
Why I'm Leaving Medium - simonebrunozzi
https://praxis.fortelabs.co/why-im-leaving-medium/
======
PascLeRasc
Can someone explain what this article was about? I've read it several times
and I still have no idea what the main point was, or how it connects to
leaving Medium. It feels like it was machine-generated - all of the sentences
don't relate to each other or say anything on their own, from my reading.

~~~
tonystubblebine
I think it's confusing because he's talking about a feature for Medium
publications that most people don't even know ever existed. For a small
handful of publications, Medium had allowed them to offer their own "pay to
subscribe" program where your subscription fee went directly to the
publication. I think of this as a failed product experiment that Medium's been
slow to kill (Medium is very slow to kill failed experiments in general).

~~~
tonystubblebine
Also, I think he's probably doing the right thing for himself. Tiago is on the
path to getting a mainstream book deal. In self-improvement, he's on the Ben
Hardy or James Clear path. A huge part of that book deal is based on the
number of subscribers to his mailing list.

A book deal is decent money, seemingly everyone gets an advance in the $200k
range. But more importantly, it's a huge career level up for someone like
Tiago. Every activity that doesn't build up your mailing list ends up being
kind of a waste of time.

I suspect that Tiago could actually make more money on Medium publishing
behind their paywall than he's going to make in his personal subscription
program. But it's not enough that it should be his focus.

Also, I assume incentives will change again at Medium down the road as they
keep trying to make the deal work for more and more authors. So maybe he'll
come back, if just to cross post.

------
fhoffa
I've been looking for Medium alternatives, but my audience wants me to
continue on it.

123 votes to where should I publish my posts:

\- 34% Medium

\- 9% Dev.to

\- 45% My company's official blog

\- 12% LinkedIn, my domain, ???

This tells me that - even if Medium continues to annoy their fans with their
new model, I should still consider it as a great platform for quick
publishing.

Survey via Twitter to my 10k followers
([https://twitter.com/felipehoffa/status/1148334055689031681](https://twitter.com/felipehoffa/status/1148334055689031681)).

Disclosure: I'm Felipe Hoffa and I work for Google Cloud - and I frequently
post on Medium and elsewhere.

~~~
gringoDan
Why not cross-post your free content to Medium, LinkedIn, etc? Then you can
take advantage of their distribution while pointing people back to your own
site.

I'm wary of companies/products built entirely on top of other products - too
much risk (see Zynga). Same concept with Medium.

~~~
redorb
Your company blog first, Medium 2 weeks later and always mentioned that 'my
posts are posted [insert url here] 2 weeks earlier'

~~~
fhoffa
My company blog first - yes! Except that I can go from idea to post in 12
hours with Medium, and that's not at all the experience for the official posts
when multiple teams want to chime in...

~~~
fitzroy
These sound like two different kind of posts. Either way, make sure the
canonical location is some place that you or your employer (whoever owns the
content) have control over. I'd suggest:

\- Post your personal stuff on your own domain.

\- Post your Google Cloud stuff on the company blog.

\- Syndicate / cross post to Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, wherever etc. if one
or both make sense for the topic.

\- You don't need to cross post the whole post if the platform doesn’t warrant
it (lots of eyeballs, but hostile to the content-publisher, i.e. Facebook).
You can put 2 paragraphs and a link to "read more on xyzblog". You're mostly
using these services for discovery. In general, treat platforms you don't
control as discovery-only.

\- Encourage and enable readers to subscribe and engage directly at the
canonical location (if practical), and not on the edges, as long as that
doesn’t create a poor experience for them.

\- If you find that more people want to engage / or the conversation is
higher-quality at one of the distribution points (say HackerNews, vs the
comments section of your blog), then provide a link to there from the
canonical location and encourage conversation there.

(edit: Formatting)

------
spiderfarmer
The Flutter community relies heavily on Medium. I try to avoid Medium whenever
I can, but somehow a lot of Googlers think it's the best platform for
technical articles or something.

Some of the writers insist on using screenshots (!) of pieces of code, so I
guess that user experience is not very high on their list of considerations.

~~~
alpb
Do you mind giving examples with links?

~~~
spiderfarmer
Not a Googler, but a literal quote from this article: "As always, I prefer
using screenshots over gists in my articles to show code. I find them easier
to work with, and easier to read."

