
Why Medium Sucks - rylandgold
https://www.cdevn.com/why-medium-actually-sucks
======
overshard
I feel like we are beating a dead horse here. Everyone I talk to knows Medium
sucks. I personally hate the modal that comes up every time if I'm not logged
in and how much of my screen is take up by fixed bars.

Medium has a community though. Facebook sucks, but it has a community. Twitter
sucks, but it has a community.

You are going to get more people to see your post if you put it on Medium. You
are going to get more "friends" if you are on Facebook. You are going to
interact with more people if you are on Twitter.

Creating your own blog will now result in you having to manage your own
hosting and possibly even do some "development".

Using another solution may not reach the community you expect to reach.

I find the discussion of HOW to get communities onto better platforms to be a
more interesting topic than why the current platform sucks, especially when
that platform doesn't even seem to listen to the criticism.

~~~
ctvo
I may be one of the folks not part of the Medium community. I only visit
Medium via direct links (on HN, shared on Twitter or shared directly to me by
friends). I can't remember the times I've been on Medium's home page or opened
up their app to browse.

If those direct links sent me to somewhere else entirely tomorrow I wouldn't
care.

~~~
CydeWeys
If those direct links sent me somewhere else tomorrow I would care, because
odds are the alternative would be better. Medium is seriously annoying with
its sign-in nags and large amounts of the screen taken up with unnecessary
bars.

I just want to read an article. Medium is a worse experience than average in
that regard.

~~~
TremendousJudge
I use the Web Annoyances Ultralist[0]. Blocks basically everything except the
header (non-sticky of course) and the text, which ends up as a nice centered
column on a white background.

[0][https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances](https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances)

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
really cool thanks. the combination of uBO and NanoDefender is absolutely
awesoome but I didn't have this Ultralist as part of my setup yet.

------
simonsarris
I think Medium is great.

I pitched an article to an online magazine, about UBI. They said they ran one
too recently, so I figured I'd self publish. I could have put it on my site,
read by zero people, but I figured a medium.com URL would get farther wherever
I submitted it.

I was right, but not only that, the Medium twitter account tweeted my article,
and Medium asked if they could edit it and make an audio version.

Many interesting things came of this signal boosting. People started emailing
me from weird places, like economics professors and government researchers,
including one guy at the World Bank. I was invited into a secret slack that
I'm still part of today (unfortunately most of the good internet is going the
way of non-public places, but that's another topic). The net result of one
article they boosted has been meeting a lot of people who are now my friends,
two years on. Kind of amazing in retrospect. Medium's boosting also allowed me
to gather enough Twitter followers to feel like its a useful platform, in a
sense unlocking "my own" audience.

None of this would have happened if I self hosted. About these issues of
canonical URL, why would I care? If I self hosted almost no one would have
read it. I am more interested in reading and writing than I am in canonical
URLs or a small bar on my screen. I suppose its unfortunate if it annoys 90%
of my readers, but that's a lot better than no readers.

So thanks Medium.

(my only nit is that their editors changed some of my language to be more
snarky, so I would not let them edit again)

~~~
fuzzybeard
That sounds like a great outcome, but it's predicated on having been hand
selected by Medium to share your specific story. 99% of posts won't get that
same treatment. Would your outcomes have been similar without that boost? That
is, just by posting on Medium, would you have achieved a reasonable level of
reach otherwise?

~~~
simonsarris
We cannot know of course, there is no Twin Earth where Taylor Swift is
president, nobody likes pizza, and I or Medium had done things differently. I
can only ponder the odds of my personal blog becoming popular vs a story on
Medium becoming popular. Both may be very small, but it should be clear that
the odds are still greater in the Medium route.

Tags allow visibility to people perusing topics on Medium, or getting emails
about those topics. The SEO boost is clearly greater, and Medium is unlikely
to go down if a flood of traffic arrives. And the possibility of "editors
pick/best of" etc is obviously greater, since it exists at all. And besides,
since I am not famous, leveraging a famous domain lends enough credibility for
more people at the margins to read what I wish to say.

So my particular outcome aside, I think it good advice for any internet rando,
including myself, to leverage the power of such a platform while the benefits
seem nonzero. Though I understand people's reservations (such as this
article!), they seem overstated or else to ignore completely the clear
advantages, even if they are only potential advantages.

------
octosphere
This is why I am a big fan of POSSE[0] which is an abbreviation for Publish
(on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, a content publishing model that
starts with posting content on your own domain first, then syndicating out
copies to 3rd party services with permashortlinks back to the original on your
site.

[0] [https://indieweb.org/POSSE](https://indieweb.org/POSSE)

Also worth reading:

[https://medium.com/@joe_wegner/why-i-dont-write-for-
medium-c...](https://medium.com/@joe_wegner/why-i-dont-write-for-
medium-c7cc156bc5d9)

[https://www.webdistortion.com/2019/05/16/can-we-all-
please-s...](https://www.webdistortion.com/2019/05/16/can-we-all-please-stop-
using-medium-now/)

