The Flutter community relies heavily on Medium. I try to avoid Medium whenever I can, but somehow a lot of Googlers think it's the best platform for technical articles or something.
Some of the writers insist on using screenshots (!) of pieces of code, so I guess that user experience is not very high on their list of considerations.
Not a Googler, but a literal quote from this article:
"As always, I prefer using screenshots over gists in my articles to show code. I find them easier to work with, and easier to read."
Yeah I don't think you can control how people write blog posts. The Flutter community on Medium (https://medium.com/flutter-community) seems to be a collection of articles mostly written by non-Googlers.
As a Googler who has a lot of technical content on Medium, I have to agree that screenshots are much more flexible than Medium's gist support, but I always add a link to the actual code right under.
In this example, I have a single gist with multiple files, but Medium can't display just a single file from that gist at a time (maybe things have changed, but I don't think so).
Medium's gist and code support in general is sub-par compared to other platforms IMO, but as a platform it does make it easy to create and share content that is also easily discoverable.
I'm probably going to start hosting the canonical post on my own domain and just use Medium to syndicate it.
The weirdest thing about that quote is that the screenshots in the article are all very low quality and hard to read. Maybe Medium just needs a better way to handle code samples.
I was going to do some technical posts for medium, but i found as a user they were not surfacing good technical content. They were surfacing bubble gum articles better placed in cosmopolitan, even after i set my preferences and explicitly searched multiple times. My click history did have me clicking on articles like that, but only on moments of weakness, i didn't intend to not did i want an infinite list of vacuous content.
There is a classic problem in content recommendations, what someone says they want vs what they actually click, good systems ( from 2008 ) do a blend, then start balancing.
I cancelled my 'open paywall' and will probably start a WordPress.
FWIW, Medium switched editorial and curation strategies for technical content and all the technical content leveled up. My standard for technical content is O'Reilly circa 2003, and Medium's not there yet. But I'm hopeful that Medium's recent changes are a precursor to leveling up again down the road.
The change is to add a lot more human curation mixed in with the algorithmic promotion. They have deals now with at least three publications where that publication's editor's taste is factored into the promotion. Those pubs are Toward Data Science, Better Programming (which I help with), and one other that's not announced. As I look at Medium's featured articles in their Programming topic, 2/3 of the articles were curated by one of those pubs.
For the Better Programming deal, we also got budget for copy editors and in the last 2+ months have copy edited about 700 articles. I find that the copy editors are doing a lot to make an article read better--it's subtle, but definitely way more than just fixing a few spelling mistakes.
I worked at O'Reilly circa 2003, which is how it came to be my gold standard. A great technical document needs a smart author who has the time to write something complete and then that author needs to be paired with good quality control. It's like how the software you write is better if someone else tests it. O'Reilly literally had code testers for their book and a very robust errata program for folding in fixes to bugs after publication.
The people who've done that in article length writing are RailsCast and more recently Swift by Sundell. That would be the obvious next level for Medium to support, and I think they will, but probably not for another year or more.
Can someone explain what this article was about? I've read it several times and I still have no idea what the main point was, or how it connects to leaving Medium. It feels like it was machine-generated - all of the sentences don't relate to each other or say anything on their own, from my reading.
I think it's confusing because he's talking about a feature for Medium publications that most people don't even know ever existed. For a small handful of publications, Medium had allowed them to offer their own "pay to subscribe" program where your subscription fee went directly to the publication. I think of this as a failed product experiment that Medium's been slow to kill (Medium is very slow to kill failed experiments in general).
Also, I think he's probably doing the right thing for himself. Tiago is on the path to getting a mainstream book deal. In self-improvement, he's on the Ben Hardy or James Clear path. A huge part of that book deal is based on the number of subscribers to his mailing list.
A book deal is decent money, seemingly everyone gets an advance in the $200k range. But more importantly, it's a huge career level up for someone like Tiago. Every activity that doesn't build up your mailing list ends up being kind of a waste of time.
