
Why ElementaryOS Left Medium - amaccuish
https://blog.elementary.io/welcome-to-the-new-blog/
======
agluszak
Yeah, so basically modals, banners, reminders to use the app etc. (vide
[https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-
origin/uploads/2019/06/...](https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-
origin/uploads/2019/06/Medium-Mobile-Popup.png)) are new toolbars of the late
2010s ([http://i.imgur.com/X7ipc.png](http://i.imgur.com/X7ipc.png)).

I don't like the direction where the Web is currently heading. Shutting down
open APIs, forcing users to use the one and only official app (Facebook
Messenger, Instagram, Reddit's starting to do so more and more), ubiquitous
tracking, aggressive ad targeting and so on.

How can we - users, programmers, hackers - fight this?

~~~
javajosh
Well, the fundamental problem is that Capital comes in and builds a really
great Thing, a Thing that may not have been built without Capital, but then
Capital wants a Return, which causes the Thing to decay. The thing Hackers can
do, as in the OPs article, is to salvage the good ideas that the initial
efforts of Capital managed to prove, and leave out the rest.

This won't work for individuals, in general, because writing good software is
hard. Even if you rely heavily on 3rd party libraries like Jekyll, you still
have to know how to pick those libraries, and how to use them, how to deploy
them.

Personally, I think it's cool that Capital is willing to get into the fray,
even though it so often ends badly. Often it _does_ contribute something, even
if it dies. People get mad at Google for axing projects, like Reader, but why?
Consider all the market validation they did, for you, for me, for free.
Consider all the product design work they did, for all of us, for free.

I don't even think it's bad that devs at Medium are, almost by definition,
currently working on nothing but anti-features. It's just part of the Capital-
driven software lifecycle, and they are feeding their families, and learning a
lot. I can't even hate the managers who made unethical product decisions,
_because it was always going to be that way_ , and better to participate in
the Capital driven software lifecycle and contribute _something_ then to never
have participated at all.

There are amazing, _sustainable_ , _ethical_ , Capital-driven software ideas
still waiting to be done, and that couldn't be done without Capital's
involvement, but clearly that's not Medium and its ilk. But as Medium declines
and eventually dies, remember that this is the fate that waits for every
project, no matter how successful, and they leave behind valuable information
for us.

~~~
tonystubblebine
> But as Medium declines and eventually dies, remember that this is the fate
> that waits for every project, no matter how successful, and they leave
> behind valuable information for us.

This statement makes me so angry with Medium's corporate communications. It
makes total sense to me that you'd think this, but I also think it's dead
wrong.

The problem is that Medium is not clear that they've just straight up changed.
So it's not that they are the big free open platform they used to be with an
annoying "upgrade to pro" ad model on top of that.

Rather, Medium is primarily a subscription service. Even though they aren't
saying this, it's best to think of them as an open-platform version of Netflix
where anyone could post an episode or show and get paid for it.

That switch came with a switch in their incentive structure. The incentives
for posting on Medium used to be that Medium will bring in a lot of traffic
from their network. But they now limit that to articles that are published
inside their subscription service. So there's not really any reason to post
outside of their subscription service.

This is what I think you're experiencing: the free, non-paywalled portions of
Medium are dying because the incentives for publishing went away and the
aggressiveness at advertising their actual product (subscribe for, they hope,
great content) has become more aggressive.

Meanwhile, while the experience that ElementaryOS was using Medium for is
dying, there's a new experience that's quite good and I think plays a nice
balancing role in the overall Internet ecosystem. Medium is making a place
that rewards quality writing, tries to eliminate writing for the purpose of
marketing, and is pouring money into authors and editors so that they can
invest more quality into their articles.

~~~
agustif
> Medium is making a place that rewards quality writing, tries to eliminate
> writing for the purpose of marketing, and is pouring money into authors and
> editors so that they can invest more quality into their articles.

As someone who by principle wont ever pay that subscription, my experience is
quite the contrary having all those metrics you say, going to the shit,
starting from quality content...

Maybe some great articles get hidden behind the paywall but mostly to me it
seems all low-quality click-bait shit now, and on top of it they put the
modals and stuff...

~~~
tonystubblebine
We made the transition from just publishing anything that got submitted to
doing much deeper editing. Maybe not the topic you care about but here's an
example of what we were able to do with an editorial budget:
[https://link.medium.com/uMM1k1cgjZ](https://link.medium.com/uMM1k1cgjZ)

------
Alir3z4
You know what's creepy ? "You read a lot. We like that."

