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.<p>It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get <i>yourself</i> in control of your stuff. The <i>next</i> free framework that comes, which promises a clean, non-distracting view, will also (most probably) eventually add advertisements, because, well, corporations need money.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now</a>
I'm amazed at how many people here say that people should simply use a static site generator instead of wordpress or medium.<p>Does anyone else understand that probably 99% of Medium traffic (both reader and writer) don't even understand those words and would have no idea even where to begin? Most of them probably had trouble just signing up on Medium and already forgot their passwords.<p>This is where Medium wins. It looks ok, makes posts look professional, and doesn't give any choices. You don't have to choose a theme, or setup anything. Signup (or even, login with twitter/facebook) and just write. Done.<p>You can't possibly hope that any writer on Medium is ready or interested in a static site generator.
Sometimes I read articles like this and think I'm past it.
It's like the whole web has turned in to this pool of mud and no-one realises what it was like before.<p>A blog is a text file on a screen. There's really no need to do it on a proprietary system, you can literally upload a text file to your own host, but if you can't be bothered, somewhere like GitHub Pages.<p>You want an image? Here's a tag: <img><p>If the idea is that it doesn't look pretty enough - well, a Medium blog doesn't look like anything at all because I've closed it after closing the first three popups.<p>Here is a link to my own personal blog:
<a href="https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/blog.txt" rel="nofollow">https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/blog.txt</a><p>You're reading this comment right now on a site that gets it right.
This topic comes up fairly often. I think about it a lot - as a Medium user and as a person who has managed multiple wordpress blogs.<p>##Here's my thoughts on why Medium is so popular:<p>1. It's easy. We are all techies here. We often underestimate the weight of this.<p>2. It looks better than your average blog theme. (With 0 effort)<p>3. It promises the opportunity to access a larger audience. (Even if it does not deliver on that promise)<p>4. It provides an endorphin rush though likes/claps and the analytics/view counts.<p>##What the average blogger doesn't care about:<p>1. Effort Overhead. Managing a web server, buying a domain, configuring a wordpress blog, updating wordpress, choosing a theme, deleting spam comments etc.<p>2. Content ownership. Most people don't think about it that much.<p>3. RSS feeds. I'm willing to bet >80% of bloggers have no idea that people still use RSS (or even what it is at this stage)<p>------<p>I don't think Medium is perfect, but I also don't think any of the alternatives are good enough either.
So why the hell did you use it to write this article, then?<p>I wrote a tool which converts your Medium blog into a Jekyll blog, for publishers hoping to migrate:<p><a href="https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify" rel="nofollow">https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify</a>
I'm glad the author mentioned the thing that I dislike most about Medium: the "share" tooltip that appears any time you highlight anything in the article. I realize that they consider this a value prop (and it certainly hasn't hurt their ability to grow) but for those of us who highlight text as we read, it's incredibly annoying.
Pretty convincing. I didn't notice how bad medium was since I'm always logged in and have an ad-blocker. I also don't think they do much in terms of discovery. My blog [0] has about 370 followers and my posts only get about 10 - 20 views unless I put them on social media. Then they'll get between 100 and 10k+.<p>Does anyone have experience with an alternative platform? Preferably free and hosted.<p>[0] <a href="https://medium.com/ml-everything" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/ml-everything</a>
More and more, I find myself relying on "follow the damn money" to understand how increasingly weird the Internet is and how to unweird it.<p>If you're a writer and you want your words to get in front of people, those words need to be on a server somewhere. Someone's gotta pay for the electricity and maintainance on that server. If you don't know who pays for that and what their motivation for doing so is, you don't have a clear understanding of how your words get to your audience.<p>So many web horror stories these days — privacy violations, shady business practices, broken user trust, companies "losing their morals", etc. — stem from the fact that the users deriving value from some product weren't paying for it and were unpleasantly surprised to discover that the people who <i>are</i> paying for it expect something in return, whether freely given or not. Even many startups that begin with their hearts in the right place eventually go wrong once those early "angel" (an ironic term if there ever was one) investors want to recoup their investments, somehow, anyhow.<p>Fortunately, there is a solution. It's not in wide use yet on the Internet (it is a long-established mechanism in other industries like food and consumer goods), but I have some hope that adoption will grow. I call it, "pay for shit". ("Macropatronage", "c-to-b", or "crypto-free currency network" might be better terms for the HN zeitgeist.) The way it works is like this: If you want some product or service, you give a company some of your own money and then they give you the thing in return.<p>This system is not without its flaws. Every time you use it, your total wealth goes down by a measurable amount. Companies often end up incentivized to give you the minimum value in return for maximum money. But it least somewhat aligns the interests of the companies you do business with because you are, well, actually doing business with them.<p>When you buy sausage from the sausage factory, you may not be exactly sure of what you get. But it's still probably better than <i>being</i> the sausage.
