
Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog - uptown
https://baremetrics.com/blog/medium-back-to-blog
======
dlandis
As someone who randomly highlights words and lines when they read, I can't
stand sites like Medium that display that annoying toolbar with the Twitter
icon every time you highlight something. Terrible UX in my opinion.

~~~
bhauer
I've observed that behavior in others but never done it myself. As someone who
doesn't randomly highlight as I read, I nevertheless agree that a toolbar that
appears on highlight is obnoxious for a reading-oriented site. (Meanwhile, I
can appreciate Microsoft Word's similar toolbar on highlight, which is
especially useful in touch and pen-oriented workflows.)

I am idly wondering about the underlying reason people do random highlighting.
I assume it's just a "tick" as they say. But I wonder if it has anything—even
in small part—to do with the bad contrast on a lot of sites and the fact that
browsers render highlighted text with good contrast. Even on high-contrast
sites like Medium, the bright background combined with dark text can be
tiresome on the eye, meaning that highlighted text will invert that yielding a
more comfortable white text on blue. As someone who doesn't _randomly_
highlight text, I often _intentionally_ highlight text to quickly and nearly-
effortlessly correct bad color selections by the site's designers. If I did
this more often, I could see it developing into a habit.

~~~
nxc18
I’ve been doing it since ~2006. Contrast was not an issue back then, and my
very young eyes wouldn’t have (and still don’t) cared.

I think maybe it was a manifestation of ADHD. Highlighting what I read helped
me keep track of where I was if I got distracted (e.g. by a thought, which
happens a lot). It also helps me if I get distracted or fail to parse a
sentence - I can easily go back to the last known good state and restart
reading.

Websites doing weird things on highlight (or preventing highlighting) piss me
off to no end.

Another tick possibly due to ADD: I consistently close my browser tabs. I’ve
met a lot of people who need special extensions so they can have 100+ tabs
open, and that drives me absolutely nuts. If I’m done using it, I close it and
if I need to come back later I google(DuckDuckGo really) it.

~~~
compuguy
I do the same exact thing. It drives me crazy that I can't highlight on an
article without causing either a post to twitter box or the font size changing
(I'm looking at you NYT). On a random note, do you know what that special
extension that allows a user to have 100+ tabs open. I have a family member
that always keeps _way_ to many tabs open (drives me nuts as well!).

------
joelrunyon
Everytime there's a new "cool" blogging platform - people do this and then 2
years later, they write a blog post like the above one.

Own your own blog!

~~~
drcongo
Funnily enough, an hour or so ago I was trying to track down a Python blog I
used to enjoy and went on a "This blog has moved merry-go-round...

[http://sayspy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/moving-this-blog-to-
med...](http://sayspy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/moving-this-blog-to-medium.html)
[https://medium.com/coder-who-says-py/i-have-moved-over-to-
sv...](https://medium.com/coder-who-says-py/i-have-moved-over-to-
svbtle-564d52028a65) [https://nothingbutsnark.svbtle.com/moving-the-blog-to-
silvrb...](https://nothingbutsnark.svbtle.com/moving-the-blog-to-silvrback)
And eventually to [https://snarky.ca](https://snarky.ca)

~~~
Andrex
Even snarky.ca has moved, from Silvrback to Ghost!

[https://snarky.ca/why-i-changed-my-blogging-platform-to-
ghos...](https://snarky.ca/why-i-changed-my-blogging-platform-to-ghost-pro/)

~~~
compuguy
You actually can run a Ghost blog on your own server:
[https://docs.ghost.org/v1/docs/hosting](https://docs.ghost.org/v1/docs/hosting)

------
acconrad
I'm currently setting up my blog and I didn't even hesitate to host it myself.
Companies like Medium come and go (e.g. Geocities, Xanga, Myspace, Posterous),
but your dot com is yours as long as you keep paying the domain fee. Guys like
Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood are probably very happy they've kept their
presence on their own dot coms over the last decade.

~~~
zodPod
Wow! I never really thought of Medium in the same realm as Xanga or
Livejournal but you're absolutely right. It's crazy to think that people are
moving _to_ it. LiveJournal and Xanga were always kind of a stepping stone
back in the day. You had your blog on their first then it started getting a
lot of traffic and you moved it to your own domain. It's crazy to see the
opposite happening now adays with Medium!

