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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

#331

Post by Wowfunhappy »

jedimastert wrote: post #297
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…

My brother wanted to start writing about his recovery process[0] and asked me to help him make a blog. He said he wanted to learn a bunch of stuff so he could be self-sufficient enough to not have to ask me/"need my permission" to go from written post to publish. He had already bought a domain that came with some bottom-of-the-barrel free shared hosting service. I pointed him towards Wordpress, he set up the entire t…

The link to your blog gives an HTTPS error for me in Firefox.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#332

Post by krtkush »

marcosdumay wrote: post #271
krtkush wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I mentioned GitHub? The thing is GitHub is just a wrapper. All my data is still with me and I can switch to GitLab in about a hours time. Also, unlike Medium, GitHub does not put a quota on number of free articles per month nor does it cover 1/4th of the page with a permanent pop-up asking the reader to sign up. I feel GitHub pages and Medium are not the same thing.

> The thing is GitHub is just a wrapper. If you own the domain name, yes. Otherwise, no.

In my case, I do own the domain name.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#333

Post by CM30 »

_mlxl wrote: post #111
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…

One thing you really miss when leaving Medium is the audience. It is easy for people search Medium for a topic they are interested in and find it within the first couple of articles. If you are trusting Google to be your entry point for traffic you have to play all kinds of gross games with your content for SEO purpose and if you are adding value to an already well explored topic there will be someone out there troun…

> One thing you really miss when leaving Medium is the audience. It is easy for people search Medium for a topic they are interested in and find it within the first couple of articles.

Not sure I'd agree with this. I've tried looking for interesting articles on Medium recently, and it seems that once you want to go outside the 'make money online/internet nomad/political rants' genre, finding anything interesting becomes real difficult.

It'a slso quite hard to find things from unknown/unpopular authors there too. Remember looking through a few Medium Digests and counting how popular each creator was, and found there was a huge bias towards people with large social media followings/existing fanbases in what was being promoted in those newsletters and on the Medium front page.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#334

Post by dredmorbius »

dspillett wrote: post #191
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.

Any particular reason for "Doesn't use node.js", given that a static site generator isn't going to use the runtime once the site is (re)generated so you don't have any efficiency or stability concerns from your reader's PoV? (I'm considering node for a personal project or two, though as much as possible avoiding the mess that NPM seems to be as the projects are small enough I can manage the few dependencies manually,…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23915700

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#335

Post by dredmorbius »

tomjen3 wrote: post #186
vmception wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but the a/b test says you keep doing it and stay on the site longer so you must love it

The more I see things like this, the more I think the original sin of this century was analytics, rather than ads.

Ads drive analytics / analytics feed ads.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#336

Post by moises_silva »

coldtea wrote: post #177
mhss wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> Nazism is the easy target. The precedence is removal of something legal by a moral/social decision by a corporate entity. This is dangerous. Do we want companies to do just what's legal or what's moral? in the end even laws are supposed to be trailing morality and disagreements are expected on what's moral and what's not. This is again the same old debate of whether is some sort of fundamental right to be served…

> Do we want companies to do just what's legal or what's moral? Content hosting platforms I want them to merely do what's legal. It's not up to them to make moral decisions. They could still make those (moral decisions) in other areas, e.g. paying their employees a good salary and not exploiting them, paying taxes, and so on. > This is again the same old debate of whether is some sort of fundamental right to be serve…

>>> Content hosting platforms I want them to merely do what's legal.

Well, one could argue that's what they're doing. Unless we make it illegal for them to make moral choices over content, they're merely doing what's legal and what they perceive in their best interest.

But, ok, I do kind of get your point and it seems you care just when it comes to content, as you still want them to make moral decisions in other areas (employee compensation). I guess that's what I find different from my expectations (I'm not from the USA btw). I am fine with them making moral decisions on the content hosted in their platforms, even if that means sometimes they may censor my own point of view, it's their platform after all and I can still host my content on my own. I know, is not where "everyone" is, but perhaps that's a good thing, if people is missing that content they can get it elsewhere. Perhaps is that I don't perceive Twitter or Cloudflare as essential as say, ISPs. I'd have an issue with an ISP snooping and making moral choices about what traffic to allow beyond what the law requires because is not like I can build my own internet as an alternative.

>>> So, in 2020, as opposed to 1920 where the public square might have been enough, having access to something like Google or YouTube should be enforced as a legal right unless explicitly cut off by court order (as opposed by corporate whim).

That's a good point and my view is somewhat swayed now, or at least I understand that point of view better. I usually don't pay attention to twitter or facebook which somewhat bias me to deem them as unimportant social noise.

>>> Even economically, if you think about it, think how Google search ranking for example (or lack thereof) could sink companies globally at the whim of Google operators.

Search (content discovery, not content hosting) I do find more inclined to believe should be pretty much impartial (beyond perhaps top results that are clearly marked as "sponsored"), but instead of expecting google doing the right thing, we should push clear legislation about it.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#337

Post by dredmorbius »

thn-gap wrote: post #173

I've been thinking recently on the idea of writing for the sake of sharing (be it a short story, some thoughts, or any tutorial), but I like anonymity. For this, I'd like to not host my content, but maybe have some fake profile on social media, and share my writings, which could be hosted on Telegram's telegra.ph. Is there a better platform for my use case, or a reason not to use telegra.ph?

Gitlab / github static hosting is an option.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#338

Post by zerop »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #286
zerop wrote: post #156

I stopped clicking on links which have medium.com domain. It will be a premium article. Medium is choosing anything under premium payment wall, without explicit consent from Author. We need an alternate to this platform

Medium does have consent from the author and the vast majority of page views are going to authors who know a lot about what they are doing. I think that's worth noting. A Medium link is most likely to an article that exists to be behind the paywall because the author thought they could make some money and get good distribution that way. A lot of these articles wouldn't exist otherwise.

I too used to think so and that's how it was earlier. Check again.

For example, other day I found one post on Netflix tech blog was also behind paywall.. check posts from famous tech blogs of companies, you would find some of them behind paywall. I don't think big corporates want to make money from their tech blogs.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#339

Post by besieged »

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…

So I have to use Bluehost in order to use your service?

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#340

Post by tonystubblebine »

zerop wrote: post #338
tonystubblebine wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medium does have consent from the author and the vast majority of page views are going to authors who know a lot about what they are doing. I think that's worth noting. A Medium link is most likely to an article that exists to be behind the paywall because the author thought they could make some money and get good distribution that way. A lot of these articles wouldn't exist otherwise.

I too used to think so and that's how it was earlier. Check again. For example, other day I found one post on Netflix tech blog was also behind paywall.. check posts from famous tech blogs of companies, you would find some of them behind paywall. I don't think big corporates want to make money from their tech blogs.

The deal is for two things, money and distribution. It's possible that people are choosing to put something behind the paywall for distribution. But I agree that's unlikely in Netflix's case. But I'm 100% certain that the Netflix is the one who put it behind the paywall by having that option checked at the time of publication.
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