~~~
bradleyhb
a.k.a. decentralization

~~~
klez
a.k.a. the web, to be fair. Major siloes were a later development.

------
Veen
You need look no further than Ev Williams' opinions on the future of the web
to understand why it sucks:

 _" The idea won’t be to start a website. That will be dead. The individual
website won’t matter. The Internet is not going to be about billions of people
going to millions of websites. It will be about getting it from centralized
websites."_

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/09/09/mediums-
eva...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/09/09/mediums-evan-
williams-to-publishers-your-website-is-toast/)

~~~
nimonian
This is pretty much what supermarkets did to the high street in the 20th
century and I fully expect it to happen to the web in the 21st.

------
stared
I have a votum separatum.

I think it is lovely that Medium charges people directly, instead of:

\- selling data

\- spamming with adverts

What else do you expect? (I'm flabbergasted that most people prefer shady ways
to get revenue... and then criticize it as well. Even here. Let's PAY for
social networks and services. And let's finally acknowledge that the "free"
model is more than often tricky/shady or at least - not sustainable.)

------
duxup
I know SEO and visibility is high on Medium.

I'm still a bit amazed that so many people, many of them who aren't short on
visibility, chose to host their content on that site.

Most of it i would have rather read on someone's personal site as IMO that
adds a lot of character and context.

~~~
lmm
Every personal site I've ever seen looks worse than Medium. I don't want the
"character" of a slightly different UI every time, I want the interface to get
out of my way so that I can get on with reading the actual content. Medium
does that (yes, subject to logging in, but you can do that once and forget
about it).

~~~
Madeindjs
Firefox's reader mode does exactly what you looking for.

~~~
lmm
When it works. It's still an extra click even then.

~~~
athenot
Safari can defaut to reader mode for some sites. I would assume the same is
possible with Firefox.

------
_iiu1
It's true, Medium sucks. What is more pathetic is that we are even here with a
Medium to complain about. What part of the 1995 World Wide Web tech is
insufficient to deliver a page of legible text and possibly some images? Why
on earth is there even a gatekeeper on such? Hosting costs for such are as low
as it can get. We have digressed to a level of decadence Geocities could never
even hope to achieve. This is MySpace 2.0 dumb. What the actual heck?

------
vishnu_ks
I don't think we need a centralised publishing platform like Medium ever
again. Anyone can create a blog for free using Wordpress. RSS feeds are
amazing and it can easily serve the job of subscribing to these blogs. Look at
the podcasting community for example. It's built on top of RSS feeds and it is
thriving. Nobody needs a Medium.com in Podcasting world. What we need in the
blogging world are more platforms and apps that are built on top of RSS feeds.
Better RSS readers. Platforms that makes it easier to easily find and
subscribe to blogs using RSS. Platforms that brings audience to self hosted
blogs.

~~~
TechFinder
Well decentralization is mostly a sham in its current state. You think people
will care about Block.One's Voice app? Steemit more or less died. Hacker Noon
got greedy. Wordpress blogs are dead.

~~~
simplecomplex
Wordpress blogs are not dead. 30% of websites are WordPress.

Are you sure it's not your reading habits that have changed? For example, I
wake up and check my RSS reader (feedbin) where I subscribe to hundreds of
individual blogs (many powered by WordPress). Actually this article was in my
feed because I subscribe to HN RSS with a "Blog" keyword filter!

