
Ditching Medium - jahans3
https://www.joshjahans.com/ditching-medium/
======
SamWhited
Not to mention that it drives your users away and reduces your conversion rate
by showing them a big full-screen banner in front of your posts every single
time they visit the site unless they sign up for Medium themselves. Who wants
to have to log in just to read some blogs?

And then there's the lack of RSS feed, so I have to actually visit each
individual blog to see if there are updates instead of having them dropped
nicely in my inbox with the rest of my morning read.

Medium is a garbage place for readers and content producers: please stay away
from it.

~~~
godzillabrennus
If you reblog your content on a Medium blog to take advantage of their user
base it can be a great tool. Don't use it for a primary blog.

~~~
kuhhk
Doesn’t that destroy your SEO? I was warned 6+ years ago never to do that, but
can’t recall the technical reason.

~~~
technion
Go back far enough and I remember you would Google a key phrase, and see the
first full ten pages being the exact same article, as accordance with some SEO
gaming scheme.

Google quite reasonably now sees duplicate identical content as an issue, you
can use the "canonical" HTML tag can be used to help it see the "real" link
where several exist.

I don't know what'll happen when there are only two copies of your page, but
I'd hazard a guess it'll preference medium's domain over your own in most
cases.

~~~
rococode
I could imagine Google being smart enough to have some tracking between
duplicates. If you include a link to your main blog on Medium perhaps it may
understand "pages A and B have the same main content, but A contains an
additional link to B so B is probably the true source".

------
burlesona
I think the author makes a giant mistake when he says the following:

“For the foreseeable future, it looks like independent blogs are back. Still,
there’s a good business opportunity waiting for someone, as Medium seem intent
on squandering the potential they had.”

I would argue the problem is that making a free blogging network like medium
is NOT a good business idea. The reason things like Wordpress, Ghost, etc.
work as a business is they have figured out a customer (bloggers) and
something to charge them for (their paid blog hosting features).

The reason those sites don’t work as great discovery networks is it turns out
their customers are possessive of their audiences and don’t really want the
platform to be directing them elsewhere.

Medium is now trying to figure out a way for the readers to be the customers,
which is just a really hard problem in the era of the internet and almost
infinite free reading material.

Not a good business opportunity at all.

~~~
rococode
From a business perspective Medium is more of a magazine or newspaper than a
blogging platform. They have a bunch of readers and try to get them to stay on
their site by pushing interesting posts from their other writers. The problem
is that their writers seem to just want it to be a blogging platform.

------
philliphaydon
It was never a go to platform for programmers blogs. It’s the worst platform
for programming blogs. The way comments work makes it impossible to have kind
of coherent conversation.

I don’t have an issue with medium for things that don’t involve discussion but
for anything that should have discussion. Ahhhhh

~~~
PaulHoule
Medium is a Ghetto. Who wants to be seen along with thinly sliced salami
articles that almost have something to say, desperate content marketers who
are writing articles like "Does your API Need a Content Marketing Strategy?"
and who are amazed that they got 35 people to view their steaming Turd Emoji?

Not me.

~~~
tomc1985
It definitely feels like the bloggers on Medium are considerably more self-
indulgent and considerably less intelligent.

~~~
opportune
I think it went through a similar transition as Quora where it was known as a
place for smart people to blog, and as it grew it then attracted a bunch of
users who wanted to be seen as smart

~~~
Haydos585x2
Absolutely, it used to be a place for pretty in-depth and well thought out
writing. It began attracting a lot of people that wanted to be seen as that
kind of writer while not being that kind of writer. I bailed once it just
became lists and lists and clickbait with more clickbait. I think it's gone
through what TEDx has gone through. Their latest strategy to try and get my
money has been the nail in the coffin for my use of the platform.

------
tehjoker
Hosting blogs is cheap and everyone should be able to have one. However, if we
leave it to the corporate sector, they'll either need a subscription or ads,
neither of which are conducive to public discussion. Since serving blogs is so
cheap, why doesn't the government offer a free service where you can host a
text website? Kind of like a university webpage for all students, but for
everyone?

You would then have a financially stable organization backing the pages, have
democratic input into the hosting process, and probably less censorship than a
private company would apply for those that care about that sort of thing
(since private companies need literally no reason to do so whereas a public
enterprise would need a court order or some such).

