The core argument against Medium is: "Until you host your content on your platform, they will always live at the mercy of the company hosting the platform."
Which is fine, a lot of people putting their ideas out there are more concerned with the level of reach/impact than whether they own a webpage nor that it lives forever.
That's me in a nutshell. I've built a regular audience for my writing over the years. As the author suggests though, it might be a good idea to have a mirror.
Owning your content and self-publication is one of the principles of the indieweb[0]. This is as relevant of a discussion I think to plug it. When it comes to alternatives to the social media/algorithm-ified/data-hungry web-that in my opinion we should have gotten-it’s the IndieWeb.
But most of them are easily replaced if they go bad. Even domains are of course technically rented, but your own domain is among the most stable identifiers we have on the internet - people owning domains over decades is commonplace.
If my domain registrar, my DNS provider, my hosting company, ... go "bad" I can just move and my readers won't notice. Even if you are on hosted wordpress etc, you can archive your site as is and move, preserving the URLs. That's not the case with Medium etc where your content lives under their domain.
Reclaiming a domain from a registrar that has "gone bad" actually sounds pretty difficult. If they were so inclined, they could refuse to give you the transfer code, and they could renew it so it doesn't expire.
It always comes back to capital, sure. Technically your ISP could disappear tomorrow, or your region's power could go out. _Then what?_ There's always some bit of internet infrastructure you don't own or that necessitates money. But infrastructure is different. As long as you pay (and aren't doing anything particularly illegal), your server will probably continue to exist. And if not, you just buy or rent a computer in a different data center, or even set up a server on a spare computer at home. But you're much less likely to have your hosting provider pull sketchy Medium-style nonsense than, well, Medium.
The question is what does it really mean to have 'your own platform'? Does it mean that you need to have your own server at your bedroom? Or is it enough to rent one at a server room, or a shared host or maybe just rent some web space? What with your internet connectivity? Or just electicity - do you need to generate your own? You always depend on someone and in theory that someone can take your blog down.
I think the reasonable answer is that you need to pay for all your needs and not rely on any free services. Then you can rely on your providers.
Paying helps, but even then, they are usually terms against abusive behavior. It seems that what constitutes abuse reduces as you go up the chain (for example: perhaps a social network forbids false information and worse, perhaps a hosted CMS forbids hate speech and worse, perhaps a VPS/colo/residential forbids only very illegal activity) but it's always there to some extent. Maybe it's about human abuse and maybe it's about technical/network abuse, but there is something forbidden.
Is it possible (not feasible, but possible) to put something on the internet that relies on nobody else at all?
Is this actually a valid (albeit not feasible, but theoretically valid) answer to the question though? I didn't capitalize the I in my question, but I should have, because I do mean for it to be interoperable / peered.
I think so? If you run your radio transmitter.
Just tell peers what frequency. Though if some company decides to build a large relay node infrastructure, you'd need some crypto verification to keep them off Yournet.
I’ve been running a self hosted instance of ghost for years now (link in my profile). It’s great! My stuff just sits there, never at risk of a policy change banning my work. I can write whatever I want. The URLs are easily memorized and I hand them out all the time.
I don’t run analytics. I have no idea how many people have read my writing. I’m okay with that. I actually thought nobody reads my site but one day a piece I had just published hit hacker news, so I guess somebody is watching. I keep the content so I can refer people to it, and as a record of my thinking over time. I share the links when relevant in an online discussion.
I highly recommend it! I should say, I was inspired by Paul Graham and his essays. Just keeping it simple and putting good ideas out there. Oh and I licensed all my work as CC0, so anyone can copy it for any purpose.
Kirby and other similar PHP based flat file CMS software is super easy to run. If I were to get back into making sites for people, I'd just use Kirby, Bulma/Tailwind, and Alpine.js.
It can run on shared hosts like Siteground, Lithium, Green Geeks, Hostgator, as well as VPS platforms like Digital Ocean. The admin interface for making new posts is great, separating it from static site generators. It uses a modified Markdown called Kirbytext which is additive. If you write pure Markdown you'll see it rendered as expected.
No database means no worrying about getting hacked (at least in terms of SQL injection).
If you don't want to build it yourself, there's themes for sale too, despite how niche Kirby is. My own blog is a Kirby theme I bought because I knew if I built it myself, I'd never finish.
I run a site on Grav, which appears to be very similar to Kirby but FOSS, with plenty of free themes and plugins (though the base installation is pretty complete). It's super easy to install compared to WordPress, and I've never had luck getting NodeJS-based software like Ghost to work and then stay working for a long time. For a personal blog it has all the features you would need, while being pretty simple.
