
Medium is a poor choice for blogging - rlv-dan
https://medium.com/@nikitonsky/medium-is-a-poor-choice-for-blogging-bb0048d19133
======
tpaschalis
It's funny, because some years ago when Medium blogs were starting to be
posted left and right, people were praising the interface, and nobody listened
to the few who objected. Now, we need all kinds of tricks, add-ons and blocks
to just read five-minute posts during our commute.

It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get _yourself_ in control of your
stuff. The _next_ free framework that comes, which promises a clean, non-
distracting view, will also (most probably) eventually add advertisements,
because, well, corporations need money.

In my humble opinion, just write your Markdown files, and use one of the
bajillion Static Sites Generators to create/host them, or fork a framework
that already does this such as [1], copy-paste them in, and you're set.

[1] [https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-
now](https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now)

~~~
coldtea
> _It 's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of
> your stuff._

But zero ways to get people to read it. I only read his post because it's on
HN. And I read Medium stuff regularly on Medium.

The chances of most people discovering some random blog? Not so much. Whereas
Medium has concentrated eyeballs and knows their preferences to serve them
stuff that's close to their tastes...

~~~
danShumway
> I only read his post because it's on HN. And I read Medium stuff regularly
> on Medium.

I totally get where you're coming from, but I'm not convinced that Medium
helps at all. I mean, this article was posted to Medium. Medium didn't put it
in front of you. So how is Medium helping?

I used to cross-post everything I wrote to Medium, because I thought it was a
good reader acquisition strategy. But posting on Medium doesn't automatically
get you readership -- you still have to go find readers and rely on them
sharing stuff on traditional sites like HN/Reddit/Twitter/Facebook. And none
of that sharing process requires your content to be on Medium.

For all of the effort I put into formatting articles well, and making sure
that I matched popular writing styles, and adapting things, a post I put on
Medium will get <20 readers over the course of a week.

In contrast, I had _one_ good post get traction on HN, and on average my self-
hosted blog now gets more visitors than that per day. So now I don't even
bother cross-posting, because I don't see how Medium helps me get content
picked up on other social sites.

~~~
thanatropism
> and making sure that I matched popular writing styles

Maybe this is the problem. I'm sure as a professional writer you need to keep
up with reader interests (rather than setting up to do the blog equivalent of
_Finnegan 's Wake_), but you don't want to be too interchangeable either.

It's like you had to decide each month from each cake you want to eat (there's
an infinite row of cakes) and you vie for the huge ones -- together with
countless other people, so you get really small crumbs. Go for a smaller cake
and you may get actual slices with frosting and all.

~~~
chrisweekly
+1 for the apt cake analogy

------
jypepin
I'm amazed at how many people here say that people should simply use a static
site generator instead of wordpress or medium.

Does anyone else understand that probably 99% of Medium traffic (both reader
and writer) don't even understand those words and would have no idea even
where to begin? Most of them probably had trouble just signing up on Medium
and already forgot their passwords.

This is where Medium wins. It looks ok, makes posts look professional, and
doesn't give any choices. You don't have to choose a theme, or setup anything.
Signup (or even, login with twitter/facebook) and just write. Done.

You can't possibly hope that any writer on Medium is ready or interested in a
static site generator.

~~~
pier25
Medium also liberates writers from social stuff. It has claps, comments, etc,
but also when you share a Medium article on Twitter or Facebook you have all
the meta-tags to make it look good.

Also, no infrastructure headaches either.

~~~
ayoisaiah
Medium comments are up there with the worst comment implementation I've ever
seen

~~~
pier25
UX wise I agree. But, I think those are better than having comments on your
own blog.

------
esotericn
Sometimes I read articles like this and think I'm past it. It's like the whole
web has turned in to this pool of mud and no-one realises what it was like
before.

A blog is a text file on a screen. There's really no need to do it on a
proprietary system, you can literally upload a text file to your own host, but
if you can't be bothered, somewhere like GitHub Pages.

You want an image? Here's a tag: <img>

If the idea is that it doesn't look pretty enough - well, a Medium blog
doesn't look like anything at all because I've closed it after closing the
first three popups.

Here is a link to my own personal blog:
[https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/blog.txt](https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/blog.txt)

You're reading this comment right now on a site that gets it right.

~~~
tpaschalis
Yes, this a thousand times. One example, Dan Luu [1] gets this _absolutely
right_. His blog would probably look similar on Lynx, or any text-only
browser, yet is better than 99.99% of stuff "out there".

[1] [https://danluu.com/](https://danluu.com/)

~~~
alanh
He took it way too far. Long lines are unreadable and 50 more bytes of CSS
would fix it.

I humbly submit my own blog as being pretty darn readable without bloat. It’s
responsive and simple. [https://alanhogan.com](https://alanhogan.com)

 _Edit:_ Here’s a relevant article: The problem with new blogging platforms
[https://alanhogan.com/the-problem-with-new-blog-
platforms](https://alanhogan.com/the-problem-with-new-blog-platforms)

~~~
Digit-Al
I mostly like your design, a nice clean look, but I have a couple of comments
and a suggestion that you are free to ignore completely.

Firstly, I hate sites that use such a narrow column on the screen. The wall of
text from the previous post is obviously too much and is far too difficult to
read and keep track of where you are, but using only a third of the screen
seem far too little. I'm sure you could double the width of your text without
affecting readability.

Secondly, I have really good distance vision but need reading glasses. I find
the text on your site a bit small. From a distance it just a bit too small to
read comfortably and from close with my reading glasses I feel like I need to
get too close. Yes, I can increase the font size easily, but how about...

My suggestion: decrease the size of your borders by about 50% on each side and
then increase the font size by 1 or 2 points. The increased column size will
give more text on screen, but the increased font size will make sure it is not
too much.

~~~
egypturnash
> Firstly, I hate sites that use such a narrow column on the screen.

FWIW most professional typographers recommend a column width of 30-40em. Much
more than that seriously increases the distance the eye has to travel from the
end of one line to the beginning of the next, and makes it harder to keep
track of where you are.

The max-width of this blog's main column is... 40em.

And now you know why so many sites do this thing you hate.

(An em, if you are not familiar with it, is a typographical measurement equal
to "the width of an M in this font".)