[https://medium.com/@greg.perry/a-design-pattern-for-
flutter-...](https://medium.com/@greg.perry/a-design-pattern-for-flutter-
db6ccaea2413)

~~~
thesandlord
As a Googler who has a lot of technical content on Medium, I have to agree
that screenshots are much more flexible than Medium's gist support, but I
always add a link to the actual code right under.

For example: [https://medium.com/google-cloud/kubernetes-configmaps-and-
se...](https://medium.com/google-cloud/kubernetes-configmaps-and-
secrets-68d061f7ab5b)

In this example, I have a single gist with multiple files, but Medium can't
display just a single file from that gist at a time (maybe things have
changed, but I don't think so).

Medium's gist and code support in general is sub-par compared to other
platforms IMO, but as a platform it does make it easy to create and share
content that is also easily discoverable.

I'm probably going to start hosting the canonical post on my own domain and
just use Medium to syndicate it.

~~~
spiderfarmer
I noticed that in a lot of articles example code is just missing, like this
one, on mobile:

[https://medium.com/flutter-community/flutter-redux-toast-
not...](https://medium.com/flutter-community/flutter-redux-toast-notification-
fcd0971eaf0f)

I don’t know who’s to blame here but I already hate Medium with a passion and
this is not helping.

------
jammygit
Why do people use medium? Does it help with seo or discoverability?

~~~
PopeDotNinja
The only reason I can think of for posting to Medium is revenue sharing, and I
am not interested in pursuing a career as a creator at this time. Putting up
content people MIGHT find via SEO tactics, only to have people driven away via
a pay wall, seems self defeating.

I suppose you can always post to Medium you and somewhere else, unless that is
a violation of Medium's terms of service. Then your basically turning yourself
into someone who spams everywhere, not just Medium.

So I guess Medium is for creators and spammers. Am I missing something?

~~~
fhoffa
I post to Medium for the same reason I post videos to Youtube: Platform +
audience.

Turns out my audience would rather have me post on Medium than on my personal
blog:

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20444875](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20444875)

~~~
wolco
What audience would prefer a paywall site to an open one? Is your content
free?

------
NancBooker
It is always about how to drive traffic and that will always be part of the
game, whatever you are writing for. Good long form ideas might have a place,
but most people are not interested in that type of information let alone that
type of format. You can have something interesting to say that may benefit
many people, but without marketing to get your ideas out, it becomes a rather
"personal" endeavor. You can try different form of marketing (like click-bait
titles and other gimmicks) to get your ideas out there, but ultimately if you
don't have the cash to fund the campaign to promote your own site, you will be
relying on sites like medium.com or whatever blogs of your choice to have a
hand in spreading your message.

If you truly believed you were writing things that people will want to read,
long form or not, you SHOULD be willing to invest in marketing yourself to
promote your own site. At least enough to justify your "risk vs reward"
balance.

Taking out a Facebook ad for your local area is not as expensive as you might
think and I honestly believe the whole Google Ads and Facebook Ads have
allowed the little guys to buy ads and distribute them to the specific target
they want. The tools are there, what is lacking is the will and confidence to
follow through.

------
allanmacgregor
Ahh is Tuesday time for a "I'm leaving medium post"

------
bbulkow
I was going to do some technical posts for medium, but i found as a user they
were not surfacing good technical content. They were surfacing bubble gum
articles better placed in cosmopolitan, even after i set my preferences and
explicitly searched multiple times. My click history did have me clicking on
articles like that, but only on moments of weakness, i didn't intend to not
did i want an infinite list of vacuous content.

There is a classic problem in content recommendations, what someone says they
want vs what they actually click, good systems ( from 2008 ) do a blend, then
start balancing.

I cancelled my 'open paywall' and will probably start a WordPress.

~~~
tonystubblebine
FWIW, Medium switched editorial and curation strategies for technical content
and all the technical content leveled up. My standard for technical content is
O'Reilly circa 2003, and Medium's not there yet. But I'm hopeful that Medium's
recent changes are a precursor to leveling up again down the road.

The change is to add a lot more human curation mixed in with the algorithmic
promotion. They have deals now with at least three publications where that
publication's editor's taste is factored into the promotion. Those pubs are
Toward Data Science, Better Programming (which I help with), and one other
that's not announced. As I look at Medium's featured articles in their
Programming topic, 2/3 of the articles were curated by one of those pubs.

