
Can we all stop using Medium now? - squiggy22
https://www.webdistortion.com/2019/05/16/can-we-all-please-stop-using-medium-now/
======
55555
I was writing on Medium because it ranks well in Google. I wrote nearly a
dozen really great articles on primarily health and dietary supplement topics.
After 2 months they started to rank well and were getting daily readers, as
the content was really great. Then I wrote an article on a 'research chemical'
and they banned my account overnight. I lost the final edited versions of all
content. They did not send me a zip with the content. They could have simply
deleted the offending article(s) but instead they deleted all of them.

The thing is, the thing I wrote about isn't illegal. When you write articles
on Medium keep in mind you're writing on someone else's website and they don't
give a damn about you. You are subject to their opinions about what is
appropriate and what isn't. I have no doubt if an alt-right voice wrote on
Medium and were controversial enough in their views they'd be deplatformed.

But also the way they handle it is just rude. Fuck them.

~~~
KingMachiavelli
I wonder if anything has changed since GDPR passed as I am pretty sure you are
suppose to be able to download your content but I'm not sure how that works
when accounts are deleted and/or banned.

Regarding your situation and concerns of other comments...

Many people in this thread point out that marketing and creating an audience
is difficult work. But I think obvious-in-hindsight solution is to always keep
a backup of your own content no matter what platform you publish it on. I'm
not sure how Medium interprets their rules exactly but I would be suprised if
you couldn't at least link every post back to a mirror on your own blog which
would let you both generate an audience and prevents you from loosing
everything is medium goes nuclear on you.

As always, back up any content that you care about. Don't just backup your own
content but also that of others - ever relize a youtube video you like has
been taken down by a bogus DMCA claim?. Online services may have their own
redundency but that doesn't matter if they decide to delete (your) content.

~~~
dspillett
_> pretty sure you are suppose to be able to download your content_

I'm not sure that such content would count, though I'd have to review the
wording of the GDPR to be sure. Its intent is to cover information about you
that companies/people have collected or derived - which may not include things
you have written about other things.

Even if the GDPRs "right to know what is stored about you" provisions does
cover this sort of content, if they have truly deleted the it then they don't
have to provide it as they don't have it to provide, and they are not
compelled to keep it so that they can provide it on request. I have no idea
whether they do truly delete the content in these cases or not, but they might
if they've taken it offline due to a generic "inappropriate content" rule: if
I deemed something posted to my site inappropriate I would want it properly
gone so it couldn't be accidentally made available on my platform again due to
some future cock-up on my part. Their ToS and other documentation my offer
some clarity on what their policy is here.

As a side note (with somewhat insincere apologies for how snarky I am about to
sound): regulations & laws aside, I tend to have little sympathy for people
who keep data in an external system with no local (or otherwise independent)
backup!

~~~
vonmoltke
> I'm not sure that such content would count, though I'd have to review the
> wording of the GDPR to be sure. Its intent is to cover information about you
> that companies/people have collected or derived - which may not include
> things you have written about other things.

All the actual legal guidance I have seen says it does count, because the
content can be cross-references with third parties to identify the author and
the fact that they once posted this text on this service. This, if they close
their account or delete the specific article the content must be purged.

------
coldtea
> _When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play?_

At the moment authors wanted to get paid. When did somebody else's writing
became a free for all?

If, as you say, that [Medium] is where "all your favourite content lives"
(which means you appreciate the content), then it's troubling that you don't
want to pay for it.

> _Just so we are clear. Medium takes your content, rolls it up into a pretty
> SEO friendly package for themselves and sells it. Oh, and turns us all into
> seals waiting for someone to throw us a fish in the process. If you are
> lucky, you might even get a cut. You know. Like the sort of cut artists get
> on Spotify. Profit share I think the cool kids call it. So why is everyone
> still publishing on it? For what? More eyeballs? More attention? More
> reach?_

All of the above. More eyeballs. More reach. More attention. A primed audience
looking to read something. And also some authors make decent-ish money (far
more than Spotify) on Medium. So there's that.

> _Please. It’s 2019. Learn to market yourself and your content. Quit being
> lazy waiting for Medium to do it for you. OWN YOUR PLATFORM._

Yeah, and how does that work for you? We've only read your blog because it was
picked by an aggregator (HN).

~~~
teh_klev
> We've only read your blog because it was picked by an aggregator (HN)

But then I only read articles on Medium because they're picked up by an
aggregator (HN). After I've read the article I rarely find any of the
suggested/related articles of any interest. I never head over to Medium to
find stuff to read because I find quite a lot of the content is just puff,
fluff and bad writing. It's kinda like Quora, mostly uninteresting, annoying
to use but has a rare gem now and again that got linked to in a news
aggregator.

~~~
coldtea
> _But then I only read articles on Medium because they 're picked up by an
> aggregator (HN) (...) I never head over to Medium to find stuff to
> read(...)_

You don't, but millions do -- and that's people post their stuff there.

------
jscholes
> If you enjoy reading on the web chances are you’ve been forced to login to
> Medium at some point in the last week.

I've never once logged into Medium. I see a "Pardon the Interruption" notice
every time I want to read something, but I just hit Escape and move on with my
day. If I had to pick a side, I'd probably say avoid Medium. But I don't know
under what circumstances it forces you to log in just to read something.

~~~
Semaphor
> I see a "Pardon the Interruption" notice every time I want to read something

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

I stopped minding medium (as a reader) since installing that.

~~~
john-radio
I'm glad this exists, and very impressed with how front-and-center their
source code is, but I decided a while ago that I'm not installing random add-
ons unless I have a very high level of trust in their integrity.