~~~
jlebar
I host my (static site, very-low-traffic) blog with nearlyfreespeech.net for
less than $10/yr. My hosting costs are less than domain-registration costs.

Highly recommended, I've had zero problems with them.

~~~
dijital
Static hosting via AWS S3 (or Azure/GCP equivalent) with a free Cloudflare
account in front it might be even cheaper!

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosti...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html)

------
blondin
slightly off-topic but i hope a UX person from medium would stumble upon this.
medium posts have a terrible UX -- for me at least. i tend to set my fonts to
be 125%-150% larger. it gives me an easy-to-read feeling on most blogs.
especially when fonts are chosen carefully. but this breaks medium blogs so
bad i often gave up on many articles. the header usually takes 40% of the
viewport height. and there's always a "get updates" footer which also takes
about 20%. so yes... what you care about fits in less than half the space. and
on posts with many big pictures, it just gets worse.

btw, my phone also has larger fonts but the reading experience is so much
better! but ofc that too is ruined by the constant nagging about getting the
"real app" (when all i did is click on your own digest which opened in the
browser...).

i mean i understand why you guys are doing all that but i certainly share the
sentiment of OP here that the combination of all that makes medium look
somehow annoying...

~~~
sonnyblarney
Overuse of white space, really weird comment/reply system and more.

It's nice on the eyes purely from an aesthetic perspective, but I agree it
lacks on the X in UX. It's a few shades form over function.

Side note: Apple's new Swift documentation feels like this to me. It was
designed to look and read like a novel. Full of prose, lack of use of colour,
wrong fonts, way too big. The 'parent class' is down at the _bottom_ of the
document! So many things like that. It looks great a first glance but it
really lacks in X.

~~~
mLuby
The highlight/comment/DM system is the only part I like (and actually love
it—all text sites should use it IMO).

------
milancurcic
Either I or the Author are confused about how Medium works.

> A blog, to me, was a place for someone to put their thoughts up onto the
> internet and have anyone who wanted to come and read - for free.

But you can still do this, no? You can write articles on Medium that can be
read for free.

> Medium relies on user-submitted content and then charges those same users
> for access to their content.

My experience is that Medium charges only for access to "premium" articles,
submitted through their partner program, no?

Can somebody please clear these up for me?

On a slight off-topic, my biggest issue with Medium is no math formatting
support. MathJax has been around for years now. Are there just not enough
scientists writing on Medium?

~~~
mkolodny
I think the author is confused about how Medium works.

> My experience is that Medium charges only for access to "premium" articles,
> submitted through their partner program, no?

After reading through Medium's FAQ, I believe that's right - an article is
free to read unless it's published through Medium's partner program [0]. So if
you want your posts to be free to read, just don't join the partner program.

[0] [https://help.medium.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360009297694-Frequ...](https://help.medium.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360009297694-Frequently-asked-questions-about-distribution-on-
Medium)

------
hadsed
Well the medium partner program is meant to enable people to earn money from
their writing, no? As an author you have to make a choice to do that. I don't
see a problem with this and if anything it's a great innovation.

My problem is that I'm subject to the kind of writing I'd rather avoid.
Perhaps if they were better able to segment their user bases and make their
feeds and recommendations better tailored to them the experience could
actually be decent. But as a modeling problem I appreciate that it's probably
pretty difficult to tell a BS article about Bitcoin (or whatever) from one
with substance.

------
azhenley
So we are back to running our own blogs again? What are the alternatives to
Medium if you don’t want to self-host? Ghost?

~~~
tedmiston
FWIW you can trivially self-host Ghost these days with an official one-click
droplet on DigitalOcean.

[https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-
apps/ghost/](https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/ghost/)

[https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/one-
clicks/ghost/](https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/one-clicks/ghost/)

~~~
npunt
Perhaps if you're doing this type of work frequently, but if you're just a
regular person who wants a blog it's not trivial nor advisable. Configuring
your DO instance can be a pain and you have to manually keep Ghost up to date
by SSHing in. Definitely not set and forget.

~~~
tedmiston
The author's post seemed to target a developer blogger audience as opposed to
regular people.

With this particular image, there's virtually no DO configuration (just
standard size / region settings which have smart defaults IIRC). You do have
to SSH in, but the new Ghost 2.0 CLI handles updating Ghost much more smoothly
than in the past. I've been happy with it personally.

