
Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain - ingve
https://arslan.io/2017/07/30/why-i-left-medium-and-moved-back-to-my-own-domain/
======
tyingq
_" Writing comments to Medium posts feels awkward because each comment is
treated as a blog post."_

This is also awkward from the reader point of view. Trying to follow a comment
chain on medium is frustrating as it only shows the first level, diving in
switches pages, and often, a need to press a second "load all comments"
button. Then the back button to wind your way back up.

Is there some sound reasoning for why it was set up this way? Some benefit I'm
not seeing?

~~~
untog
I suspect it's because they didn't/don't want people to comment in the usual
way - you can highlight text on an article and leave short comments in the
relevant place if you want to do that.

I think the comments section at the end was intended more as a place for
lengthy reaction posts. It's why comments have "recommend" rather than "like"
as a button. I might "like" someone saying "great post!" but I'm not going to
"recommend" it.

It often feels like Medium has made a product for what they want online
discourse to be, rather than what it actually is. I don't hate them for
trying.

~~~
freehunter
Commenting on articles is a terrible method of interaction. Anti-spam is hard,
and spammers always win. Trolls always win. Comments rarely add much to the
discussion from the article, and they're often hard to follow. There's no
reason to leave a comment saying "great post!". It's spam. It's unnecessary.

Blogs are a wholly inappropriate place for back-and-forth discourse to happen
simply because if I have a blog, it's my blog. It's not a discussion board. I
inherently have the advantage, I control the conversation, and it's all about
me. I have the ability to delete comments I disagree with. That's not
discourse, that's an echo chamber.

I completely agree with Medium. Just because blog posts have historically had
comments doesn't mean it's the right choice. The minute people accepted
"pingbacks" as a valid form of comment was the moment comments died. V!AGR@
and P3N15 type spam sealed the deal.

~~~
vilmosi
> Commenting on articles is a terrible method of interaction. Anti-spam is
> hard, and spammers always win. Trolls always win.

But that's practically what HN is, yet I like to believe it's a good platform
without too much spam or trolls.

~~~
rattray
That makes me curious as to the mechanisms hn employs to combat spam. I've
never seen a comment I've been able to tell was spam, which is impressive.

~~~
sah2ed
Visit your HN profile then set "showdead" to "yes" to see some of such
comments.

~~~
dredmorbius
There's some stuff that shows up there, but surprisingly little.

I've been browsing "showdead" for quite some time. My main complaint is that
there's no obvious way to tell if an account has been shadowbanned or not.
I'll report questionable instances to hn (via email), and on something like
3/4 of cases, the account has been, though it's not clealry evident.

I'll vouch for some flagged items. Flag others. Generally I think the comment
ranking is pretty good. There's a tendency for somewhat fluffy comments to be
excessively highly rated, but as compared to other systems (say, Reddit), HN
compares favourably.

There's also a slight tendency for the hivemind to punish critical, but valid,
comments. But again, compared to most other systems I've seen, not
particularly, and the situation often evens out.

------
JoshMnem
I don't understand why people write programming blogs on Medium. I think that
managing a live website with its own server (rather than only working on other
people's projects) is a very important skill.

If you don't want to manage WordPress, try a static site generator like
Metalsmith:
[https://github.com/segmentio/metalsmith](https://github.com/segmentio/metalsmith)

Deploy on Digital Ocean or Linode for $5/month. Free hosting options include
Github Pages and Netlify.

~~~
mercer
I can't speak for others, but one reason why I'd use something like Medium is
_precisely_ to ensure that I don't manage anything by myself except for the
content production part.

I have a long list of attempts at setting up my own site, but because it's
mine I wanted to get it just right. And so down the rabbit hole I go: making
sure my server is super-secure (because it's important hey I'll learn in the
process!), finally trying out Caddy, using Ghost (node.js), building my own
static site generator using React for the backend, which of course means
updating and perfecting my Ultimate Front-End Setup.

And once that's done, I want to do right by the design, and of course make
sure my html/css/js is impeccable and that it all runs on every browser under
the sun.

Of course I love doing this and I learn a lot from it, but if my goal is to
write stuff and put it online, this approach never really works. I'm happy it
doesn't, because it means I still love what I do more than writing about what
I do, but it's one very legitimate reason to use something like Medium.

