
Ask HN: Why use Medium.com over a blog? - bire98
Can someone explain the prevalance of medium.com over other formats, such as hosting a blogging site?<p>The design seems homogenized and &quot;just ok&quot;, and the site is extremely heavyweight for the content it brings.<p>The social content is sparse, and instead I&#x27;m given links that resemble advertising.
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arenaninja
I would not use medium.com to write a blog (in fact I write a blog with no
audience and it's not on Medium).

First, the average quality of a Medium blog post continues to go down. A year
ago I wouldn't have hesitated to follow a medium link, but now a combination
of 1) low quality posts 2) low quality writers and 3) annoying popup means I
stare at the link to try and see if I've read from this author before and if
what they wrote is worth the hassle

Just my 2 cents, I'm sure others derive value from it, it's just that I don't

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itronitron
I find it really depends on author. There are some great ones but also a lot
of ramblings that never get to the point. For sheer entertainment value I
suggest reading the latter type of articles with an exaggerated valley-girl
accent.

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drakonka
I was tempted to try Medium and even made an account, but more and more I
value hosting and controlling my own content. So many popular blogging
platforms have come and gone, if I jumped on every bandwagon over the years
I'd have gone through a ton of painful data
exports/imports/restyling/maintenance/etc. Hosting my own bypasses all that.

However, there can still be a benefit in certain audiences. Medium isn't that
thing for me, but for example I sometimes repost my content on another
website's blog section - this gets more niche views and most importantly
feedback from a group of people relevant to the topic. I always make sure to
check that this is actually allowed and mention that this content is reposted
for the sake of transparency.

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ecesena
I personally use medium for the distribution. I also like the distinction
between views and reads in their analytics -- I'm sure it's not perfect, but
at least you have some metric to say if people are just clicking or not.

There are also some "side" effects on being on medium. You'll start with low
reach, but the more your posts grow, the more you get visibility, and
publications will start reaching out to let you be a contributor. For example,
I'm now a writer for Hackernoon, even though I don't publish that much.

To give you a sense of the numbers, let's get my latest post:
[https://hackernoon.com/solo-the-first-open-source-
fido2-secu...](https://hackernoon.com/solo-the-first-open-source-
fido2-security-key-4b1b491c7bdb)

I'm currently at around 1k views and 650 reads. Plus 1.3k of RSS feeds (all
from hackernoon). I get usually 50-100 reads by posting on hn (without getting
to the front page). This warms medium up, and hackernoon brings most of the
rest. In 2-3 months these numbers will be at least double, thanks to SEO.

I'm not saying that you can't achieve these things with your own blog, but
it's certainly harder and slower, unless you have already a decent followship
on other socials.

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Huhty
It's quick and easy to get going. It comes with build in social features for
both writers and publications.

But it also comes with negatives, biggest one being that most content is just
old "re-purposed" content from other sources.

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billconan
one benefit is that it helps you find audience. your post will be pushed to
readers who share the same interests. I would never get this many followers if
I host my blog myself.

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cloudsqueeze
The advantage is a community of users. At one point it was worth it to have a
blog on LinkedIn - the readership was amazing back when it was Pulse. Medium
seems to have such a readership. The downside of is something similar to
LinkedIn purchases Pulse and then changes everything to where blogs get no
readers. What I see working is people building micro teaser blogs on Medium
and driving traffic to other sites.

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meagher
like other's mentioned: audience.

i recently switched from my free github pages jekyll blog to posthaven
([https://websgrain.com/posthaven](https://websgrain.com/posthaven)).

everytime i sat down to write, i wanted to fix or update something on my blog.
it became too distracting. having an environment for just writing with limited
customization is really focusing.

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abledon
Guess it depends on your style , I love gh pages Jekyll I can customize the
page post or whatever to be really thematic and styled towArds the content .
Think opening a d n d codex or a beautiful large picture book of early 1990s.
Yes there’s text but there are side Call outs with weird and delightful css
stylings ala Ann leckie book cover . A way to breath personality and soul onto
the electric page , maybe not in some peoples mindscape, but to me definitely
makes tutorials or lab note type blogs about a technical journey with deep
learning or game design etc much more of a compelling read. Like playing a
9.99 puzzle game off steam store