~~~
npunt
The DO one-click is super easy, but the SSL config and adding Cloudflare wound
up being a huge pain. DO's docs aren't great and that meant I spent hours in
config land just trying to get tablestakes blog features of HTTPS and DDoS
protection.

Ghost 2.0 is definitely better than prior versions but still needs
babysitting. As an infrequent blogger, I've found I am updating Ghost more
frequently than I'm blogging.

Github pages or Gatsby (via something like Netlify) are much better suited to
this problem because server config & SSL are handled and they're just serving
static pages.

~~~
tedmiston
I used Cloudflare with Ghost pre-2.0 but switched to Let's Encrypt for 2.0
[1]. I found this easier than using Cloudflare with 2.0 which handles auto
renewing the cert as well.

[1]: [https://docs.ghost.org/integrations/lets-
encrypt/](https://docs.ghost.org/integrations/lets-encrypt/)

------
alexmorley
[https://write.as](https://write.as) ftw. Clean, minimal design. And you can
auto-publish to medium/twitter/mastadon etc if you want a wider reach.

------
crispytx
I moved my old blog to a new domain name recently, and wasn't able to keep
using Medium because they no longer support custom domains. So now I'm using
WordPress for my blogging software and also using their hosting as well.
That's too bad for Medium, because Medium's blogging software is superior in
my opinion. They've just made a few boneheaded mistakes. My theory is that Ev
Williams wants to create the next Twitter, and that's the reason behind his
poor decisions. Williams should have just worried about creating the best
blogging software and blog hosting solution and things would have kept humming
along just fine. Greed can make people do silly things.

Ev, if you happen to read this: 1) bring back custom domains. 2) start
charging a monthly fee for hosting custom domains like WordPress does 3)
Create a native advertising service that publishes promoted stories into the
main Medium.com story feed.

------
skilled
It's funny that you can clear cookies and reset the limit counter. Kind of
annoying to have to do it often though.

~~~
perseusprime11
Most of us read it on our mobile devices. You can't clear the cookies on your
device.

~~~
rozenmd
Sure you can.

Tap the lock next to the URL, tap on 'SITE SETTINGS', then tap on 'CLEAR &
RESET'.

------
Alex3917
On the topic of programming blogs, are there any libraries to automatically
detect code snippets within text? I know there are some StackOverflow posts
talking about possible approaches to this, but not sure if anyone has actually
built an open source solution.

~~~
huntermeyer
[https://highlightjs.org](https://highlightjs.org)

~~~
Alex3917
It looks like this highlights code within <pre><code> blocks with a color
scheme appropriate for the language, but it can't actually detect whether a
snippet is code in the first place.

This is good to know about, although I personally care more about just
displaying code blocks in a different typeface than I do about highlighting
them appropriately.

------
tedmiston
> Medium would be charging people to read content that I am putting out for
> free.

Agree that this ^ is non-ideal.

But was Medium ever the go-to platform for programming blogs?

They don't really have much feature-wise catering towards technical posts
e.g., nice syntax highlighting or code embedding, runnable snippets, limited
embedding support, minimal analytics offering.

------
village-idiot
I have _never_ understood tech blogs on Medium. Surely if you’re writing about
a technical subject, especially programming, you have the skills to setup a
quick Jekyll blog? It’s what I did, and I have no idea why I’d hand control of
my user experience over to Medium, no idea whatsoever.

~~~
tedmiston
Not for technical reasons, for distribution. A lot more people subscribe to
Medium publications for instance than my personal blog.

~~~
village-idiot
Handing control of distribution to one company is always a dicey proposition.

------
cryptos
I wonder how easily people bind themselves to a certain provider. Since the
appereance of Medium I waited for the day they try to monetize it and people
would leaving for better options. The possibility to move away should probably
considered before starting to use such a service.

My own website is based on Hugo. While the usage (especially the template
syntax) is not exactly a joy to use, it works fine and fast for years now. The
only thing I need is some web space to drop static files, so it would be
really easy to move to another provider. However I wouldn't recommend Hugo to
non-technical writers, since the configuration and template syntax would scare
them probably away.

The world needs more "static CMS" software (instead of just "static site
generators")!

