It's funny, because some years ago when Medium blogs were starting to be posted left and right, people were praising the interface, and nobody listened to the few who objected. Now, we need all kinds of tricks, add-ons and blocks to just read five-minute posts during our commute.
It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of your stuff. The next free framework that comes, which promises a clean, non-distracting view, will also (most probably) eventually add advertisements, because, well, corporations need money.
In my humble opinion, just write your Markdown files, and use one of the bajillion Static Sites Generators to create/host them, or fork a framework that already does this such as [1], copy-paste them in, and you're set.
I am as sad as anyone that medium sold out an began to intentionally mistreat their users for "engagement" (read: money).
But in their early days, their praise was well earned. I was a designer with a focus on typography at the time, and medium's defaults were an order of magnitude better than any other non-custom publishing platform at the time.
Big, readable serifs, intentionally constrained column widths (and corresponding line length), and lots of attention to the details and best practices that ease the pain of reading things on the web. They're cluttered now, but they were intentionally uncluttered then, which isn't exactly typographic but is worth a lot in terms of cognitive burden.
To the extent that this is table-stakes now, and no longer a differentiating factor, medium is mostly to blame IMO. They showed that doing web type the way typographers told you to got slam dunk results. Everyone copied their style and the web is vastly more readable for it.
So while they lived long enough to become the villain, there's some gratefulness due to their former selves as well.
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I personally do things the way you've described (markdown > jekyll > GH pages), but I think medium's value prop now is ease of distribution. You get bolted onto the homepage and other people's articles as part of a graph of other people's work, and writers find that valuable.
>It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of your stuff.
But zero ways to get people to read it. I only read his post because it's on HN. And I read Medium stuff regularly on Medium.
The chances of most people discovering some random blog? Not so much. Whereas Medium has concentrated eyeballs and knows their preferences to serve them stuff that's close to their tastes...
> I only read his post because it's on HN. And I read Medium stuff regularly on Medium.
I totally get where you're coming from, but I'm not convinced that Medium helps at all. I mean, this article was posted to Medium. Medium didn't put it in front of you. So how is Medium helping?
I used to cross-post everything I wrote to Medium, because I thought it was a good reader acquisition strategy. But posting on Medium doesn't automatically get you readership -- you still have to go find readers and rely on them sharing stuff on traditional sites like HN/Reddit/Twitter/Facebook. And none of that sharing process requires your content to be on Medium.
For all of the effort I put into formatting articles well, and making sure that I matched popular writing styles, and adapting things, a post I put on Medium will get <20 readers over the course of a week.
In contrast, I had one good post get traction on HN, and on average my self-hosted blog now gets more visitors than that per day. So now I don't even bother cross-posting, because I don't see how Medium helps me get content picked up on other social sites.
> I mean, this article was posted to Medium. Medium didn't put it in front of you. So how is Medium helping?
Medium has a ton of recirc features that drive page views within the ecosystem. That is the entire reason why Ev started Medium, it wasn't about giving people better typography or whatever.
The reason the product is kind of messed up is because they made some financing decisions that may have not been correct in retrospect, so now they've had to go back and try to retroactively design the product to match their capital structure. But it's not like they wouldn't have had tons of other problems if they were bootstrapped, the reality is there just aren't any good financing options for consumer web startups right now.
> and making sure that I matched popular writing styles
Maybe this is the problem. I'm sure as a professional writer you need to keep up with reader interests (rather than setting up to do the blog equivalent of Finnegan's Wake), but you don't want to be too interchangeable either.
It's like you had to decide each month from each cake you want to eat (there's an infinite row of cakes) and you vie for the huge ones -- together with countless other people, so you get really small crumbs. Go for a smaller cake and you may get actual slices with frosting and all.
>I totally get where you're coming from, but I'm not convinced that Medium helps at all. I mean, this article was posted to Medium. Medium didn't put it in front of you. So how is Medium helping?
Medium put it in fronts of tons of other people though -- someone of which posted it here.
And I discover posts on Medium alone every day.