Or install our mobile app and get more content, or signup and get more content
we figured with our fancy algorithm for you.

Here's the thing, Medium never worked for me. I had over ~300 followers and if
I published something none of them would see it, no reaction, no visit, no
read at all and I repeated the same thing over and over again with no luck.

I'd only get visits and reads on my articles when I shared the articles on
social networks.

It seems your followers, real or fake don't matter are spammed with Medium
algorithm to read "recommended" content.

I'm a developer, I like simple thing, but I don't like using static site
generators to build a blog out of rst or md files and push to github etc.

I want a community around my blog, I wanna nice simple UI, a simple commenting
solution, a place to upload my files and attach in posts optimized for web.

Plenty of blogging platforms may or may not provide all of it out of the box,
but each with their own weird ToS and privacy policy.

I simply had enough of it and created my own blogging platform,
[https://www.gonevis.com](https://www.gonevis.com) where I have my own blog
[https://alireza.gonevis.com](https://alireza.gonevis.com)

I'm done with weird platforms where things are shiny and promising until
they're not.

~~~
itronitron
All they would have to do, in order to have a functional and transparent
recommender 'algorithm' is to rank order articles by how many of your
followers liked, or read, an article... so if you have 100 followers and 50 of
them happened to like another article 'B' then that article would be highly
recommended to people reading your article. If they knew who was reading the
article (logged in) then they could simply exclude articles from the list
which the person had already viewed. That would help people browse through
groups that shared similar interests.

~~~
Alir3z4
Thing is they want to put more recommended content to your face as much as
possible without knowing much about you, otherwise your scroll bar will hit
the bottom quickly.

The recommendation engine from technical point of view is not a rocket
science, they're just simply trying to tune for maximum engagement even if it
costs them repeated nonsense content you don't like which tbh defeats the
purpose of "recommendation".

It seems there's not much of community in Medium. All viral articles are the
ones that the author had a good influence over their twitter of facebook etc
audience.

If you already have 10s thousands on your twitter follower list that you
worked hard to find and bunch of people know you for some of your other work,
no matter Medium or a static generated blog, your article will go hand to hand
and viral in many cases.

------
kryptiskt
Every time I follow a link to Medium they seem to get more and more pushy. I
shy away from clicking on links there anymore, so news like this is welcome.

I must say I don't get what unique value proposition Medium think they have
that allows them to treat both publishers and readers like crap.

~~~
yoz-y
> I must say I don't get what unique value proposition Medium think they have
> that allows them to treat both publishers and readers like crap.

My take is that they had a unique value proposition at the beginning: "YouTube
for text: audience and authors all at the same place, with recommendations and
unified comment platform". But then it became apparent that they will not
magically become profitable or bought, so they started with the crap.

~~~
wastedhours
The problem is, with a lot of companies trying to be "YouTube for X", they
left out the monetisation stories.

The reason a lot of creators have bought into YouTube is 1) it's still
expensive to host video elsewhere 2) there's constant noise around the earning
potential (as misguided as it might be to listen to it).

Medium doesn't have the depth of content to become a destination wholly in and
of itself as they don't have a critical mass of creation. All they needed to
do was allow creators to make some decent cash, get a few wild "this author is
earning a $1m a year, just on Medium!!11!1!1" stories into the mainstream, and
suddenly you'll have an influx. Then, just don't be a complete arse to those
creators and keep the cash pumping.

I don't really want more ads in the ether, but that would have been the most
obvious way to juice it - have their own self-serve ad product from ad one,
and the offer the options to remove down the line.

Instead, we get dialogue boxes.

~~~
yoz-y
I wonder if they could have started as a sort of readability/patreon style
platform for text without taking any investment and build just enough audience
to become profitable. I imagine that running their servers should not be
massively expensive, especially if they scaled up slowly.

~~~
wastedhours
But then you look at Ev's history and realise that's probably not a direction
he'd have been exploring unfortunately.

------
alanfranz
My problem with Jekyll (or other static generators) is that it's not as
straightforward as anything with a web gui, like wordpress or ghost (or medium
or tumblr or...). You still need to handle things manually (e.g. the yaml
front matter), the preview is not "out of the box", different
plugins/extensions may add unpredictable behaviour, you need to setup a
build/deploy pipeline, etc. - the experience is just not streamlined.

I think that when you want to write, you shouldn't need to mess up with tech
details of your system. It's distracting. Of course I'd like a static website
for deploying, but I'd love a web gui which acts as a frontend for such
generators. I think that Prose was something similar but I found it buggy/not
updated, while another saas I tried(Forestry, I think?) was good but you
couldn't customize everything.