I don't have numbers but my anecdotal experience is that more blog articles I
read are on WP blogs than not. Ghost is probably the other major platform I
see along with static site generators.

~~~
vishnu_ks
Since you mentioned you read 100s of individual blogs what do you think of
[https://diff.blog](https://diff.blog). Its a side project that I have been
working for a while. Do you see yourselves using something like this?

------
tonystubblebine
Here's the Dev.to piece on the FCC section that the author is talking about. I
wouldn't take FCC's public posturing uncritically as it appears they stole a
lot of people's articles on the way off of Medium and ruined a lot of author's
SEO in the process. [https://dev.to/ben/i-m-concerned-with-the-move-that-
freecode...](https://dev.to/ben/i-m-concerned-with-the-move-that-freecodecamp-
just-pulled-by-leaving-medium-io8)

------
dickeytk
Must be a slow HN day if we've got another post about Medium

~~~
duxup
Yeah it's getting to be "a bit much" with the volume of such articles.

------
Vordimous
So I have been putting together a way for people to more easily make their own
blogging platform. It would kind of mimic a blog or social media platform, but
since everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack it could
easily be converted to a full website or in your case you could simply delete
the repository or any number of your posts because they are just files in your
repository. Any feedback would be wonderful. [https://your-
media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/](https://your-
media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/) Everything is owned by the end
user. This is only providing a recipe for people to use. I will also mention
that [https://www.stackbit.com/](https://www.stackbit.com/) is doing basically
the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers”
perspective.

------
_bxg1
My theory is that the aggressive business practices and dark patterns are a
sign of desperation in the face of a failing business model. Nobody wants the
paywall, so authors don't put posts behind the paywall (most of them don't
even blog to make money, they do it for publicity or for fun). You might
sympathize with Medium here: they're hosting all this content for free and
nobody wants to give them the money to pay their hosting costs!

But here's the thing: those hosting costs only become significant when they
_are_ centralized on a platform like Medium. If I want to go start my own blog
site, I can set it up without any coding and host it for single-digit dollars
a month. If most authors are blogging simply because they want to, they won't
have a problem with paying that nominal fee, and suddenly huge server costs
are spread out to the point that they become trivial. Medium is trying to
solve a problem that didn't exist. That's why it's sinking.

~~~
tonystubblebine
Reasonable in theory, but in practice subscribers have gone up and that's
evident in the payout to authors. Also, in the vacuum of HN & FCC leaving
Medium, I had no problem launching a programming pub focused on the subscriber
program, finding authors (212 in the first 40 days), and readers (now hitting
25k views/day).

What's sort of lost in all of this discussion is the point of the subscriber
program. The point is to higher quality articles to people who care about
quality. A programmer's hourly rate is well above three figures, why would you
waste your time reading low quality articles? Because sometimes they're the
best available. But it doesn't have to be that way.

------
grecht
I agree with the author: It sucks. But so does white font on a blue
background, since we’re also talking about readability. At least they got that
right!

~~~
mixmastamyk
Are you dissing Word Perfect and edit for DOS?

~~~
grecht
No, those are mostly fine, but a blog has different requirements than a text
editor. I just find it a bit hard to read, because for example bright pictures
really stand out, and I think he’s using different shades of white (or grey)
for the font in different elements (like a paragraph or a quote).

I just discovered that it’s possible to switch to a light theme, which is much
more readable. Still would’ve preferred a nice serif font, though.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Yep, it was a comment in jest.

I use the readability button and "Dark Background/Light text" on Firefox when
things get a bit too wild and bright for me.

------
octref
> Let's start with something simple, like syntax highlighting.

I built a syntax highlighter, Shiki, that allows you to use any theme from VS
Code to color your code [0]. It works great with Node now as a static website
generator plugin, but with some effort you can run it all in client side as
well. TypeScript's new handbook is using Shiki [1].

I can't really believe how it's 2019 and Medium and Slack still can't syntax
highlight code snippets.

[0]: [http://shiki.matsu.io/](http://shiki.matsu.io/)

[1]: [https://microsoft.github.io/TypeScript-New-
Handbook/chapters...](https://microsoft.github.io/TypeScript-New-
Handbook/chapters/classes/)

~~~
caspervonb
Syntax highlighting add any information tho, without it it's easier to bring
focus to elements that matter with emphasis.

------
vowelless
“There are also a few Medium alternatives out there. I personally post my blog
to Dev.to (which you might be reading this on right now) as they support the
features I need to control my own content. As a product guy, there are
definitely some UI changes I would make, but the overall experience is much
better than Medium.”