I think medium has some cool features like the "claps", comment boxes and story analytics. There's a lot of stuff that that just works out of the box<p>However I really dislike syndicating my blog to it because the formatting is so limited. You cannot do bullet point lists for example, which makes it a huge pain having to tinker with your existing post to reformat it for medium.<p>Nowadays I just syndicate an introduction to the post and a "click here to continue reading" hyperlink to my actual blog. Which is a rubbish experience for Medium users.<p>I'm wondering if there's a decentralised version of a blogging network, where users host their blog themselves, with the social features like claps/comments wrapped around it, plus a bit of a 'recommendation' system for other posts in the network to get that network of writers feel.<p>I know disqus exists but it's not quite the same
No site has perfect UX, but some of these complaints don't seem true, e.g.:<p>> <i>No, those do not go away as you scroll. They literally (yes, literally) take up 25% of your vertical space</i><p>On my computer the bars <i>do</i> go away the instant I scroll down (Chrome on a Mac, and logged-in, not sure if those matter), and 25% is a made-up exaggerated number for a window the author has made much shorter than any reasonable person would be browsing with, even on a small laptop.<p>Yes, Medium strongly nudges you to have an account and be logged-in, and if you do a lot of the other complaints go away. Because it's inherently a <i>social</i> blogging platform, not a <i>static</i> blogging platform. And the social aspect helps spread your audience and build engagement... that doesn't make it a "poor choice". To the contrary, it's a great choice to have.
Disabling JavaScript and cookies for medium.com domain, and a bunch of uBlock rules [1] should do the job<p>[1] Here's mine:<p>medium.com##.metabar<p>medium.com##.js-stickyFooter<p>medium.com##.js-postAttributionFooterContainer<p>medium.com##.js-postActionsFooter .buttonSet<p>medium.com##.button--follow
This is an on-point rant, but what alternatives are there that combine clean, useful publishing tools with the ability to reach a wide audience? Sure I can host my own blog, but what good is it if I have no reader engagement. If there is a decent replacement, I'm all ears.
Outline.com strips away all the distraction.<p>Although in this case it duplicates all the images somehow: <a href="https://outline.com/uZc4XF" rel="nofollow">https://outline.com/uZc4XF</a>
Counterpoint: Medium brings you readers and that's the most valuable feature<p>I've been running my own company since 2001 and been on Twitter since 2006 and I still don't have a readership that is anywhere near what I can get through the Medium algorithm.<p>I write to think. But I publish to get that thinking read. There really is no other feature that comes close to mattering more to me than Medium's network effects. I published something the other day that has 269K views with an additional 1k coming every day through the Medium network.<p>Medium's stats say they were directly responsible for 170k of those views.<p>Then when I look at the external views, I mostly see that those were driven by Medium as well. For example, 10k views came from Twitter, but those were Medium readers retweeting. I looked at my own promotion: Reddit, HN, newsletter, Twitter and can only count up about 10k views that I was directly responsible for.
I stopped using Medium when they removed the ability to see a list of just your articles, mixing your comments into the list (as though every comment you write at the bottom of an article is just as significant as an article you wrote, what a stupid idea though it looks like they've realized that and reverted back). Also I never liked how they don't let you nest bullet points.<p>Moved to markdown and and self-hosting and haven't looked back since. Much prefer the freedom of owning my own files and not being married to any platform.<p>However I do miss the convenience of just being able to post online without needing to compile everything on my laptop with a static file generator and pushing to GitHub, so maybe I'll switch to Wordpress or something later if I take writing more seriously.