But, software like Grav and presumably also Kirby are very much not easy to run for 'normal' people. They would need to secure hosting without getting overwhelmed with the technical details or all the upselling that providers try to do, then install the software which is 'easy' but not 'click this button and you're done' easy, and of course also deal with domains and DNS etc. A hosted solution - even if you have to pay for it - is the only practical solution for normal people.
That said, for the type of people that read HN I would highly recommend Grav. Installation is easy, it has a nice web-based interface for administration and writing posts, it is fast, and it is not the latest trendy static site generator. It is a boring PHP application that will probably keep working for 20 years with no changes required - but is still actively maintained and will be for the foreseeable future.
I agree it's not as easy as starting a wordpress.com site or even a self hosted Wordpress site if the host has a 1 click builder, but if a user can figure out basic PHP hosting, they can run Kirby (and presumably Grav).
Grav's advantage over Kirby is that it's totally FOSS, but I encountered Kirby first and have a more thorough understanding of how it works. The maintainers and community are also quite helpful as well as super lenient about unlicensed usage.
Is the entry to barrier to new trendy static site generators relatively higher? Or how does this approach differ from them? Having never tried options like hugo I've always wanted to know about them directly from people who've used those.
It's telling that Medium stopped allowing custom domains. Their brand over yours, and no way of cleanly migrating elsewhere when they start log-in walls etc.
(Of course their brand is now kinda poisoned by "log-in wall" and lots of low-quality "think-pieces", so you don't really want to be associated with theirs - which was somewhat different when Medium started)
I don't know, was it? From the beginning everything on Medium seemed to be written by folks who styled themselves as "thought leaders," but clearly weren't
medium had one killer insight, which was that if they dolled up blog posts to look like prestige news site articles, most people would mentally put them in the same category. at one point there was a wave of public figures using medium basically like they use/d the nyt oped section before and after
but they messed up their site chasing a business model, and nyt/wapo/etc basically turned into tech companies and fill the niche that medium wanted to. meanwhile substack mints prestige by emphatically not looking like a news site. medium doesn't really have a place on either end of that anymore
I think so. There was a phase where there was clean design + many high-profile users pushing it a bit above other platforms. Nowadays clean design is more commonplace, they ruined their own design, more low-quality content, ... push them far down.
I remember the clean design phase. It's easy to forget, but back then medium was really impressive. Their design team posted an article about quotation marks in 2015 and I still remember it today:
I don't have the link handy, but I also remember their team posting about how the process of creating the underlines for their hyperlinks and thinking how interesting it was to see all the thought and process they had out into it.
Another reason I host my own articles is that Medium is very heavy to load. Yes their design is great, but it's something that is achievable with a very small amount of CSS. This might not matter for a lot of people but I don't like how slow their platform is.
yea, it's actually surprising how heavy it is given it's all to provide a veneer of minimalism and simplicity. I run qutebrowser on musl, which is as you might guess not the most stable web experience, but one funny side effect is it makes me acutely aware of what sites are simple and what ones do too much. the three worst sites, that consistently 100% of the time freeze the tab they're opened in, are reddit wapo and medium
Is it? I had to write a bunch of µBlock and usercss rules to make their articles somewhat readable. The sticky bars waste a lot of screen estate. Firefox reader mode (Ctrl+Alt+R) is a wonderful thing, but it breaks on some pages (I guess due to Medium's incompetence or brain-dead priorities since they're still using gist for code snippets (every single snippet in a separate iframe!) instead of spending half an hour to integrate highlight.js)
I actually found it to be not that terrible in comparison to some other sites that are out there today. Medium loads 17 scripts totalling about 2.4MB of js. For comparison, reddit loads 78 scripts totalling 7.5 MB.
Is it heavy for such a simple blog? Yes absolutely. Is it heavy for a modern React app? Not really. I think the crux of it is that we often rely too much on heavy frameworks for React even for simple things. It's definitely an antipattern in development today.
For an app like medium, client side react with that many dependencies is perhaps not the right approach in the first place?
Server Side Rendering(react or w/o react) would be a better way to do serve their content and have the added benefit support users who have no js support (noScript , terminal based browsers, screen readers? etc)
I just checked one of my longer articles and my website loads 11678 bytes including the article and 23.39kb, including CSS, custom fonts and and images.
I would think that 0.5mb should be more than enough.
But ads have been a thing since the Egyptians started to write sales documents on Papyrus, but it is only in the last 20 years or so analytics have changed the game: I suspect that I might have been slightly of in the previous comment, maybe it is only when analytics can note the effect of individual customers actions that they matter.