Plus, Medium posts don't feel like a wasteland -- they have a healthy number of comments.
Yeah, Medium isn't great if you're an up and coming writer, or don't have a following on other social media sites. If you need more proof of that, well go and look at the digest emails they send, or the articles featured on the home page.
About 80-90% are from users with a large following on Medium.com, and many of those are also 'online influencers' with decent sized Twitter/YouTube/LinkedIn/whatever fanbases as well.
Oh, and forget it if your story isn't a paid story. About 90+% of Medium's promoted stories are members only stories now, with the home page I got just now literally having every single story outside of the 'popular on Medium' column being a paid one.
If you're not charging for the story and don't have a pre existing fanbase, at best you've got the end of article suggestions and latest stories link to rely on and the latter has about twenty pages of mediocre stories for every good one.
Like on many platforms now, it seems the popular just get more popular, and the rest battle for the scraps or the off chance they'll break out.
But in practice, is Medium currently helping people build audiences in a significant way? My experience suggests no. It was easier for me to do that with a self-hosted site.
I'm not sure exactly why this is -- maybe it's that Medium's discovery algorithms take into account correlations between existing readers, so if you don't already have a bunch of readers you'll never get picked up. Maybe Medium is just super crowded, so the odds of you getting recommended over someone who's already popular are low.
All I know is that my readers are return viewers (which self hosting helps a lot with) and people coming from Hackernews, Reddit, Facebook, or curated link aggregators. I don't personally see any data that suggests Medium is driving any traffic to my content. And at this point, universally across the board, my self hosted blog performs better than my Medium blog.
I'm sure that varies from publisher to publisher, but I think it's simplistic to say that Medium by default drives traffic. I suspect that for small sites it's a lot more complicated.
> But in practice, is Medium currently helping people build audiences in a significant way?
I actually don't think Medium ever helped people build audiences in a significant way, with relatively few exceptions: Medium has always been structured to build an audience first for Medium and second for "publications" hosted on Medium. But it's never been particularly good at building audiences for individual authors.
While I'm aware this is anecdotal, there appears to be very little correlation between the number of followers one has and the number of views any given article gets: you can have several hundred followers and have some articles that get thousands of views (usually because they were included in someone else's publication or linked from somewhere else on the web), and others that get maybe a couple dozen views.
> I don't personally see any data that suggests Medium is driving any traffic to my content.
It is not. Readers that start on Medium by and large stay on Medium.
> maybe it's that Medium's discovery algorithms take into account correlations between existing readers,
Yes, Medium takes into account who you follow and what subjects you've liked, which is one reason Medium article collections like HackerNoon exist.
I feel Medium is for writers who don't take the time and effort necessary to self market their own content, which is not easy for many people. The platform is just like everything else in life. Are you willing to make concessions for its benefits? I don't see anything wrong with it as long as people are aware of the price of the Faustian deals they make in exchange for a little magic. The same applies to Alexa, Facebook, Waze, etc...
Well, yeah, but a post on a self-hosted blog can be posted to HN just as easily as a post on Medium can. And it's not like having "(medium.com)" next to the submission is going to drive upvotes any more than having "(yourdomain.xyz)" would. (For me it actually has the opposite effect; there's so much empty "thought-leader" drivel posted at Medium that seeing that domain next to an HN submission makes me less likely to click through.)
So I guess the question becomes: does Medium function well enough as an aggregator of its own content to make posting there worth the tradeoffs? Does it drive enough traffic from other Medium readers to your own Medium posts to justify giving up everything you have to give up to use the platform? (That's the theory behind Medium, of course, but what I'm wondering is how well it actually works in practice.)
Do many people browse Medium like this? I read a decent number of posts there, but only because someone sends me a link or shared it on another platform.
The "See also" links at the end of Medium posts, and the weekly "interesting for you" mail list were rather relevant to me, that is, often had links I was willing to click, and under those, sometimes were articles I was willing to read.