Is Dev.to a developer focused medium? It looks really slick! Could it be a
future Hugo and Medium replacement for developers personal websites/blogs?

~~~
tonystubblebine
Dev.to is great. It's part of why I don't understand the point of FCC and HN
leaving Medium. Why try to be the go-to independent platform for programming
articles when Dev.to is already doing it so well.

------
tonystubblebine
Medium publisher here (I run three pubs behind the paywall). I'd love for
people to just start considering Medium a paid service like Netflix or the
NYTimes. Medium and the NYT offer monthly samples and Netflix doesn't. That's
why you end up hitting the modal so often for NYT/Medium.

I think there's a bigger point though which is just "Does Medium have articles
yet that are worth $5/month?"

It would be totally reasonable to answer no. But every month they spend more
money on authors. And, you don't see this, they are also ramping up spending
on editors.

On programming topics, a lot of articles are finally getting a stricter
editorial curation and even going through copy edit. Even though I'm involved
in editing some of these programming articles, I don't think it'll be enough
editorial in the end. I think programming articles should also go through a
tech review where the code actually gets tested.

I'm hopeful, based on the growth of the programming publication that we'll be
able to afford tech reviewers at least by the end of the year. So maybe if
it's not worth $5 now, it'll be worth $5 later.

------
mft_
Can anyone explain how Medium got to be so big, despite its drawbacks?

I mean, it wasn't launched _that_ long ago, and it's not like blogging
platforms were rare then. Was it the curation/discovery aspect? Or something
else?

~~~
zrobotics
When it started it wasn't annoying at all, and is even lower-friction for a
blog than github pages. However, they don't have enough of a draw to justify
the annoyances/pay wall, and larger blogs leaving will make their value
proposition even worse. It isn't that hard/expensive to setup a blog with a
static generator like Jekyll or Hugo, the hardest part is migrating off of
medium. They do have good SEO, but with freecodecamp & hackernoon leaving I
would imagine they will start dropping in rankings.

Edit: For folks who want WYSIWYG editing, even something like the tools
namecheap provides or hosted WordPress are very viable options as well, since
not everyone will be comfortable with a static site generator.

~~~
fastball
Also forestry.io is a pretty good free backend for a static site with WYSIWYG
editing.

------
teamski
Any Googlers from the search team reading this:

Just downrank medium.com. This is the actual problem with Medium.

The content on medium is ok but does rarely match the search ranking it has.

------
tracker1
It only there were some kind of system self hosted blogs could use... that you
could use an app or site to subscribe to... Like a Really Simple Syndication
or something like that. You could pop open your app, and get through all the
new posts from everyone you follow really quickly.

Nah, Medium and google's fast republishing proxy thingy are so much better.

------
jwlake
Medium actually works great if you just block all their cookies. This fixes
most "news" and publishing sites.

------
ausjke
For me it's about too many eye candies there, I really just want simple text
with pictures only when it is absolutely necessary.

that probably explains why I like HN, simple and brief, it might not be the
most impressive UI when you started to use it, but it works well for the long
term.

------
justaaron
Until such a time that I don't find ALL programming info on Medium.com or it's
subsites I will continue to decry this increasing centralization of content.

The web is our tool for liberation and this is a subversion of the very
principles that the web was founded upon.

------
sergiotapia
What would be the easiest, most inexpensive way to host a blog with code
support today?

~~~
rylandgold
Netlify (free) + and static site builder. My blog (the one this article is on)
was built with Gridsome (uses Vue.js). I personally like it a lot.

Other options are, Jekyll, Gatsby, Hugo and many more. Netlify will make any
of those free.