I suspect that Tiago could actually make more money on Medium publishing behind their paywall than he's going to make in his personal subscription program. But it's not enough that it should be his focus.
Also, I assume incentives will change again at Medium down the road as they keep trying to make the deal work for more and more authors. So maybe he'll come back, if just to cross post.
I thought article is well written and explains interesting mechanics that professional authors face. The core insight is that all you need is a tribe of few hundred people paying $10/mo if you want to make living out of your writings. However constructing such a tribe requires producing serious long-form high-value content as opposed to something that people will be amused by a short piece and immediately move on to next random amusing short piece. Counterintuitively, the goal isn’t to reach largest possible audience but the most serious audience which might be pretty small. You want your content to be valuable enough that people would be willing pay by their cold hard cash as opposed to pay by their attention. In this model knowing and connecting with your tribe members deeply is also important.
The author argues that Medium attempts to imitate all-you-can-eat model of Spotify and Netflix but for written text. This model depends on grabbing attention as much as possible by random stream of articles each providing small dopamine hit instead of providing long term value to determined readers who are willing to put in work to digest complex long-form content. Currently they also don’t allow you to connect back to your followers. This means it’s hard to build tribe of serious audience, forced to write simple attention grabbing short pieces and depend on vitality lottery/luck factor to get paid.
I've been looking for Medium alternatives, but my audience wants me to continue on it.
123 votes to where should I publish my posts:
- 34% Medium
- 9% Dev.to
- 45% My company's official blog
- 12% LinkedIn, my domain, ???
This tells me that - even if Medium continues to annoy their fans with their new model, I should still consider it as a great platform for quick publishing.
Why not cross-post your free content to Medium, LinkedIn, etc? Then you can take advantage of their distribution while pointing people back to your own site.
I'm wary of companies/products built entirely on top of other products - too much risk (see Zynga). Same concept with Medium.
My company blog first - yes! Except that I can go from idea to post in 12 hours with Medium, and that's not at all the experience for the official posts when multiple teams want to chime in...
These sound like two different kind of posts. Either way, make sure the canonical location is some place that you or your employer (whoever owns the content) have control over.
I'd suggest:
- Post your personal stuff on your own domain.
- Post your Google Cloud stuff on the company blog.
- Syndicate / cross post to Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, wherever etc. if one or both make sense for the topic.
- You don't need to cross post the whole post if the platform doesn’t warrant it (lots of eyeballs, but hostile to the content-publisher, i.e. Facebook). You can put 2 paragraphs and a link to "read more on xyzblog". You're mostly using these services for discovery. In general, treat platforms you don't control as discovery-only.
- Encourage and enable readers to subscribe and engage directly at the canonical location (if practical), and not on the edges, as long as that doesn’t create a poor experience for them.
- If you find that more people want to engage / or the conversation is higher-quality at one of the distribution points (say HackerNews, vs the comments section of your blog), then provide a link to there from the canonical location and encourage conversation there.
One thing that seems to me like an impediment is the lack of a trusted counterparty to handle contract & billing mechanics. For example: subscribing to a channel on amazon prime video means that I know I can cancel effective towards the end of each monthly anniversary by simply hitting a button that I know how to find. I've done it numerous times, and as a result of the fact that I know how frictionless it is, I go around shopping for interesting channels quite freely.
Entering your credit card details into a generic payment system requires a significant level of trust which I may not be willing to extend to some blogger I hardly know.
Some people have very weird contractual structures in mind when they advertise "$10/month". They might mean: Yearly contractual term paid for on a monthly basis, but with a 3-month notice period, and contract renewing for another full year term if it doesn't get cancelled on time.
Sometimes it can be difficult to contact customer service (or anyone else willing to listen to you) when there's a problem with billing. Sometimes, cancellation can involve having to send a fax.
Sometimes they might sell your data to people who will spam you. etc. etc. etc.
