
Is Medium still the place to publish high-impact articles? - johnsunlight
With Medium now restricting casual readers, I&#x27;m wondering where the best place would be to publish tech-related articles, tutorials, etc. LinkedIn, maybe? Facebook (ugh)? Tweet and link to my blog?
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billconan
May I take this opportunity to recommend Epiphany, a new blogging experience
tailored for tech content?

[https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=2684bc94f9fcb9ffe637ebfbeba2...](https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=2684bc94f9fcb9ffe637ebfbeba2af8c797c6ad9a66181026ee4bd3806b6f211)

Epiphany is a crossover of Jupyter notebook and Medium.com,

Not only can you write text, you can also program on it, to create interactive
examples, see:

[https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=4c411b8a0b5207739f97e787d2af...](https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=4c411b8a0b5207739f97e787d2af77ec9e1a1a47f117eb946ba1fcf51865d5f6)

In addition to interactivity, Epiphany implements version control, forking and
pull request. You can collaborate with others just like you do on github.

[https://epiphany.pub/history?refId=2684bc94f9fcb9ffe637ebfbe...](https://epiphany.pub/history?refId=2684bc94f9fcb9ffe637ebfbeba2af8c797c6ad9a66181026ee4bd3806b6f211)

It also has the social publishing feature as seen on Medium.

Finally, users own their content. Epiphany has a download button to allow
downloading all blog data.

The format used by Epiphany, unlike that of Jupyter, is in plain text and is
human readable.

disclaimer: I made Epiphany

~~~
Bob312371
Nice project.

Until you implement server side rendering you will have a difficult time
getting this project off the ground.

Having your article indexable by search engines is critical for 99.9% percent
of people that use these sort of mediums.

~~~
billconan
that's good feedback. It's a bit difficult, because for security reasons, the
dynamic content is rendered within an iframe. But I did do some tricks to let
google find the content:
[https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&sxsrf=ACYBGNQ_Qfod-
qU...](https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&sxsrf=ACYBGNQ_Qfod-
qUqRLebTwdUhGFCz1HZYQ%3A1570728149229&source=hp&ei=1WifXfH7CvTK0PEPisev8Ak&q=implement+a+toy+video+encoder+in+browser+epiphany&oq=Implement+a+toy+video+encoder+in+browser+epiphan&gs_l=psy-
ab.3.0.33i160l2.961.2690..4468...0.0..0.158.1096.0j9......0....2j1..gws-
wiz.......33i299.SzFC6bv_Gp0)

But there is certainly room to improve.

------
jjohansson
If you benefit from users visiting your website, then post it there. Quality
content on a domain name you own will benefit your site’s overall SEO
(expertise, authority, trust). Then tweet it and share it on LinkedIn.

Posting it on medium would be like giving them all those benefits, while
getting a very short burst of visibility.

If you absolutely must post on medium, then post only a summary of your main
blog. Then link it (“read the full article here”) to the full blog that’s
hosted on your owned domain (but don’t link back to medium from your main
blog).

~~~
chatmasta
Doesn’t medium allow you to set the canonical URL? You can post on your blog
first and then on medium with the canonical URL set to your blog.

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Porthos9K
I despised Medium from the start and saw it as a content farm. I have always
had a policy of downvoting or flagging Medium articles on sight.

If you have something to say, say it on your own website. Stop being a digital
sharecropper.

~~~
Nicholas_C
Plenty of people don’t have the time or technical skills to make their own
website. It’s also a good idea if someone wants to post a one off essay and/or
post something anonymously and still reach people.

~~~
Porthos9K
They could use Neocities.

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lioeters
No to all 4 counts: Medium, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter.

For the love of user privacy, choice and respect: please publish on your own
site/platform and syndicate to social media.

------
jascwar
A Better Medium is here.

Take a look at dev community: [https://dev.to](https://dev.to)

DEV Community is a burgeoning source of guidance and discussion on software
topics, especially web dev.

A few additional links pertaining to dev.to

Traffic stats:
[https://www.similarweb.com/website/dev.to](https://www.similarweb.com/website/dev.to)
Twitter:
[https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev](https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev)

~~~
stuqqq
I can’t understand dev.to ‘s aesthetic taste. It’s only a bit better than
Craigslist.