~~~
TeMPOraL
This looks mostly like CSS hack (even the little bit of JS there seems to
mainly query the DOM and apply styles). Such things should IMO be packaged as
userstyle files. I think people need to be reminded of the concept of
userstyles, and how useful they are to remove the garbage web designers
produce.

Stylus is a godsend:
[https://github.com/openstyles/stylus](https://github.com/openstyles/stylus).
Sad thing is, this used to be a built-in browser feature.

~~~
apk-d
As a counterpoint, I find userstyles far less convenient than extensions. In
my experience, they are more difficult to install, they work less often and
break more easily (because of the "put this thing I hacked together on the
internet and forget about it" mindset), don't auto update, are more difficult
to find or discover, and the UI for managing/customizing them is horrible.

Sure, there's advantages too, and I like the _idea_ of user styles/scripts,
but after wasting some time on trying (and failing) to use them to customize
my browsing experience on a few sites, I settled on a Dark Reader + Auto
Reader Mode + uBlock combo that makes _all of the internet_ nice and readable
with almost no extra hassle.

------
throw007
I'm writing on Medium because its rank well on Google. I have several articles
about the product I'm selling that rank 1-5 on Google and it gives me a lot of
customers.

It'll take me a lot of time to build my own website and content that gives me
the same result. So, there's that.

Sorry, not a native speaker.

~~~
yingw787
Your English is great, and it’s great that you prioritize shipping over
worrying about which blogging platform to use. Shipping is very important.

That being said, I do think a small investment into moving onto your own
platform may be worth it, and that might kick in much earlier than you’d
think. I use Hugo and a fork of hugo-minimo-theme for my technical and
personal writing, and it took maybe three days to set up (granted I have some
technical experience). If you paid a contractor to spend a week setting up a
statically compiled site with a CMS, you may get competitive SEO without
having to worry about content licensing or platform updates. I think
statically generated content is generally friendly to search engines. I don’t
update my blog infra at all really, and there’s very few steps involved if I
needed to relearn how to do it. It is possible to use free open source
software and have it get out of your way in terms of making money.

~~~
badestrand
> If you paid a contractor to spend a week setting up a statically compiled
> site with a CMS, you may get competitive SEO

Sorry, but that's just not how it works. The technical part is easy and
certainly once piece of the puzzle, but without a certain website age and tons
of good backlinks you will never be able to compete with medium.

~~~
Veen
Domain authority has some importance, but my understanding is that backlinks
work per page, not per domain. Your newly published Medium article has the
same back link profile as a newly published page on an owned blog.

~~~
ovidiu
Doesn't Medium suggest articles, thus passing links to new pages? You wouldn't
get this benefit on your own blog.

------
_seemethere
Not everyone has the time to create their own platform and curation network.
That's the reason why people will keep using Medium.

We need to stop acting like it's easy to build these types of platforms.

~~~
regnerba
The struggle for me in understanding why people use Medium is that I am a
reader of Medium articles, but I only find them when posted on Reddit,
HackerNews, or when they come up on a Google Search. So as far as I can tell
it wouldn't matter if it was posted on Medium or a personal blog on their own
site.

~~~
joegahona
Medium has a built-in audience so the number of people who will see a
particular post and share it on Reddit, HackerNews, etc., is higher than if
you just host it on Wordpress and do all the marketing yourself.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
Have you ever met someone who navigaed to medium.com to fin articles, or is
this a matter of faith?

~~~
jessaustin
If one ever makes the mistake of giving Medium a valid email address, one's
inbox will be 78% Medium article recommendations until one gets quite
aggressive with the spam flags.

~~~
nightski
It's quite easy to disable the daily or weekly digests if you don't want them.
Not saying I think medium is perfect, but there are better ways to approach
the problem then training a spam filter.

~~~
jessaustin
If I've tried to turn if off once, and either it hasn't worked or it later
reverted, I'm not wasting any more time on it. I can press the spam button
without even leaving my mail client. I don't work for these spammers, and I
don't owe them anything.

------
dmje
There's quite a lot of mileage in what this guy says, and the "content behind
walled garden" thing pisses us all off (I'm a non-Facebooker for All The Usual
Reasons and have the same response whenever I see stuff "published" there).

But: noone seems to have mentioned the fact that you can publish on WordPress
and use the Medium plugin to copublish to Medium. It deals with the whole
canonical content / SEO thing, you get to keep your original content, and you
get the potential benefits of a Medium audience / stats / etc.

Best of all worlds.

~~~
vermilingua
If someone can find your work on medium, why would the bother to find your
site and read it there instead?

~~~
mayankkaizen
Your content is backed up. In addition to Medium, your own blog can also
attract users. Your website is much more customizable. With some luck and
work, your website may perform better in google search.

~~~
kkarakk
That's what archive.is is for(as a reader). if i share an article i usually
back it up on archive.is first just in case. your hosted website can go down
at any time as well sadly(i see this a lot for ms hosted content)

~~~
Crinus
What makes impossible for archive.is to go down? Last time i checked it was
developed and funded by a single guy (who even seems to have some sort of
agenda against cloudflare for some reason).

------
silveroriole
Seems like not many commenters are giving a perspective on why people might
like Medium more than going to a personal blog. Here’s mine.

As a reader, I usually don’t care who wrote the post I’m reading. I also don’t
care about seeing more content from the same person, which is all I would get
on a personal blog; in fact, I would prefer to see related content but
different viewpoints from other people, which is what Medium shows me. I want
to read them all in the same format, not hop between different blog layouts. I
want them all to have consistent like/comment mechanics. As a reader, sorry, I
just don’t care about your personal brand or platform. I want to easily read a
lot of stuff by different people on a topic.