For the Better Programming deal, we also got budget for copy editors and in
the last 2+ months have copy edited about 700 articles. I find that the copy
editors are doing a lot to make an article read better--it's subtle, but
definitely way more than just fixing a few spelling mistakes.

I worked at O'Reilly circa 2003, which is how it came to be my gold standard.
A great technical document needs a smart author who has the time to write
something complete and then that author needs to be paired with good quality
control. It's like how the software you write is better if someone else tests
it. O'Reilly literally had code testers for their book and a very robust
errata program for folding in fixes to bugs after publication.

The people who've done that in article length writing are RailsCast and more
recently Swift by Sundell. That would be the obvious next level for Medium to
support, and I think they will, but probably not for another year or more.

------
nottorp
Hmm let's ignore the Medium thing.

He's basically going from freemium to a closed group of hardcore readers. I
see two problems with that:

1\. He obtained those hardcore readers via the freemium approach. What will he
do about subscriber churn, rely on just word of mouth, or go back to freemium
once in a while?

2\. How long does the think the 10/month will last? It's fine now as few
writers are doing it. But does he think he'll be able to charge 10/month when
_everyone else_ charges that much? No matter how rich you are, as a reader,
there's a limit to how many subscriptions you're willing to pay.

------
stakhanov
One thing that seems to me like an impediment is the lack of a trusted
counterparty to handle contract & billing mechanics. For example: subscribing
to a channel on amazon prime video means that I know I can cancel effective
towards the end of each monthly anniversary by simply hitting a button that I
know how to find. I've done it numerous times, and as a result of the fact
that I know how frictionless it is, I go around shopping for interesting
channels quite freely.

Entering your credit card details into a generic payment system requires a
significant level of trust which I may not be willing to extend to some
blogger I hardly know.

Some people have very weird contractual structures in mind when they advertise
"$10/month". They might mean: Yearly contractual term paid for on a monthly
basis, but with a 3-month notice period, and contract renewing for another
full year term if it doesn't get cancelled on time.

Sometimes it can be difficult to contact customer service (or anyone else
willing to listen to you) when there's a problem with billing. Sometimes,
cancellation can involve having to send a fax.

Sometimes they might sell your data to people who will spam you. etc. etc.
etc.

For all of these reasons, the friction I experience when contemplating what is
prima facie $10/month is significantly more than just that monetary value.

Here it seems to me that medium could play the role of that trusted
counterparty (like amazon prime video) to make subscriptions frictionless. Or
maybe someone should just do that as a generic paywall service for
subscriptions. Or maybe that already exists, and I just don't know of it's
existence yet (with the caveat, that, in this case, it doesn't really enjoy my
trust at this point making it a bit pointless).

------
mistermann
Any recommendations on the easiest way to set up a blog? Is relative anonymity
possible?

~~~
ltrcola
I just tried StackBit this weekend. It's still in beta, but it's pretty slick

[https://www.stackbit.com/](https://www.stackbit.com/)

------
galaxyLogic
If I use Medium does that mean I can't also publish the same articles on
dev.to and elsewhere?

------
oferzelig
This post is from 4/2018, why sharing it now?

------
91edec
Anyone know of any good code blogging platforms?

~~~
toddr123
Not sure how in depth you need code support, but I'm going to peddle my new
blogging host, [https://personaljournal.ca/](https://personaljournal.ca/)

It's based off of WriteFreely, the same blog platform that people.kernel.org
just switched to. It's totally free to use, and I'll never put ads on it. It
supports markdown and html posts, so code syntax highlighting and all that fun
stuff is well supported. Give it a shot if that sounds good for you!

------
timvisee
Good. I noticed I'm closing Medium articles more often these days, as articles
have annoying paywalls, and I consider skipping more Medium articles in the
first place.

The website feels so much more bloated than a few years back . It is full of
advertisements to other articles, weird share buttons and inconsistent
layouting.

------
8bitsrule
I have no interest in subscribing to a publisher and letting them choose what
I read. Give me a way to tell an author I'd like to see more by deciding how
much I want to donate _to that author_ after reading a piece ... an instant,
secure, online donation. They can put my on their mail-list.

If the author chooses to congregate with other authors on a publisher's site,
and pay them rent, their choice. So long as there's no paywall.

------
mirandatann
TL;DR: Guy is selling subscriptions to his blog for 10$ a month.

------
jen729w
TL;DR: the same reason everyone else is.