~~~
krrrh
The big difference is that you can point your own custom domain at Medium, and
if you want to leave, you can move your posts to your own site and maintain
the canonical url structure.

~~~
detaro
They stopped offering that.

------
makecheck
Medium is one example of something that went from “nice” to “annoying” very
quickly. (LinkedIn and Meetup are other examples.) Then it gets “improved” and
customers just want to leave.

I don’t know who these people are that just can’t help themselves, stomping
all over something that was nice the way it was. And it means we need to
desperately revisit open platforms, since you should always have the option of
forking from the pre-shark-jumping point.

~~~
freehunter
If there's any site that has absolutely no need to nag me to log in before
reading, it's Medium. Yet every time I visit, they pop up and say "You've read
XX articles, time to make this official". Why? Why? What benefit do I get from
signing in unless I'm writing a blog?

It's annoying when Quora does it, but at least Quora is a question and answers
site. It's designed for a back and forth and user interaction. Stack Exchange
proves you don't need to make people log in for that, but whatever. Quora does
it. But Medium is not a chat site. It's not a forum. It's not Q&A. It's a blog
site. I'm not writing a blog, I'm just trying to read.

Stop asking me to make an account.

~~~
silverbax88
The issue with Quora, on the other hand, is they want access to one of your
accounts - like Gmail - in order to log you in. Nope.

~~~
wlesieutre
They have big colorful [Continue with Gmail] and [Continue with Facebook]
buttons, but there's a link below that to create an account via any email
address.

------
agentgt
I remember once someone who posted their blog and it was just a listing of
markdown files in a github repository. Not even a jekyllyzed version... just a
folder with date prefixed markdown and rst files.

I have to say it hit me and I was like... damn I should just do that. Forget
all this blogging platforms and getting caught up in look and feel. Just write
text files.

Even with Jekyll (and its variants) I got caught up on making it potentially
look nice but this person just said ... f-it... let google and github figure
out how to organize the content.

~~~
rocky1138
You might be interested to know that this is how blogs got their start. For
reference, see .plan files [0].

[0] [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/plan-
file.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/plan-file.html)

~~~
jcurbo
See also: John Carmack's plan file updates. [https://github.com/ESWAT/john-
carmack-plan-archive](https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive)

------
drcongo
His stats for Medium views vs own-host views are the exact opposite of my
experience. Everything I've ever written on Medium has way more views than
anything I've ever published elsewhere, and we find the same happening for
clients who make the switch too. We tend to recommend publishing on Medium to
clients these days, both for the traffic and the inbound link SEO bonus.

There's tons wrong with Medium, but it still feels like a better option than a
self-hosted system that nobody ever discovers.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
The best practice (and what Baremetrics is doing) is to do both. Post your
content first to your own domain and then later import it with the Medium
article import tool.

~~~
heyyyouu
The double content can be a hard negative hit on SEO, even with canonical
links (it's not perfect).

------
bogomipz
Title: "Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog"

Closing paragraph:

>"Going forward, we are still going to publish to Medium, ...

A better title might have been "Why we are now using both our own blog AND
Medium. I'm guessing that's a less click-baity title though.

------
sheraz
I rarely click on links when I see the source as medium.com. The quality of
content there feels too much like blogspot back in the day.

~~~
bogomipz
Same. Quality issues aside, the experience of trying to read content on
mediums miserable.

Their insistence on taking up an outsized proportion of screen real estate for
a header and footer promoting medium.com is beyond obnoxious.

A platform for consuming content should not distract the reader from
concentrating that content.

Also if I like a blog I'll bookmark it and check back. I do not need to sign
up to "never miss a story from _____."

~~~
blackrose
Yep, nailed it. For those of us who still read despite all that, here's the
browser extension you've been looking for (Make Medium Readable Again):
[https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA](https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA)

~~~
bogomipz
Ha, this is great. Thanks for sharing.