~~~
Digit-Al
I am familiar with em thanks. I am a software developer and have done some web
development in the past.

Far be it from me to argue with professional typographers, but do you hear
anyone saying "oh, the line lengths on paperbacks are far too long, I can't
scan them"?

Maybe it's just me but I'm a little tired of always having to cater the the
very lowest common denominator. That narrow width seems almost ludicrously too
narrow to me, it's like a childrens book.

There has been research that suggests that most people don't finish articles,
so it seems to me that maybe making columns so narrow is catering to the
audience most likely to have such a short attention span that they probably
won't finish your article anyway.

Or maybe I'm just a moany old git :-)

------
almostarockstar
This topic comes up fairly often. I think about it a lot - as a Medium user
and as a person who has managed multiple wordpress blogs.

##Here's my thoughts on why Medium is so popular:

1\. It's easy. We are all techies here. We often underestimate the weight of
this.

2\. It looks better than your average blog theme. (With 0 effort)

3\. It promises the opportunity to access a larger audience. (Even if it does
not deliver on that promise)

4\. It provides an endorphin rush though likes/claps and the analytics/view
counts.

##What the average blogger doesn't care about:

1\. Effort Overhead. Managing a web server, buying a domain, configuring a
wordpress blog, updating wordpress, choosing a theme, deleting spam comments
etc.

2\. Content ownership. Most people don't think about it that much.

3\. RSS feeds. I'm willing to bet >80% of bloggers have no idea that people
still use RSS (or even what it is at this stage)

\------

I don't think Medium is perfect, but I also don't think any of the
alternatives are good enough either.

~~~
TheRealPomax
A small note on that very last one: RSS falls in the "you probably don't know
about this, so let us tell you that you can reach more people with it"
category. Any platform that doesn't offer it, or offers it "tucked away" is
doing so intentionally, to keep traffic siloed, and keeping the posts from
reaching external audiences. Not knowing what RSS is as a user is completely
fine, and really:to be expected. But that's true for all technology: pick any
tech you value and the majority of the world won't be familiar with it (case
in point: I didn't know hackernews existed until my stuff got posted to it and
people started yelling at me about it) so it's not a matter of "do people know
about it" but "should there be a reasonable expectation that people are told
about it when they start doing a thing that would greatly benefit from it".

Not offering RSS, when you're an online syndication platform, is a pretty
clear sign that Medium made Medium to serve Medium first. Not to be the best
experiences for readers and writers of blog posts and long reads. Which
includes not informing people about things they could have had if Medium was a
little less self-serving and actually cared about getting people's voices
heard out there.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
So why the hell did you use it to write this article, then?

I wrote a tool which converts your Medium blog into a Jekyll blog, for
publishers hoping to migrate:

[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify)

~~~
wpietri
Because it's not just a platform, it's an audience. If you want to reach the
audience, you have to use the platform. And the audience most in need of this
message are definitely the people publishing on Medium.

~~~
almostarockstar
Are you referring to platform generated content? The thing is, Medium doesn't
do very well at that either.

I have a medium blog. I've had a few posts got >10k reads within a month.
Almost none of those reads came from Medium itself, but rather from the
various outlets that have linked to my post, and Google.

The only reason I currently use Medium is that people are more likely to open
a Medium url when it shows up in link aggregators. People trust the familiar
url far more than www.mypersonalblog.me - and it'll never get blacklisted /
shadowbanned on reddit.

Oh, and claps. I like the claps.

~~~
jasonlotito
> people are more likely to open a Medium url when it shows up in link
> aggregators. People trust the familiar url far more than
> www.mypersonalblog.me

I know this is just anecdotal, but I assume anything coming from Medium is
usually less worthwhile. First, the author isn't important on a Medium
article. Medium is the brand, the other is someone that doesn't matter.
Secondly, it's not easy to follow the author, so even if I did read the author
bio at the bottom, following the author is a pain. Finally, everything the
above article mentioned. Medium articles are all about playing SEO games and
"Growth hacking" before good content (literally). I'll ready Medium articles,
but personal blogs are far more credible every day of the week in my book.

That being said, I would be interested in how you reached the conclusion that
people are more trusting of medium articles?

~~~
almostarockstar
>That being said, I would be interested in how you reached the conclusion that
people are more trusting of medium articles?

Really just from my own experience. I've been writing and posting content for
a few years and usually I get more clicks and comments when using the medium
domain. (not always but noticeably more often)

------
marpstar
I'm glad the author mentioned the thing that I dislike most about Medium: the
"share" tooltip that appears any time you highlight anything in the article. I
realize that they consider this a value prop (and it certainly hasn't hurt
their ability to grow) but for those of us who highlight text as we read, it's
incredibly annoying.

~~~
iaml
It's very annoying, but thankfully reader mode in every browser gets rid of it
and every other annoyance medium has, including popups.

~~~
nindwen
Reader mode is definitely a very important part of the modern web experience.
A rather sad truth.

I recently also found a Firefox extension [1] I'd been looking for a some
time: a way to automatically enter reader mode on some URLs, such as
medium.com. This makes browsing Medium much nicer.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-
rea...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-reader-view/)

~~~
reaperducer
_a way to automatically enter reader mode on some URLs, such as medium.com_

Safari has this built-in.

Enter reader mode on a web page, then right-click on the reader icon and you
can set every page in the domain to automatically display in reader mode.