I stopped doing both, though: you can't read too much for free, but more than half of the content was not worth reading (for me), except maybe for quick skimming. There definitely are articles on Medium that are gems (again, from my POV), but I hope them to be brought to me by social networks anyway.
For authors, though, Medium must be pretty valuable, bringing relevant readers, and maybe some ad revenue. It does have a discovery feature which may be not brilliantly great, but is still quite OK, especially if you have time to spend on lighter reading.
Not very high if you browse, but adequate if you get a link or two from other sources.
I wish they adopted the bandcamp model: quite a number of tracks for free per day, but you can instantly pay for the one you liked, the amount you like (above a certain minimum). This way, the articles I personally find valuable would be both easier for me to find, and paid by me higher than the slice of the common subscription funds they receive now.
Fairly late, but I must read eight or more Medium articles on a heavy day. The only thing I ever get is a modal prompting me to "make it official" and create an account.
I think the main avenue for exploration in Medium are the article recommendations at the bottom of the page, above the comments.
I personally rarely click on them, but I can imagine some titles can be hard to resist. That make interaction-driven recommendations, which are becoming the dominant way of content exploration, a bit of a dark pattern.
Perhaps we're only an inch away from 'article autoplay'.
> Perhaps we're only an inch away from 'article autoplay'.
Have you ever seen news sites that let you seamlessly scroll to the next article, by dynamically appending it at the bottom of the one you're reading, and updating your URL as you enter it? The ones where it's ridiculously easy to get lost, because scroll space keeps expanding (sometimes both ways) and the URL keeps changing?
Someone's gonna figure out soon that the code for loading those articles could use a recommendation engine.
tbh, often when I get interrupted by the "sorry to interrupt you" I just close the tab.
and if I'm on mobile and link says "medium" I don't even bother to click.
but that's me.
> Maybe it is me but most of the Medium articles I stumble upon are pure garbage.
It's not just you, a lot of them are.
Look at how many are just "python deep learning tutorial" recycled for the millionth time, but with some fundamental misunderstanding or shortcut, or they're just lifted almost verbatim from the starter example or the documentation with nothing actually meaningful added. Often there's lots of "here's how to do x in y" that somehow manages to not understand good practices at all.
You’re discounting the security/authority that “medium.com” brings over a random domain name. You might get less traffic from HN and Reddit if you weren’t on Medium.
Edit: just because a few people (myself included) have a negative reaction to a Medium link doesn’t change the fact that many Medium links are upvoted on HN.
At least for me and some other people, medium.com is a negative signal of quality. Medium is full of low-quality and marketing articles, I'll associate your links with that, and me only seeing "medium.com" on e.g. HN means you don't have a chance of establishing a "brand" I trust by recognizing your domain as "good" after a few articles.
EDIT: adressing your edit, do you have any evidence they wouldn't be if they weren't on medium.com?
I think it goes for any topic. I’ll use food as an example. I’ve been on a lot of food blogs, I end there from DuckDuckGo or google, mostly google.
I only remember a handful of them, one in particular that is now a regular bookmark of mine (it’s https://www.valdemarsro.dk and in Danish so likely uninteresting to most), and the one thing that the ones I remember have in common is that they are their own things.
I don’t think there is anything beneficial to being a medium blog for this exact reason. I may read your article, I may even really like it, but it takes more than one article to get me to stick around, and because every medium article looks the same I can easily end up reading more than one without noticing it.
Having a unique domain helps as much as having a unique look.
Don't forget that it also prominently features a large distracting photo that was just ripped from a royalty-free photo site and has nothing to do with the content.
It worked. Then someone wrote about it, and everyone did it. Then it became a negative signal. There seems to be a 5-10 year trend lag time on stuff like that where the least self-aware self-promoters don't realize it doesn't work. Eventually a new trend falls to their level, and the cycle begins anew.
A big reason everyone has the big, irrelevant image on top is that medium was designed to work best with that assumption. If you actually blog there, your index won't look good unless you have a header photo for each post.