------
styfle
This article has the same conclusion I came to...use Medium to syndicate[0]
content, not originate content.

Medium is still very useful to get content to readers that would otherwise not
visit your website.

Articles I wrote that were picked up by a "publisher" on Medium get way more
views than anything on my own domain.

To put some real numbers on it, one article I wrote this month got 92 hits on
my personal website[1] but 429 hits on hackernoon[2].

That makes me motivated to write because people will actually read it :)

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

[1]:
[https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2018-01-01-es6-pr...](https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2018-01-01-es6-proxy-
localization.md)

[2]: [https://hackernoon.com/es6-proxy-and-
localization-c1269bbc0a...](https://hackernoon.com/es6-proxy-and-
localization-c1269bbc0a26)

------
lucideer
> _ultimately your takeaway is “I read this article on Medium”, and that’s not
> what I wanted. I wanted to get back to people saying “I read this article on
> Baremetrics”._

Is that what you'd be getting back to though, or would it be "I read this
article on some blog I found on Google" (or didn't find, since—as he
says—Medium is excellent at surfacing content).

He says his traffic has slumped since the Medium switch; it may be causal, or
not.

------
dmerfield
I run a small blogging platform ([https://blot.im](https://blot.im)) and get a
steady stream of Medium-apostates who've made this realization. Medium is a
deeply flawed product and is not designed in the best interests of its writers
or its readers. I recommend _The Billionaire 's Typewriter_ by Matthew
Butterick if you're interested in why this is so:

[https://practicaltypography.com/billionaires-
typewriter.html](https://practicaltypography.com/billionaires-typewriter.html)

Medium's trendy design can be enticing but I'd try to steer people towards a
platform over which they have control.

~~~
kaushalmodi
I'm getting a 404 here: [https://blot.im/guides](https://blot.im/guides)

~~~
dmerfield
Oops, I was working on the documentation earlier today. Will fix those broken
links tomorrow. Thanks for letting me know!

------
willow9886
> They’ve been fumbling left and right trying to figure out how to make Medium
> sustainable, and I’m just not convinced they’ll always do what’s best for us
> and our business.

This is the risk of becoming dependent on any outside service or company for
_your_ critical business activities.

SaaS services make your life easier... until they stop working the way you
want, go out of business, get acquired and shuttered, etc. etc.

Pick and choose wisely. And always have a backup plan!

------
TailorJones
Medium seems to hate mobile users - always putting up a non-closable popup.

~~~
warrenm
They want you to use the Medium app

------
pilingual
I've been meaning to blog more, and currently I have 2 posts on Medium. Part
of the problem is the work it takes to make a solid post. But mostly, as Fred
Wilson points out, it is the lack of control. Want to add a small image
customly placed? Can't do it. Want to provide your non-logged in readers an
experience where an annoying interstitial doesn't appear _every_ time they
visit? Can't do it.

I have thought about syndication, and I'm glad to learn here about the import
tool.

Edit: Incidentally, where is Dustin Curtis? There is opportunity here. Own
your blog _and_ make it social. Must be a way.

------
Groxx
> _I realized Medium is really great about surfacing content, but it removes
> the face of it. It neutralizes all content to basically be author-agnostic.
> It’s like Walmart or Amazon in that you can buy from thousands of different
> brands, but you rarely actually know what brand you’re buying…you just know
> “I got it from Amazon.”_

Medium has pretty much always pushed the stance that they're the "face" of the
blogs on the site. You're not hosting your blog _on_ Medium, you're writing
_for_ Medium. Heck, their "our story" section says right at the top:

> _Medium taps into the brains of the world’s most insightful writers,
> thinkers, and storytellers to bring you the smartest takes on topics that
> matter. So whatever your interest, you can always find fresh thinking and
> unique perspectives._

That's pretty clearly "Medium has great content", not "look at these excellent
bloggers". They're a curator / reading platform, intentionally emphasizing the
value you get _from Medium itself_.

Given that stance, loss of brand identity seems like a pretty natural outcome.

------
rusbus
I recently decided to move from Svtble elsewhere. I looked at medium briefly
but wasn't super thrilled. I ended up with using Hugo and hosting it with
Netlify.

Pushing to GitHub publishes my blog , it looks pretty nice and I have total
control over it.

And most importantly, as the author notes, it's "my blog", hosted on my site
with links to hire me.

Definitely way more enjoyable, and as a result I blog a lot more.

------
nailer
> We’ll publish new content two weeks later to Medium (so the initial
> publishing of the content is able to get solidified as the primary source
> from an SEO standpoint).

Hrm interesting, but if it's the same content, won't Google rank the copy
Medium very poorly?

