
Ask HN: Why does anyone still use Medium? - oblib
There were a couple links here today in the &quot;New&quot; section with headlines that peaked my interests enough to click on them but they went to &quot;Medium.com&quot; which requires I &quot;sign in&quot; with Google or Facebook.<p>I won&#x27;t do that. I&#x27;m not a hardcore &quot;do not track&quot; surfer but I have my limits and that&#x27;s just a line I won&#x27;t cross.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a leap to say this probably happens more than authors think.
======
stevekemp
For the future you should say "piqued my interest".

As for Medium, it has a lot of people using it because it was popular,
fashionable, and free for a long time. These days as a reader it is terrible -
I don't bother clicking medium links, and as an author I'd want to host my own
content, not get it mixed in with the other noise hosted nearby.

~~~
6502nerdface
> For the future you should say "piqued my interest".

Classic example of a common eggcorn. More details at
[https://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/86/peak/](https://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/86/peak/)

------
cellar_door
What I find quite annoying is that Medium has clearly spent a lot of effort on
SEO. Whenever I Google a technical topic, the top results always include
poorly written Medium articles.

~~~
ogre_codes
If someone built a search engine with a blacklist feature I’d switch to it and
Medium would be on the blacklist. Annoying default behavior and it does
something to make images look like hell in reader view.

I have no idea why it gets bumped up in SEO, content on Medium is very hit or
miss.

~~~
pier25
I agree. I'd also love to block Pinterest from the image search results.

~~~
ogre_codes
Oh god yes. Really any site that paywalls or limits content viewing to their
app should be Auto-excluded from search results.

------
rodneyg_
As a writer on Medium I didn’t know it requires sign in for free content. I
plan to move my content to a personally hosted blog but haven’t got to it yet.
I also get a lot of views (10k+ mon) with no real effort on my part.

~~~
ben11kehoe
I don't think it requires sign-in for content that's not behind the paywall. I
think it occasionally prompts the user to sign up or sign in, but you can
click outside the box to move past it. It's hostile that they don't exclude an
explicit "dismiss" button, though.

~~~
hopia
I don't think clicking outside of the box works anymore. You really have to
reopen the page in incognito mode in order to read it, if you don't want to
register & sign in.

~~~
Ntrails
That appears to be untrue, given I read the post today by clicking on the link
and never got so much as asked to sign it

------
lloydde
[https://nomedium.dev/](https://nomedium.dev/) is a new site, where the author
describes what he doesn’t like about Medium including “ When sharing a Medium
article, there is a high degree of uncertainty that the person opening the
link will be asked to pay money to read the content.”

I learned about it at
[https://mobile.twitter.com/ChrisShort/status/121849195514918...](https://mobile.twitter.com/ChrisShort/status/1218491955149185029)

~~~
snarfy
"...there is a high degree of uncertainty that the person opening the link
will be asked to pay money to read the content.”

I feel the same way about clicking links on hacker news.

------
aeturnum
I have used Medium and would consider using them in the future.

Basically, Medium is at a sweet spot of pleasant presentation and zero
maintenance. I don't write things to make money and don't particularly care
that Medium can make money off my "work." I am also not at a place where I
want to actively maintain a self-hosted solution (which is totally possible, I
just don't want to keep it up).

All the downsides of the service are real, but they're in line with other
services that people use (facebook, etc) and I've generally been skeptical
that they're worse. That said, they recently started having much more
aggressive "log in" popups and I'm once again interested in alternatives.

~~~
basch
If you dont care about discoverability, and the social network side of Medium,
[https://telegra.ph/](https://telegra.ph/) is a great alternative.

~~~
wholien
how do you use it? Just type and publish, that's it, though?

~~~
basch
More or less. Theres a way to use a Telegram account to log in and save your
articles, allowing you to edit them later from other machines.

------
riskneutral
I found some good articles by real people about real life things that I don’t
think I would ever have read in another publication. I paid and bought a
subscription to Medium after that. I like the idea of paying writers for their
work and if I ever get around to writing myself I would use Medium for the
same reason.

~~~
beatgammit
Please don't. Medium is a very annoying platform and pushes away a significant
portion of readers just because of the hosting. I only click through to a
medium article as a last resort.

That being said, I also believe authors should be paid for their work. I pay
for news subscriptions for precisely this reason, and I'm considering using
scroll[1], which seems to be a simpler way to subscribe to a large number of
information sources without having to have a subscription for each one.

I'm not going to support a product that I find annoying.