Yeah this is honestly the biggest reason for me not to use medium. I genuinely cannot help selecting text and clicking the paragraphs (highlighting them) while reading. God knows how many mice have died in my care. I think it might have to do with ADHD or something, but I've never been tested.
I've been yelling about this for years, but please start & own your own blog.
Use webflow, ghost or whatever you like, but wordpress is good enough for most people.
HN audience can likely handle their own, but if ease-of-setup is an issue - I created StartABlog.com to help people do this (and we'll actually set up your site for you for free - https://startablog.com/start).
Own your platform. Own your content. Own your voice. Use everything else as distribution methods - not core dependencies.
Another easy solution, both for hosting and ownership, is using a static site generator/editor. I like desktop-based visual WYSIWYG tools so i use Publii[0] (example[1], though i really need to write something more :-P or at least move some older articles i had in now-defunct blogs that were hosted by others). I'm not a big fan of the program though (i dislike how it is based on Electron while not even taking advantage of it being based on Electron - e.g. no full WYSIWYG and not even an in-app site preview - and the UX has all the issues i dislike by modern apps like a design that pretends i'm using an oversized tablet) but it is the only one that does what i want without requiring me to enter cryptic codes (ok, markdown isn't so cryptic but i really prefer using WYSIWYG tools), having inline images/galleries and some (primitive) site management while generating static HTML (though a bit too heavy and i really dislike the themes... but again, not much of a choice and the tech used to make the themes look like a PITA so i avoid touching it for now).
Personally, I prefer a good ol' CMS. I manage my website by visiting a URL. I edit the content in a WYSIWYG editor, and it goes live when I press "Save". I don't need to install anything on my machine to write new content.
With a properly set up cache, your website will be serving static files anyway.
Well, this is claims to be a CMS too though it seems to be more mainly for blogs than something too generic. I guess you are supposed to make "posts" for individual pages and use the custom menus to make navigation. But personally i only wanted the blog feature so i never bothered setting up the menus or anything like that.
I love Publii! Best combination of a WYSIWYG editor and static site gen. Beautiful themes and built in publishing for github pages, netlify, AWS S3, etc.
+1 for Publii. I struggled to get non-technical users to use a static site generator like Hugo but the WYSIWYG tools of Publii made it very easy to move users over.
Agreed, but don't host your own wordpress unless you're planning to run a botnet. Everyone I know who's hosted their own wordpress in the past two decades has eventually regretted it.
I don't self-host Wordpress, my blog is a static site made with Jekyll and served by Nginx. A static site ages well.
That said I self-host other services, like Matomo or FreshRSS (also PHP apps that need a database).
The secret is in setting up auto-update policies. All the self-hosted services I host are in Docker and auto-updated [1] even if that means they can break.
Have been doing this for some time and worked great thus far, but granted self-hosting stuff is a continued investment, you can't just leave that server there to bit rot.
I upvoted this because it's also my experience. It's so frequent that I've stopped telling people when I discover their Wordpress is hacked, because half the time they don't care (!), and the rest of the time they beg me to help them fix it for free - instead of paying one of the many WordPress consultants who specialize in fixing hacked WordPress sites.
The most common hack I've seen is one where the admin doesn't even know, because it redirects some visits to their site that have Google in the referrer. Because they rarely Google themselves while logged out of WordPress, they never know every page on their site is redirecting to MyCoolMalwareDroppr.
Being selective about plugins is so important. When I first started working independently, I was blown away by how much work could be had just saving people from the misery of Wordpress plugins. Not glorious work, but wow, you could work until the sun is gone just churning out plugin updates for Wordpress site owners.
Almost all of the problem plugins weren’t even that important to the site. Someone just added it at some point and left it, maybe for years. Then there you are running old code with known exploits. Of course you’re going to get hacked.
Although I didn’t enjoy that work, I did love how excited and happy my clients were that their sites were fixed. You can’t measure the misery and anxiety some people feel when stuff goes wrong with their websites. Fixing that, with php and Wordpress no less, was a great feeling.
All that is to say that I agree; only adopt plugins you really need with a reputation you’re comfortable with.
Install Wordfence. The free version is enough. Regularly checks the site for dodgy files, blocks spammers and offers 2FA for login. Big fan since it prevented multiple hack attempts to several of my sites.
I have set non-technical people up using Markdown+pelican. I have no idea what made us use Pelican instead of something else, nor if those advantages still hold weight, but it’s been great.
Not a static site generator (if that's what you mean), but I personally went with Grav: https://getgrav.org/. It's a small CMS written in modern PHP where the content is defined and managed via markdown files (so no need for a database). You have a bunch of themes and plugins directly installable through the admin interface and the documentation is good.