Safari isn't usually the first with new features, so it might be available in
other browsers, as well.

~~~
_threads
Damn’ thanks ! Awesome ! I just discovered it’s also working on iOS with a
long press on the reader button

------
bko
Pretty convincing. I didn't notice how bad medium was since I'm always logged
in and have an ad-blocker. I also don't think they do much in terms of
discovery. My blog [0] has about 370 followers and my posts only get about 10
- 20 views unless I put them on social media. Then they'll get between 100 and
10k+.

Does anyone have experience with an alternative platform? Preferably free and
hosted.

[0] [https://medium.com/ml-everything](https://medium.com/ml-everything)

~~~
harveylord
There is a freemium service called Write.as [0]. It might not be the exactly
same kind of thing as Medium, but, personally, I appreciate its ultra-
simplicity. Since I have never went as far as starting my own blog, I
occasionally host text content there that I want to share.

[0] www.write.as

~~~
how_to_bake
According to the creator's blog, he intends to complete a whole suite of
products that all work together.

As of now, normal people will have difficulty understanding how Read.as,
Write.as, Snap.as all work together.

Looking forward to when I can get a full Facebook replacement for like
$3/month subscription.

------
munificent
More and more, I find myself relying on "follow the damn money" to understand
how increasingly weird the Internet is and how to unweird it.

If you're a writer and you want your words to get in front of people, those
words need to be on a server somewhere. Someone's gotta pay for the
electricity and maintainance on that server. If you don't know who pays for
that and what their motivation for doing so is, you don't have a clear
understanding of how your words get to your audience.

So many web horror stories these days — privacy violations, shady business
practices, broken user trust, companies "losing their morals", etc. — stem
from the fact that the users deriving value from some product weren't paying
for it and were unpleasantly surprised to discover that the people who _are_
paying for it expect something in return, whether freely given or not. Even
many startups that begin with their hearts in the right place eventually go
wrong once those early "angel" (an ironic term if there ever was one)
investors want to recoup their investments, somehow, anyhow.

Fortunately, there is a solution. It's not in wide use yet on the Internet (it
is a long-established mechanism in other industries like food and consumer
goods), but I have some hope that adoption will grow. I call it, "pay for
shit". ("Macropatronage", "c-to-b", or "crypto-free currency network" might be
better terms for the HN zeitgeist.) The way it works is like this: If you want
some product or service, you give a company some of your own money and then
they give you the thing in return.

This system is not without its flaws. Every time you use it, your total wealth
goes down by a measurable amount. Companies often end up incentivized to give
you the minimum value in return for maximum money. But it least somewhat
aligns the interests of the companies you do business with because you are,
well, actually doing business with them.

When you buy sausage from the sausage factory, you may not be exactly sure of
what you get. But it's still probably better than _being_ the sausage.

~~~
projectramo
I agree with you in general.

However, it feels there should be a "fair" amount to pay.

What is the fair amount to pay for blog hosting? Free is too cheap and surely
subsidized by something else. $20/month seems like too much for a blog.

The odd thing is that the marginal cost goes down with the popularity of the
site.

Something like $5 feels right (svbtle is at $6). I think if you hit scale you
might be profitable at $3 or $4.

I am not talking about the value I get, but about the cost + profit threshold
for the provider.

~~~
curlypaul924
I think $5/year feels about right for a low-traffic personal blog.

I also think free makes sense, if the business model is to get people using
the tool for personal projects, hoping they will recommend it at work.

------
djhworld
I think medium has some cool features like the "claps", comment boxes and
story analytics. There's a lot of stuff that that just works out of the box

However I really dislike syndicating my blog to it because the formatting is
so limited. You cannot do bullet point lists for example, which makes it a
huge pain having to tinker with your existing post to reformat it for medium.

Nowadays I just syndicate an introduction to the post and a "click here to
continue reading" hyperlink to my actual blog. Which is a rubbish experience
for Medium users.

I'm wondering if there's a decentralised version of a blogging network, where
users host their blog themselves, with the social features like claps/comments
wrapped around it, plus a bit of a 'recommendation' system for other posts in
the network to get that network of writers feel.

I know disqus exists but it's not quite the same

~~~
supermdguy
You actually can do bullet points if you type '*' or '-' and then a space. For
some reason, they have a few markdown-like formatting features that aren't
shown in the popup editing bar.

Also, about the recommendation system for self-hosted content, I've seen a few
sites that link to HN or Reddit for comments. Upvotes can stand in for
"claps", and posting on HN or Reddit makes your article discoverable.

~~~
djhworld
Sorry, you are right, I misremembered, I think I meant further indentation of
bullet point lists is not supported, so only 1 level of indentation is
supported.

I think linking to HN/reddit is fine but that means leaving the original site
where you were consuming the content. I was more thinking along the lines of
the social features would be embedded in your blog, and would act as part of a
bigger network.

------
crazygringo
No site has perfect UX, but some of these complaints don't seem true, e.g.:

> _No, those do not go away as you scroll. They literally (yes, literally)
> take up 25% of your vertical space_

On my computer the bars _do_ go away the instant I scroll down (Chrome on a
Mac, and logged-in, not sure if those matter), and 25% is a made-up
exaggerated number for a window the author has made much shorter than any
reasonable person would be browsing with, even on a small laptop.

Yes, Medium strongly nudges you to have an account and be logged-in, and if
you do a lot of the other complaints go away. Because it's inherently a
_social_ blogging platform, not a _static_ blogging platform. And the social
aspect helps spread your audience and build engagement... that doesn't make it
a "poor choice". To the contrary, it's a great choice to have.

~~~
michaelt
Here's what I get opening the post with a landscape iphone:
[https://imgur.com/a/ywJtaCn](https://imgur.com/a/ywJtaCn) (that's after I
dismissed the cookie warning popover)

Neither bar disappears when I scroll down. You can test this with Chrome dev
tools and see the same thing.

------
amelius
In any case, it is stupid to give one platform all the power (see YouTube).
Internet should be decentralized.

~~~
criddell
There are some benefits to centralization. For example, if I want to watch a
movie or TV show, I have to look for it on Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, HBO,
and my cable box. I wish I could subscribe to a single mega-service that just
covered everything.