Never used it as a writer, but why should individuals have to set up their own
SEO, comment system, blog system, etc just to post an article? Because they
think that they’re so important or controversial that they need a personal
space/brand? For most writers I think you get a lot for free with Medium.

~~~
jesseschalken
> I want them all to have consistent like/comment mechanics. As a reader,
> sorry, I just don’t care about your personal brand or platform.

This is an important point. There is a small mental burden users face every
time they see a new website and have to understand how it has been laid out
and where things are and what they mean. Medium gives users "just the content"
in the same familiar layout to streamline the process.

Not to mention the sites that have silly disorienting scrolling effects, with
things moving around while they slowly load, or are barely even functional on
mobile. Although these tend not to be problems for the average blog.

~~~
rchaud
> Medium gives users "just the content" in the same familiar layout to
> streamline the process.

minus the login prompts, the persistent top and bottom dickbars and the full-
screen interstitial blocking the page if you've dared to open more than 5
links in a month.

------
sgarman
I know this doesn't justify all the issues but I'm at least a little excited
that someone is trying to create a media/news service that isn't ad based.
Seems like we have a way to go but at least this is a start.

I'm a little surprised that there are so many complaints here - I bet a lot of
the same people complaining also complain about ad based services and now they
create news / journalism / articles designed for clicks and not quality
content.

~~~
mojuba
Ever since we switched our app from ads to ad-free soft paywall with daily
limited content, we get a lot of hate and negative reviews on the App Store
from our users. Some even said quite directly "bring back the ads".

This is so strange. What this kind of people don't understand is, we all buy
products whose prices include advertisement costs. Eventually we pay for
everything anyway, there is no charity (unless something is explicitly
charity). Let alone cases where ads make us buy things we don't need. And not
to mention the rabbit hole behind the seemingly free services like Google
Search/Maps.

I don't get all the hate here. Paywalls are at least honest, clear and upfront
about how the business makes money. We should support this type of businesses.
It's usually the switch that triggers a lot of hate: businesses should
probably be cautious about it.

~~~
inapis
> It's usually the switch that triggers a lot of hate: businesses should
> probably be cautious about it.

I agree. The switch is the noisy period. When you are free, you attract people
who are looking for free and would probably never pay for it directly. When
you are paid and ad-free from the start, you attract a customer base who
understands the value intrinsically and will probably run away if you switch
to an ad-based model.

------
Hackbraten
Please re-enable the `-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;` CSS style for your
content. The article is a pain to read on Mobile Safari because bouncy/rubber-
band scrolling is disabled.

~~~
NightlyDev
That feature has serious bugs on iOS, and that's probably why it's not the
default as Apple can't get it to be stable.

Don't ask him to add it, ask Apple, it's their fault. It's not a production
feature.

And since it's Apple, you can't just use another browser as it's all the same
crap on iOS.

You're stuck with something worse than the 2019 equivalent of IE6. iOS is a
joke when it comes to web browsing.

~~~
eppsilon
It's probably not the the default because it disables the scrolling behavior
used everywhere else on iOS. The "Safari is IE6" meme was briefly valid a
couple years ago, but they've done a much better job more recently. (Check out
the release notes for the technical previews.)

~~~
NightlyDev
The default isn't touch(which is momentum scrolling), so it's by default NOT
like it's most places in iOS.

Technical previews is for Safari on Mac OS, and that browser works quite well.
It's safari on iOS that is a huge shitshow.

Its more unstable than ever before and far behind everyone else on features,
and it's freakishly unconsistent. Heck, Apple can't make up their mind if they
are having a click delay or not, so now they have it only for standalone.

------
tyingq
Large.com is available for $850k if there's a VC thinking they can disrupt.

~~~
jaza
Would you like fries.com with that? It's for sale too.

~~~
unityByFreedom
I'd like a literacola.com please.

~~~
mindgam3
I don't want alargefarvaIwantagoddamnliteracola.com, but perhaps you might be
interested?

------
DanielBMarkham
There's a deeper thing going on here that should be mentioned because it
applies in so many places: the platform is the enemy.

That is, once you create a platform to do X, the purpose of the platform
becomes "get people to use the platform to do X", _not_ X. They sound like the
same thing but they are not.

An example: Facebook, I guess, is all about sharing things with your friends.
But over time it quickly morphed into an engine that was only concerned about
how many people would spend their time on their site sharing and consuming
things, not about sharing. So people "shared" by posting memes from other
places. They shared by copying crap and fake articles. They "shared" by
playing dumb and addictive games for hours at a time, asking anybody they
could find to help them milk a fake cow or something.

If you cared about sharing, you might think about a wise investment in time,
both for the sharer and the folks consuming what was being shared. But if you
think about whatever you could pass off as sharing, then you might think about
virality, demographics, psychology, and so forth. Worse yet, you'd probably do
whatever you could to prevent people from talking about real sharing. After
all, that would be a huge hit to your site's metrics. It might even involve an
existential crisis.

Likewise Medium cared about blogging and publishing, but only in terms they
had predefined and could control. As they started looking at their numbers,
they started refining their definitions.

The same thing is happening everywhere, for instance YouTube. YT couldn't care
less about average folks making creative content to share, even though that's
the schtick. What they really care about is reliable non-offensive video
content being regularly produced and consumed by the most numbers of people
that they can sell ads to.

