No
Can we all stop using Medium now?
301–310 of 341 posts
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 Youtub…
Do you have a trustworthy source for MS "switching" to Youtube? Their self hosted videos of Build 2019 [0] is what they directed me to when i was searching for sessions. I later found Youtube versions through some other source as well (probably a link on HN), but this seems more of a PR move ( "we don't do evil walled garden anymore" ) to me than a technical necessity. I do agree with your core message, that video is…
If it was a PR move, is "we don't do evil walled garden anymore" more important than "Azure rocks and we do a lot of shit with it, look at this case study"?
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 Youtub…
I think you and the other poster may be talking passed each other.
He seems to be trying to emphasize the relative triviality of the technical problem from building the MVP absent leveraging "someone else's computers" perspective.
You're talking about the delta and impact created by the fact we've become so dependent on someone else's computer to point us in the right direction to create the visibility and discoverability we want.
The point I think both of you are dancing around, but not hauling out into the light, is these platforms enable the abstraction of the techie work, and allow creators to just publish. Creators are so dependent on not having to do the techie work, that unfortunately, they are left at the mercy of the techie+business platform provider, and as a result, are vulnerable to censorship based on that platform's visibility to the world at large.
Large integrated platforms are cool and all, but at some point, we need to sit down and look at the federatability of these types of communication platforms.
We can't rely on implicit Gatekeepers not being manipulated into acting as amplifiers/dampers as circumstances warrant from their side.
At least that's the vibe I'm getting.
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 Youtub…
I think you and the other poster may be talking passed each other. He seems to be trying to emphasize the relative triviality of the technical problem from building the MVP absent leveraging "someone else's computers" perspective. You're talking about the delta and impact created by the fact we've become so dependent on someone else's computer to point us in the right direction to create the visibility and discoverab…
>The point I think both of you are dancing around, but not hauling out into the light, is these platforms enable the abstraction of the techie work,
No, not the techie work. In both of my previous comments, I de-emphasized the technical reasons.
Instead, I've tried to emphasize that the killer feature of Youtube for the content creator is the simplifying of finances down to $0 costs for distributing video. Others may argue that "audience & discoverability" is equal to (or more important than) the $0 costs to distribute. That's valid as well.
Since a technical solution of self-hosted video web stack does not solve $0 distribution costs and audience reach, it is irrelevant to the discussion. (Context of discussion was parent comments by fiala__ & ralphstodomingo talking about "scale" and "discoverability".[0])
To add some counterbalance, it does not mean Youtube's "value proposition" of $0 payment for audience reach is always a good deal. An example of this is Netflix. They don't need nor want Youtube's servers to host videos.
>Creators are so dependent on not having to do the techie work,
Again, this type of statement is evidence of techies misunderstanding Youtube.
Even if the content creator hired a techie such as a webmaster to set up a self-hosted video site, it still does not solve the problem that Youtube solves.
Even if you gave a set-&-forget "video hosting web appliance" to a content creator, it still doesn't solve the same problems that Youtube solves.
In both cases of those technical solutions, you've created new problems that the content creator doesn't want to deal with!
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the same as those who believe that if you ask the person selling you weed if they are police, they are under obligation by law to tell you so. They are not.
Eh, not really the same. Cops are demonstrably not required to tell you they are cops. The idea that they need to was always ridiculous misinformation. Meanwhile, as far as I'm aware, SWIM has not been the lynchpin in a court case yet, so it's hard to say one way or the other if using it as legal cover is actually a gross misconception.
It's a lot like the freemen-on-the-land folks. People think, against all evidence, that the law is a mindless machine, a slave to its inputs, unaffected by the human beings who actually administer it. They think you can hack the law by saying the right magic words, like Captain Kirk crashing an evil computer by saying "this sentence is false."
It doesn't work that way. If you try to buy 50 grams of coke off an undercover cop, no jury on earth is going to believe that you thought you were buying Coca-Cola. You're not going to get away with using a slang term universally understood to mean "me" and claiming it meant "someone else," either.
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
For some while (maybe still), there was a common belief that talking about your drug experiences online couldn't be used against you in court if you pretended it was someone else. This could be done semi-convincingly if you talked about, say, your "roommate" using drugs, but pretty quickly people started saying shit like "my cat" or "someone who isn't me" and, finally, abbreviated that to "SWIM." Like, "SWIM wants to…
That is similar to the stupid IANAL preface people insist on including. Quite frankly you can literally make a post stating you are a lawyer and the following is legal advice and there would not be a single repercussion.
That's not why people say "I am not a lawyer."
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I use Medium, they might earn money with my content. My blog, on the other hand, costs me money. I do have a personal blog instead of Medium. But it's definitely not about the money.
Personally, depending on my mood, if I have the obnoxious "sign in" prompt that medium and others give I'll maybe just not read the blog at all 1 time in 4. I am sure I am not the only one that gets put off by that crap.
Sure, there's a lot of reasons to prefer your own blog over Medium, if only for the sake of your readers. Earning money for many is not one of them, though.
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I use Medium, they might earn money with my content. My blog, on the other hand, costs me money. I do have a personal blog instead of Medium. But it's definitely not about the money.
Jekyll + Github Pages / Netlify / Surge is free with subdomain. Or you could buy .dev (or anything else) for minimal price. Personally i bought 1$ .xyz domain. Its not that “costy”.
It doesn't cost me a lot of money, indeed, and I'm happy to pay the couple of Euro's that it does. GGP suggested that you shouldn't let Medium earn money over your content, though; even if that's something you care about, it's still a better deal than paying for your blog yourself.
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I can't speak for Hugo but with Jekyll, I solved this by writing a few line plugin. It still involves putting in a short custom tag (which I have as an editor snippet) and paste in the video ID.
It's not as pleasant as pasting a URL in but it takes about 3 seconds to get it all set up when I want to embed a video. Very minimal impact IMO.
If I had to embed hundreds of videos all the time I would probably just write a custom plugin that scans the file and converts Youtube URLs to embed snippets.
Re: Can we all stop using Medium now?
#310> When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play?
That's what happens when there are no ads. This is what the HN majority keeps saying they want.