~~~
lookforlight
I wonder if it would be possible to create a service (or if one already exist)
where you could select which streaming sites you are subscribed to, and the
service could search all those sites for the movie you want to watch, then
redirect you to that site. Because it's hard to remember or to know which site
has which movies/TV shows.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Android TV has a unified search if you have multiple apps installed. It works
very well - and on my SHIELD, highlights shows from multiple apps on the home
screen with proper thumbnails etc.

~~~
criddell
I bought a Sony TV at the start of this year and it has Android TV. The
Android TV stuff is slow and will throw out error messages that don't mean
anything to me. Stuff lik "Huey module has stopped". Or it complains about a
Samba issue. We ended up buying a Roku box and use that instead of the Android
stuff.

The only thing we use Android TV for is the MLB app. I'd like to figure out
some way to delete everything but that one app because I always have to search
for it.

------
wongmjane
Disabling JavaScript and cookies for medium.com domain, and a bunch of uBlock
rules [1] should do the job

[1] Here's mine:

medium.com##.metabar

medium.com##.js-stickyFooter

medium.com##.js-postAttributionFooterContainer

medium.com##.js-postActionsFooter .buttonSet

medium.com##.button--follow

~~~
shopkins
There are also dedicated extensions for this [0]

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

~~~
eyeundersand
Thank you for this.

------
joeax
This is an on-point rant, but what alternatives are there that combine clean,
useful publishing tools with the ability to reach a wide audience? Sure I can
host my own blog, but what good is it if I have no reader engagement. If there
is a decent replacement, I'm all ears.

~~~
int0x80
1- Host your blog.

2- Write post.

3- Post to multiple aggregators (HN, reddit, etc)

It can even be made (semi)automatic.

~~~
foo101
I have found Reddit to be a very hostile place to post content. You post your
blog post. Regardless of how much hard work you put into your content, the
first few comments on Reddit are going to be a snarky one that attacks some
trivial point and adds nothing to the discussion. I don't know why people do
that.

HN, on the other hand, feels like a more matured community. Any other such
matured communities where one can feel comfortable about posting their blog
posts?

~~~
dredmorbius
Worse, for Reddit: _there is no sustained discussion_. I've been thinking and
working a lot on discussion (first law: conversation scales poorly), and what
sites do and don't work.

G+, for its many, many, many flaws, _could keep a discussion going_ on those
rare instances where it started in the first place. In ways few other sites
do.

The fact that all members of a conversation (up to a point) are informed of
new posts, helps. That's a two-edged sword: low-value comments, if left
standing, merely annoy others, and tend to cause them to mute out of the
discussion.

But it's a dynamic few other sites match.

I've also been using Reddit as a blogging platform (not simply syndicating
content) for several years. I'd already been in the process of moving that
elsewhere when the G+ shutdown announcement hit -- I've been somewhat engaged
in that over the past month or so. I do plan to continue syndication, though I
moderate _strongly_ for quality.

------
amelius
Outline.com strips away all the distraction.

Although in this case it duplicates all the images somehow:
[https://outline.com/uZc4XF](https://outline.com/uZc4XF)

~~~
onemoresoop
Thanks for posting, I'm going to give outline a test drive. It seems to be
doing what I want. The redundant images are less intrusive than the bells and
whistles on medium.

------
tonystubblebine
Counterpoint: Medium brings you readers and that's the most valuable feature

I've been running my own company since 2001 and been on Twitter since 2006 and
I still don't have a readership that is anywhere near what I can get through
the Medium algorithm.

I write to think. But I publish to get that thinking read. There really is no
other feature that comes close to mattering more to me than Medium's network
effects. I published something the other day that has 269K views with an
additional 1k coming every day through the Medium network.

Medium's stats say they were directly responsible for 170k of those views.

Then when I look at the external views, I mostly see that those were driven by
Medium as well. For example, 10k views came from Twitter, but those were
Medium readers retweeting. I looked at my own promotion: Reddit, HN,
newsletter, Twitter and can only count up about 10k views that I was directly
responsible for.

------
JDiculous
I stopped using Medium when they removed the ability to see a list of just
your articles, mixing your comments into the list (as though every comment you
write at the bottom of an article is just as significant as an article you
wrote, what a stupid idea though it looks like they've realized that and
reverted back). Also I never liked how they don't let you nest bullet points.

Moved to markdown and and self-hosting and haven't looked back since. Much
prefer the freedom of owning my own files and not being married to any
platform.

However I do miss the convenience of just being able to post online without
needing to compile everything on my laptop with a static file generator and
pushing to GitHub, so maybe I'll switch to Wordpress or something later if I
take writing more seriously.

------
blaze33
Not sure the issue is Medium being a poor tool compared to other ways of
blogging...

The issue I see is one of ownership:

You think you "use" Medium to publish your content, you call that blogging.
But Medium own the domain and the tools: you'll never exploit the owner using
the tools they offered you. In the end, it's medium that really exploits you
(ie. the content you freely gave). And they'll use your content in the way
they want.

Your content is just a hook they'll use to attract readers and push them to
those obnoxious pop-ups, banners, buttons, etc. Well you read the article.

Personally I own my domain. I use open source tools (ghost & custom made web
apps). It serves me well. I own my place and have the freedom to grow it as
I'd like.

Thanks for reading, take care :)

------
mikedd
Bashing medium is cool and all but why not present some alternatives.

I clicked on it actually expecting some random article about "hey check out
this cool open-source _built_in_some_hipster_language_ blogging _buzzword_
_buzzword_ platform I've built"..

Joke aside..gimme alternatives fam.

~~~
bbbowzer
open port 443

------
MrStonedOne
Number one web experience trick: If its a article style website (news,
blogging, etc), disable javascript.

Since chrome removed javascript from the site model I've been using ublock's
javascript button. it looks like this `</>`

Outside of images that don't render the full resolution version on sites like
the Times, its a truly objectively better experience.