I'm not saying that any of these platforms are evil or ran by bad people. My
point is that by defining a platform and business model that's widely-adopted,
you end up preventing any sort of change, quality improvement, or re-imagining
what the important drivers are for that platform. I can change what I consider
to be high-quality video to create, share and consume ten times a day. YouTube
cannot. Same goes for Medium and text content. The platform, the idea of
fixing quality attributes for complex things into code, is the natural enemy
of serious consideration and evaluation of the thing the platform supposedly
supports.

------
melling
It’s halfway through the month and I’m blocked by Medium. It is a bit
frustrating.

I’m not sure about this comment though:

“Learn to market yourself and your content. Quit being lazy waiting for Medium
to do it for you.”

Maybe I am lazy but there really isn’t an easy and inexpensive way to market
your blogs or apps.

~~~
jolmg
> Maybe I am lazy but there really isn’t an easy and inexpensive way to market
> your blogs or apps.

HN, Reddit, and other social networks?

~~~
Untit1ed
I've had blog posts do well on Medium but sink like a stone on those
platforms. It's a very different proposition submitting to medium and having
it shown to people who are likely to be interested over a day, vs self-
submitting to a site like HN or Reddit and watching it sink like a stone
because the few people who are likely to be interested aren't looking at that
particular moment.

Not to mention the fact that if you self-submit anything to those sites people
tend to take it as an invitation to eviscerate you.

~~~
rchaud
Well, for Reddit, I know that tech subreddits really don't like it if you drop
a link and don't provide any additional commentary in the post. This is doubly
true if the link happens to be "medium.com" because Reddit is already full of
downvoted posts submitted by content marketers.

If you aren't a regular poster on the sub that you're placing the link on, why
would posters bother opening said link? You have to participate in the
community as well, and that includes providing content in the form of Reddit
posts as well, because Reddit users don't like clicking outbound links with no
context.

------
bwasti
I wrote one article on Medium. I ended up writing my own little version using
open source markdown rendering to see how hard it would be to roll my own,
[https://jott.live](https://jott.live)

From what I found, there is a lot of stuff Medium does well that is hard to
recreate by one's self. Super simple features, like

\- rich text editing that isn't ugly

\- caching what you're currently working on

\- tracking views and who has viewed your article

aren't easy to build and generally aren't worth it unless you write many many
articles.

Although I don't like the aggressive account on-boarding and payment models
for reading articles, Medium certainly makes life easy for writing articles.

~~~
chrshawkes
They use Quill.js - rich editing (you can use this in your project easily)

Caching/saving work just simple AJAX calls to a localized database or
filesystem which can store the JSON data that Quill.JS creates.

Google Analytics is free and offers more customer insight and analysis
opportunities and it's as simple as a script tag inclusion in the html.

I plan to show how to replicate this website in a matter of minutes on my
YouTube channel.

------
dtornabene
g-d forbid writers find a way to be compensated, eh? I despise medium, it
sucks as a platform, it sucks to read, and 99 times out of a hundred if I'm on
an aggregator or twitter and I see a medium link to a piece that sounds
interesting I skip it, because medium _sucks_. But christ does that post reek
of entitlement. On top of that, maybe learn to put words together a bit better
if you want people to read your blog over another platform

------
dickeytk
The main argument in this article doesn't apply unless the Medium writer
enabled the partner program on the post. That's what enables the pay wall.

~~~
troydavis
A huge percentage of the authors behind the paywall don’t realize that they
are. It seems like Medium might have made this option less clear than it needs
to be be (like by describing the benefits but not the drawbacks) or made it on
by default.

~~~
knrz
Nah man, I considered turning it on for no reason in particular.

Asked me for bank account routing info.

Wasn't interested about it that much.

Definitely not on by default.

~~~
DoctorOW
The partner program isn't on by default, the paywall is. You do not need to be
part of the partner program for the paywall.

Source: [https://help.medium.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360018834314-Stori...](https://help.medium.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360018834314-Stories-that-are-part-of-the-metered-paywall)

~~~
dickeytk
What on earth are you talking about? From the link you posted:

> Stories become eligible to be part of the metered paywall if the writer
> selects that option in each story’s distribution setting. Medium will never
> meter a story without the writer’s permission.

> During the publish flow, you have the opportunity to check the box to be
> eligible for curation review and distribution across Medium. Checking this
> box means that your story is also eligible to be part of Medium’s metered
> paywall, and can earn money if you are in the Medium Partner Program.

~~~
reificator
Your second quote implies that the paywall and the partner program are
separate.

~~~
dickeytk
Partner Program is a prerequisite for having paywalled articles.

[https://help.medium.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360018677974-About...](https://help.medium.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360018677974-About-Medium-s-distribution-and-earnings-system)

~~~
reificator
I don't see why, that link still implies that you can have paywalled articles
without being part of the partner program.

Follow the chart from the top:

> Are you enrolled in the partner program? NO

> Would you like to be eligible for curator review? YES

> Was the story curated? YES

> Story is distributed by Medium, _is part of the paywall_ , and _does not
> earn money_.

~~~
dickeytk
You're right actually: curation is paywalled even without payment. Still, it's
not enabled by default: [https://imgur.com/lFY0hzp](https://imgur.com/lFY0hzp)

------
regnerba
I don't publish anything ever really so I don't understand the appeal of using
Medium. Can anyone explain it to me? Is it just the ease of use? Write some
text, click button, it's available online?

~~~
dickeytk
I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as
good. The stats are also incredibly well done.

Some people are saying authors use it for the built-in audience. I can't say
that was an appeal for me—or that I got very many readers from within medium
anyways.

I started my own blog with hugo/netlify (though notably I don't post things
very often). The main reason I switched is because so many people enable the
pay wall on medium I feel the medium brand is hurting my own now, even though
I've never enabled the pay wall myself.

I definitely miss that editor—and not having to update the site's
dependencies.