~~~
michaelbuckbee
The general term for what Baremetrics is doing is called "content syndication"
which is the fancy buzzword term for putting all your content on your own
blog/domain first and then copying/importing it to other sites.

What makes Google not flip out and de-rank your content for duplication is two
things:

1\. There is a specific rel=canonical tag that sites can add into their
headers pointing at the URL of the source article.

Medium's import tool (which is hidden at
[https://medium.com/p/import](https://medium.com/p/import) ) will add this
header to the articles you import with it, pointing them back to your blog and
not hurting you and maybe helping your SEO.

2\. There is a notion of timeliness - that if you post on your blog first,
wait for Google to index your content there and then post to a place where
there isn't a rel=canonical option (like Quora, Tumblr, etc.)

If you're trying to convince someone else that they shouldn't put all their
eggs in the Medium basket, point them to this article which is the "nuke it
from orbit" article on the subject:

[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?rel=hn)

~~~
heyyyouu
The problem is that rel=canonical isn't always effective. So you can still get
the SEO hit. Esp. if Google reads which site posted first what wrong (it
happens)

------
tomc1985
The less we patronize organizations that serve their own good as opposed to
the general good, the better.

Medium took something wonderful -- elegant, self-service blog hosting -- and
ruined it.

------
city41
I don't understand why anyone posts on Medium. If you are an individual, a
github blog is easy to set up and completely free. If you are a business, I
don't understand relinquishing control and diminishing your brand. Whenever I
visit Medium it asks me to create an account, which is mildly annoying. Id' be
worried Medium will increase the annoyances to a point you'd have no choice
but to move elsewhere, which is a hassle.

~~~
juvoni
For people or businesses that don't have enough reach Medium is a reasonable
tradeoff to get more reach on their network.

------
Hoasi
Medium works great as an amplifier and as an aggregator. It can get you
additional traffic for your blog, product or site. But yeah, own your own
content.

------
coding123
I'm reading and re-reading the first sentence with the words "has becoming".
And I'm totally stumped if that is proper or not, my mind says "is becoming".
Certainly a new usage to me, but I'm not convinced its actually incorrect.

~~~
Shpigford
Haha, sorry, I've still got a bit of flu fog. Fixed. :P

------
tracker1
Along a similar note... anyone have suggestions on tooling to publish from
markdown files with yml front matter to a github site? I took the time to
convert my blog to a more generic format, but got lazy on building tooling.

~~~
etskinner
Use the default GitHub site generator, Jekyll

[https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-as-a-static-
si...](https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-as-a-static-site-
generator-with-github-pages/)

------
shopkins
All great reasons to leave. We really need to consider who's getting enriched
when we put crucial parts of our businesses on certain platforms, and in
Medium's case, it seems like they absorb most of the value (I always cringe
when people say "check out my Medium post").

I've kept a _personal_ blog on Write.as for the past few years, and while it's
still not self-hosting, I can at least get my data out, have a custom domain
and syndicate to Medium when I'm really fiending for those claps (hint: I'm
usually not).

------
CodeWriter23
Viewing Medium as a content discovery / syndication tool instead of a blogging
platform is pretty insightful. Now I have a reason to use Medium, where I
previously did not.