That’s actually a great question — does Medium truly gives you that many readers that it makes sense to live in the closed ecosystem? I have its app installed and subscribed to a bunch of people but I still only go there via the links on the web and I feel like a lot of people do just like me.
As some anecdotal evidence, I get about half of my Medium views from people browsing the Medium app/feed. That's definitely been the number one reason I've stayed on the platform.
Perhaps someone should develop a platform that creates the same discoverability, but while allowing people to retain control of the content?
No. I started my own site around this time last year with a CSS / HTML template I modified and I did everything myself. I even wrote the static site compiler. This is really not hard.
I have somewhere between seven and nine[0] articles out and my work has been translated into French, Portuguese (twice), Russian, and Uzbek.
Medium isn't a source of traffic unless you're one of the very few writers they intentionally push. People share high quality work or new ideas, and audience engagement helps too, so link to your Twitter and share your email.
[0] Since starting the site I've started writing for other publications and the audience flows back and forth between the sites, so it depends on what you think counts as an article.
Two years ago, I used to spend a lot of my free time browsing Medium, reading articles I otherwise would’ve never discovered. Now? Not so much the case—maybe it’s the degradation in quality or the number of badly written articles.
Maybe what we need for blogs isn’t a platform, where authors come on and content is hosted centrally; but an aggregator, where each author self hosts but content is still discoverable by a wider audience.
If you write about tech, you can cross-post your article on dev.to and set a canonical link for SEO. I don't know if Medium offers this kind of option.
So you have people reading your content while you keep your personal blog.
You can post self-hosted articles on HN, reddit, etc. I doubt that "You might like this..." clicks on Medium would add significant eyeballs to an independent author's articles.
HN, Reddit, social media. You read this post because someone posted it here.
Getting other people to read your post is as difficult as getting other people to read other people's content - you post it where you frequent, and if people like it, they'll reshare it. Building a larger audience requires work, and any attempt at cheating that is unsustainable at scale.
It's easy to fall into the trap of seeking scale, because we're surrounded by it: best selling authors, viral content, etc. But I'd rather have a small number of readers who really appreciate my writing versus a large number of randoms gathered from feed promotions who won't even finish reading.
No they don't. If you want your Medium post to get read you have to promote it on HN, reddit, facebook, twitter, etc exactly as you would with a self-hosted post.
Depending on how simple you want it, you could just use MarkDeep, TexMe or MdMe plus something like NeoCities or a Github repo. You'd miss out on some benefits of a full generator, like automatically creating an archive page and RSS feeds and stuff like that, but you'd gain that 90's simplicity.
FYI: Instead of the "old / out-dated" Jekyll Now setup by Barry Clark (before packaged themes arrived on GitHub Pages) - you can use the Minima theme (default) and get started in 60 seconds. See Hello, Minima! Theme - Get Started in 60 Seconds @ https://github.com/henrythemes/hello-minima-theme as a ready-to-fork (live) example.
PS: For more ready-to-fork (open source) themes for GitHub pages, see the Dr Jekyll Themes directory / listing (200+ and counting) @ http://drjekyllthemes.github.io
I agree with the static hosting side of things. However that often requires more technical know-how such as the command-line, Git, and potentially other advanced topics.
Instead I recommend people buy a domain, create a DigitalOcean account, have DigitalOcean manage it for them, and then create a single $10/month Droplet with their one-click deployment of Ghost. Now you have your markdown files and a self-hosted, beautiful blog.
That being said I am a "power user", so I use Hugo and Netlify, but there are deeper requirements to make that work. I would love to see a one-click deployment of a Netlify based blog.
I use Jekyll and Forestry.io for my site but I’m also realistic and know that solution is a little too complicated for a lot of WordPress and Tumblr folks. The uptake in these tools are because of their simplicity, which honestly the design patterns haven’t changed in almost 20 years.
The mods can't see everything. It depends how evident it is and if the comments are relevant [1] and if the if the only purpose of the user is to make adds. My guess is that this user only makes a comment per month, so it's not so easy to remember.