~~~
nickjj
> I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as
> good.

What about a local code editor with live reloading on a local copy of your
site running in a browser?

This is what I do in Jekyll. I write everything in the same code editor I
wrote code in, and on save, I see a 100% replicated live view of my site in
about 1 second (even with 200+ posts). Both windows sit side by side. To me
this beats any alternative set up.

~~~
dickeytk
It’s good, still not as good as medium. Especially being able to copy and
paste YouTube/gist/etc links in and have them auto-embed.

I can still embed with Hugo, but not as quickly and this does impact my
writing flow.

~~~
nickjj
I can't speak for Hugo but with Jekyll, I solved this by writing a few line
plugin. It still involves putting in a short custom tag (which I have as an
editor snippet) and paste in the video ID.

It's not as pleasant as pasting a URL in but it takes about 3 seconds to get
it all set up when I want to embed a video. Very minimal impact IMO.

If I had to embed hundreds of videos all the time I would probably just write
a custom plugin that scans the file and converts Youtube URLs to embed
snippets.

------
keyle
I wish I could upvote this 10 times.

Medium is the pinterest of thoughts.

------
IloveHN84
Funny how from "All to Medium, ditch WordPress and personal blogs" now people
want to go the way around because of metered views and other limitations
imposed by Medium popularity.

I say it since ever: own your own content.

~~~
pergadad
But you don't really own your WordPress. No way to get around using their
services if you want to have proper spam filtering.

~~~
luckylion
Sure you can. There are multiple anti-spam plugins out there, and unless
you're running a super large high value target, most spam won't be custom
made, so very simple things like hiding the "URL" field with CSS and marking
as Spam when something has been entered will get rid of 95% of it.

------
wtmt
Side note. I didn’t read this post for two reasons. On mobile, the lack of
inertial scrolling makes it like pushing hard against some massive slush, and
the lack of a scroll bar prevents me from knowing how long the article is and
whether I should read it quickly now or check it later.

A criticism on Medium, including its usability (I presume), should do a lot
better if it wants to be read.

~~~
SCLeo
I am mobile and I have inertial scrolling. I think it is probably because you
are using iOS safari.

iOS' inertial scrolling for some reason breaks very often. It happened to my
website a couple times, and I had to fix with a bunch of css hacks.

Supporting iOS is just a pain. Sometimes, I would even rather support IE 11
than iOS.

(btw, all iOS browsers are forced to use safari render engine.)

------
superconformist
But how will I "clap" for top-shelf webshit content if it's not on Medium?

~~~
bubblewrap
Isn't there a "clap" plugin for Wordpress?

~~~
CM30
Yeah there is. Probably quite a few, though this one came up first:

[https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-applaud/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-
applaud/)

------
mikl
I really hope people do. Medium is awful and getting awfuller as time passes.

------
davidz
It's fine to dislike Medium and run your own blog, but I find the article
intellectually dishonest in comparing Medium to Facebook. One harvests your
data and lets advertisers target you with ads, the other charges a
subscription to provide access to content.

It's disingenuous to claim they "sell whatever advertising they please", and
link to a ToS screen cap that's completely unrelated.

Companies have to make money in order to pay their developers and pay for
servers. Personally, I'd rather pay them instead of seeing ads plastered
everywhere.

------
spyckie2
Please KEEP USING medium to keep all those uninspired rants, thought leader
posturing, and no substance fluff pieces on subjects that are actually
interesting behind a paywall.

Please put more effort into creating better content by exhibiting interest and
passion into a subject through deep exploration, insights, discussion of core
issues and resolution, and great descriptive writing.

It used to be that everyone who wrote a diary had no expectations of their
content being anything valuable, and the value of writing was in the
exploration of ideas and organization of your thoughts. Now the value of
writing is how many people you reach? Philosophically, I'm against that
change, so please keep that stuff behind a paywall.

------
fbn79
To make a parallelism with traditional paper it's like to say that everyone
want to publish an article must become an editor and found a newspaper. That's
not realistic. Medium and other platform put a lot on work on promotion,
positioning and creating an engagement place for writers and readers. I don't
think that every writer must became an editor in digital era. It's like to say
that if you are a musician you have to host your clone of spotify and bypass
all distribution platforms.

~~~
omarchowdhury
Medium doesn't provide editing services, nor do they promote your content.
Your content promotes itself by merit of engagement with readers.

~~~
fbn79
But Medium promote the platform, attract readers and give visibility to you
article. I think is the same think a traditional newspaper do.

------
musicale
This should be medium link.

------
gurlic
I'm currently working on an alternative to Medium. So far it has all the
elementary things like a working editor, notes and highlights, a decent
commenting system. There are publications too, with teams, submissions etc.
User profiles and publications have custom domains, custom CSS for branding.
There's also a somewhat half-working Github integration for advanced writers
but I'll need to work on it a fair bit to polish the edges. At some point, I'd
ideally want to open-source the editor/bloggy bit and have people self-host it
and perhaps push their content back to the platform for centralized
distribution if they want.

It's still a work in progress and I'm trying to figure out some sort of
strategy, especially a content policy around not allowing clickbait and spammy
"how to use learn redis in 3 minutes" type articles. I'd probably have to cap
the max number of users and publication to a few thousand since I don't have
the resources for this to be anything more than a hobby project.

I'm aware of a couple of others working in the same space. Write.as comes to
mind, thought I don't think they're doing publications etc.