------
muzani
I've done Facebook blogging very effectively for the last 5 years. Nearly all
the jobs I got in that period were from people who followed my Facebook, and I
even landed a management tier job.

But after some experiments, I realized that people were only reading the first
10 words and then agreeing or disagreeing based on comments. So it's not
possible to do high impact things in that format.

The other downside is that it Facebook, LinkedIn, HN, etc, they force you to
fit their format. You can't post a full blown 5000 word article because nobody
will read it. It has to be refined in a way, which is good, but not everything
can be simplified, and complex ideas just don't work.

Medium, as well as places like DEV, are full of people who write to promoting
themselves as experts or marketing a service. They're focused on either making
everything look like a nail or making small problems seem more complex than it
is. There's very little actual interesting content or deep thoughts on complex
situations, and/or the algorithm does not show them. It's also really hard to
identify the bad content at a glance; you'd have to read stuff for 3 minutes
to discover the author has no idea what they're talking about.

So Medium and DEV, while technically decent, are so filled with junk that
anything on there is associated with junk.

------
buboard
noooo... this is what you see on mobile:
[https://i.redd.it/ao5outqo0es21.png](https://i.redd.it/ao5outqo0es21.png)

Please use Blogger! if anything, for historic reasons

~~~
jarvelov
That is almost hilarious would it not be for real. Out of curiosity may I ask
what device you are using?

~~~
li4ick
Probably iPhone 7/8 by the looks of it.

------
auganov
I had the displeasure of being inexplicably banned from medium after posting a
relatively high impact story, and it's absolutely the worst possible
experience. Broken links all over social media, messed up SEO for a few weeks
and so forth. Completely killed the story.

------
dilippkumar
I installed NetNewsWire 5.0[0] when it was launched and subscribed to a bunch
of RSS feeds. In my opinion, a native desktop application that downloads
content for offline consumption, without CSS, javascript, advertisements,
trackers and GDPR pop-ups has led to an incredible experience!

If you publish to your own blog, social media will not be able to censor you.
You won’t be required to conform to “community guidelines” that you disagree
with, just to reach a target audience. You will own all the IP and content
that you create.

I want RSS feed readers and personal blogs to be the future. In my own blog,
I’ve started sharing links to other blogs I like - and I hope that one day,
people who like my blog will link to me. I hope to eventually acquire readers
who come to my blog via a network of high quality recommendations from other
bloggers, and they will discover more blogs from those I recommend - all of
this without the tyranny of a single social media company controlling “how
information flows through their network”

Give NetNewsWire or your favorite RSS feed reader a try. There are several old
AskHN posts that have a large number of fantastic RSS feeds you can subscribe
to. Try it for a month and see if you agree with me.

[0] [https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/](https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/)

~~~
buboard
It s amazing how much we've regressed in that field

------
ciupicri
GitHub Pages [1][2] and Bitbucket Pages [3][4] are way better options for
hosting articles.

[1]: [https://pages.github.com/](https://pages.github.com/)

[2]: [https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-
pages](https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-pages)

[3]: [https://pages.bitbucket.io/](https://pages.bitbucket.io/)

[4]: [https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/publishing-a-
webs...](https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/publishing-a-website-on-
bitbucket-cloud-221449776.html)

------
jjjbokma
May I take this opportunity to recommend a static blog generator [0] I wrote?
It uses a single file for input which is Markdown separated by % characters on
a line by itself. It comes with 10+ different styles and you can either run
the Perl or the Python version.

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

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rajacombinator
Medium seems to have been flooded by a ton of low quality article mill
operations and people posting their data science boot camp homework. I heavily
discount any article I read on that domain these days.

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pnw_hazor
no. I blocked medium after one too many jarring ad or UI experiences.

edit-to-add: I deleted my linked-in and facebook accounts too. HN is where I
find leads to most good stuff now.

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borplk
The hot new thing is called your own blog ;)

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ptcampbell
When Medium launched it provided an elegantly focused compose / reading
experience which was unique at the time. As it’s gained traction I think
creators mostly want to leverage the audience and social aspect. But I have
despaired as every tech brand has latched on to it as their PR channel, and as
tech bloggers place their dime-a-dozen tutorials and hot-takes behind a
paywall.

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anfilt
Your own website...

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pknerd
Yes I do cross post but don't put behind paywall. It helps me to generate
traffic for my blog.

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Peter_Smith
no