For an official reply, you can send an email to the mods hn@ycombinator.com and they can take a look at the history of comments of the user.
[1] It's fine to reply to the technical questions that appear about your page/app/product. It's not fine to add a link to your product in unconnected threads.
I agree. I'm okay with people promoting their stuff as long as it fits in the discussion and has proper disclosure that it's their project. But it's not very nice when almost every post is like this:
To amplify: they really do. I've got my beefs with HN moderation on occasion, but neither 'dang nor 'sctb have ever failed to respond to an email with a response, and a thoughtful one if it's a topic that needs one.
You've sent us hundreds of emails using many accounts. We responded to all of them until it became obvious that it was only energizing the problem, and even then never stopped responding completely. I doubt there has ever been a case of forum moderators treating a user with greater patience. It isn't infinite though.
Since you won't stop posting abusive and misleading comments to HN, we're not going to unban you.
> It's funny, because some years ago when Medium blogs were starting to be posted left and right, people were praising the interface, and nobody listened to the few who objected.
Your memory is very, very different from mine. I remember Medium being heavily criticized by (sorry, lack of a better term) "tech nerds" for stuff like the article brings up when it first came out. People complained about it not working when Javascript was disabled and bloat for a text website, load times, etc., all sorts of stuff. People said they refused to visit Medium. In fact, it was so negative I'm a bit surprised it got as popular as it did with tech blogs.
>Now, we need all kinds of tricks, add-ons and blocks to just read five-minute posts during our commute.
Only "tech nerds" care about those sorts of things. Joe User reads Medium just fine without any tricks, add-ons and blocks.
Oh, and since everybody seems to post their personal blogs for critique, shameless plug in adding a link to my own, which I think gets the minimalism aesthetic sooomewhat right.
It still needs some more slimming down, and small aesthetic changes would be welcome, but here it goes.
>Now, we need all kinds of tricks, add-ons and blocks to just read five-minute posts during our commute.
Is this only a thing for phones? I never use my phone for web browsing, but I use my web browser. All I have on that is uBlock Origin and I have always found Medium pages completely clean and pleasant to look at with no clutter or ads.
> It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of your stuff.
It's 2018 and there's still no standardized format for a blog's complete content (text, images, comments/credentials for comment provider) that we could use to move quickly from one site/setup to another. It would be nice to just get all Tweets even into Hyde or whatever.
I am building my own Static Site Generator [1] similar to Jekyll for fun. It's so great to do this in 2018, compared to the first time I tried to manually build something similar around 2014. Now things are amazing, the npm libraries just seem to merge together nicely to build the whole thing.
I just need RSS and a decent data parser for the blog entries list and it'll be all set. Not recommended for you to use it, just build one, it's fun! And easy, and you'll learn a lot.
Noone reads my blog anyway, but I also import my posts into Medium so people can read it there if they choose. Medium sets the canonical URL to the hosted version on my own site so SEO shouldn't take a hit.
> people were praising the interface, and nobody listened to the few who objected.
Or maybe objecting had the same effect it had back then as it does now: absolutely nothing.
It's like me saying "the government is corrupt!" and, any time something happens or some time has passed, "shoulda listened! ;)" -- Seems a bit masturbatory at best.
> It's funny, because some years ago when Medium blogs were starting to be posted left and right, people were praising the interface, and nobody listened to the few who objected.
It's the same with OSX, often praised but at some point the UX got so bad that you'd have to install system updates through their music player iTunes.
I've been using macOS X since Snow Leopard, and at no point were software updates delivered through iTunes. In fact, I have the (probably bad) habit of running sudo rm -rf /Applications/iTunes.app on all my new machines (alongside a lot of other default apps).
It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of your stuff. The next free framework that comes, which promises a clean, non-distracting view, will also (most probably) eventually add advertisements, because, well, corporations need money.
In my humble opinion, just write your Markdown files, and use one of the bajillion Static Sites Generators to create/host them, or fork a framework that already does this such as [1], copy-paste them in, and you're set.
[1] https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now