That's because it is plagued with "growth hacking" features. I am always being bothered to sign up/sign in when I just want to read the damn article.
Ditching Medium
51–60 of 125 posts
Re: Ditching Medium
#52So we are back to running our own blogs again? What are the alternatives to Medium if you don’t want to self-host? Ghost?
https://write.as/ appears to be a very nice, minimal blogging platform. It's gorgeous, and easy to read on so as a frequent blog reader I love it.
Re: Ditching Medium
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
$72 a year is a lot of money. [1] The thing that made Medium special was that anyone could post about something that mattered to them and get noticed no matter their background. WordPress, Blogger, and other free things cost energy in place of money because they're top-heavy with features and weak accessibility. That's as much a blocker as a recurring charge. [1] "But it's $70 if you pay the full year!" That's not mu…
$72 a year is not a lot of money. If you got a $1.00 coffee every other day from McDonald's it would be twice that. The main reason why the web is such a sight for sore eyes in 2019 is that people seem to think $72 a year is a lot for having a voice. People can find 10x that for a new iPhone or spend that much on beer in a month or on a cable subscription but having a blog sure can't be worth much to most people. For…
It's a fair amount of money compared to a hosted Wordpress.com site that costs $0/yr (foo.wordpress.com), $13/yr (custom domain) or $50/yr (custom domain, no ads), and has the safety valve of being able to export and move to any other WP host including self-hosting at any time.
Re: Ditching Medium
#54I developed an aversion to medium well before the paywall went up. Most articles involved a novice doing preliminary research about something they had limited prior experience with, coming up with a toy solution and then lambasting the experts for having not seen said solution. (Granted, my route to Medium was mostly through HN.)
To be fair, that’s most blogs; they just have a difference in discoverability.
Re: Ditching Medium
#55So we are back to running our own blogs again? What are the alternatives to Medium if you don’t want to self-host? Ghost?
I've moved to: https://dev.to
Solid platform, discoverability baked in, great writing tools. They do need to polish their UX though as I wrote a lengthy article for about an hour and then clicked on "Write a Post" instead of Save to publish. This wiped my editor clean with no way to recover what was lost. Horrible experience there.
They should at least autosave for you on every keystroke. No reason not to.
Re: Ditching Medium
#56I am not sure if it's a goto platform for programming blocks if it does not even give your syntax highlighting capability or embedding code snippets such as gist.
Re: Ditching Medium
#57slightly off-topic but i hope a UX person from medium would stumble upon this. medium posts have a terrible UX -- for me at least. i tend to set my fonts to be 125%-150% larger. it gives me an easy-to-read feeling on most blogs. especially when fonts are chosen carefully. but this breaks medium blogs so bad i often gave up on many articles. the header usually takes 40% of the viewport height. and there's always a "ge…
Overuse of white space, really weird comment/reply system and more. It's nice on the eyes purely from an aesthetic perspective, but I agree it lacks on the X in UX. It's a few shades form over function. Side note: Apple's new Swift documentation feels like this to me. It was designed to look and read like a novel. Full of prose, lack of use of colour, wrong fonts, way too big. The 'parent class' is down at the bottom…
The highlight/comment/DM system is the only part I like (and actually love it—all text sites should use it IMO).
Re: Ditching Medium
#58I have never understood tech blogs on Medium. Surely if you’re writing about a technical subject, especially programming, you have the skills to setup a quick Jekyll blog? It’s what I did, and I have no idea why I’d hand control of my user experience over to Medium, no idea whatsoever.
Well, from my perspective I've had my own blog since 2005 and still do (wordpress on a cheap vps), but the articles I publish on Medium get way more interaction, views, reads and comments.
Re: Ditching Medium
#59Either I or the Author are confused about how Medium works. > A blog, to me, was a place for someone to put their thoughts up onto the internet and have anyone who wanted to come and read - for free. But you can still do this, no? You can write articles on Medium that can be read for free. > Medium relies on user-submitted content and then charges those same users for access to their content. My experience is that Me…
They changed it so that Medium now defaults you into creating paywall posts and you have to fight the UI to create a free post. And when you create a free post, they warn you that it won't be promoted anywhere except to your followers.
Basically, they ruined the site.