
Ask HN: Medium.com or Personal Blog? - eldridgea
I try to keep an active habit of writing. Often just for my self but also to share interesting things and &quot;grow my personal brand&quot; and all that. I&#x27;ve always preferred to host my own blog as opposed to a service like Medium, but I&#x27;ve seen more and more people and begin to use it.<p>Do the network effects and other parts of Medium actually increase readership just by virtue of posting there vs a personal self hosted blog?
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detaro
Prefer personal blog, if you are worried about the reach, post on both. I
think Medium even still allows you to mark a post as a copy of your original,
so it sets a canonical url reference on it.

I would not trust Medium, especially long-term, and it already has quite a bad
reputation in some circles (i.e. I personally tend to avoid Medium links if
they don't come well-recommended). If they change in a direction you don't
like, you've tied your writing to them - your own domain is a lot more
flexible and safe in that regard. On the other hand, people do report larger
reach on Medium if they aren't already established. Crossposting gives you
access to that, while also maintaining your own place on the web.

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poushkar
I prefer owning my data and customise my pages to be blazingly fast without
any javascript bloat, etc. That's why I use static blog generator - Jekyll and
host it on AWS.

But it's a bit tedious at times. Having an "admin panel" accessible from
everywhere is very comfortable. But I don't like the bloat monsters like
Wordpress, etc.

As for the reach - I think Medium doesn't provide so much value. Posting on
HN, Reddit, etc feels enough in my case.

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tmaly
Personal blog, then put a teaser summary on medium and link back to full
article.

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MaximumMadness
The core trade-off is ownership vs distribution.

Platforms like Substack & Medium offer you "reach" because they can distribute
content at scale. That means less intentionality from your readers, but a
higher likelihood some random person finds your work. Reach is great when
you're trying to scale your work and get it in front of lots of people. There
is no doubt that by virtue of SEO, higher traffic, more organization etc. that
platforms like Medium will get your stuff in front of more people.

Personal blogs offer a level of complete ownership and customization. I cannot
tell you how often Medium, Mailchimp, Substack etc have disappointed me in how
I can monitor the traffic to my publication, or even have a custom URL for SEO
purposes.

Personally, I optimize for reach > customization starting out. The benefits of
more eyeballs on my work far outweighs my need to customize when building from
the ground up. But that's primarily due to the fact that my content is
designed for more folks to see it.

(Source: I write about video games every week @ www.pausebutton.news)

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type0
The best would be resurgence of blog rings from before, as well as subject
based rss planets, they still exist but are often neglected by new bloggers.

edit: I'm sure there could be some sort of decentralized approach that can
mimic mediums tag functionality via ActivityPub. That would be the best of
both worlds, discoverability and independence.

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scott31
Since you want to grow your personal brand, I'd rather you use Medium. It will
make it easier for us to filter out your blog just by looking at the URL.

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merciBien
I don’t read medium.com blogs anymore, I got annoyed by the reminders to login
or lose access. Maybe I’m alone in that feeling, but I suspect not.

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rasulkireev
Certainly Personal Blog!

You can always cross post on Medium and other such services. Just got to
remember include the canonical URL.

That way you get the advantage of being searched on services like Medium,
Dev.to and others (although, I don't think this is much since most search via
Google). And you get the advantage of owning the content and your own personal
brand.

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nreece
An existing community (like Medium or Substack) can help gain readership, else
you're on your own to promote your content.

I recently came across a popular new blogging platform - Hashnode. It has a
decent balance between ownership (sync to repo) and distribution (their
community).

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pknerd
Why not both? Write on your own and import it on medium. In this way you will
increase your outreach.

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rednosehacker
Publish the same content on both

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vaidhy
I am also interested in this.

