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Ask HN: Would you still start a Medium.com publication today?

10 points by anon1094 ↗ HN
I see popular publications like HackerNoon.com and freeCodeCamp.org actively moving away from Medium.com into their own platforms.

If you wanted to start a publication would you still recommend Medium? If not, what's another option?

7 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 23.5 ms ] thread
soulchild37
No, always own your platform, Medium has shit UX (forced popup that ask user to sign up, plus top sticky banner sometimes). And now Medium has started to put paywall on articles, and the profit sometimes doesn't go to the author.

You can use Jekyll / Hugo to generate your blog staticly and host in on Github Pages or your own server. If these are too much effort, simply sign up for a wordpress blog , it works well too.

https://www.alwaysownyourplatform.com

digital_voodoo
There is a large choice of publication platforms.

I'm not tech-savvy enough and mostly don't have enough free time to fiddle with the installation of Ghost, Hugo and Co. But at least I know they exist.

For the time being, I've installed Wordpress on my own hosting and with my own domain name. It's not ideal, but I considered Medium when setting up my professional blog, and decided against it for the above-mentioned reasons.

lmiller1990
I started on Medium way back (2-3 years ago) since it was easy and the UX was relatively clean. The main benefit I continue to enjoy is a large audience; lots of people find my articles who might not otherwise have. I think it's best to maintain your own personal blog, but crosspost to medium (maybe a week after, with a backlink to your original post on your own blog).
mindcrime
I wouldn't have started a publication on Medium yesterday, still wouldn't today, and won't tomorrow. Say "no" to closed/walled-garden ecosystems, for the love of FSM.

Other option? Self-host using Apache Roller or something. It's not like there aren't 12,000 F/OSS blog/CMS/wiki/etc. systems out there one could use for this sort of thing.

softwaredoug
Absolutely not.

I want to own my content as much as possible. Tech startups like Medium seem to have a habit of silently changing TOS and eroding my rights.

Jekyll / Wordpress are not THAT hard to use, and there’s a lot of free options these days.

If you care about your publication I fee it behooves you to learn a system that you have under your control - not opt into a pseudo social media site like medium. (Face it, they’re going to end up a “blogging as social media” platform)

Jefro118
No, because you don't have full control. I've just started using Ghost and it's pretty good. The self hosted version was extremely easy to set up on DigitalOcean, or you can go with the hosted version and get a few advantages from that.