\- [1] [https://scroll.com/](https://scroll.com/)

~~~
iamhamm
Interesting opinion.

------
y42
For authors the access barrier is pretty high, IMHO. It seems like there are
millions of authors and posts fighting for the top home page position. I once
wrote a post because I thought Medium is a great platform to reach a lot of
readers. It isn't. It took around two weeeks until I got the notice that my
post is eventually being ignored because there are to many posts to be
reviewed. What I understand. But this also means, Medium is not the platform
that gives you millions of impressions in the blink of an eye.

Publishing on Medium on one side takes away the pain of hosting your stuff on
your own premises. That's all. But - as far as I understand it - you need to
put a lot of effort into writing dozens of posts before you are actually being
considered from the "post-review-team". I would rather spend time and effort
into SEO to push my self hosted content. Seems easier and more sustainable.

------
archsurface
What was the attraction to Medium in the first place? As someone who doesn't
write article I wouldn't have noticed if all the Medium articles I'd read had
been on Wordpress.

~~~
jadbox
It's all about exposure and discoverability, as Medium does as good job of
effectively giving your blog 'free advertising' by recommending your posts to
other users. It would be great if there was a decentralized way of doing this
somehow.

~~~
pier25
These are the stats of my most read article:
[https://imgur.com/BAICxnm](https://imgur.com/BAICxnm)

As you can see only 8% came from inside Medium.

------
crawftv
Exposure is one reason. Two of my articles have over 3k views. On medium you
can make good content and get a decent amount of views much easier than
hosting own blog and growth hacking.

~~~
pier25
It's super easy to get 10k views on an article. My most read article has over
100k views. Probably less than 10% of the views come from Medium itself or
Google so there is really no benefit in using Medium. You could use a static
host and give your readers a better experience.

~~~
kick
It's definitely not hard to get eyes on an article, but you're probably
underestimating the amount of views that Medium brings. It has excellent
discovery, and based on anecdata from friends who have tried A/B testing this
stuff, 90%+ easily come from Medium, especially in the 100,000+ view-range,
unless you're intentionally going out of your way to spam the link to your
personal site everywhere.

Also, a substantial amount of views come from search engine traffic with
almost every bit of content on the internet, unless you're doing it wrong.
Your most recent post is full of frequently-searched terms. It seems unlikely
that little of it is coming from search engines, and almost impossible that
most of that viewership is coming from something other than Medium's
discovery.

Maybe try A/B testing with your next article? I think we'd all be interested
in that.

~~~
pier25
You can easily see where the traffic comes from in the stats for each article.

I just checked it and my most read article has about 170k views. About 50% of
that came from HN and direct URL. Only 8% from Medium.

See for yourself: [https://imgur.com/BAICxnm](https://imgur.com/BAICxnm)

------
pier25
I'm guessing Medium is burning money fast and hasn't found a way to generate
revenue which is why they have become so aggressive now. I'm guessing they
still have a couple of years before they run out of cash but I doubt they will
be able to raise another series of funding.

The subscription thing will not work because 1) there is no guarantee you will
get good content from Medium and 2) people want to support content creators
not faceless platforms (with questionable practices).

Of course content creators should be able to monetize their content but Medium
is certainly not the way to achieve that.

------
BenGosub
If you have a user, after reading a few posts you are denied from reading if
you don't get a subscription.

The Practical Dev (dev.to) has been consistently growing, while adding
incredible features and offering everything for free (and open source).

My guess is that dev.to should create a similar amount of traffic as Medium
and maybe outgrow it, since many writers/readers have migrated over there.

My advice is to move to dev.to, it doesn't make sense to write on Medium
anymore.

------
chirau
Medium does NOT require you to sign in. It asks you to, but you don't have to
be signed in to read the posts. You can just close the prompt or click outside
of it.

Source: I have never signed up for Medium and. I have been able to read in
full any article I click on up until today.

As much as you may dislike it, I don't think you should spread misinformation
when you could simply have investigated this first.

~~~
oblib
I went back to those articles and you're right, you can click through.

But I did not "spread misinformation". The fact that I didn't know you can
just click outside that login screen to read their content isn't because I was
misinformed. It was because I was intentionally not informed.

And I won't be patting myself on the back now that I know it's easy to get
around either. I'd rather just avoid sites that play silly tricks like this in
order to collect more data on me.

~~~
chirau
If you walk up to a bar, see a cash box at the door (maybe for a cover, maybe
for donations) but no one asks you to pay and you choose not to enter and walk
away because of the bucket, then you go around asking people why they would go
to said club when it has a cover charge, I believe that counts as
misinformation.

