HN Explorer

Is Medium still the place to publish high-impact articles?

31 points by johnsunlight ↗ HN
With Medium now restricting casual readers, I'm wondering where the best place would be to publish tech-related articles, tutorials, etc. LinkedIn, maybe? Facebook (ugh)? Tweet and link to my blog?

35 comments

[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 81.5 ms ] thread
billconan
May I take this opportunity to recommend Epiphany, a new blogging experience tailored for tech content?

https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=2684bc94f9fcb9ffe637ebfbeba2...

Epiphany is a crossover of Jupyter notebook and Medium.com,

Not only can you write text, you can also program on it, to create interactive examples, see:

https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=4c411b8a0b5207739f97e787d2af...

In addition to interactivity, Epiphany implements version control, forking and pull request. You can collaborate with others just like you do on github.

https://epiphany.pub/history?refId=2684bc94f9fcb9ffe637ebfbe...

It also has the social publishing feature as seen on Medium.

Finally, users own their content. Epiphany has a download button to allow downloading all blog data.

The format used by Epiphany, unlike that of Jupyter, is in plain text and is human readable.

disclaimer: I made Epiphany

Bob312371
Nice project.

Until you implement server side rendering you will have a difficult time getting this project off the ground.

Having your article indexable by search engines is critical for 99.9% percent of people that use these sort of mediums.

muzani
What's the catch? I can't find a pricing page. This looks like something that could be potentially more expensive than Ghost.
billconan
I want to make an ebook marketplace. the income of the platform will be from ebook sales. If you don't want to sell your blog content as books, you won't be charged.
guenter-chao
I don’t think anyone is willing to pay for it nowadays, because now people think that you should be obligated to produce content to educate him and entertain him. However, most of the other parties are not willing to pay if they donate freely. Though someone's class is paid, People want to say that there are other free podcasts...

So it’s really hard for the average person to charge before becoming a celebrity.

billconan
I basically want it to be the udemy for books.

You don’t need to write an entire book. the bar is too high for that. You collaborate with others. Each writes one chapter (as a blog). And the blogs can be organized into a book. I have implemented a collaboration workflow.

Marketplace is hard. You need the network effect. I know.

But this platform is meaningful to me, I need it. A few others told me the same.

sharma_pradeep
I'm going to try it out and share on my twitter if I don't forget about it by next weekend

Btw check your page load time

billconan
Thank you for the feedback. Speed is very important.

I’m trying to optimize that. But it’s not that easy for a complex site.

I also need to consider my budget, because it is not funded yet.

But yes, optimizing performance is my highest priority.

Porthos9K
I despised Medium from the start and saw it as a content farm. I have always had a policy of downvoting or flagging Medium articles on sight.

If you have something to say, say it on your own website. Stop being a digital sharecropper.

Nicholas_C
Plenty of people don’t have the time or technical skills to make their own website. It’s also a good idea if someone wants to post a one off essay and/or post something anonymously and still reach people.
jjjbokma
May I take this opportunity to recommend a static blog generator [0] I wrote? It uses a single file for input which is Markdown separated by % characters on a line by itself. It comes with 10+ different styles and you can either run the Perl or the Python version.

https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog

dilippkumar
I installed NetNewsWire 5.0[0] when it was launched and subscribed to a bunch of RSS feeds. In my opinion, a native desktop application that downloads content for offline consumption, without CSS, javascript, advertisements, trackers and GDPR pop-ups has led to an incredible experience!

If you publish to your own blog, social media will not be able to censor you. You won’t be required to conform to “community guidelines” that you disagree with, just to reach a target audience. You will own all the IP and content that you create.

I want RSS feed readers and personal blogs to be the future. In my own blog, I’ve started sharing links to other blogs I like - and I hope that one day, people who like my blog will link to me. I hope to eventually acquire readers who come to my blog via a network of high quality recommendations from other bloggers, and they will discover more blogs from those I recommend - all of this without the tyranny of a single social media company controlling “how information flows through their network”

Give NetNewsWire or your favorite RSS feed reader a try. There are several old AskHN posts that have a large number of fantastic RSS feeds you can subscribe to. Try it for a month and see if you agree with me.

[0] https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/

buboard
It s amazing how much we've regressed in that field
mastar2323
I totally agree. Unfortunately I'm still using feedly as my aggregator and reeder for reading. On the one side it’s super comfortable to sync my devices but on the other side you share your reading list with them.

What are your top three RSS feed recommendations?

buboard
noooo... this is what you see on mobile: https://i.redd.it/ao5outqo0es21.png

Please use Blogger! if anything, for historic reasons

jarvelov
That is almost hilarious would it not be for real. Out of curiosity may I ask what device you are using?
li4ick
Probably iPhone 7/8 by the looks of it.
buboard
That's not even my device, its one of many screenshots from google. I would have to add to that the GDPR prompt , and most likely "you have exceeded your monthly limit or whatever". And those damn huge page headers don't ever go away
jjohansson
If you benefit from users visiting your website, then post it there. Quality content on a domain name you own will benefit your site’s overall SEO (expertise, authority, trust). Then tweet it and share it on LinkedIn.

Posting it on medium would be like giving them all those benefits, while getting a very short burst of visibility.

If you absolutely must post on medium, then post only a summary of your main blog. Then link it (“read the full article here”) to the full blog that’s hosted on your owned domain (but don’t link back to medium from your main blog).

chatmasta
Doesn’t medium allow you to set the canonical URL? You can post on your blog first and then on medium with the canonical URL set to your blog.
lioeters
No to all 4 counts: Medium, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter.

For the love of user privacy, choice and respect: please publish on your own site/platform and syndicate to social media.

ptcampbell
When Medium launched it provided an elegantly focused compose / reading experience which was unique at the time. As it’s gained traction I think creators mostly want to leverage the audience and social aspect. But I have despaired as every tech brand has latched on to it as their PR channel, and as tech bloggers place their dime-a-dozen tutorials and hot-takes behind a paywall.
pnw_hazor
no. I blocked medium after one too many jarring ad or UI experiences.

edit-to-add: I deleted my linked-in and facebook accounts too. HN is where I find leads to most good stuff now.

borplk
The hot new thing is called your own blog ;)
auganov
I had the displeasure of being inexplicably banned from medium after posting a relatively high impact story, and it's absolutely the worst possible experience. Broken links all over social media, messed up SEO for a few weeks and so forth. Completely killed the story.
rajacombinator
Medium seems to have been flooded by a ton of low quality article mill operations and people posting their data science boot camp homework. I heavily discount any article I read on that domain these days.
muzani
I've done Facebook blogging very effectively for the last 5 years. Nearly all the jobs I got in that period were from people who followed my Facebook, and I even landed a management tier job.

But after some experiments, I realized that people were only reading the first 10 words and then agreeing or disagreeing based on comments. So it's not possible to do high impact things in that format.

The other downside is that it Facebook, LinkedIn, HN, etc, they force you to fit their format. You can't post a full blown 5000 word article because nobody will read it. It has to be refined in a way, which is good, but not everything can be simplified, and complex ideas just don't work.

Medium, as well as places like DEV, are full of people who write to promoting themselves as experts or marketing a service. They're focused on either making everything look like a nail or making small problems seem more complex than it is. There's very little actual interesting content or deep thoughts on complex situations, and/or the algorithm does not show them. It's also really hard to identify the bad content at a glance; you'd have to read stuff for 3 minutes to discover the author has no idea what they're talking about.

So Medium and DEV, while technically decent, are so filled with junk that anything on there is associated with junk.

pknerd
Yes I do cross post but don't put behind paywall. It helps me to generate traffic for my blog.