~~~
giobox
I've had largely the same experiences. Recently I decided to challenge myself
to instead keep it simple, rather than treat the whole thing as a "learn some
new thing along the way" type exercise. The end result is I actually have a
blog I'm actually writing on that is absurdly easy to maintain, rather than
the usual (for me anyway!) 75 percent complete side project in some new
technology I'll never get around to finishing.

Simple VPS, webserver, letsencrypt, static site generator, cloud flare for CDN
duties and a little CSS. All I do now is write a new article in Markdown every
now and then, then run a simple shell script to regenerate the site and rsync
the newly minted static pages to the server.

Personal sites or new blogs are all too often victims of premature
optimisation - your amazing google PageSpeed score is nice, but who cares if
no one is reading.

~~~
cupcakestand
> Simple VPS, webserver, letsencrypt, static site generator, cloud flare for
> CDN duties and a little CSS.

Why didn't you host on Github Pages and you could have saved all that but
having the same flexibilty regarding a SSG use case?

~~~
corobo
> Why didn't you host on Github Pages

Tried that once, fell down a 3 day rabbit hole trying all the static blog
generators.. ended up picking WordPress.

~~~
cookiecaper
Same. For all the times this is recommended, I haven't found a static blog
generator that really works well. WordPress is still the easiest and most
flexible to get running, but it's a PITA to keep it maintained.

After trying Lektor (fine for general use, but hard to theme; no pre-baked
templating/theming system at all) and Hugo (tbh I don't remember the exact
thing here, but I got really frustrated trying to do something and ended up
deciding that themeless Lektor was better), I'm now holding out hope that
Ghost, while not a SSG, will be good and simple enough that I can self-host a
"blog" without falling back to raw HTML editing or WordPress. Started out by
having to edit the package dependencies to versions that work on recent
versions of Node... :\

~~~
bschwindHN
Write your own generator, it's pretty easy! Blogs don't have to be fancy, most
programming blogs need just paragraphs, images, and code blocks. Then you can
add fancier features (interactive diagrams, fancy animations, a nice
deployment pipeline, etc.) as you go along.

------
pmontra
About the dickbars:

1) I uBlock them on my phone and tablet. Unfortunately there are plenty of
random sites on Medium with their own domain. I don't follow any of them and
get there from HN or similar sites. Blocking all of them doesn't make sense
because I'll probably never get back to that domain. I agree with the author,
the button in the middle of the page really sucks.

2) On desktop, the button and the dickbar never show because I'm running with
NoScript and they are a JavaScript thing :-)

The author misses another inconvenient feature of Medium, the login. It's
either by oAuth (I don't remember which providers) or by email. That means
they send me an email with a link to click to login. In theory it's ok,
because obviously email is safer and more convenient than a password stored in
a password manager (/sarcasm). The first time I used it the mail didn't arrive
until the day after, so I've been primed against it. Probably almost everybody
just login with Facebook or something so, quoting the author, "I’m not a part
of his [Ev Williams] vision".

~~~
Sylos
In case you're not aware, NoScript also exists for Android:
[https://noscript.net/nsa/](https://noscript.net/nsa/)

Not quite as functional as its bigger brother, but an option nonetheless.

~~~
tuxracer
NoScript is also integrated into
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.browser)
This uses Chrome so there's likely higher compatibility with mobile sites

~~~
jccalhoun
script blocking may be built in but I don't think noscript is.

~~~
tuxracer
Other than name/logo what's the difference? Brave allows you to block all
scripts by default and only whitelist specific sites.

~~~
jccalhoun
Noscript does more than just turn javascript on and off. I recall the creator
of noscript writing a post a few years ago saying that the plugin model of
chrome didn't allow for all the things noscript does. That may have changed
since and umatrix may be able to do things that the noscript guy said couldn't
be done but I don't know

~~~
tuxracer
Brave's features are not an extension. It's is a fork of Chromium. Any
mechanism they include in their build has none of the limitations extensions
have and they're not extensions at all.