Not sure the issue is Medium being a poor tool compared to other ways of blogging...<p>The issue I see is one of ownership:<p>You think you "use" Medium to publish your content, you call that blogging.
But Medium own the domain and the tools: you'll never exploit the owner using the tools they offered you.
In the end, it's medium that really exploits you (ie. the content you freely gave). And they'll use your content in the way they want.<p>Your content is just a hook they'll use to attract readers and push them to those obnoxious pop-ups, banners, buttons, etc. Well you read the article.<p>Personally I own my domain. I use open source tools (ghost & custom made web apps). It serves me well. I own my place and have the freedom to grow it as I'd like.<p>Thanks for reading, take care :)
Bashing medium is cool and all but why not present some alternatives.<p>I clicked on it actually expecting some random article about "hey check out this cool open-source _built_in_some_hipster_language_ blogging _buzzword_ _buzzword_ platform I've built"..<p>Joke aside..gimme alternatives fam.
"Hosting" your own blog takes around an hour of setup for wordpress or github pages. Personally, I use vultr + wordpress for my blog[1], but I have technical expertise - it took only 30 minutes to setup and transfer from my previous provider.<p>Reason I like to host my own, is I control the content, the popups, the UI, etc. If you care about that, host it yourself. Medium is there to make money, we can't fault them for attempting to collect for their service.<p>[1] <a href="https://austingwalters.com/" rel="nofollow">https://austingwalters.com/</a>
I hate modern web. Every site nowdays filled with bright/flashing/wobbling/jumping buttons, modal windows, pinned bars covering 1/3 of the content (or 2/3 on my phone in landscape mode) and asking me to install Yet Another Special App to view site. But I already have app for viewing sites - damn web browser. Browser can even open different pages in different tabs. Or even different sites in different tabs, unbelievable!<p>(Will it ever end?)
I stopped writing on Medium because I don't want claps and statistics and incentives to add stock photos and so on. I don't want my writing gameified. Other than that, it's pretty nice. More here:<p><a href="https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/01/04/The-Well-Appointed-Skinner-Box.html" rel="nofollow">https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/01/04/The-Well-Appointed...</a>
Nice, everyone is posting their favourite CMS, again.<p>I use <a href="https://getgrav.org" rel="nofollow">https://getgrav.org</a> because I like flat-file CMS.<p>Maybe there are some photographers here: <a href="http://koken.me" rel="nofollow">http://koken.me</a> (CMS for photographers).<p>Another idea: Use a static page generator and Amazon's S3 with this neat blackhat trick - <a href="https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-one-website-exploited-amazon-s3-to-outrank-everyone-on-google.1059156/" rel="nofollow">https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-one-website-exploited-...</a> (mildly joking).<p>OT: I pay 0.19$/month for my blog hosting including domain with around 500 views/month (just a personal blog). Many services cost 5$/month, I don't think that's cheap.<p>edit: Medium is for visibility. I know many SEO experts who use it extensively to increase their rankings. Its UX might be annoying for some, but its true value lies in its popularity and outreach.
I am not into blogging. If I were, I would just you a very lightweight html and css on a tiny VM, precompress it and serve it from the ram disk. No CDN. No CMS. Just good ol' vim. Maybe I would get fancy by having a header and footer that shows up on each page. There would be no limit to how many times people could view it for free.<p>If I wanted to let friends add their blogs or comments, I would enable a chroot sftp and link to a root page for them. I've taught teenagers to use sftp, so it can't be that difficult.<p>In summary, I suppose I agree that any heavy framework on some domain you do not own is less than ideal. If self hosting were not an option for whatever reason, I might use neocities [1] for nostalgic reasons. That would also be free to view for everyone.<p>[1] - <a href="https://neocities.org/" rel="nofollow">https://neocities.org/</a>
Maybe a different paradigm to blogging would be bring your own cloud, put in your cloud creds, then it does the beauty work for you in publishing static stuff to those cloud providers like AWS S3. You just pay a minimal fee to use it ad hoc or something as you would need a way to keep it running. Wouldn't need to store creds, just client-side signing to upload. It then updates its "home page" to list your articles recently for SEO. Have community plugins etc you can use etc. Kind of like a modern wordpress but without the terrible code. I don't have time to do this but thought it might be a good idea to flip it based on what we have now. I guess an issue could be broken links if people flop on their cloud payments but seems pretty light weight to build.