~~~
sdan
As a person who blogs on certain areas in ML, the sole thing I look for in any
platform is SEO. I tried going on Medium, but because of the lack of LaTex
support, I had to go on my own blog, but I'd really like if there's an
alternate to Medium with amazing SEO (as you explained).

~~~
gurlic
That's definitely one of Medium's strengths and something I'd like to focus on
when I find the time. I still have much reading to do about SEO in general.

LaTex, syntax/code was high on my priority-list while initially building my
product since I wanted to primarily target technical writers.

------
ausbah
Doesn't medium also fill the gap of a sort of easy to use, personalized
aggregate site for blogs and such? I'm not aware of any other site that does
this.

And isn't that kinda of the point of sites like Medium, Reddit, YouTube,
Facebook, etc. - that provide enough of a valuable service to people by
providing a single place for people to view a certain type of content that in
spite of ads, centralized control, some pay walls, crappy technology, etc.
that consumers and producers still find it worth while to use for viewing and
publishing.

I would even go a step further and say such aggregate sites like Medium
represent what the "new" internet represents, convenience and monetization.
The average user doesn't care about privacy or ads as much as they want easy
access to information. The average producer doesn't care about control
compared to what runs their operation, revenue and readers. I think many
"technologists" and other people who populate sites like Hacker News have
values the align more closely to that of the "old" internet, so view many of
the new trends negatively.

I'm not trying to say if it's right or wrong, just my two cents.

------
phantom_oracle
The authors complaints are valid, but fails to acknowledge that besides
Medium, so many great(and not so great) conversations happen on platforms that
are now locked behind login gardens. It was fine back in the day to just
create a throwaway FaceTwit account but now they demand mobile numbers too.

Pre social media, how did people discover great content? You can go as far
back to the 90s or very early 00s as a time reference

~~~
azimuth11
That’s a good point. It was much harder to find interesting stuff to read back
in the day. I had my Google Reader with a bunch of blogs, but that ended up
being pretty noisy and they took it away. You had to do the searching yourself
and be your own data curator, or have a network of other friends pitching in
content to check out (eg. forums, Maybe digg?)

It’s locked in a somewhat growing, walled garden, yes, but Medium is now
basically the Google Reader for a lot of people. Those people don’t care about
logins if they can get a good read every now and then. And, when Medium goes
to crap, some other platform will pop up with no ads (for a while :) ) and
lure us all over there.

------
duxup
I've been amazed seeing some folks I think of as good web citizens who are
thoughtful about the web, web development, and etc.... keep using Medium, or
at least have recently.

Some of these people would get plenty of attention posting on a personal site
and just tweeting it out, but they choose medium, and I wonder why.

Folks less well known, I get it it assuming they somehow get more attention on
medium.

------
vcavallo
jeez, could you jack my mobile scrolling any further? not reading that for any
longer than 2 seconds

------
samwilliams
A community member built a blogging platform on our permanent, decentralised
web (Arweave) today. You might want to check it out:

[https://arweave.net/egqLRAbESk4BvrPZGwNM-
koJZZU3_xYRb_G9-CYC...](https://arweave.net/egqLRAbESk4BvrPZGwNM-
koJZZU3_xYRb_G9-CYCvFs)

Full disclosure: I started the Arweave project.

Sam

------
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 social media platform, but since
everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack it could easily be
converted to a full website. 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.

------
vfc1
One of the big advantages of self-hosting is that you own not only own the
platform, but also the traffic.

When I started my business I had a previous blog with several topics covered.

Because I self-hosted, I managed to redirect the traffic only for a specific
set of posts on the topic to my new business blog where I moved several posts
over, getting thousands of visits in my business blog (and converting
customers) since day one.

The Ghost blogging platform is open source, and you can self-host if you want
(I do).

With Ghost, you can also get their hosted service for a monthly fee and you
own your own platform, you have a markdown-based editor with markdown on the
left and content on the right.

You can run your own ads, have a fixed top menu that does not go away with
scrolling with links to your products and services, etc.

If you are serious about running a business blog, you should definitively
self-host. I know Medium has the sharing aspect, but it's not worth it because
most of the traffic in blogs in general comes from Google searches and not
sharing.

The social sharing traffic is a drop in the ocean for most blogs, it's not
worth getting potential paying customers blocked due to a medium paywall
popup.

------
amelius
What happens if you are a popular blogger, and one day you decide to take your
business elsewhere, and make the announcement on Medium in your last blogpost
there? Will they take that post or even your entire blog down?

Similar question for YouTube.

------
miguelmota
Medium should be used as a means to distribution (like a mirror) but not be
the canonical source. Make your personal blog be the primary source of storing
your articles but copy post on medium for discoverability

------
pwncake
Is there a suggested alternative people should be turning to as opposed to
building their own, especially if their expertise is in writing or some other
field than computer science or web design?

~~~
hombre_fatal
Though I also kinda resent the idea that, just because I have the skills to
build my own blog from scratch, I'd want to waste even one second building it,
setting it up, configuring it, maintaining it, fixing it, implementing basic
features that other platforms already have, etc.

------
skilled
I have yet to figure out the 'persona' for Medium users.

From time to time you can come across some decent content, but the loops and
hoops you have to go through to read it are simply not worth my time.

~~~
StevePerkins
It seems to mostly revolve around resume-enhancement spam. The sort of empty
filler that people write, just to appear like a "thought leader" when
potential employers or clients google them.