------
cupcakestand
To the point criticism of Medium, very detailed and the OP is picking the
right issues of Medium.

While Medium looks so beautiful and clean at first glance it really
disappoints when you use it on a daily base both as a creator and as a user.
Everytime I use Medium, I am surprised that Medium is successful. Its
appearance feels definitely premium and significantly of higher value than any
other blog system but the usability is a nightmare.

So we are back to square one. Which blog system should we use? SSG on Github
Pages?

~~~
gboudrias
> Which blog system should we use?

Hosting your own WordPress site? It's simple and easy. Why did anyone ever
want to be on Medium in the first place? Most likely for the name association
and the visibility that comes with it.

I think we have a responsibility to promote self-reliance as part of
technological culture. If we want people to move away from centralization
(which I do), we have to teach by example (which I do).

~~~
Someone
_" Hosting your own WordPress site? It's simple and easy."_

I would think that, for at least 90% of those publishing on Medium, that's
neither simple nor easy.

Even ignoring that, hosting your own Wordpress site means taking
responsibility for keeping it up to date, security-wise. That hurdle alone
probably makes most bloggers use some third-party blogging provider.

~~~
gboudrias
It's just an example, there are many choices, some of which are presumably
even simpler.

But yes there will be some responsibility involved, I think that falls into
healthy technical culture as well. It's the difference between taking care of
something and getting someone else to take care of it. At the end of the day,
someone has to do it, and we shouldn't always simply trust others with it just
because it's easier.

------
shinzui
The best part of reading technical content is the discussion in the comments –
Medium makes that impossible.

~~~
penpapersw
I've seen many technical articles link to an HN post for discussion instead of
using Disqus or hosting on something like medium.

~~~
Qub3d
I get it, too. HN is a threaded comment system, which we've been iterating on
since the USENET days.

Not that threaded comments are the solution for everything, but it excels at
visually separating each of the distinct discussions that may arise around a
given topic.

------
Entangled
Medium is a blog platform and a news aggregator. I use it mostly for consuming
news by using tags of interest. Good luck with that writing your own blog on
your own server. Oh, and the daily newsletter is a delightful joy.

Discoverability is key to the success of Medium.

[https://medium.com/tag/swift/latest](https://medium.com/tag/swift/latest)

[https://medium.com/tag/kotlin/latest](https://medium.com/tag/kotlin/latest)

[https://medium.com/tag/python/latest](https://medium.com/tag/python/latest)

[https://medium.com/tag/java/latest](https://medium.com/tag/java/latest)

Or by topic

[https://medium.com/tag/design/latest](https://medium.com/tag/design/latest)

[https://medium.com/tag/UX/latest](https://medium.com/tag/UX/latest)

[https://medium.com/tag/AI/latest](https://medium.com/tag/AI/latest)

~~~
cupcakestand
Why should I discover content on Medium?

This job is done by HN and Reddit and unfortunately Facebook if I am on FB. I
don't have time to get sucked in another feed.

~~~
corobo
Specific content. For example I follow the Laravel tag on medium, I've not
seen anything regarding Laravel on HN in a fair while.

------
francis-io
Using something like Jekyll to create a static blog lets you put it on AWS S3.
For all but the highest traffic sites the bandwidth cost is trivial and you
totally remove all the issues with uptime and securing a server.

~~~
copperx
Same applies to GitHub pages.

~~~
steventhedev
GHP means you're subject to github's downtime, which tends towards more
frequent than s3 (outside us-east-1). Worse, you can't run HTTPS with GHP and
a custom domain.

You could use CloudFlare's flexible TLS, but it's unsecured from their system
to your site, which has resulted in carrier level content being injected[0].

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12091900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12091900)

~~~
nickjj
That's what got me to host my Jekyll sites on my own too (lack of proper end-
to-end SSL on a custom domain).

Also, if you're not using S3 / CloudFront you can use Let's Encrypt to issue
free SSL certificates on any cloud hosting provider.

It's an awesome set up once you know how to get everything up and running.

I even recently released a course[0] that explains how to do it step by step
(setting up a custom domain, hosting multiple sites on 1 DigitalOcean server,
A+ SSL ratings for both nginx and Apache, etc.).