For all of these reasons, the friction I experience when contemplating what is prima facie $10/month is significantly more than just that monetary value.
Here it seems to me that medium could play the role of that trusted counterparty (like amazon prime video) to make subscriptions frictionless. Or maybe someone should just do that as a generic paywall service for subscriptions. Or maybe that already exists, and I just don't know of it's existence yet (with the caveat, that, in this case, it doesn't really enjoy my trust at this point making it a bit pointless).
Not sure how in depth you need code support, but I'm going to peddle my new blogging host, https://personaljournal.ca/
It's based off of WriteFreely, the same blog platform that people.kernel.org just switched to. It's totally free to use, and I'll never put ads on it. It supports markdown and html posts, so code syntax highlighting and all that fun stuff is well supported. Give it a shot if that sounds good for you!
The only reason I can think of for posting to Medium is revenue sharing, and I am not interested in pursuing a career as a creator at this time. Putting up content people MIGHT find via SEO tactics, only to have people driven away via a pay wall, seems self defeating.
I suppose you can always post to Medium you and somewhere else, unless that is a violation of Medium's terms of service. Then your basically turning yourself into someone who spams everywhere, not just Medium.
So I guess Medium is for creators and spammers. Am I missing something?
Medium basically killed the incentives to publish outside their paywall. For most people, free hosting isn't enough.
But posting within their paywall is generally a pretty good deal.
Medium gives you some small amount of revenue. $50 to $200 is common, but I've had several authors in publications I run make $3000 or more for a single article.
Medium also tries to promote the best articles to people who care about the topic you're writing on but who might not have any idea who you are. They do a pretty good job of this. New writers might get an audience of a few hundred readers they wouldn't get otherwise. Committed Medium authors seem to get audiences of a few thousand people for each article.
And the author isn't giving up much for those two benefits. They get to keep their copyright and could publish anywhere else. The article still qualifies for SEO even though it's behind a (metered) paywall. Authors have a "friend" link that bypasses the paywall altogether.
I have no interest in subscribing to a publisher and letting them choose what I read. Give me a way to tell an author I'd like to see more by deciding how much I want to donate to that author after reading a piece ... an instant, secure, online donation. They can put my on their mail-list.
If the author chooses to congregate with other authors on a publisher's site, and pay them rent, their choice. So long as there's no paywall.
He's basically going from freemium to a closed group of hardcore readers. I see two problems with that:
1. He obtained those hardcore readers via the freemium approach. What will he do about subscriber churn, rely on just word of mouth, or go back to freemium once in a while?
2. How long does the think the 10/month will last? It's fine now as few writers are doing it. But does he think he'll be able to charge 10/month when everyone else charges that much? No matter how rich you are, as a reader, there's a limit to how many subscriptions you're willing to pay.
Good. I noticed I'm closing Medium articles more often these days, as articles have annoying paywalls, and I consider skipping more Medium articles in the first place.
The website feels so much more bloated than a few years back . It is full of advertisements to other articles, weird share buttons and inconsistent layouting.
It is always about how to drive traffic and that will always be part of the game, whatever you are writing for. Good long form ideas might have a place, but most people are not interested in that type of information let alone that type of format. You can have something interesting to say that may benefit many people, but without marketing to get your ideas out, it becomes a rather "personal" endeavor. You can try different form of marketing (like click-bait titles and other gimmicks) to get your ideas out there, but ultimately if you don't have the cash to fund the campaign to promote your own site, you will be relying on sites like medium.com or whatever blogs of your choice to have a hand in spreading your message.
If you truly believed you were writing things that people will want to read, long form or not, you SHOULD be willing to invest in marketing yourself to promote your own site. At least enough to justify your "risk vs reward" balance.
Taking out a Facebook ad for your local area is not as expensive as you might think and I honestly believe the whole Google Ads and Facebook Ads have allowed the little guys to buy ads and distribute them to the specific target they want. The tools are there, what is lacking is the will and confidence to follow through.
