
Dear Devs, please stop using Medium for your contents - todotask
Having a hard time to reading without the annoying popup for your sign up, please, let me know which other platforms do you use?
======
jraph
This comes up again and again, but a personal solution until things move is to
disable Javascript on Medium. Then, you are presented with a fully working
page, without any distraction. Just disable JS on Medium. It "gracefully
improves".

~~~
andybak
I've reached my article limit and it won't show me the full text even with js
disabled.

Do people realise that interested readers aren't getting to their content
because they chose Medium?

~~~
fyp
In chrome, open developer tools then in "Application" tab, "Clear Storage"
subtab, click "clear site data"

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sexy_seedbox
I don't get why devs work so hard on their project/tutorial, only to be lazy
on the last step (publishing/announcement) and give away their content to be
published on Medium.

It's very easy to roll out a Hugo/Jekyll/Zola static blog published for free
on Github/Gitlab/Netlify. Then point it to your own domain name so you own
your content and don't have to worry about what some 3rd party site does on
top of your writing.

~~~
austhrow743
It's not laziness. Medium comes with an audience and rolling your own likely
doesn't.

It's a question of do you get more people from medium than people you lose
from other sources because your post is on medium?

~~~
buboard
What audience? All the medium articles i read, i found here, in reddit or
Twitter

~~~
krapp
You just described three link aggregators, sites whose purpose is to spread
third party content. The audience is the people posting Medium articles, and
the people who follow them back to Medium.

~~~
buboard
shocking i know, but i don't follow anyone on medium (i dont even have an
account)

~~~
krapp
Neither do I, but that isn't really relevant. Medium has an audience of
readers who don't sign up for the service, but that's still an audience.

~~~
effingwewt
If the responses on their site to articles posted there are any indicator they
don't even have a built-in audience any more. Even articles that make it to
the front page here, the hn comments are half or more people complaining
(rightly so imho) about medium.

Medium used to be good, people published good content there. but as they
increased their gatekeeping it seemed like there was a sharp decline in
quality and quantity.

~~~
krapp
I'm not disagreeing, but it doesn't really matter how high the quality of the
content is on any site, more people on HN are going to complain about the
presence of javascript and attempts at monetization than will ever bother to
read the article.

It only happens more often with Medium because Medium articles are posted more
often. I don't think it's an objective indicator of much, beyond HN's
generally cantankerous attitude towards the modern web.

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DerekQ
Medium hate comes up again and again here, and I get it to a degree. But,
Medium delivers an audience that hosting your own rarely does.

Fair enough if all you want to do is post to HN, but if posting to HN is only
one delivery channel, you're giving up a huge audience just to placate techie
UI sensibilities on this site.

Posting on my own blog gets me single digit views, because I don't have an
audience of my own. Sure, I could and probably should work on that, but
working on that is a long term plan. Posting to Medium via an established
publication such as The Startup, HackerNoon or The Mission has delivered 5k to
50k reads (not views) for me in the past.

I think a sanity check is required here. Annoy a few techie users or have your
work read by many thousands who would not otherwise read it. To me that's a no
brainer.

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have_faith
I tried dev.to but the signal to noise ratio was much worse than Medium. It
combines the worst parts of Medium with the worst parts of Twitter. I had high
hopes for it though and hope it can improve.

Medium seems to strike a good a balance as I have been able to find with
regards to quality albeit with a little searching.

~~~
IceCreamGondola
Agreed, the quality of content on there isn't poor in itself but is aimed at
getting low hanging fruit.

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jjjbokma
I self-host two blogs [0][1]. I even made the static site generator I wrote
for the second one available [2].

Each time I visit a Medium page I wonder why people are still using it.

[0] [http://johnbokma.com/blog/](http://johnbokma.com/blog/)

[1] [https://plurrrr.com/](https://plurrrr.com/)

[2] [https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog](https://github.com/john-
bokma/tumblelog)

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fileeditview
Shameless plug: I created Glyph, a static site generator utilizing Github
Issues and Github Pages. It should be great for developers because 99% of the
time you will use Github anyways and you don't need any other accounts to
publish. (hn link:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16776047))

Checkout the following resources if you are interested:

[https://github.com/dbriemann/glyph](https://github.com/dbriemann/glyph)

[https://github.com/dbriemann/glyph-zero](https://github.com/dbriemann/glyph-
zero)

As an example have a look at my blog (not very active):

[https://dbriemann.github.io/blog/](https://dbriemann.github.io/blog/)

You can click on the "Discuss" button to go to the "original" markdown as a
Github issue.

~~~
cwilkes
I quickly looked over your GH pages for examples and didn’t see anything
beyond the link to your personal blog, which you note hasn’t been updated in a
year and a half.

Maybe making a post on that blog about how you use your own software would
make more people interested in your project? Plus it can act as documentation.

It would greatly reduce the friction people have trying out something new to
see it being actively used.