On a related note, while scrolling towards the second half of the article, the site started breaking apart in front of me. By the time I reached the comments the whole article had become invisible, seemingly blocked by a pop-up background that wasn't removed by the adblocker.<p>And this is a trend I'm seeing more often recently. I've encountered multiple sites that start to fail on all sides once you use adblock, and I'm not talking about noscript or others where the site not working is already the default behaviour more often than not.<p>In fact some websites actually worked better in a purely terminal-based browser than on my current Firefox setup when I tried it a few weeks ago. Something is really going in the wrong direction.
I don't think anyone should be locked into a specific blogging platform and should own their content 100%.<p>WordPress has been my blogging platform of choice for years but, I've tried many different platforms and ultimately ended up returning back to a platform (ORG) in which I could have total control over.<p>I've also built a tool (<a href="https://scribewp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://scribewp.com/</a>) which allows me to now write my blog posts in any text editor I prefer and later I can sync a markdown file to a posts or page in WordPress. This has improved my productivity and I own my content 100%. While medium is a great platform, there is too much noise going on when reading a blog post.
The criticisms here are regarding the end user's reading experience, which are all fair.<p>However, Medium's unique value propositions typically outweigh these concerns:<p>1. For creators wanting to monetize, Medium automagically promotes content that is getting engagement on their platform. Everything from emails to their huge user base and social media promotions can drastically amplify engagement.<p>2. For non-technical writers, it offers a great UI for writing and publishing, and tools for engagement and feedback (claps, comments, ....)<p>Highly technical people, like the founders of basecamp/inventors of ruby on rails, use Medium for these reasons<p>Until a viable alternative for these 2 emerge, it's just as valid to recommend rsync over dropbox
There's a Chrome and Firefox extension called Make Medium Readable Again: <a href="https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA</a><p>It works great and disables many of these annoying things.
<i>> Sure, Medium editor is nice. Typography is good (for English, other languages are not supported). Publishing is free.</i><p>That's it? I'm not sure the author accurately summarized the upside of Medium. I thought the main benefit is distribution.
I wrote about why you should not move to medium sometime back citing the example of Basecamp. <a href="https://medium.com/@adarsh_thampy/basecamp-moved-their-blog-to-medium-but-you-probably-shouldn-t-ab36aa88158a" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@adarsh_thampy/basecamp-moved-their-blog-...</a><p>And basecamp is moving away from Medium.<p>The problem with Medium is that the inbuilt audience will go away soon. Browse their home page, and now most of the articles are premium ones.<p>This is very similar to Facebook. When pages started, they were great. But as Facebook wanted to make money, they began restricting reach.<p>Clearly, that's where Medium will head towards.
Funnily enough, I was able to read this story only by switching FF into reader view. For some reason I was unable to scroll page in normal view. Probably scrolling needs some javascript which was blocked by uMatrix, or something like.
Medium only carries mediocre stuff. My heart sinks a little when an enticing title carries that domain. No I don't want another es6/react top 10 stuff. This is the best article medium has posted. Speaks volumes.
It's so laggy on Safari OSX Sierra and often hangs. I'm not subscribing to read articles by amateurs. What it has going is nice content, white space, a feed feature – that's about it.
I just read every single comment, and not one person mentioned Typepad. Perhaps I'm the only one still using it. I started my blog there in 2004 and have been posting many times/day 7 days/week since: over 30,000 posts, all instantly accessible by anyone in my Archives sidebar. I haven't changed a single thing about the look or format since it began. I know nothing about coding, RSS, etc.; reading the comments, all the techie stuff washed over me like an invisible medium (no pun intended).