Ghost is my ultimate choice until an official, core-developers supported web
gui is created for jekyll, hugo, or whatever static generator lies out there.

~~~
zubspace
I tried Hugo before but came to the same conclusion. The simplicity draw me
into trying it, but in my opinion the solution is not streamlined.

That's why i finally settled for a Flat File CMS [1], in my case Grav [2].
Like with hugo you get total control. And with most of them you get a single
web interface to administrate the site, manage extensions and write blog
entries. And you still have the possibility to git push everything on the dev
server and git pull on prod, without managing a database. It's a dream.

They are not without problems though. You need to host your php site
somewhere. Sometimes it's necessary to dive into php to fix some problems and
creating something unique still takes some web skills (in contrary to
wordpress for example).

[1] [https://github.com/ahadb/flat-file-cms](https://github.com/ahadb/flat-
file-cms)

[2] [https://getgrav.org/](https://getgrav.org/)

~~~
e_proxus
I would love something with a UI like Grav to edit and create my site, but
with a static web page export to publish it. I'm fine with running the UI only
locally on my computer so even a desktop app would be fine.

~~~
zubspace
There's a plugin [1] for that, but I haven't used it before. It creates plain
old html files.

[1] [https://github.com/BarryMode/grav-plugin-
blackhole](https://github.com/BarryMode/grav-plugin-blackhole)

------
panpanna
I thought this would be another rant, but this post was actually very well
written and really informative. Key points are:

* Medium policy changes and how they affected readers and authors

* The importance of "owning" your own posts

* Possible alternatives to medium

* Issues with CDN wrt privacy

* Issues with commenting services

* Use of custom fonts

* Sharing to social media without being privacy invasive

* Google AMP, and how Google strong arms you into using their tech

... and much more. Highly recommended!!

------
strenholme
I myself have left Medium and cancelled my subscription. When asked, I told
them it was annoying to see the modal popup asking me to sign in every time I
looked at Medium from my work computer.

The popups, as mentioned in the linked article are annoying. As is the
increase in the number of articles you have to pay to read. Not to mention the
fact that the trolls have discovered Medium, and the quality of writing there
has gone down (One article prominently linked was about how one needs to
“ditch loyalty” to have a healthy relationship).

For my personal blog, [https://samiam.org/blog](https://samiam.org/blog), I
use a homegrown CMS that makes static content I wrote using UNIX shell
scripts, with a bit of Perl and PHP, about a decade ago. I updated it to use
web fonts once those became viable about five years ago, and updated its color
scheme based on my wife’s wishes after she passed away.

For reading stuff online, I have a subscript to the New York Times which keeps
me up to date on the news; I also read articles linked to here (and I haven’t
seen Hacker News link to a Medium article in a while).

~~~
lethologica
Your blog is a huge breath of fresh air. I genuinely miss blogs of this style.
Easy to navigate, easy to read, quick to load. Love it.

~~~
strenholme
I’m quite proud of it. Not only does it use 100% open source fonts for the
rendering, it also renders on pretty much any browser made. The stylesheets
are set up so the same HTML + CSS looks good on both desktop and mobile
browsers (we use different CSS for mobile, but there’s no nonsense like
m.samiam.org). The webfonts have been carefully hinted and subsetted to be of
minimal size, and look good on pretty much any browser (I made sure they look
good in Chrome + Windows, even on a low DPI display, which has had a lot of
font rendering issues).

For example, the http → https redirect is set up so the redirect is not done
in browsers which do not support Javascript (and may not support HTTPS); older
versions of Internet Explorer which do not support modern TLS encryption also
remain on the http website. The stylesheets do not “gracefully degrade” (in
the sense I don’t try to have the site look mostly the same in antiques like
IE6, IE7, or IE8), but the site is fully compatible with Internet Explorer 9
and above and any other mainstream browser from 2010 on. It is still
completely readable (albeit with a different look) in older versions of
Internet Explorer and in browsers without any CSS support (and, of course, it
also can be read in the Lynx text-only browser).

I have tested it in Internet Explorer 5 and above, Opera 12 (the last version
to use the Presto rendering engine before they moved on to WebKit), Dillo
(depending on the version, it may need to have CSS disabled), Chrome, Firefox,
Safari, you name it. It can be read by pretty much any browser that exists
(the Unicode will look a little strange in stuff like Mosaic from 1994, but
the site is still readable).

------
ktpsns
I never understood the hype of Medium. If I want to have a clean blog, there
is plenty of off-the-shelve software to do so, especially free and open source
ones.

Why did IT-affine people (i.e. people who can easily manage their own
installations or which can easily move to other hosters) use Medium in the
first place? Maybe [because] they never used the platform without being logged
in? Because that's where all the cruelity ("you already read your 3 free
articles this month...") starts.