In fact, I want to see that as an addon, a plugin that disables on javascript
on sites based on a list, like adblocks now and days, with the following
criteria: does disabling javascript lead to a net increase in UX?. For sites
like Medium, almost every news site, etc, the answer is yes.

------
citilife
"Hosting" your own blog takes around an hour of setup for wordpress or github
pages. Personally, I use vultr + wordpress for my blog[1], but I have
technical expertise - it took only 30 minutes to setup and transfer from my
previous provider.

Reason I like to host my own, is I control the content, the popups, the UI,
etc. If you care about that, host it yourself. Medium is there to make money,
we can't fault them for attempting to collect for their service.

[1] [https://austingwalters.com/](https://austingwalters.com/)

~~~
dbspin
I hosted my own wordpress blog for several years on various virtual private
servers, and was hacked multiple times. Just got to be way too much work to
admin the site. I use wordpress.com currently. It's less than ideal, but I
think you're underestimating the amount of work required to secure a site long
term, rather than simply install one. For most lay users, insuring that their
host is keeping python up to date, that the security permissions are correct
on each file, and that every plugin installed is 'safe' is more time consuming
than it's worth. I'm not up to speed on the state of static site generators,
but that's got to be a better way to go for most users.

------
batat
I hate modern web. Every site nowdays filled with
bright/flashing/wobbling/jumping buttons, modal windows, pinned bars covering
1/3 of the content (or 2/3 on my phone in landscape mode) and asking me to
install Yet Another Special App to view site. But I already have app for
viewing sites - damn web browser. Browser can even open different pages in
different tabs. Or even different sites in different tabs, unbelievable!

(Will it ever end?)

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I hate the modern web too. I also hated the web's pseudo-skeumorphic rounded
corners and drop shadows phase. Why can't we go back to good old framesets and
(mostly) plain text. ;)

------
kemitchell
I stopped writing on Medium because I don't want claps and statistics and
incentives to add stock photos and so on. I don't want my writing gameified.
Other than that, it's pretty nice. More here:

[https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/01/04/The-Well-
Appointed...](https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/01/04/The-Well-Appointed-
Skinner-Box.html)

------
alan_wade
What would it take for another platform to take over? What features would it
need, in your opinion? How would it be promoted and monetized?

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
It would be like Medium was when it first started. Such a platform will come
along soon if it hasn't already, everyone will jump to it, and then they'll
monetize it, and then another will come along...

~~~
mikedd
the never-ending cycle

------
mockingbirdy
Nice, everyone is posting their favourite CMS, again.

I use [https://getgrav.org](https://getgrav.org) because I like flat-file CMS.

Maybe there are some photographers here: [http://koken.me](http://koken.me)
(CMS for photographers).

Another idea: Use a static page generator and Amazon's S3 with this neat
blackhat trick - [https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-one-website-
exploited-...](https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-one-website-exploited-
amazon-s3-to-outrank-everyone-on-google.1059156/) (mildly joking).

OT: I pay 0.19$/month for my blog hosting including domain with around 500
views/month (just a personal blog). Many services cost 5$/month, I don't think
that's cheap.

edit: Medium is for visibility. I know many SEO experts who use it extensively
to increase their rankings. Its UX might be annoying for some, but its true
value lies in its popularity and outreach.

~~~
elcomet
What does flat-like means here? Are they talking about the design (flat) ?

~~~
applecrazy
It’s referring to how posts are stored serverside. CMS software such as
Drupal, Wordpress, etc. store posts in a database. A flat-file CMS stores
posts in a file, making editing and creating posts easier. Also saves on the
hassle of securing an admin dashboard.

------
tmaly
I just use Hugo for my personal blog.

I use medium to post snippets to help attract traffic.

~~~
foo101
I have taken it a step further.

I started with Blogger (blogspot), then Medium, then Jekyll, then Hugo. Even
with self hosted Jekyll/Hugo, I never felt comfortable about the tooling
dictating how my directory structure should be.

Now I have my own static site generator written in Python. It is based on
[https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite](https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite)
that was posted to HN sometime back.

What I like about generating my blog with pure Python is that I can control
every aspect of my blog just the way I want it.

------
perseusprime11
Switching to LinkedIn these days is a better value proposition considering
that your professional network is right there.

------
briandear
Have we forgotten how awesome [https://svbtle.com](https://svbtle.com) is?

~~~
wcpines
I said the same thing. I'm sad it didn't catch on more.

------
LinuxBender
I am not into blogging. If I were, I would just you a very lightweight html
and css on a tiny VM, precompress it and serve it from the ram disk. No CDN.
No CMS. Just good ol' vim. Maybe I would get fancy by having a header and
footer that shows up on each page. There would be no limit to how many times
people could view it for free.

If I wanted to let friends add their blogs or comments, I would enable a
chroot sftp and link to a root page for them. I've taught teenagers to use
sftp, so it can't be that difficult.

In summary, I suppose I agree that any heavy framework on some domain you do
not own is less than ideal. If self hosting were not an option for whatever
reason, I might use neocities [1] for nostalgic reasons. That would also be
free to view for everyone.

[1] - [https://neocities.org/](https://neocities.org/)

------
sebringj
Maybe a different paradigm to blogging would be bring your own cloud, put in
your cloud creds, then it does the beauty work for you in publishing static
stuff to those cloud providers like AWS S3. You just pay a minimal fee to use
it ad hoc or something as you would need a way to keep it running. Wouldn't
need to store creds, just client-side signing to upload. It then updates its
"home page" to list your articles recently for SEO. Have community plugins etc
you can use etc. Kind of like a modern wordpress but without the terrible
code. I don't have time to do this but thought it might be a good idea to flip
it based on what we have now. I guess an issue could be broken links if people
flop on their cloud payments but seems pretty light weight to build.

------
alpaca128
On a related note, while scrolling towards the second half of the article, the
site started breaking apart in front of me. By the time I reached the comments
the whole article had become invisible, seemingly blocked by a pop-up
background that wasn't removed by the adblocker.