If the platform itself weren't so awful in many other ways, the blogging tools on LinkedIn are pretty good, and I've always had very good engagement with very little effort.
Most of the time when I see a Medium link I refuse to read it. The website is awful. The comment system/discussions are awful. The content is mostly awful. Why should I listen/read from some random on Medium? What is your background? How are you an expert that I should read and take advice from? It seems like a bunch of random people trying to make it blogging again, like in the first Dotcom bubble. Medium feels like Twitter long reads. Maybe it's just me though.
I just use Github Gists. I've posted over 500 articles onto Github Gists. It's the best blogging system in the world imo. It is git backed, renders ipynb and other fancy formats, has comments and stars and allows forking. Also I use giscus to notify me of comments. The search system can use some UI help though. But hashtags help.<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/CMCDragonkai" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/CMCDragonkai</a>
Could be a good time to mention Plume [1], a Medium clone written in Rust that uses the fediverse for displaying blog posts across different instances.<p>Still very much a work in progress – but one can already publish articles, comment them, and follow people using RSS or a Mastodon account (because ActivityPub rocks).<p>Not ready ret, but quite promising.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/Plume-org/Plume" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Plume-org/Plume</a>
I have a growing collection of resources under the title: "My Own Platform," and this is exactly why.<p>As many have mentioned, there are some awesome utilities out there for simple Markdown publishing -> Push to Github pages. Sure, you won't get all the interwoven clicks and promotion, but in my book, I think shooting for a smaller quality group of readers, then a huge mass of people is more where I am at. Milage may vary, I'm sure.
The first thing I see is this: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/jFJRaoB.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/jFJRaoB.png</a><p>Very cringe worthy indeed.
Yep -- I was a paid Medium subscriber / user for most of this year. Discontinued last month for many of the reasons already cited. In particular for me, the content creation interface is absolutely horrible [even worse in the iOS version] and it's a chore to get anything done using it. Clearly the guiding UX principles were aesthetic rather than usability-oriented.
Just to throw my dead-simple blogging software into the mix: <a href="https://github.com/blhack/blogeyBlog" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/blhack/blogeyBlog</a><p>It's written in go. You write text files and put them in a directory. It applies a template and serves them. That's it. Personally I love it, you might too!
I tried to port an article from my personal blog to medium once. The experience was abysmal. They don't render Markdown, there is no easy way of adding code sections, etc.<p>I had never used Medium until then and will probably never use it again but I still gotta ask. Why are we stuck with this awful platform, and why do they still not have markdown/code support?
A bookmarklet I adapted from an example I read about NodeIterator in js.<p>Removes sticky and fixed blocks from the dom. I use it all the time, even on mobile safari.<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/colincbc/f8d1b8768e1e566d86b6ef4e691ecc5b" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/colincbc/f8d1b8768e1e566d86b6ef4e691...</a>
I started modestly blogging on Medium in 2016. The same year I moved away from the platform to a Github Pages + Jekyll combo (<a href="https://msadowski.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://msadowski.github.io/</a>). I'd never go back to hosting my content on external platform.
Honestly I don't bother with Wordpress and the like anymore.<p>I simply write what I want to publish in org-mode then export it to HTML or PDF and that's it...<p>My data is no longer tied to anything like a database or some specific framework so its easier for backups and moving it to new servers when needed.
> <i>Another interesting point is that they are really eager to block embeds that do not respect Do Not Track header but do not respect DNT themselves. Yes, Medium will collect your profile even if you are not a registered user and explicitly ask them not to do it.</i>
Someone in the comments linked to this Chrome extension: <a href="https://makemediumreadable.com/" rel="nofollow">https://makemediumreadable.com/</a><p>I tried it, and after turning on all the extension's features, it pretty much solves the problem.
Having just posted a programming related article there last night I think it’s a poor choice for technical subjects too. We need a Medium for technical people. Maybe not quite Observable (Mike Bostock’s thing) but with more tools than Medium.