47 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 98.6 ms ] threadBut this is 'easiest' only if you are of a dev\IT background.
https://www.stackbit.com/
Some of the writers insist on using screenshots (!) of pieces of code, so I guess that user experience is not very high on their list of considerations.
https://medium.com/@greg.perry/a-design-pattern-for-flutter-...
For example: https://medium.com/google-cloud/kubernetes-configmaps-and-se...
In this example, I have a single gist with multiple files, but Medium can't display just a single file from that gist at a time (maybe things have changed, but I don't think so).
Medium's gist and code support in general is sub-par compared to other platforms IMO, but as a platform it does make it easy to create and share content that is also easily discoverable.
I'm probably going to start hosting the canonical post on my own domain and just use Medium to syndicate it.
https://medium.com/flutter-community/flutter-redux-toast-not...
I don’t know who’s to blame here but I already hate Medium with a passion and this is not helping.
There is a classic problem in content recommendations, what someone says they want vs what they actually click, good systems ( from 2008 ) do a blend, then start balancing.
I cancelled my 'open paywall' and will probably start a WordPress.
The change is to add a lot more human curation mixed in with the algorithmic promotion. They have deals now with at least three publications where that publication's editor's taste is factored into the promotion. Those pubs are Toward Data Science, Better Programming (which I help with), and one other that's not announced. As I look at Medium's featured articles in their Programming topic, 2/3 of the articles were curated by one of those pubs.
For the Better Programming deal, we also got budget for copy editors and in the last 2+ months have copy edited about 700 articles. I find that the copy editors are doing a lot to make an article read better--it's subtle, but definitely way more than just fixing a few spelling mistakes.
I worked at O'Reilly circa 2003, which is how it came to be my gold standard. A great technical document needs a smart author who has the time to write something complete and then that author needs to be paired with good quality control. It's like how the software you write is better if someone else tests it. O'Reilly literally had code testers for their book and a very robust errata program for folding in fixes to bugs after publication.
The people who've done that in article length writing are RailsCast and more recently Swift by Sundell. That would be the obvious next level for Medium to support, and I think they will, but probably not for another year or more.
A book deal is decent money, seemingly everyone gets an advance in the $200k range. But more importantly, it's a huge career level up for someone like Tiago. Every activity that doesn't build up your mailing list ends up being kind of a waste of time.
I suspect that Tiago could actually make more money on Medium publishing behind their paywall than he's going to make in his personal subscription program. But it's not enough that it should be his focus.
Also, I assume incentives will change again at Medium down the road as they keep trying to make the deal work for more and more authors. So maybe he'll come back, if just to cross post.
The author argues that Medium attempts to imitate all-you-can-eat model of Spotify and Netflix but for written text. This model depends on grabbing attention as much as possible by random stream of articles each providing small dopamine hit instead of providing long term value to determined readers who are willing to put in work to digest complex long-form content. Currently they also don’t allow you to connect back to your followers. This means it’s hard to build tribe of serious audience, forced to write simple attention grabbing short pieces and depend on vitality lottery/luck factor to get paid.
123 votes to where should I publish my posts:
- 34% Medium
- 9% Dev.to
- 45% My company's official blog
- 12% LinkedIn, my domain, ???
This tells me that - even if Medium continues to annoy their fans with their new model, I should still consider it as a great platform for quick publishing.
Survey via Twitter to my 10k followers (https://twitter.com/felipehoffa/status/1148334055689031681).
Disclosure: I'm Felipe Hoffa and I work for Google Cloud - and I frequently post on Medium and elsewhere.
I'm wary of companies/products built entirely on top of other products - too much risk (see Zynga). Same concept with Medium.
- Post your personal stuff on your own domain.
- Post your Google Cloud stuff on the company blog.
- Syndicate / cross post to Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, wherever etc. if one or both make sense for the topic.
