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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

#371

Post by nicbou »

axegon_ wrote: post #370
nicbou wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are an exception. If one in 83 unique visitors donated I'd be well off, but it's not the case. I'm a bit tired of people pretending the internet could survive on donations and micropayments. Affiliate marketing works well for my niche. I wanted to start similar sites about other topics, but if those don't naturally lead to certain purchases, they're extremely hard to effectively monetise.

Perhaps. But you see my point, right? There is something morally corrupt in offering "free" content while compiling a spam mailing list.

That's another pattern I really dislike, and deliberately avoid. I don't want to use my content as a bargaining chip to collect emails or what-have-you. I have that luxury because my topic is easily monetised. Most content creators don't.

In general, the internet got incredibly annoying, but I can understand why. Part of it is because we feel entitled to free content. There are few business models that allow people to be rewarded for their work while still offering a product for free. It usually involves selling something the user's data or attention.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#372

Post by dredmorbius »

tomjen3 wrote: post #369
dredmorbius wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads drive analytics / analytics feed ads.

But ads have been a thing since the Egyptians started to write sales documents on Papyrus, but it is only in the last 20 years or so analytics have changed the game: I suspect that I might have been slightly of in the previous comment, maybe it is only when analytics can note the effect of individual customers actions that they matter.

The major development of advertising is notably more recent:

https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/n...

AdTech creates measurement problems not experienced in mass advertising, newer yet:

https://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#373

Post by NotSammyHagar »

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…

It's kind of free but your service's landing page requires a domain name and hosting provider, so it's free setup but paid hosting is required (which appears to support multiple companies, not just yours to your credit).

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#374

Post by evdub »

tjpnz wrote: post #237
axegon_ wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Many years ago I was really happy with medium as a reader. And the feed algorithm was decent enough. By no means the perfect content but for the most part it pushed forward things I was interested in. However, the monetization model turned medium(originally a decent blogging platform) into tumblr and it was a race to the bottom from that point. Any website that asks you to register in order to read a blog po…

It's rather telling that the first thing Medium does is flash a login prompt in your face when landing on one of their pages. At that point I tend to go elsewhere.

That's not actually a thing that happens anymore FYI.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#375

Post by wilsonbright »

tomcam wrote: post #138
axegon_ wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Many years ago I was really happy with medium as a reader. And the feed algorithm was decent enough. By no means the perfect content but for the most part it pushed forward things I was interested in. However, the monetization model turned medium(originally a decent blogging platform) into tumblr and it was a race to the bottom from that point. Any website that asks you to register in order to read a blog po…

> this is still a terrible thing to do. What’s the alternative, assuming the blogger doesn’t want to give everything away for free?

https://www.sigle.io/ built on Blockstack is an interesting one.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#376

Post by fastball »

johnonolan wrote: post #368
bishalb wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much more complex to get started with compared to what Ghost? Really? Almost all shared hosting services offer a single click install of WordPress, I don't think ghost is anywhere as simple as that to install(for a non tech savvy user) WordPress has improved a lot in the past few years in terms of security, "worpdress is insecure" is an old meme. Sure if you just go on installing any plugin under the sun, there can b…

"Ghost isn't easy to install" is an equally old meme which is trivial to disprove :) Self-hosting any CMS requires a degree of tech-savvy. Here's a comparison of Ghost vs WP in terms of time to install: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMKNgV1gTHg

Helpful that you have a video ready to go!

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#377

Post by donny2018 »

vishnu_ks wrote: post #295
vlttnv wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have said, this is great! A simple but very useful idea and a great execution. Thank you for not making it an amalgamation of heavy javascript frameworks.

Thank you. I wanted to mainly use Python for the backend, since that's the language I am most comfortable in. And Django was good enough for 90% of the use case. For the frontend stuff like Newsfeed, Comments, Upvotes etc which involved user interaction I used Javascript/handlebars/jQuery. React or any frontend frameworks would have probably been an overkill (honestly, even jQuery was) in the case of diff.blog, since…

Thank you for going “old school”. We need more stuff like this. All these frontend monstrosities are getting out of hand lately. Lots of overhead for very little value.
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