The proper way to think of Medium is as "Long Form Twitter" - that it's not where you should primarily post your long treatise about XYZ, but that it's a secondary platform for promoting it, interacting with the audience there, etc.<p>OPs article describes the first landing UX - which is definitely bad, but not what a habitual Medium reader sees.<p>I wrote this much bigger posts about it here [1], but the TL;DR is that you should post on your own site and use Medium's hidden "Import" tool to bring your content into their platform:<p><a href="https://medium.com/p/import" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/p/import</a><p>This preserves the SEO of your original article because it adds a rel canonical tag.<p>1 - <a href="https://sendcheckit.com/blog/why-you-should-put-your-content-on-medium-and-your-own-domain" rel="nofollow">https://sendcheckit.com/blog/why-you-should-put-your-content...</a>
What's great about Medium is the exposure it can quickly get you if you get to write something worth it for people to read. It's still powerful for that.
try <a href="https://getbuzz.io" rel="nofollow">https://getbuzz.io</a>, we're in private beta, it is white label and you can put it on your domain.
I moved on to <a href="https://dev.to/sergio" rel="nofollow">https://dev.to/sergio</a><p>1000 times better writing experience, and non of the political fluff that pesters you on Medium.<p>If you write technical articles, go to Dev.to
This article seems to miss the point of medium entirely. He fails to mention that you can be paid for content you create on medium, and content consumers don't have to sell their eyes to advertisers. Yes, they have to be pushy so they can acquire that critical base of paid users, but I'll take that any day over traditional advertisers.<p>Now, if you aren't interested in being paid for the content you create, then medium's goals might not be aligned with yours, so another self hosted platform may be better.<p>> it’s bad. Bad. Really bad. It’s not good, for any meaning of good you can imagine. There’s no person on Earth who could honestly call it at even partially good. Banners all over the place. Aggressive tracking and profiling.<p>Go poll 50 free users on the reading experience of Medium. Obviously this is anecdotal but almost everyone I speak to loves reading on medium. Compared to other ad-infested or high paywall websites, medium provides a incredible reading experience for it's goals as a for profit platform.
over a year ago, the rapid fire, almost daily updates to their android app had given me the suspicions that their operating expenses would be too much to remain humble for long, then came the notifications and social media posts inviting me to come read the paywall articles. I'm not against paying for access with subscription, as I have a few, as well as a healthy list of creators on Patreon but I feel it's kinda like YouTube profiting massively from user generated content. I know they aren't in it for fun, just saying it's been obvious for a while now
Most of the popular online services have screwed up their interface.<p>I think it started with Digg. It was once a loved website. The screwed up the interface and everyone ran to Reddit.<p>Now Reddit has screwed up their interface too.<p>We all used to love Google for its simple and elegant web interfaces. Look at what a mess GMail is now.<p>If there is anything that more than 10 years of Web 2.0 teaches us, it is that once we host our content on another company's service, we are at the mercy of that company. They can take our content and serve it over absolute crap interface providing an absolute crap experience to our readers whenever they want to. They are never going to care about the presentation of the content the way the original author might. So I think it is time to take back control and host your own blogs. I know not everyone wants to buy a domain name, buy a VPS, set things up, and keep a blog running. And no, GitHub Pages, is not a solution. GitHub Pages is great today but if there is anything that more than 10 years of Web 2.0 teaches us, it is ... Do you see my point?<p>So as technologists, we need to think how we can make it easier so that anyone (from young kids to the suits type) can setup their blogs and publish content with ease. Any interesting solutions? Any takers?
Number one web experience trick: If its a article style website (news, blogging, etc), disable javascript.<p>Since chrome removed javascript from the site model I've been using ublock's javascript button. it looks like this `</>`<p>Outside of images that don't render the full resolution version on sites like the Times, its a truly objectively better experience.<p>In fact, I want to see that as an addon, a plugin that disables on javascript on sites based on a list, like adblocks now and days, with the following criteria: does disabling javascript lead to a net increase in UX?. For sites like Medium, almost every news site, etc, the answer is yes.