~~~
fileeditview
The blog I linked was created with Glyph. There is also a blog post about it:

[https://dbriemann.github.io/blog/2-introducing-glyph-
static-...](https://dbriemann.github.io/blog/2-introducing-glyph-static-site-
generator-powered-by-github-issues-and-pages.html)

In fact that is the reason why I linked it because as you said I am not
writing any blog posts these days.

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otras
I host a simple Hugo blog on GitHub pages. The only cost for me is the domain
name. Highly recommend Hugo, since it makes everything outside of writing
easy.

The downside is that discoverability is lower, but my goal for it is writing
for myself rather than getting page views.

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brainlessdev
[https://github.com/fnune/nay](https://github.com/fnune/nay)

A Chrome/Mozilla extension to help you avoid clicking on links from websites
you don't like. I use it to block medium.com links.

~~~
everybodyknows
Been wanting something like this, will try it on FF desktop.

Mobile support would be a big attraction for users with low-powered devices.
Accidental taps on slow links to fatty content e.g. news sites can trigger
some pain.

~~~
brainlessdev
It supports mobile I think. I'm the maintainer, so please open an issue if it
doesn't.

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ruairidhwm
I moved off medium to self-host my blog via Gatsby and Netlify. It's a far
nicer experience and I wouldn't go back!

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dwheeler
For a personal domain, own your own domain or be owned by someone else.

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sethammons
I wonder if there is space for a web-ring type solution. Have a discovery
service that an author plugs at the bottom/footer of their posts that can link
to similar labeled articles. Now you have discoverability and control of your
content. For monitization, you could go with ads and/or subscription.

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1337shadow
gitlab.com/pages provides many example blog engines they will host for free

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pythonbase
I use Medium to direct traffic to my personal blog. This is what 3rd party
publishing channels are for, be it Medium, LinkedIn or FB groups/pages.

~~~
koehr
Exactly my thought.

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pinehqcom
I setup this alternative for Medium, [https://bun4.com](https://bun4.com).
Make a Pull Request on
[https://github.com/pinehq/bun4](https://github.com/pinehq/bun4) and it
automatically compiles. Stop complaining and start writing ;)

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TheLastSamurai
Fully agree with you, best option is to start your own blog using either
Blogger.com or a statically hosted site at Github.com (they allow static-
hosting). And if you can spend some money on it, why not register your own
domain and go for your own Wordpress or Drupal hosted site? Own your content
and be your own master if you call yourself a developer!

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BrandiATMuhkuh
It might not work for everyone, but you can answer your own question on
stackoverflow. If you want to write a blog post about how to setup e.g.: a
Webserver on a raspberry pi, you could formulate it as a question on
stackoverflow, and answer your own question. I personally really like this
approach.

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lmiller1990
I post to my own blog and cross-post to Medium. I get a lot more views on my
Medium cross posts - that's why I continue to post there. I've found job
freelance opportunities via people visiting my Github, which they said they
found from Medium.

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foursixnine
I use jekyll since ages, since it was easy to set up && publish, and lately
started syncing the content to dev.to in order to try to amplify the audience
(although most of what I write, are just oneliners, so that I don't forget)

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koehr
I think the best way is in the middle. It is called POSSE: Publish Own Site,
Syndicate Elsewhere. You own your stuff by first posting it on your own page
and then syndicate it to other places for visibility.

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kresten
Publish on medium?

I instantly close your post.

~~~
coldtea
The reason people publish on Medium is that it comes with a large, eager to
read, audience.

People see numbers of visitors in Medium that they don't see when they post on
their personal websites...

So, unless you also come and check people's personally hosted blogs, and
convince millions to do the same, don't let the door hit you on your way out
when you "instantly close" Medium posts...

~~~
simion314
Not sure why but I expect a big storm when Medium does something
"outrageous"/"politically incorrect" and then people would move in mass. We
need to calculate teh cost of a possible migration in the future, what happens
if you delete your account in protest or they will delete it for you.

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JohnFen
I agree for a number of reasons. I strongly dislike Medium, and avoid it
unless there's something specific of exceptional interest that is only there
(which is reasonably rare).

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heavyset_go
I automatically follow any developer's blog I come across with an RSS feed.
Just putting it out there for anyone who has a blog and wants to share :)

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deca6cda37d0
Someone should start a personal/company dev blog aggregator. Don’t allow any
medium.com URL’s.

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poisonborz
As usual whenever this comes up, no alternatives recommended. And the truth
is, all alternatives are worse currently. They either require way more out-of-
scope effort, or draw in a lot less potential readers.

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dezb
jesus get a MySpace account and be done with it ;-)

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pknerd
Medium is more of a traffic generator for me. I post articles on my blog and
then simply _Import_ them on Medium. Almost 99.9% of my articles are free
without any paywall.

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dr-detroit
Those articles aren't for you they are to impress potential employers who can
afford to pay for Medium.