It takes less than 1 minute to deploy and protect any custom site (or web
app), since the course comes with ready to go configs and scripts too.

[0]: [https://httpswithletsencrypt.com/](https://httpswithletsencrypt.com/)

------
Mikho
Switched long time ago to Blogger--free to use your domain, change template
design as you like as much as you like, connect external widgets like Disqus
(my blog to check how Blogger may look:
[http://blog.babich.me/](http://blog.babich.me/)).

Also, a huge thing is integration with Google Photos and Google Drive. You may
insert in a post photos from your Google Photo right by selecting them inside
an image addition menu--no need in hustling with links, just look through
Google Photos inside Blogger. BTW, it's possible to see photos uploaded via
Blogger in Google Photos folder inside Google Drive (Google Photos app itself
does not show photos uploaded via Blogger).

You also may connect FeedBurner (Google company) in Blogger settings and
collect subscription emails and also automatically send emails to subscribers
via FeedBurner when a new post is published. BTW, every tag used for tagging
posts in Blogger becomes dedicated RSS feed. So, if you write about different
topics (e.g. coding and travel), it's easy to set up for people to follow RSS
or subscribe via email only to a topic they are interested in and not
everything you write.

And it's all free!

Medium feels like long-form Twitter with all these replies treated as posts.
This is a terrible experience. Especially when you follow RSS feed of somebody
on Medium and comments & replies are delivered and treated in the feed the
same way as posts. I guess it's due to the fact that Ev was also Twitter
founder and has only one construct in his head as to posts and replies.

~~~
Rjevski
One of the things I hate the most about Blogger is their stupid JS template
where on mobile swiping left/right (to move the page if you're zoomed in)
switches to the next/previous post instead.

~~~
Mikho
I just rewrote the template completely. It's not that hard. So I do not have
to deal with standard templates issues.

------
alanh
A commentator on Arslan's post mentions “Medium’s foolproof wysiwyg editor.”
This surprised me. I find their WYSIWYG editor to be incredibly frustrating,
counter-intuitive, limiting, and obnoxious.

Allow me to belabor only the last point.

Imagine typing the following sentence (I’m using pipe | to show the cursor):

    
    
      Clifford is a big dog.
    

But it's missing something, so you move your insertion point:

    
    
      Clifford is a big| dog.
    

and you type “<space>red.” In any sane editor, the result will be exactly what
you typed:

    
    
      Clifford is a big red| dog.
    

But on Medium, the result is:

    
    
      Clifford is a big red|dog.
    
    

Clifford is a big reddog? Ffffff. This happened because when you typed the
first space after “big”, the result was not the insertion of a space but in
fact the same as if you had hit the "right arrow" key:

    
    
      Clifford is a big |dog.
    

Not cool. I have a strong habit of inserting words with the surrounding spaces
already inserted. How dare Medium forbid me to type the way I want?

I know that Medium does this because they are on a crusade to kill the usage
of two spaces after sentence. That doesn’t excuse insane frustration of the
editing process. No wonder most Medium posts don't look like they have ever
experienced the most cursory proofreading!

------
dhruvkar
I don't think this is an either/or situation.

Medium's value is in exposing new, (arguably) high-quality content to its
readers.

Every so often, when you write an extra high-quality article, post it on
medium as well, with a way for the reader to subscribe. It'll expose new
readers to your writing and you still keep your content on your own platform.

------
edem
The OP forgot to mention the worst (IMHO) problem: Medium does not support
multi-language content (more here: [https://medium.com/@oleksiy/multilingual-
content-management-...](https://medium.com/@oleksiy/multilingual-content-
management-a-challenge-that-faces-bloggers-and-a-punch-for-medium-
ea1ecb3e357a)). If I write posts in English or Hungarian it is okay. But when
I start to write in both my readers will see unreadable gibberish when they
come to my page and half of the content will be noise for them and it can't be
helped.

That's why I do it the other way around. I have my own domain and page which
runs on a custom Jekyll / GitHub Pages setup and I __import __stories to
Medium from my page.

This way I can keep using medium and get more readers for free but Medium will
display the "Originally posted at ..." line at the bottom. Win-win! You should
try this out and use Medium for what it is useful for.