There are two categories of resume-spam:

1\. "Sunny" filler that doesn't really say anything new (e.g. " _The Future Is
Serverless_ "). The preferred platform for this seems to be LinkedIn.

2\. "Edgy" filler that doesn't really say anything new (e.g. " _Serverless
Considered Harmful_ ", or " _Why I Don 't Use Serverless_"). The preferred
platform for this seems to be Medium.

------
cfitz
I am happy to pay for well articulated content that can sometimes reach
45min/piece in reading duration.

Medium will slowly learn what you’re interested in and send you opt-out’able
weekly newsletters with recommendations.

I’m surprised the OP has this much distaste for a platform which not only has
good content, but rewards such, yet without ads. I’d happily pay to see less
ads in my life.

------
paulie_a
A lot of content creators have posted their experiences here. It matters for
SEO, while being shitty to content creators.

From this readers perspective if it's on medium it's not worth reading. I've
literally thought this "awesome that sounds like it will solve my exact
issue...oh fuck it's on medium...next"

------
rchaud
A big chunk of the comments are about the problems of self-hosting video. The
reality is that if you're not hosting on Youtube, or aggressively promoting
the video via FB Ads or something, you will never get anywhere close to the
number of views that would necessitate thinking about "video at scale".

------
throwaway13000
I have decided not to post on internet platforms that take my content and put
it behind a login wall. I guess if I post a blog or video, I expect that
everyone must be able to view it without having to login. Only then I will
give my content to your platform. This will stop the web from being a bunch of
islands.

------
siscia
There is definitely something I miss in the discussion self-hosted blog vs
medium.

But the simplest solution isn't to just write on your own self hosted blog and
cross post on medium setting the canonical URL?

Doesn't this give the best of both worlds?

You still have control over your property and you still get the SEO benefits
from the medium domain...

------
pawurb
Medium is also bad for SEO [https://abot.app/blog/medium-blogging-platform-
seo](https://abot.app/blog/medium-blogging-platform-seo) . Selling your
personal brand for a fancy WYSIWYG editor does not seem to be the best trade-
off.

------
robsun
I can remember praising Medium as the ultimate solution for professional
bloging. I stopped using Medium when a pay wall was introduced. I didn't
follow what happen since then with the platform. Can someone shortly introduce
me to the topic why Medium is considered now as evil corp?

------
suzil
Medium will often pop up when I search for something programming-related, but
I'm less likely to find someone's blog post. What if we had a search engine
that would only show programmer/technical blog posts? Then we could bring more
traffic to the self-published.

------
salutonmundo
_Prediction_ : next week on HN: an article titled "Why Medium is super great"

------
neop1x
Your page still won't display in built-in webview of Materialistic Android HN
client. And it has trouble parsing HTML. Just like Medium and many other
modern (=broken) websites full of javascripts and ads.

------
jarym
Just came here to say I hate Medium. I frequently get a strobing green bar at
the top of the page that is permanently there and as far as I can tell doing
nothing. WTF?

------
aerovistae
Ironically this page doesn’t work on mobile. It doesn’t have inertial
scrolling, and I just have no patience for that. I stopped reading after the
first paragraph.

~~~
aembleton
Works on Firefox 66.0.5 on Android 9

------
ddalex
> When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play?

Stallman was right.

------
manigandham
> _When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play?_

That's what happens when there are no ads. This is what the HN majority keeps
saying they want.

------
ga-vu
Had a friend lose hundreds of posts after he complained on Twitter about the
company's annoying popup. They deleted his account within hours.

------
stanislavb
What is your best alternative? I'd say dev.to is a good one for the context of
software/programming related content

~~~
julienreszka
Blogger is just fine

~~~
jlarcombe
It does still work well but I have the sense no-one is really using it for new
stuff any more - it has a sort of unloved feel to it, and Google have recent
form in dropping stuff...

------
StanislavPetrov
Thankfully medium required a Google account to register, saving me the trouble
of learning the hard way how bad they were.

------
xkcd-sucks
Somewhat relatedly, does anyone else need to adblock/disable medium.com JS in
order to scroll through articles?

------
Grustaf
Seems like you can have the cake and eat it too by posting to Medium AND your
own domain, or wherever you want.

~~~
slig
Do you mean using your own domain on a Medium blog? If so, that was disabled a
while ago. Or do you mean cross posting the same content on Medium and your
blog? That's tricky, how do you tell Google that it should consider your blog
as the owner of the content? Otherwise you can get punished for duplicated
content.

------
girlsrule1234
For someone with such strong opinions on personal platforms, he’d do well to
fix the scrolling in his site.

------
DmitryOlkhovoi
I don't read medium. It's just another stupid website that takes your time and
gives nothing.

------
azhenley
Fine. I’m going to make a Medium alternative this weekend and this person
better try it out.

------
sytelus
TLDR; The article says that Medium locks up content behind its walled garden,
requires login and then payment in some cases.

I think the article is not well researched and doesn’t understand the basic
premise of Medium: _Enable professional writers to make living off of
writing._ Medium is not your usual free blogging platform. There is an
expectation that people _will_ pay for good content and the hope that good
writers should be able make living off of their writing. Medium wants to take
on doing SEO, infrastructure, payments and let authors focus on just creating
content.

Here’s some stats on how much writers can earn on Medium:
[https://medium.com/s/partner-program-updates/april-update-
fr...](https://medium.com/s/partner-program-updates/april-update-from-the-
partner-program-1bf39020f3f4)

If I have to be devil’s advocate, I would ask why can’t Medium use ads as
revenue source. Their $5/mo subscription may look like cup of coffee but
honestly I am tired of having dozen such subscriptions in my life. Also,
people outside developed world, kids, teenagers, college students will still
find this unaffordable.