------
gowthamgts12
Part of public domain now:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_(website)#Criticism_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_\(website\)#Criticism_and_Controversy)

~~~
tonystubblebine
Oh brother. An alternative take on that criticism is that FCC pulled off a
huge copyright heist: [https://dev.to/ben/i-m-concerned-with-the-move-that-
freecode...](https://dev.to/ben/i-m-concerned-with-the-move-that-freecodecamp-
just-pulled-by-leaving-medium-io8)

I'm pretty sure that what FCC calls extortion was actually just the end of a
free ride. Based on what I know of the ecosystem and the offer that was made
to me as a publisher, I think the content of the Medium's approach would have
been along these lines:

"For the past several years, you've been getting a free ride where we gave
free hosting, free traffic, free readers and created a situation where most
programming authors on our platform looked to you as the first place to
publish, i.e. you got free authors. That free ride is over. We think you have
these options:

A) We have pivoted to a subscription business. Do you want to pivot with us
and publish within our paywall? If so, we'll continue giving you readers and
authors, along with an editorial budget and a page-view based performance
bonus. Also we'll start paying your authors out of our end.

B) Stay on our free platform. You'll still get the benefit of the SEO traffic
from the articles you've already published and you can continue to publish as
much as you want. We won't algorithmically promote your articles though and
that will probably mean that fewer authors will choose you as their publisher.

C) You can leave. The problem with leaving though is that you don't own the
copyright to any of the articles in your publication or your subscribers. So
you can ask your current readers and authors to move with you, but on the
surface it looks like this will cost you quite a bit of traffic."

I'm not sure about FCC's actual numbers, but I imagine the option A would have
paid $20-50k/month in "profit" after costs of editing, authors, etc. It also
would have significantly improved the quality of the articles. Not that the
articles were bad, but a bigger editorial budget would have made them even
better.

What it looks like FCC actually did was option D. Copy all of the articles in
their pub (clear copyright infringement), taking a few million views per month
in SEO traffic and then basically dare Medium to sue them. But Medium doesn't
have standing because they don't own these copyrights either, so Medium's not
doing anything. Instead, it's up to about 1k FCC authors who each individually
are having to decide whether to take legal action (usually a DMCA complaint to
FCC's hosting provider) or jump through FCC's hoops. FCC didn't even auto-
create accounts for the authors, so in order to reclaim control of their
article authors are having to either get on the phone with FCC or go through
Twitter DM. However, if the author does that work, it does appear that FCC is
willing to delete the article and/or give control back to the author.

~~~
tonystubblebine
I see a lot of places where tech people call what Medium did above "pulling
the rug" or "bait and switch." I'm always shocked to hear this from tech
people.

We know how startups work. A pre-revenue company is by definition going to
pivot to a business model or go bankrupt (or often both). I think it's a bad
look to act entitled to that pre-revenue period lasting forever. And
certainly, it's disingenuous to act surprised.

Then too, if you are an entrepreneur building a partnership with a pre-revenue
company, you have to understand that that partnership is not stable. I'd
consider it a first principle of business partnerships that both sides need to
make money.

So, in the old days when Medium was hemorrhaging cash, that is by definition
an unstable partnership. Of course it's going to change.

To me, for the first time ever, Medium is now a stable company to partner with
because you basically know what their actual incentives are.

------
rp36
Does Medium support exporting publication? I can export my posts but does not
appear the entire publication can be exported or has API support. If anyone
have looked into it, appreciate the tips.

~~~
futhey
Relatively easy to crawl. I did HTML -> Turndown (.md) -> Ghost.

------
manjana
One thing that is really nice thou is the typography they have chosen to set
on. Most blogs fail at this imo (to a lesser or ocasionally to a disastrous
degree).

------
garkin
My only problem with Medium are rehosted "personal blog" junk domains.
Otherwise uBlock would work without any additional effort.

------
bananamerica
As a reader, I find it slow and cluttered. It may have advantages for
publishers, but I only open Medium links when strictly necessary.

------
lioeters
Well, at least this one isn't hosted on Medium itself - like the previous one
with the exact same title..

~~~
frosted-flakes
If you want to target Medium users, Medium is the best place to publish.

------
stunt
Anybody is still using WordPress? From the picture left on top of my head, WP
is/was a good option.

------
rinze
I don't want to violate the Prime Directive, but quoting from $that_site: "The
idea that someone could just rent space in a colocation facility, install a
web server, and start posting information onto the internet is, sadly, one
hundred percent impossible, and can never happen."