And this is a trend I'm seeing more often recently. I've encountered multiple
sites that start to fail on all sides once you use adblock, and I'm not
talking about noscript or others where the site not working is already the
default behaviour more often than not.

In fact some websites actually worked better in a purely terminal-based
browser than on my current Firefox setup when I tried it a few weeks ago.
Something is really going in the wrong direction.

------
mpurham
I don't think anyone should be locked into a specific blogging platform and
should own their content 100%.

WordPress has been my blogging platform of choice for years but, I've tried
many different platforms and ultimately ended up returning back to a platform
(ORG) in which I could have total control over.

I've also built a tool ([https://scribewp.com/](https://scribewp.com/)) which
allows me to now write my blog posts in any text editor I prefer and later I
can sync a markdown file to a posts or page in WordPress. This has improved my
productivity and I own my content 100%. While medium is a great platform,
there is too much noise going on when reading a blog post.

~~~
amelius
The problem is not only how much how a blogging platform owns your blog, but
also that it owns the viewer's eyeballs. From the moment the viewer reads your
blog, the platform has power over the viewer.

------
writepub
The criticisms here are regarding the end user's reading experience, which are
all fair.

However, Medium's unique value propositions typically outweigh these concerns:

1\. For creators wanting to monetize, Medium automagically promotes content
that is getting engagement on their platform. Everything from emails to their
huge user base and social media promotions can drastically amplify engagement.

2\. For non-technical writers, it offers a great UI for writing and
publishing, and tools for engagement and feedback (claps, comments, ....)

Highly technical people, like the founders of basecamp/inventors of ruby on
rails, use Medium for these reasons

Until a viable alternative for these 2 emerge, it's just as valid to recommend
rsync over dropbox

------
nathan_f77
There's a Chrome and Firefox extension called Make Medium Readable Again:
[https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA](https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA)

It works great and disables many of these annoying things.

------
abalone
_> Sure, Medium editor is nice. Typography is good (for English, other
languages are not supported). Publishing is free._

That's it? I'm not sure the author accurately summarized the upside of Medium.
I thought the main benefit is distribution.

------
adarsh_thampy
I wrote about why you should not move to medium sometime back citing the
example of Basecamp. [https://medium.com/@adarsh_thampy/basecamp-moved-their-
blog-...](https://medium.com/@adarsh_thampy/basecamp-moved-their-blog-to-
medium-but-you-probably-shouldn-t-ab36aa88158a)

And basecamp is moving away from Medium.

The problem with Medium is that the inbuilt audience will go away soon. Browse
their home page, and now most of the articles are premium ones.

This is very similar to Facebook. When pages started, they were great. But as
Facebook wanted to make money, they began restricting reach.

Clearly, that's where Medium will head towards.

------
ordu
Funnily enough, I was able to read this story only by switching FF into reader
view. For some reason I was unable to scroll page in normal view. Probably
scrolling needs some javascript which was blocked by uMatrix, or something
like.

------
bbbowzer
Medium only carries mediocre stuff. My heart sinks a little when an enticing
title carries that domain. No I don't want another es6/react top 10 stuff.
This is the best article medium has posted. Speaks volumes.

------
theriddlr
It's so laggy on Safari OSX Sierra and often hangs. I'm not subscribing to
read articles by amateurs. What it has going is nice content, white space, a
feed feature – that's about it.

------
bookofjoe
I just read every single comment, and not one person mentioned Typepad.
Perhaps I'm the only one still using it. I started my blog there in 2004 and
have been posting many times/day 7 days/week since: over 30,000 posts, all
instantly accessible by anyone in my Archives sidebar. I haven't changed a
single thing about the look or format since it began. I know nothing about
coding, RSS, etc.; reading the comments, all the techie stuff washed over me
like an invisible medium (no pun intended).

------
moron4hire
If the platform itself weren't so awful in many other ways, the blogging tools
on LinkedIn are pretty good, and I've always had very good engagement with
very little effort.

------
b3b0p
Most of the time when I see a Medium link I refuse to read it. The website is
awful. The comment system/discussions are awful. The content is mostly awful.
Why should I listen/read from some random on Medium? What is your background?
How are you an expert that I should read and take advice from? It seems like a
bunch of random people trying to make it blogging again, like in the first
Dotcom bubble. Medium feels like Twitter long reads. Maybe it's just me
though.

------
CMCDragonkai
I just use Github Gists. I've posted over 500 articles onto Github Gists. It's
the best blogging system in the world imo. It is git backed, renders ipynb and
other fancy formats, has comments and stars and allows forking. Also I use
giscus to notify me of comments. The search system can use some UI help
though. But hashtags help.

[https://gist.github.com/CMCDragonkai](https://gist.github.com/CMCDragonkai)

------
kemenaran
Could be a good time to mention Plume [1], a Medium clone written in Rust that
uses the fediverse for displaying blog posts across different instances.

Still very much a work in progress – but one can already publish articles,
comment them, and follow people using RSS or a Mastodon account (because
ActivityPub rocks).

Not ready ret, but quite promising.

[1] [https://github.com/Plume-org/Plume](https://github.com/Plume-org/Plume)

------
andrew-dc
I have a growing collection of resources under the title: "My Own Platform,"
and this is exactly why.

As many have mentioned, there are some awesome utilities out there for simple
Markdown publishing -> Push to Github pages. Sure, you won't get all the
interwoven clicks and promotion, but in my book, I think shooting for a
smaller quality group of readers, then a huge mass of people is more where I
am at. Milage may vary, I'm sure.

------
jack1243star
The first thing I see is this:
[https://i.imgur.com/jFJRaoB.png](https://i.imgur.com/jFJRaoB.png)

Very cringe worthy indeed.

------
MisterOctober
Yep -- I was a paid Medium subscriber / user for most of this year.
Discontinued last month for many of the reasons already cited. In particular
for me, the content creation interface is absolutely horrible [even worse in
the iOS version] and it's a chore to get anything done using it. Clearly the
guiding UX principles were aesthetic rather than usability-oriented.

------
blhack
Just to throw my dead-simple blogging software into the mix:
[https://github.com/blhack/blogeyBlog](https://github.com/blhack/blogeyBlog)

It's written in go. You write text files and put them in a directory. It
applies a template and serves them. That's it. Personally I love it, you might
too!

------
SilverSlash
I tried to port an article from my personal blog to medium once. The
experience was abysmal. They don't render Markdown, there is no easy way of
adding code sections, etc.

I had never used Medium until then and will probably never use it again but I
still gotta ask. Why are we stuck with this awful platform, and why do they
still not have markdown/code support?

------
sodosopa
It’s accessiblity is pretty bad and it’s not tweakable. Why support sites
which treat the UI as if everyone can see perfectly?

------
colinprince
A bookmarklet I adapted from an example I read about NodeIterator in js.

Removes sticky and fixed blocks from the dom. I use it all the time, even on
mobile safari.

[https://gist.github.com/colincbc/f8d1b8768e1e566d86b6ef4e691...](https://gist.github.com/colincbc/f8d1b8768e1e566d86b6ef4e691ecc5b)

------
msadowski
I started modestly blogging on Medium in 2016. The same year I moved away from
the platform to a Github Pages + Jekyll combo
([https://msadowski.github.io/](https://msadowski.github.io/)). I'd never go
back to hosting my content on external platform.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
You and me both. Now they support custom domains and HTTPS it's an even easier
decision. Authoring posts in plain text and then a commit and a push to put it
live (just a click of a button in a half decent editor).

According to most of the posts in this thread this is "too complicated" for
your average blogger, apparently.

------
educationdata
Medium makes reading comments extremely difficult. It must be intentional,
i.e. it is a feature not a bug?

------
Globz
Honestly I don't bother with Wordpress and the like anymore.

I simply write what I want to publish in org-mode then export it to HTML or
PDF and that's it...

My data is no longer tied to anything like a database or some specific
framework so its easier for backups and moving it to new servers when needed.

------
0xmohit
> _Another interesting point is that they are really eager to block embeds
> that do not respect Do Not Track header but do not respect DNT themselves.
> Yes, Medium will collect your profile even if you are not a registered user
> and explicitly ask them not to do it._

------
Skillset
Someone in the comments linked to this Chrome extension:
[https://makemediumreadable.com/](https://makemediumreadable.com/)

I tried it, and after turning on all the extension's features, it pretty much
solves the problem.

------
ryanmarsh
Having just posted a programming related article there last night I think it’s
a poor choice for technical subjects too. We need a Medium for technical
people. Maybe not quite Observable (Mike Bostock’s thing) but with more tools
than Medium.

------
wcpines
I like(d) Svbtle for both reading and writing. I'm sad it didn't catch on
more.