If you tell people a site has a paywall when it doesn't, that is
misinformation. If you tell people that a site requires login when it doesn't,
that is also misinformation.

~~~
oblib
>>If you tell people a site has a paywall when it doesn't, that is
misinformation

I did not tell people here there was a "paywall". I told them Medium requires
I ""sign in" with Google or Facebook". The truth is they don't, but they make
it look like they do.

So, are you deliberately trying to misinform others here now by claiming I
said they have a "paywall"?

That seems a lot closer to that line you've accused me of crossing than what I
wrote here.

------
zzo38computer
Somehow, I do not have that problem. I do not have an account with Google,
Facebook, or Medium, but the article is readable for me anyways, if cookies
are disabled.

However, they use too big font and too narrow width; this can be avoided by
disabling CSS as well.

------
estomagordo
Because the vast majority of internet readers have no such ludicrous lines
they won't cross for arbitrary reasons.

------
tcgv
I have always been able to just close the (anoying) Sign In popup and read the
article without loging in.

Probably one of the main reasons people use it is because it's convenient and
easy to use. Not everyone wants, or has the required skils, to
configure/manage/monitor a custom blog.

~~~
makeavish
And you can always clear your Medium cookies to get more free articles.

------
geofft
Medium doesn't actually require you to sign in (for free content, at least).
It just asks you to, but you can dismiss the dialog.

That said, I think you're right that people get confused about this more than
authors think and close the site without reading the page.

------
salamwaddah
I mostly get there by search results. I don’t specifically go to medium and
search it.

------
ben11kehoe
I think people don't realize that Medium doesn't require articles to be behind
the paywall. There are two ways an article gets paywalled:

1\. You opt-in to getting paid for views.

2\. If you put your article up for curation AND it gets picked. If it gets
picked to be shown in curated feeds, it goes behind the paywall, but if it
doesn't get picked by a curator, it's openly accessible.

If you don't select getting paid for views or put it up for curation, it's
always openly accessible.

I use Medium because hosting my own blog would be too much of a hassle. I
never put my articles behind the paywall; my aim in writing is not to get
paid, and I don't put them up for curation because I don't have an explicit
goal of increasing my readership.

I'm also a Medium member, because I do think we need ways of paying for
content, and paying for good content (the curation part). Maybe Medium's model
is not the best way to do that, but I'd rather support a company that's trying
to find the right balance than declare that all content should be free.

~~~
detaro
The alternative to Medium isn't necessarily "hosting your own", they are not
the only blog hosting service around.

I personally would suggest at least going for your own domain, so you can
switch providers if they turn worse, if you're ok with spending some money on
it.

------
swiftcoder
Almost all Medium articles can still be viewed in incognito Firefox (you get
"1 free article" in each new incognito session).

The gradual paywalling of the web continues apace, however. Medium is just the
latest in a long trend of content moving onto walled platforms (first social
media, then news sites, now blogging)...

~~~
makeavish
You can always clear your Medium cookies to get more free articles in your
normal tab.

------
arikr
Medium provides a lot of value to both readers and writers.

I think people don't like signing up or paying because they're not used to
having to do that, so it feels unfair.

But if you look at the trade-off objectively, it's very worth it.

Medium adds much more than $10/month of value to my life, just in terms of the
articles I read there. That's perhaps two coffees.

Just another perspective.

I think we often have unreasonably high standards for what we're owed by
software companies, that we don't have when those companies make hardware and
physical goods.

~~~
leotaku
I find it interesting you say that Medium provides +10€ value to you every
month.

I'd say the writers that choose to be on Medium and would otherwise use
another platform, provide that value to you. Be realistic, how many of the
writers you enjoy actually benefit from the affiliate program? I would guess
not many. (I could be wrong of course)

For the "high expectations" argument I'd say there are other options that
match those expectations. Of course we should be able to say Medium is worse
than them.

------
raverbashing
Press 'esc' and the popup disappears

------
kyriakos
Why did medium become popular in the first place? What sets it aside from any
other blogging platform?

------
benjaminsuch
They don't require it. At least I have an "X" Button.

------
simonsarris
bane voice: "No one cared who I was until I put [it] on the Medium."

It looks nice enough, people read the things I write. When the editors like
the things I write they send it to lots of people. For people who don't
already have any kind of following, these are big plusses.

------
epanchin
Ask HN: why does HN allow moans disguised as questions?

Nothing productive will come of this topic.

~~~
oblib
>>Ask HN: why does HN allow moans disguised as questions?

That's a perfect oxymoron.

But, to answer your question, learning more about this subject is exactly why
I posted the question here, and it wasn't moaning. I have nothing personally
against people that publish or read stuff on Medium, or Medium as a company.
I'm truly curious about why people use it.

I learned quite a bit from the responses in fact. Several people wrote about
why they still use it, several others offered alternatives to Medium. Others
pointed out their own experiences publishing on Medium and several why they
stopped. Most the responses were very informative and insightful.

