low-quality "think-pieces", so you don't really want to be associated with theirs - which was somewhat different when Medium started)

I don't know, was it? From the beginning everything on Medium seemed to be written by folks who styled themselves as "thought leaders," but clearly weren't

I think so. There was a phase where there was clean design + many high-profile users pushing it a bit above other platforms. Nowadays clean design is more commonplace, they ruined their own design, more low-quality content, ... push them far down.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#34

Post by iamacyborg »

Netlify makes it fairly trivial for almost anyone with moderately techy chops to host their own static sites, so that's where I host my sites.

Jekyll amd similar static site generators are more than good enough for 99% of blog sites anyone might want to build.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#35

Post by nissehulth »

simula67 wrote: post #28
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…

How do you make sure you don't get hacked using Wordpress? I hosted my own blog for a short while and got hacked, so I moved back to Wordpress.com.

Pretty much the usual. Make sure to keep it updated. Don't install crappy plugins. Use safe passwords.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#36

Post by acidburnNSA »

simula67 wrote: post #28
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…

How do you make sure you don't get hacked using Wordpress? I hosted my own blog for a short while and got hacked, so I moved back to Wordpress.com.

Strong passwords and regular updates. Ive had a WordPress blog for 15 years self hosted and havent to my knowledge been hacked yet.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#37

Post by scollet »

wincy wrote: post #21
dvtrn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Owning your content and self-publication is one of the principles of the indieweb[0]. This is as relevant of a discussion I think to plug it. When it comes to alternatives to the social media/algorithm-ified/data-hungry web-that in my opinion we should have gotten-it’s the IndieWeb. [0] https://indieweb.org/principles

Except now if you say things that a group doesn’t like you just get ddosed out of existence.

Something tells me this happens less than you imply.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#38

Post by boramalper »

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…

Publii looks great! Just out of curiosity, do you know any other WYSIWYG alternatives out there?

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#39

Post by bad_user »

kevingadd wrote: post #27
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…

Agreed, but don't host your own wordpress unless you're planning to run a botnet. Everyone I know who's hosted their own wordpress in the past two decades has eventually regretted it.

I don't self-host Wordpress, my blog is a static site made with Jekyll and served by Nginx. A static site ages well.

That said I self-host other services, like Matomo or FreshRSS (also PHP apps that need a database).

The secret is in setting up auto-update policies. All the self-hosted services I host are in Docker and auto-updated [1] even if that means they can break.

Have been doing this for some time and worked great thus far, but granted self-hosting stuff is a continued investment, you can't just leave that server there to bit rot.

[1] https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#40

Post by jjcm »

realusername wrote: post #10

Another reason I host my own articles is that Medium is very heavy to load. Yes their design is great, but it's something that is achievable with a very small amount of CSS. This might not matter for a lot of people but I don't like how slow their platform is.

I actually found it to be not that terrible in comparison to some other sites that are out there today. Medium loads 17 scripts totalling about 2.4MB of js. For comparison, reddit loads 78 scripts totalling 7.5 MB.

Is it heavy for such a simple blog? Yes absolutely. Is it heavy for a modern React app? Not really. I think the crux of it is that we often rely too much on heavy frameworks for React even for simple things. It's definitely an antipattern in development today.

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