~~~
StavrosK
I evaluated Hugo and went with Lektor for the reasons you mention. I haven't
regretted it, Lektor is much more sane.

~~~
cryptos
While Lektor doesn't look bad, I doubt it would be attractive for non-
technical persons. I'm thinking of something more like Ghost, WordPress (with
less features), but with static files as output.

~~~
johnonolan
This is possible with Ghost :) it functions as a headless CMS and can be used
with essentially any static site generator which can pull content from an API,
eg. Gatsby --
[https://docs.ghost.org/api/gatsby/](https://docs.ghost.org/api/gatsby/)

We'll be sharing more about this on Weds in a bigger blog post - it's a fairly
recent addition

------
phnk
> I already talked about how bloated Medium articles are. That one-sentence
> essay is easily over a megabyte.

[https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

------
Reedx
A downside of a pure growth first, monetization second strategy.

~~~
Alex3917
I mean this is as much bad behavior on the part of users as it is bad behavior
on the part of publishers. Users flock to products that are super polished and
have tons of celebrity users (both made possible by huge fundraises), but then
flip out when they're asked for $5 a month to pay for the service they're
getting.

~~~
m52go
It's not fair to blame it on users. This is businesses playing bait-and-
switch. No person would like it if all of a sudden they had to pay for
something they were getting for free before.

It's the business's job to charge a fair price upfront (or, at the very least,
give the user some hint of its future plans so they're mentally prepared).

------
concurrency
Recently decided to self-host as well, and used it as an excuse to build a
command line controlled cms with Sublime-esque syntax highlighting for the
code snippets. [https://synref.com/](https://synref.com/) It's been a lot of
fun, and I'd encourage anyone that's considering going the self-hosting route
to do so.

------
JumpCrisscross
I developed an aversion to medium well before the paywall went up. Most
articles involved a novice doing preliminary research about something they had
limited prior experience with, coming up with a toy solution and then
lambasting the experts for having not seen said solution. (Granted, my route
to Medium was mostly through HN.)

~~~
kochikame
"Three Things That Will Save Apple From Death"

"What Tim Cook Needs To Do Now To Save Apple"

That kind of thing, right? It's so cringey.

------
msadowski
I've left medium about 2 years ago after using it for 8 months. I never felt
in control there.

After moving from medium I created my blog using jekyll and hosted it on
GitHub pages and never looked back.

------
thatoneuser
I didn’t even know they were doing a paywall thing. I got into medium last
year for a while because it seemed like this perfect place for people in
different tech sectors to share wisdom. But not too long and I realized that
most of the writers are talking out of their ass and playing the “use strong
language so people will believe you” tactic while being wholly absent of
meaning.

It’s honestly like reading one of those subreddits where people get to ask and
field questions about an industry. You realize pretty quickly that the sub is
filled with wannabes (still in college or otherwise) who spend their days
fantasizing about what an industry is like while they have literally no
experience. They’ve just read the tropes enough times that they can echo “good
sounding” advice with no basis in reality.

That’s what medium is to me. A place where people pontificate over things they
really don’t know anything about other than reading other online posts.

------
ChicagoDave
I’m happy to pay $5/month. The content I receive far outweighs the content I
create and I’ve learned so much from others. The servers aren’t paying for
themselves.

------
EduardoBautista
That's because it is plagued with "growth hacking" features. I am always being
bothered to sign up/sign in when I just want to read the damn article.

------
SoulMan
I am not sure if it's a goto platform for programming blocks if it does not
even give your syntax highlighting capability or embedding code snippets such
as gist.

------
rhizome
Programming blogs are kind of meh to me in general, and will be until the
code-display aspects finally get ironed out.

~~~
colordrops
Could you elaborate on the problems of displaying code in blogs?

~~~
rhizome
broken font size, running off the edge of the page. pretty much everything
outside of the first 40 characters of any line.

------
TACIXAT
This blog is gorgeous on mobile. Nice PWA features too for adding to the home
screen.

------
cheriot
Are there any good, free hosted options for blogs about programming?

~~~
mnmlsm
Hashnode is great - it's a blogging community for developers.

------
thoughtstheseus
Reminds me of jaron Lanier