~~~
projectramo
It took me so long to find the pricing. I actually cannot find it anywhere on
the site and had to give up and do a google search.

There is no reason for that. Why would anyone sign up without knowing the
pricing?

~~~
wcpines
This is a good point. But that aside, I like that it's a simple platform for
reading/writing. Its drawback, I suppose, is content/topic discovery.

------
jpfed
This is as good a place as any to ask- what's the easiest way to get a POSSE
setup?

------
octosphere
[http://medium.com/joe_wegner/why-i-dont-write-for-
medium-c7c...](http://medium.com/joe_wegner/why-i-dont-write-for-
medium-c7cc156bc5d9)

------
michaelbuckbee
The proper way to think of Medium is as "Long Form Twitter" \- that it's not
where you should primarily post your long treatise about XYZ, but that it's a
secondary platform for promoting it, interacting with the audience there, etc.

OPs article describes the first landing UX - which is definitely bad, but not
what a habitual Medium reader sees.

I wrote this much bigger posts about it here [1], but the TL;DR is that you
should post on your own site and use Medium's hidden "Import" tool to bring
your content into their platform:

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

This preserves the SEO of your original article because it adds a rel
canonical tag.

1 - [https://sendcheckit.com/blog/why-you-should-put-your-
content...](https://sendcheckit.com/blog/why-you-should-put-your-content-on-
medium-and-your-own-domain)

------
jpincheira
What's great about Medium is the exposure it can quickly get you if you get to
write something worth it for people to read. It's still powerful for that.

------
xena
I wrote my backend blog code mainly so I could have a step above a static site
gen, but allow for future expansion in weird ways if i want to do that.

------
dredmorbius
DeFuckifyingMedium.css:
[https://pastebin.com/YdmTFcBi](https://pastebin.com/YdmTFcBi)

------
chenshuiluke
Do any of you guys know how I can downvote posts or let Medium know that I'm
not interested in having articles like x on my feed?

------
LastZactionHero
Anyone want to start a web ring?

I'd love to self-host, but without some audience from Medium I'd probably just
be blogging to myself.

------
sudovancity
Honestly, it used to be pretty good, they did some UI changes and added a paid
platform and I haven't used it since.

------
KrishnaAnaril
Medium may not be providing Rss, but I'm a big fan of their curated content.
Plus it gives your posts more publicity.

------
knowingathing
One of the worst things about Medium is the commenting section. I still have
no idea how it works, the UX is terrible.

~~~
Quiza12
Ditto. Absolutely dreadful. It's like they sort of tacked it on without much
thought of how to do it.

------
automathematics
Funny, medium suggested this message to me.

------
markkat
This cycle has been repeated and will continue to be repeated until the
underlying economic models change.

------
burtonator
I suspect posts on medium get up voted more in hacker news but I don't have
data to back this claim.

~~~
minimaxir
Nope; if anything, the signal-to-noise is much lower.

------
mothsonasloth
I would like to put forward an alternative called Ghost, I self host my
version but its nice and simple.

------
ninjakeyboard
Why is he writing the post on medium instead of a platform that doesn't have
the issues mentioned?