------
sixQuarks
Moral of the story: Try to never rely on another company's platform for your
business. It's hard enough creating a successful business, but to add a layer
of risk on top of that is not smart.

~~~
tchaffee
Github, an ISP, mobile phone company, rented offices, an OS, hardware, and the
list is almost endless. I actually think it's important to outsource as much
as you can and focus on your core business.

~~~
sixQuarks
you're obviously not understanding my comment

------
linopolus
I never understood how writers of any kind would let Medium (or Tumblr, or
...) rip all control off their hands.

~~~
pmlnr
Thirst for (fast/instant) fame.

------
amelius
This is good. Medium is, in a sense, the anti-internet. It centralizes where
no centralization is needed.

------
s3nnyy
I feel one of the main reasons Medium is so successful is that they cracked
discoverability and rank high on Google for any topic (sort of like
Wikipedia). Hence, I am hesitant to move away from it although I really want
to build a sustainable, long-term business on my own domain.

Any ideas on this?

~~~
CharlesW
My advice: Publish on your own domain, syndicate to Medium (and LinkedIn, and
whatever) shortly after.

Always import the story[1] so that Medium adds a rel="canonical" link, and
link back to the canonical version (e.g. "Originally published at XXX" in the
text of the story itself.

[1] [https://medium.com/p/import](https://medium.com/p/import)

~~~
mcguire
Any idea how to get code formatted properly?

[https://medium.com/@mcguire.crsr/applied-formal-logic-
brute-...](https://medium.com/@mcguire.crsr/applied-formal-logic-brute-force-
string-search-71e417b7f157)

~~~
CharlesW
If you type ``` on a new line, Medium will switch to code input mode.

If you forget, Control/Command-? brings up keyboard shortcuts help, and the
2nd page has the shortcuts for code formatting.

------
ngsayjoe
I recently wanted to move my Tumblr personal blog to Medium however after a
few days of nightmare and still unable to setup a custom domain despite having
paid $75 fee i requested a refund and closed my account. Their customer
service and documentation kind of sucks!

~~~
djsumdog
It's sad that a process like this is still somehow manual. I can't imagine
what technical debt they must have where they can't automate custom domains.

~~~
slig
I believe it's by design. They want their brand "medium.com" visible. They
don't want to become a commodity blog hosting.

------
TheAceOfHearts
Personally, I never write comments on blog posts, but I participate in
communities like Hacker News and a couple random subreddits.

I prefer including links to Hacker News or Reddit in the blog post. I'm not
interested in handling authentication, moderating users, or dealing with spam.
News aggregators usually do a great job with all those points.

The Webmention [0] spec solves this problem, but sadly, it hasn't been widely
adopted. :(

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webmention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webmention)

------
bhalp1
At [https://dev.to](https://dev.to) we have a similar product to Medium in a
lot of ways. One thing we try to do is offer the benefits of Medium in terms
of distribution, but also encourage users to easily make their own site the
canonical source, because we don't want to force vendor lock in when you get
to this point.

I'd like to think we also do a good job dealing with a lot of the UX issues
that the author outlines :)

------
ewanm89
Why lose flexibility and switch to medium in the first place?

~~~
colept
Because when I switched to Medium my blog posts went from ~50 impressions to
1000+ impressions

Exposure.