~~~
rchaud
Because of eyeballs and attention. Creating a brand new site and posting on it
in this day and age is basically the equivalent of yelling into the void. No
one is going to see it, and the only way to get it to come up on Google is by
typing in "site:[myblog.com]), barring the few friends and family members who
may give you a pity click when you post on your social media.

Almost nobody is writing anything 'just because'. They're writing because they
want to be noticed, either as a "domain expert" or "thought leader", or simply
as a stepping stone to a writing gig at HuffPo, Forbes.com, Inc.com, whatever
replaced Gawker and the various pipelines of formulaic listicle generators out
there that might pay a few pennies for the next "Elon Musk's top 10 secrets
for Productivity" gruel.

------
m52go
Nice. I did the same exact thing last week with one of my own blogs.

But I was disappointed a little with some quirks with Jekyll. For example, I
really needed to list blog posts in categories separately. Turns out there's
no built-in way to do that with Jekyll, so I had to find a third-party plug-in
to do that. Then there were some changes didn't trigger a rebuild with the
local development server running, which I (eventually) realized required
stopping the server, deleting the _build directory, and then restarting the
server.

These things sound minor in hindsight, but they took a lot of time for me to
figure out in the moment. "It's a static site...I picked a static site
generator for simplicity!" I kept thinking, annoyed.

I chose Jekyll in particular because it's been around forever and expected it
to have little things like this figured out, but was slightly disappointed.

Otherwise it's been good I guess.

For what it's worth, I will occasionally repost articles on my Medium account
too, to take advantage of my following there, with the appropriate
rel=canonical tag. No reason not to take advantage of it while it lasts.

~~~
techntoke
I'd definitely recommend checking out Hugo too.

~~~
yoz-y
I second this. I migrated from Middleman a while back because I couldn't be
bothered to handle ruby dependency conflicts during an update anymore. Hugo is
what I use now and it's great. Migration from one to other was actually
surprisingly easy too.

------
zwaps
I always thought it odd that a team like ElementaryOS with a clearly defined
"ethical code and goal" would choose Medium, which is an anti-consumer and
anti-privacy company (e.g. try accessing Medium on a mobile phone with a
smaller screen).

Good on them for changing.

~~~
morganvachon
That is explained in the very first paragraph of the article (emphasis mine):

"In 2016, elementary moved to a Medium publication to host our official blog.
_At the time, Medium was touted as a simple, clean, and reader-focused host
for writers. They supported custom domains, a robust API, RSS, rich
formatting, and great image embedding._ We had been largely happy with the
experience—as were our readers—but something changed in 2017."

------
pmlnr
> Write.as excels as a way to painlessly publish thoughts to the
> Internet—anonymously or otherwise. If you’re an individual looking for a
> clean, reader-friendly Medium-like experience, Write.as is a perfect fit.

That's the very same thing Medium took people away with from self-hosted.
Rinse and repeat?

------
sundarurfriend
> While we understand and empathize with the struggles of ethical
> monetization—and applaud Medium for refusing to monetize via intrusive ads
> and trackers

This part is interesting. Assuming it isn't just polite PR-speak, what is
Medium being applauded for, here? Trying to use user accounts openly and
directly, instead of cookies and other tracking elements to track everyone?
I've always thought of these Sign in prompts on Medium (and on Quora) as just
an annoyance to get past, not a possible means to "ethical monetization
somehow.

------
bovermyer
I love the shout-out to Write.as. More people should check out that
platform/software.

------
jesuslop
I liked that RSS support tops Elementary requirements list.

------
NKosmatos
I can understand Medium wanting to make a profit but they've taken the wrong
path (IMHO). Too many popups, distractions and recently reading limits.

I know I'm going to be downvoted for this but I'll give it a try :-)

Can we please-please have a native dark theme for Hacker News? Without
plugins, browser specific hacks or other gimmicks, just a simple "Light|Dark"
option.

------
coldtea
At this point Medium looks like a dumpster fire.

I even have a subscription, but will cancel it.

------
asd
Don't get me wrong, I'm on the Medium Hate Train along with many others here
on HN, but aren't these stories getting a bit monotonous?

[https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ACYBGNQoux3i-UEEDHgCPFks...](https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ACYBGNQoux3i-UEEDHgCPFksuM1327CV7w%3A1566302844719&ei=fOJbXc6-K4OItQXm2LiwBw&q=left+AROUND%284%29+Medium+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com&oq=left+AROUND%284%29+Medium+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com)

------
bogomipz
Aside from the aforementioned aggressive tactics of Medium, the reading
experience is degraded by Medium's insistence of claiming a disproportionate
amount of screen real estate for themselves. Scrolling between an oversized
header and footer that promotes Medium is a miserable reading experience.
Kudos to ElementaryOS. I look forward to keeping up with you in this improved
reading experience and hope other follow suit. Cheers.

------
fmajid
Good for them. A thousand deaths are not enough for Medium.

------
topicseed
The one problem I have with Medium is the same as with YouTube. I have an
account with both.

Whenever I click an article or watch a video, that must trigger such a strong
certainty signal in their system that I then receive a lot (TOO MANY) related
articles/videos as suggestions.

YouTube recently fixed that, but Medium has not. So I just don't click
anymore. And I read a lot less on there.

------
cntlzw
Many articles on Medium are of low-quality. It used to be different. Don't
know if this is caused by the monetization efforts.

