HN Explorer

Why Are We All on Medium?

44 points by finavorto ↗ HN
I find it strange that a group of FOSS-freaks and hacker-types would all congregate around one closed, proprietary platform. I'd like to know why this is.

I suppose the better question is "why aren't we all using weird home-made static blogs?"

34 comments

[ 12.7 ms ] story [ 1553 ms ] thread
J_Darnley
It is the new Live Journal, Blogger, Wordpress, or whatever.

To me it doesn't look like the FLOSS people are on it but rather a bunch of marketing types. Usually the new startup of the month has its company blog on it. Fashionable javascript library of the week too. Or is that just because most links I see published here are for this kind of use?

gkya
Well the short answer to this is that we are not all on medium.
vertis
I have a weird static blog that I almost never post to.
wingerlang
I've got one as well, 15 posts over the last year. But I don't think I ever shared it with anyone so far. It is more of a "official" dump of things I've done that I found cool.
api
Running a server is annoying and requires a level of technical expertise beyond what most people possess, and Medium is pretty and easy to use.

It's really the new blogger.

douche
I found Blogger to be less irritating than Medium. Medium really, really does not encourage comments - there is the kind of terrible responses feature, but, meh.

Also, the parallax image scrolling stuff gets old quickly.

simbalion
Who wants to spend their time re-inventing the wheel? That said, I dont even know what medium is. Most bloggers are using Wordpress, if you look at the statistics of the web, and for good reasons.

Anyone who's serious about creative control is operating their own blog. I think Twitter and Facebook's biggest contribution to social media will be the eventual resurgence of private blogs and RSS.

snaky
> Who wants to spend their time re-inventing the wheel?

Ask any author of thousands of 'We reimplemented something in Go, Rust and Node.js'.

singham
What if the wheel turns faster in Go?
simbalion
I'll respond by pointing to the example set by Betamax & VHS.

Speed isn't everything. Stability and Security are arguably more important.

I think there are developer concerns as well, when considering new or alternative languages and platforms.

Wordpress is presently king, as it comes to both blogging platforms and CMS. There are many reasons for this, and I doubt it will change anytime soon because it has momentum now as well. WP is built using PHP of course, and I've heard lots of developers say PHP is terrible.

CM30
Well for me, it's a way to post about stuff isn't gaming related. Some people like to read that stuff, it's not relevant on any of my own websites and I can't be bothered to maintain yet another one to host it.

I suspect a lot of other people are the same way. They don't want to set up another website for content they consider irrelevant to their main business/hobby.

RUG3Y
I'm on Medium, I think because it's really easy. I don't like it very much. I see a ton of really awful stories there and I don't really align with the culture.

I'm thinking about launching my own blog again but haven't decided what I really want to do.

laurentdc
In fact the best people I know (hackers, makers and the alike) are all using home-made static blogs or even the much bashed Wordpress.

Medium seems really full of clickbait articles, or stuff with very little real content (the typical "How Waking Up At 7 AM Changed My Leadership Style And My Career Forever" kind of crap).

skylark
I feel like the most obvious answer was missed: People use Medium because there's an audience there and it mostly "just works."

I don't personally care about organically building a brand for myself over the course of years. I don't want to write an article a week only to have it never see the light of day. All I want to do is jot down a few thoughts from time to time and have some people stumble upon it. Make the world a slightly better place.

Medium is perfect for that. The interface is beautiful, and it's far more likely that someone will stumble across my post on Medium than find my crappy blog.

yolesaber
What FOSS-freaks are on medium? The communities I know of congregate on reddit, IRC, forums, and blogrolls
csixty4
Once upon a time I had a custom-coded blogging platform, a domain name, and a fairly frequently updated personal blog. And nobody read it. Once in a while I had a technical post that got a little attention, but it faded quickly.

I'd mention posts to friends and their response was always "what's your LJ name? I'll friend you." And then I'd tell them about my self-hosted blog and they'd look at me like I was an alien. There wasn't room in their world for a blog that didn't live on LiveJournal.

LJ added a feature to pull in an RSS feed and make it look like an LJ account. The only difference was the RSS logo next to the username instead of a photo. One of my wife's friends sucked in my feed this way and people started following me there. They also started commenting there, but their comments on LJ weren't connected to my blog's comments. People were hurt I wasn't responding to their comments because I never saw them. I had to open an LJ account just to respond to my blog's comments somewhere other than my blog.

Look, I'm active in the WordPress community. I've coded blogs in PHP, Java, and Node.js. But at the end of the day, I want people to read and engage with my content. And in 2016 that means posting on Medium. I need to go where the audience is, and Medium's social features & suggested posts make it a winner.

thenomad
Yes, this is the main reason.

The biggest challenge for any long-form writer in 2016 is discoverability, assuming that you don't already have a huge audience and you do want people to read your writing.

That's why I, for example, tend to guest-post on friends' blogs with larger followings rather than posting on my own small blog.

With the near-death of RSS, vanilla blogs have almost no subscription mechanism, so you can't assume people will return to them. And people subscribe to / follow individual blogs far less often than they did circa 2002 / 2003

But Medium has bubble-up features enabling your writing to be discovered.

I'm not a huge fan of the platform, but that's why I use it from time to time.

flashman
Why are we all on HN and not Usenet, the original distributed link-sharing system?
snaky
That's a very good question actually. GNUS is so much better than any web interface for that.
mbrock
"Better" in some sense. I've used Gnus a lot and I love it, but it's also very complicated, annoying to configure, hard to understand... and definitely doesn't work on iPhone. This web site is much, much easier to access than a newsgroup.
reitanqild
Alternatives did exists: I think I originally read newsgroups on Outlook Express and found it usable.
mbrock
That's true... though I happen to know that Outlook Express is notorious for strange NNTP protocol behavior... so that's another source of misery.

Basically I'm just pointing out that one of the reasons that we seem to congregate mostly on centralized web sites is that they're extremely convenient in specific ways: you already have the client on all of your devices, etc.

fiftyacorn
I use wordpress for my blog. Its mostly technical note taking

I looked at moving to jekyll recently since it was getting a lot of press. But felt it was too much work(I would rather work on other things), and wordpress was easier to use and has plugins. I expect people use medium for the same reason

jventura
I am using my own home-cooked solution which is based on flask, flask pages for markdown and flask frozen to freeze everything into html files.
kup0
At 3MB for a short text article, I'm wondering the same thing, honestly. I think it's mostly ease-of-use and discovery.
kyloren
I like medium but I am not sure when they will start showing ads on our blogs. I don't like ads on my personal blog.

But I also don't like to write in markdown and yaml and compile into static site and post it on GitHub so I recently moved backto blogger but I still blog on medium too. https://justruky.blogspot.com

sotojuan
HN is very far from being "FOSS-freaks".
qwertyuiop924
I dunno. I still mostly follow actual blogs (Armin Ronacher's is one of the best), even as most people consign RSS and Atom to the bitbucket. I only read medium when there are articles posted on HN from it: The signal:noise ratio on Medium is pretty high.