~~~
pmart123
Are you using a custom domain with Medium?

~~~
colept
No I opted for no-domain because my articles can be sequestered to any
publication where they will receive better exposure than if I had reserved it
for my own.

------
illuminea
From a branding and long-term point of view, it's really important to "own"
your content by hosting it on your own domain and even server space. The
advantage of a platform like Medium is that it can increase the reach of your
content, but it's too risky to go all in with them since who knows how long
they'll be around, or what limitations they might add down the line.

But there's a way to have your cake and eat it too: you can publish first on
your self-hosted WordPress site, and then republish automatically on Medium
with a canonical tag pointing back to your WordPress site. This means you get
the SEO and control benefits of WP, and the reach benefits of Medium.

I wrote a guide on how to make this magic happen:
[https://illuminea.com/ultimate-guide-to-wordpress-
medium/](https://illuminea.com/ultimate-guide-to-wordpress-medium/). Of course
this post is also reposted on Medium with the canonical tag :)
[https://medium.com/@miriamschwab/6425c2d5e5c4](https://medium.com/@miriamschwab/6425c2d5e5c4)

------
zabil
It's not easy to run a team (engineering) blog with static site generators.
Authoring in markdown, reviewing, external contributions etc takes up a lot of
time.

With medium we've encouraged the team to run personal blogs and add interested
articles to the team publication. It's a bottom up approach.

In return, we get viewer-ship when medium recommends our articles on other
(medium) blogs or via tags. Medium has a sense of community. Speaking strictly
for myself, running your own site is tad selfish, it lacks as sense of
community. Right now medium does that, We'd only move out of medium if there's
something that does it better.

------
erikb
I find the first part particularly interesting. I always contemplated of
whether or not I should start blogging. And for me it always seemed an obvious
choice between whether or not I want to host my own blog, which would mean a
lot of energy and money investment, or if I should start a medium page,
possibly losing control over my texts and page views.

When you now say that it's a hassle to setup and even costs money, why should
anybody use Medium? Do people not know how much you already gift a page if you
let them host your content? They should pay you and not the other way around.

------
alanh
Not to be a horrible self promoter (it's just the ideas I care about), but my
2012 discussion of the problem with new blogging platforms still applies, from
a general perspective, to Medium: [https://alanhogan.com/the-problem-with-new-
blog-platforms](https://alanhogan.com/the-problem-with-new-blog-platforms).
(tl;dr is that eventually you will grow out of virtually any non-Wordpress
platform, especially one you don’t control yourself.)

------
vertebrate
See also: [http://practicaltypography.com/billionaires-
typewriter.html](http://practicaltypography.com/billionaires-typewriter.html)

~~~
MikusR
HN really need to add Matthew Butterick's sites to spamlist.

~~~
Jaruzel
Why so? I just skimmed read the linked page (after pasting the URL
manually...) and it doesn't seem any worse than other articles posted here.

~~~
MikusR
Because if you follow the link you get
[http://practicaltypography.com/graylist.html](http://practicaltypography.com/graylist.html).
That page has about the same amount of content as a typical spam page.

~~~
Jaruzel
He's just blocking high traffic referrers. Which I agree is odd. It's not like
his site is media heavy.

~~~
jessaustin
He attempts to monetize without resorting to ad networks. A laudable goal,
even if the methodology is idiosyncratic.

------
luord
I had no interest in using medium, but this is one extra little reason for not
fixing my unbroken pelican+GitLab pages setup.

------
Goladus
Why remove all your posts from medium.com? Why not post to both wordpress and
medium.com?

~~~
reboog711
I haven't followed the progression of Google search indexing, but in the old
days, the 'rule of thumb' was that having the same content on two different
domains would hurt your rankings.

------
denisehilton
Does medium allow you to monetize your content and put ads? If it's not the
case then why do people write for Medium. What's there to gain?

------
owens99
Medium is blocked in China. And there are as many people learning English in
China as the entire US population.

That's the biggest deal breaker for me.

------
skyisblue
One thing that really annoys me is embeded gists don't render in medium's
mobile app.

------
pgeorgep
Interesting read. Personally, I prefer Medium for the convenience.

------
crispytx
My blog is hosted by Medium on my own domain and I think it kicks ass. All of
the issues the author brought up in his post seemed pretty minor to me. Just
my opinion, but Medium has the best blogging software out there, by far.

------
xerophyte12932
Irony: I am getting a "This site can be reached".

------
nvr219
Privacy Badger blocks most medium sites for me :)

------
maxraz
Setting up a domain was difficult. Really?

------
abiox
i generally avoid medium.com blogs because the ui is bad. i hate the comments
system.

------
tomerbd
may I ask which theme you use? it looks very nice..

~~~
tomeehan
[https://wordpress.com/theme/revelar](https://wordpress.com/theme/revelar)

------
tomerbd
i did some google search for

"gatsby themes" "gatsby disqus"

almost nothing useful turns out.. any ideas?