~~~
PKop
Because the target audience for the message he is presenting (Medium is bad,
use it less) is Medium users.

------
mmartinson
If we didn't have medium where would all the documentation for js frameworks
be published?

------
partycoder
Pissing off the user creates an opportunity for competitors to kick in.

------
vvpan
Ha. I was about to write an identical blog post. Must be zeitgeist.

------
robot
try [https://getbuzz.io](https://getbuzz.io), we're in private beta, it is
white label and you can put it on your domain.

------
sergiotapia
I moved on to [https://dev.to/sergio](https://dev.to/sergio)

1000 times better writing experience, and non of the political fluff that
pesters you on Medium.

If you write technical articles, go to Dev.to

------
brian_herman__
You realize you are using medium to blog right?

------
chuckgreenman
PostHaven is $5/month, but it is much better than medium. They add a tiny
little chip with the logo and get out of the way.

------
Gys
What would be a good alternative ?

~~~
braythwayt
I don’t know if it’s a _good_ alternative, but I blog on GitHub using GitHub
Pages. It’s a minimalist experience: I use Markdown (optional), and I have my
own domain (critical!)

If they ever shutter the service, it is very easy to generate all the HTML
pages with Jekyll, and then throw them up on a static host.

Every single one of Medium’s discoverability and traffic benefits feel like
Faustian bargains to me, so I am not going there.

The last time I experimented with publishing in a walled garden was Posterous,
mostly because they were a YCombinator startup at a time when that wasn’t some
kind of golden ticket, and I wanted to make a gesture of support for them and
for YCombinator.

Posterous shuttered, and I republished my work using GitHub Pages, but all the
old urls broke, and I’m never doing that again.

~~~
Biqh1
I'm curious as to why you say it's 'critical' to have your own domain on
Github pages? Is it to do with search engine listings?

~~~
braythwayt
Joel Spolsky (if you don’t know him, he was one of the first “Celebrity
Bloggers” in tech culture) gave me a piece of advice more than a decade ago:
Own your own domain and publish under it, that way you always control your
content and the links to your content.

If my blog was raganwald.githubpages.com, GitHub could theoretically decide
that githubpages needed to be deeply integrated with Windows or some other
foolishness, and I’d be screwed.

But since my blog appears to the world as raganwald.com, I can leave GitHub
Pages whenever I like, and all the links will continue to work. It's about
long-term control, and for that you need:

1\. Control your content, ideally with a copy of the source on your own
devices at all time, in an open format with an ecosystem of tooling, and;

2\. Control your domain name.

------
mrapogee
This article seems to miss the point of medium entirely. He fails to mention
that you can be paid for content you create on medium, and content consumers
don't have to sell their eyes to advertisers. Yes, they have to be pushy so
they can acquire that critical base of paid users, but I'll take that any day
over traditional advertisers.

Now, if you aren't interested in being paid for the content you create, then
medium's goals might not be aligned with yours, so another self hosted
platform may be better.

> it’s bad. Bad. Really bad. It’s not good, for any meaning of good you can
> imagine. There’s no person on Earth who could honestly call it at even
> partially good. Banners all over the place. Aggressive tracking and
> profiling.

Go poll 50 free users on the reading experience of Medium. Obviously this is
anecdotal but almost everyone I speak to loves reading on medium. Compared to
other ad-infested or high paywall websites, medium provides a incredible
reading experience for it's goals as a for profit platform.

~~~
virgilp
For me, "the point of medium" is entirely different. I don't blog regularly...
I hardly ever write anything. When I do, medium offers me a large audience. I
don't feel pressured to write periodic posts in order to maintain my audience.
I just write something when I feel like it. No self-hosting solution can give
you that.

~~~
mrapogee
That's a good point, I think it ties back in as well. Medium does a solid
percentage of the work of building an audience for you. They need a way to be
compensated for the costs of that as well, hence get more paid users.

------
cbar_tx
over a year ago, the rapid fire, almost daily updates to their android app had
given me the suspicions that their operating expenses would be too much to
remain humble for long, then came the notifications and social media posts
inviting me to come read the paywall articles. I'm not against paying for
access with subscription, as I have a few, as well as a healthy list of
creators on Patreon but I feel it's kinda like YouTube profiting massively
from user generated content. I know they aren't in it for fun, just saying
it's been obvious for a while now

------
rockoo
Story about Medium sucking published on Medium... the irony

------
recmend
Why did you post your rant on medium?

------
foo101
Most of the popular online services have screwed up their interface.

I think it started with Digg. It was once a loved website. The screwed up the
interface and everyone ran to Reddit.

Now Reddit has screwed up their interface too.

We all used to love Google for its simple and elegant web interfaces. Look at
what a mess GMail is now.

If there is anything that more than 10 years of Web 2.0 teaches us, it is that
once we host our content on another company's service, we are at the mercy of
that company. They can take our content and serve it over absolute crap
interface providing an absolute crap experience to our readers whenever they
want to. They are never going to care about the presentation of the content
the way the original author might. So I think it is time to take back control
and host your own blogs. I know not everyone wants to buy a domain name, buy a
VPS, set things up, and keep a blog running. And no, GitHub Pages, is not a
solution. GitHub Pages is great today but if there is anything that more than
10 years of Web 2.0 teaches us, it is ... Do you see my point?

So as technologists, we need to think how we can make it easier so that anyone
(from young kids to the suits type) can setup their blogs and publish content
with ease. Any interesting solutions? Any takers?

~~~
_emacsomancer_
> Now Reddit has screwed up their interface too.

At least Reddit has alternatives (for now), e.g. dm.reddit.com ;
old.reddit.com

~~~
kup0
For now, indeed. Not sure what I'm going to do when they go away, I dislike
the new interface so much that I don't think I'll use the site anymore

------
foobarbecue
Why is this post written on medium??? Just to be ironic?

------
samat
Why on earth did he post it on Medium, then?!