------
kgwxd
I forget Medium exists until some complains about it. Several years ago, the
popularity of Medium and several paywall/signup-wall sites posted on HN and
Reddit inspired me to write a Firefox add-on that is able to apply CSS to any
element that contains any text or attribute value matching a given regular
expression on any site. So far, I've only used it to apply "visibilty: hidden"
to sites I don't like, but it theoretically has other uses. I use a variation
of the filter in Newsbeuter to keep them out of my RSS feeds. The result is
that I do not see any links or any embedded content for sites I know I never
want to interact with, ever. Search results, Reddit, HN, blogs, etc. The sites
I add are basically erased from my personal internet experience. It is
glorious, and I think if a lot of people used it, misbehaving sites would be
more scared of it than ad blockers because they don't even get the chance to
grab your attention. It's called ssure if anyone is interested. It's a bitch
to configure but it works on desktop and Android FF.

------
ajflores1604
So just my personal take, I definitely benefit a lot from Mediums
recommendation system, however it might work. Probably because I'm brand new
to programming, and even fields like machine learning are very fresh to me
even though it seems like everyone and their mom already knows the basics. So
having a system that can see that I looked up a specific topic and recommend
similar articles from that domain. A lot of the time I don't know what I don't
know, so having this recommendation system helps illuminate the domain a bit
more for me. And the general style of medium where the posts can be a more
casual overview of a topic compared to the deep dive of a whitepaper, helps me
grasp concepts faster. The recommendation aspect also helps me explore domains
in a more focused way compared to the random nature of social networks that
just bubbles up whatever's popular. I'd be lying to myself if I said I haven't
benefited from Medium.

Not trying to excuse them for what they're doing, just trying to point out
from my personal experience the value they've added to me and why following
personal blogs or places like reddit, which I see mentioned as alternatives,
isn't a one to one replacement for me. I don't know what or who I'd need to
follow if the domain is new to me.

I guess continuing on this train of thought, and not wanting to complain
without putting out an idea for a solution...if something were to come in and
be a viable alternative to Medium it would have to

>Allow for easy publishing (editor)

>Have reliable distribution/hosting (network)

>And have some way to explore related topics or publications (discovery)

For publication I think the community would have to come around to a standard
format. Like a simplified latex, or something similar to it, with an
approachable interface that even my Mom or Dad could write something up
without needing to read documentation.

As for distribution, the only thing I can really think of is an ipfs style
network. Similar to how torrents can provide some security in the survival of
a file even if the originator decides to stop seeding (hosting). And also
similar to torrenting, I can see ppl willingly giving up resources for 'the
cause' if they themselves benefit enough from the network existing.

The only thing left, that also contains all the things I liked about Medium,
is the discovery aspect. Also seems like it'd be the most difficult to
implement on a distributed network. Maybe a few designated community servers,
similar to tracker servers from the torrenting analogy, carry the information
of what files are in the network. Im not sure exactly what the ipfs spec
implements for this aspect of file discovery. But it seems some sort of
designated 'discovery nodes' would be necessary. Maybe graph network nodes
that ppl can query using their own discovery algorithms or ones shared within
the community? Idk how well those would scale, I've heard from the Neo4j pitch
that Behance rolled over their infrastructure to neo4j from cassandra and
reduced their server requirements by a factor of 10. Maybe that kind of
efficiency would be enough to support the network in general with a minimal
number of critical nodes?

I haven't worked on an infrastructure level with anything I've mentioned,
mostly just know of the technologies, so I might be completely off base with
the individual things I proposed, but I feel like the general concept is worth
dissecting.

~~~
luckylion
> A lot of the time I don't know what I don't know, so having this
> recommendation system helps illuminate the domain a bit more for me.

That's a very good point. Before the advent of Google, we used to have curated
link lists for topics that you could explore. It's become rare, and it's
probably harder to do now that everything moves much faster (or maybe it
doesn't and I've just gotten much slower).

------
getcrunk
So what alternatives are there? Either as a service or code?

------
bitL
We need a Zeitgeist service returning Overton window for each company and
automate hiding articles/content that are no longer fitting inside it.

~~~
markn951
what

------
AngeloAnolin
I've seen a lot of complaints about how Medium is becoming worse in terms of
writing / publishing / blogging your thoughts on the internet [1]. I just
don't see why no one (or group) has taken to building a similar service less
the cruft and could still be a viable business.

[1] [https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-
medium/](https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/)

------
myspy
He is right. Medium was cool around 2016. Before the content was behind a
paywall and the free content was accessible in a visible way. They send you a
mail with interesting stuff everyday and now it's dead to me. The mobile site
is horrendous, a banner where it says to download the app which can't be
canceled after five or so tabs. The asshole that designed it should never get
a job in the business again.

------
taylodl
Can we all stop posting articles from Medium on HN? While we're at it let's
stop posting articles residing behind paywalls. That'd be great.

------
whydoineedthis
No

------
emptyparadise
This site appears to break scrolling inertia on touch screen devices.

------
jasonvorhe
> You know. That old internet that used to be open and free.

This is bullshit. Medium is free, you're free to use it, it's open (unless an
author explicitly asks for a paywall for compensation) and you're free to
register an account to have your own content published there.

Medium isn't using a proprietary protocol nor does it require a licensed
client to access it and everyone has a browser, so I really don't get the
issue with publishing there.