So we have to go to Medium to publish. Not even Wordpress.com. ( _gasps_ )
Blogspot!

~~~
dredmorbius
"That site" == n-gate.

------
neya
There's an even major problem which the author hasn't mentioned. But I can
understand if perhaps the author hasn't experienced it.

Medium embraces censorship. Medium has a content policy that's allows it to
take sides. For example, Medium is very pro towards certain topics and anti
against some. Eg. writing anything anti-feminism will get your account banned
(even if presented with logical arguments, stats and facts). Medium will ban
you for some dumb reason if you write anything pro-white people, Trump, Taiwan
and sometimes Hongkong.

I know this because my friend wrote a stellar piece about a professor who
openly expressed hatred towards males and who held a senior position in a
university [1] and her account was banned the very next day.

To me, this seems like a strategy for Medium to become profitable by
controlling/swaying people's opinions which is a much larger business than
hosting blog content.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-
men...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-
men/2018/06/08/f1a3a8e0-6451-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html?utm_term=.3d46f7468e8a)

------
owens99
Medium is also blocked in China. Meaning 1.4B people can’t access your
content.

------
pawurb
Tell me more [https://abot.app/blog/medium-blogging-platform-
seo](https://abot.app/blog/medium-blogging-platform-seo)

------
Advaith
Medium peaked a couple years ago, with many startups leveraging the audience
and using it as a blog. I suppose their pivot into aggressive growth +
monetization has lost them some really important publications. Arguably,
hackernoon and freecodecamp were some of the most popular publications.

By removing the 'free' aspect of the content, medium effectively put itself in
the same bucket as other platforms.

I also don't like medium's UX, especially the highlighting feature. It is
really distracting.

It'd be cool to have a central store where users can publish content without
worrying about uptime, paywalls or anything as such.

~~~
nimonian
I think a lot of people fantasise about a better, more open Medium, and I'm
surprised it doesn't exist.

Github does a fantastic job of hosting code and keeping people happy
(generally). It's generous to individuals and has a good business model. It
would be great to have a place to host my content which is as friendly as
github.

I think cloning Medium wouldn't be horribly difficult. It might even be a good
medium (hue hue) term project for a solo dev. Perhaps I'm grossly
underestimating the work; perhaps it already exists; or perhaps I've just
found something to keep me busy over the summer!

------
cftorres
The author says paywalls are not the problem but as a reader I don't
understand why the autors have to ask for those high prices. The articles you
can find in Medium are well written but they aren't scientific articles, with
a lot of resourses and time invested to find some data. And the way I find
those articles are more like a coincidence than a specific search for economic
purposes. I think internet is changing abruptly because of an unsustainable
ambition, we are turning all interactions into transactions.

------
RocketSyntax
Jupyter Notebook based blog site?

~~~
billconan
I also think this this a great idea. I'm making
[https://epiphany.pub](https://epiphany.pub) , a mixture of medium.com +
Jupyter notebook.

------
socrates1998
I honestly haven't read more than three articles since most of their content
went behind a paywall when I used to read one or two a day.

I wasn't aware that the publisher got to choose if they wanted to put up a
paywall or not.

------
pnw_hazor
Just add it your site blocklist and life will be better.

------
smitty1e
I'm allergic to paywalls.

While I can't fault their capitalism, life is just too short. There isn't ANY
lack of diversion elsewhere, for example, here.

------
sonnyblarney
I'ts all the white space.

Too much form over function surprisingly gets in the way.

~~~
nimonian
I really like the whitespace. Very Donald Knuth.

------
TechFinder
Yes making $5,000 US when you live in Canada really sucks, I got to admit.
Paywalls are everywhere now in Media, that's just the new reality. That any
coding writer or personal essayist can make $ supports creators and real
people.

------
TechFinder
What if the bro-culture of coders is an echo bubble that doesn't even
understand what Medium has become?

So you guys are going to create your own paywalled walled garden for coding
content? What's your solution even.

[https://medium.com/1-one-infinity/why-medium-doesnt-
suck-f04...](https://medium.com/1-one-infinity/why-medium-doesnt-
suck-f04329de153f)

------
mattieuga
Are ads > paywalls?

~~~
aloisdg
When a platform let you choose between Scylla and Charybdis, avoid the
platform.

------
someexgamedev
It must be doing something right otherwise why spend the time writing a
thousand words about how bad it is? If it were truly bad it would just fade
into obscurity

~~~
AlexB138
People spilled gallons of ink about the Nationalist Socialist party. Something
gets written about because it is relevant, not because it is good.

------
ycombonator
_The ethos behind Medium is one of openness and democracy—like the Internet
itself._ Evan Williams. [https://medium.com/@ev/what-were-trying-to-do-with-
medium-e2...](https://medium.com/@ev/what-were-trying-to-do-with-
medium-e2f5bfcf0434) He is chan/rging the world.

~~~
ycombonator
Evan did you downvote ?