- You don't need to cross post the whole post if the platform doesn’t warrant it (lots of eyeballs, but hostile to the content-publisher, i.e. Facebook). You can put 2 paragraphs and a link to "read more on xyzblog". You're mostly using these services for discovery. In general, treat platforms you don't control as discovery-only.
- Encourage and enable readers to subscribe and engage directly at the canonical location (if practical), and not on the edges, as long as that doesn’t create a poor experience for them.
- If you find that more people want to engage / or the conversation is higher-quality at one of the distribution points (say HackerNews, vs the comments section of your blog), then provide a link to there from the canonical location and encourage conversation there.
(edit: Formatting)
Entering your credit card details into a generic payment system requires a significant level of trust which I may not be willing to extend to some blogger I hardly know.
Some people have very weird contractual structures in mind when they advertise "$10/month". They might mean: Yearly contractual term paid for on a monthly basis, but with a 3-month notice period, and contract renewing for another full year term if it doesn't get cancelled on time.
Sometimes it can be difficult to contact customer service (or anyone else willing to listen to you) when there's a problem with billing. Sometimes, cancellation can involve having to send a fax.
Sometimes they might sell your data to people who will spam you. etc. etc. etc.
For all of these reasons, the friction I experience when contemplating what is prima facie $10/month is significantly more than just that monetary value.
Here it seems to me that medium could play the role of that trusted counterparty (like amazon prime video) to make subscriptions frictionless. Or maybe someone should just do that as a generic paywall service for subscriptions. Or maybe that already exists, and I just don't know of it's existence yet (with the caveat, that, in this case, it doesn't really enjoy my trust at this point making it a bit pointless).
It's based off of WriteFreely, the same blog platform that people.kernel.org just switched to. It's totally free to use, and I'll never put ads on it. It supports markdown and html posts, so code syntax highlighting and all that fun stuff is well supported. Give it a shot if that sounds good for you!
I suppose you can always post to Medium you and somewhere else, unless that is a violation of Medium's terms of service. Then your basically turning yourself into someone who spams everywhere, not just Medium.
So I guess Medium is for creators and spammers. Am I missing something?
Turns out my audience would rather have me post on Medium than on my personal blog:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20444875
But posting within their paywall is generally a pretty good deal.
Medium gives you some small amount of revenue. $50 to $200 is common, but I've had several authors in publications I run make $3000 or more for a single article.
Medium also tries to promote the best articles to people who care about the topic you're writing on but who might not have any idea who you are. They do a pretty good job of this. New writers might get an audience of a few hundred readers they wouldn't get otherwise. Committed Medium authors seem to get audiences of a few thousand people for each article.
And the author isn't giving up much for those two benefits. They get to keep their copyright and could publish anywhere else. The article still qualifies for SEO even though it's behind a (metered) paywall. Authors have a "friend" link that bypasses the paywall altogether.
If the author chooses to congregate with other authors on a publisher's site, and pay them rent, their choice. So long as there's no paywall.
He's basically going from freemium to a closed group of hardcore readers. I see two problems with that:
1. He obtained those hardcore readers via the freemium approach. What will he do about subscriber churn, rely on just word of mouth, or go back to freemium once in a while?
2. How long does the think the 10/month will last? It's fine now as few writers are doing it. But does he think he'll be able to charge 10/month when everyone else charges that much? No matter how rich you are, as a reader, there's a limit to how many subscriptions you're willing to pay.
The website feels so much more bloated than a few years back . It is full of advertisements to other articles, weird share buttons and inconsistent layouting.
If you truly believed you were writing things that people will want to read, long form or not, you SHOULD be willing to invest in marketing yourself to promote your own site. At least enough to justify your "risk vs reward" balance.
Taking out a Facebook ad for your local area is not as expensive as you might think and I honestly believe the whole Google Ads and Facebook Ads have allowed the little guys to buy ads and distribute them to the specific target they want. The tools are there, what is lacking is the will and confidence to follow through.