~~~
seren
It is the fate of most platforms, initially there are only early adopters that
are selected, hand picked or invited, and as the platform progress there is an
influx or more mainstream content producer, and the quality tends to be more
average.

------
agustif
Well looking at the bigger picture it's not just Medium as a platform, but
News/Writing/Journalism as a profession that's going hillside here.

I've long dreamed of a kind of Unsplash for news/text. Just don't have time/or
care enough to do it, just would be great to have it available as a user.

------
meerita
I commented this 3 days ago: Medium is not for writers. They struggle to do a
good business model. hurting non-profesional writers, so, it's obvious they
leave Middle-Earth. If Medium only works for proffesional writers, there will
be a tiny tiny portion of content compared they have today.

------
SahAssar
Medium is surprisingly usable if you turn off all JS (and I'm not usually part
of the no-js crowd).

------
isacikgoz
I think this happens when you don't have clear monetization strategy from the
beginning.

Also, I always felt uncomfortable when reading a Medium post. It was always
much more than a clear text that what I am interested.

------
skilled
Medium is an absolute disease and it makes no sense that anyone would use that
platform for blogging. Its enforced and aggressive layers of pop-overs is a
disgrace to the community.

------
druvisc
Why should everyone care why X left Medium? There's at least a couple of
articles like this every month. If you're not happy with a service, just stop
using it.

~~~
rikroots
Personally I like it when people and/or companies announce they've switched
from service (architecture, etc) A to service B and then give a good account
of why they made that decision, how they then established themselves on B,
etc. Reading such articles helps broaden my knowledge about both A and B.
Seeing responses to such articles on places like HN helps me deepen that
knowledge.

I've seen Medium post links on various social media, clicked on them and read
the articles (or got the paywall nag thing), but I never went beyond the
articles to investigate what Medium itself was all about. Now - thanks to this
article, and the comments it's generated on HN - I know everything I want to
know about Medium, alongside some useful pointers for possible tools to set up
my own static-site blog.

"Don't announce; just flounce" is often good advice for people who want the
world to know what they're up to, just because they think they're important.
But I'm happy to see people ignore that advice if they offer me a compelling
backstory to go alongside their announcement.

------
yakattak
Another not surprising shift away from Medium. When starting my own blog this
year, I was debating between Medium and self-hosting solutions like WordPress
and Ghost. When asked “why not Medium?” My answer was usually “I don’t want my
content behind a paywall, I don’t like it when I’m a reader and I wouldn’t
want the same experience for others.”

The other reason to me, is that you lose your own brand since your editing
options are limited in terms of fonts, colors, domains etc.

I wonder now, how many blogs will follow suit? I like a lot of the _content_
on Medium, but I don’t like the platform. It’s positive (to me) to see others
migrating off.

I, personally, eventually settled on Ghost, hosted on DigitalOcean. WordPress
felt frustrating to work with and something like Jekyll just wasn’t “enough”
for me. My day job is writing code all day, a platform that is just text
editing in the browser is a nice relief.

------
sigzero
Thank goodness. I avoid Medium like the plague.

------
Yuioup
I hope that the Angular Blog will follow suit.

------
artsyca
Up next: the .io domain