------
rodolphoarruda
I have stopped reading anything in Medium because I cannot save the page for
offline reading using the Evernote Webclip browser extension.

~~~
QasimK
I encountered this problem on iOS where you have no control. On Firefox I
managed to solve it with a lot of effort of scrolling to get the images to
load and carefully selecting how to clip the page. It kind of works.

It did more to make me re-assess why I’m paying for Evernote than make me
avoid Medium.

------
zodPod
I agree with this a lot. I barely take note of the author or their site when I
read stuff on Medium. So it makes a lot of sense if you want people to read
the stuff you write but it seems to make much less sense from a marketing
perspective assuming that I'm not alone in the way I use it. Though from the
article that seems to not be the case.

------
tandav
My wish: much more developers use github issues for blogging.

~~~
untog
Github pages, sure. But Github _issues_? How/why would you blog through that?

~~~
adnzzzzZ
I've been doing it for a while
([https://github.com/SSYGEN/blog](https://github.com/SSYGEN/blog)) and it
works fine. It has markdown support and a commenting system, which is
basically everything I need. Although it has its limitations depending on what
kind of blogging you're doing, so it doesn't work for everyone.

~~~
madebysquares
Using GH issues for a blog doesn't seem like it could really work for most
people. While you can get comments and discussions which is cool, GH isn't a
great way to read long form content IMO. Plus if you want any time of
analytics how can you find views/reads/etc. On side note you're current
tutorial looks very neat, I've never used LUA so I'm going to try and follow
along.

------
urda
Much like blogger before it, people are starting to figure out it's best to
have your own digital home on the internet.

Medium echoes Blogger today, the downturn is coming.

------
kentf
I have been waiting for a post like this for a while. Thanks for sharing.

------
dabeeeenster
I'm thinking of building a blogging API as a Service (kind of like moltin but
for blogging instead of ecommerce).

Would anyone be interested in that?

~~~
mprev
Would contentful be a similar idea?

------
contingencies
Medium is banned in China.

~~~
kim0
And Egypt! Why, beats me though

------
ucaetano
I applaud that. Medium makes it far harder to get a glimpse of the actual
source of the article. Take this post, for example, HN lists (baremetrics.com)
as the source. If it had been published on Medium it would have listed
(medium.com) which is irrelevant.

~~~
pmlnr
> Medium makes it far harder to get a glimpse of the actual source of the
> article

This is even more worse when it comes to pinterest and the source of the
image. Seeing stuff like "image source: pinterest" in articles is disgusting.

~~~
fenwick67
Even worse: "Source: Google Images"

------
tzahola
Wow, it’s almost as if making free content for another company to capitalize
on is not the brightest idea.

------
zitterbewegung
Yea, I'm evaluating options to get off of medium also (I dislike the interface
and I don't know how claps will make me money if at all). Right now I am
evaluating [https://zarf.co](https://zarf.co) which allows you to put a
paywall to your blog posts.

~~~
Veen
It's an interesting idea, but I think most people who publish on Medium are
interested in self-promotion, rather than a direct cash payout. It would be
lovely if writers could make a decent amount of money publishing to a small
audience of dedicated followers who will pay, but the evidence is that
advertising makes more money than direct payments.

------
bitwize
Good on them. Medium is Tumblr for people who are a bit too mature for purple
hair and Steven Universe. The social currency earned through Medium can't be
reliably exchanged for anything that matters.

~~~
matthewmacleod
I literally have no idea what you are banging on about; Medium appears to be a
simple blogging site, and that's about the extent of it. I think you've
probably just projected any other attributes you perceive.

~~~
bitwize
Both Medium and Tumblr are simple blogging sites the way the popular kids'
table at the cafeteria is a simple table. Both have a secondary function as
markets for whuffie among a certain crowd, and it's that function which
distinguishes them from other blog platforms. That's what I was getting at.

------
jl6
I used to run my own blog, but I became disillusioned with the direction
HTML/CSS/JavaScript was taking. I lost confidence that my content would
continue to be readable in future browsers. I know I could have customised a
solution that perfectly preserved the content, but it would have been a lot of
work, plus ongoing maintenance.

Now I have a Medium blog and I export articles to PDF for safekeeping. Dead
easy.

~~~
etskinner
Why not just stick with basic HTML and CSS? Isn't it likely that Medium will
fall out of favor faster? There are many static site generators out there that
perform just fine for blogs, and are not hard to use.