Some time ago I asked myself the same question. Ideally I wanted not so much a generator but rather something that is completely self-contained. Essentially add a markdown or html file, commit and move on. Surprisingly enough I couldn't find anything that does that so I ended up building one myself. Doesn't support syntax highlighting at the moment but I've considered looking into it. Perhaps I should open source it and see if someone wants to give a hand, who knows...
Did something like that years and years ago as a learning project. Works great! Drop in some markdown and you’re done. The source is only a few hundred lines; no build or package manager.
> Ideally I wanted not so much a generator but rather something that is completely self-contained. Essentially add a markdown or html file, commit and move on.
As I said, make it fully self-contained without relying on "builds" or any other mumbo-jumbo, the way you would with sphinx or hugo or whatever. Essentially add a new html or markdown file, put whatever you want in it, let's call it "something.md". Then add a link from your index page to "#/something.md" and not deal with builds or styling or whatever, simply commit and move on and have it take care of all the html. And in the case of markdown, parse it and render it as html on the client.
I searched for something similar. Considered Caddy and Nginx/Apache with markdown plugins, but wanted to be able to create and edit pages/files and made a small script with Flask instead.
Web server with built-in support for QUIC, HTTP/2, Lua,
Markdown, Pongo2, HyperApp, Amber, Sass(SCSS), GCSS, JSX,
BoltDB (built-in, stores the database in a file, like
SQLite), Redis, PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL, rate limiting,
graceful shutdown, plugins, users and permissions.
Pelican [1] works this way, and I love it for my blog/website.
I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook.
> I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook.
This is exactly what I don't want to deal with. Sure, I could use a ci service but this is a typical case of over-engineering a simple problem.
Something must turn the .md into HTML, and something must also publish it. You end up with 2 choices: the above one, or sth like GitLab pages, where you need to provide a CI script but then can just commit & push.
Yep, you're right, something must turn the markdown into an html. In my case, I let the browser do that and by doing so, I avoid the hassle around builds, cis which is what I didn't want to deal with. For something so brutally simple anyway.
Say Microsoft decides to kill github pages. OK, fine, next.
Now picture Netlify changing some policy, adding some pricing or killing off a service which you need(unlikely but not entirely impossible). You have to setup the whole thing all over again with someone else, be it circleci, jenkins, gitlab, etc. Though in different contexts, I've been in similar situations and by the third time I usually want to murder someone.
You're overestimating Netlify's build tooling. It literally just spins up a virtual machine with Node on it, clones your repo, and does an `npm install && npm build`. When that finishes it copies the output directory to a server to host. Moving to a different host is a case of finding something that will let you do the `npm install && npm build` bit, which practically every modern hosting company does these days. Netlify's automated builds aren't even close to the complexity of running a CI process.
If you wanted to you could run the build process locally and commit the output HTML and CSS files to the repo, and the build process wouldn't even be necessary. You'd just need to copy the output files to a server using a git commit hook.
Which brings us back to my original question: Why????? Why bother doing all that and relying on third party tooling, regardless of how simple it is to run a command? If this is what I wanted, I could write a 5 line shell script on a raspberry pi which can do just that.
I DON'T want to do either of that. Add a file, push it and know everything has worked.
The reason I have things set up to deploy from github to Netlify is mainly because I'm not the only contributor to things I work on. As soon as you work in a team it's far simpler to have a central service that people push to doing the builds, especially if you don't want contributors to have access to the host server.
I'm not questioning the scenario where you have multiple contributors. This is one of the major reasons why the concept of ci/cd exists.
The topic of the thread is __specifically__ personal blogs/pages and my point is as strong as ever: having to deal with builds, cis, for your personal page is pure bs.
Netlify simply adds an abstraction layer over a task which I don't want to be performed __AT_ALL__. I don't care if I'm doing it myself or someone else is on a server somewhere on my behalf. It is utterly stupid to have all that to serve a static file.
So write HTML and push that directly to your webserver.. what do you want from the world haha
Forgive me for suggesting the first thing that popped into mind, could you run the generator script locally and also push the /public dir which your server then serves directly?
> So write HTML and push that directly to your webserver.
A much better option. Still have to deal with the de-facto boilerplate of every html file: head, body, header, footer. Which is why I built something that does it in the browser for me.
> Forgive me for suggesting the first thing that popped into mind, could you run the generator script locally and also push the /public dir which your server then serves directly?
Same as CI - adds an extra step to the process. But as I said, services like Netlify come and go and the news might slip by you and catch you off guard. If I had to go down that road, I have ~10 raspberry pi's 6 of which are currently booted up. A 5 line shell script could easily do that. But again - I see no point in doing it if there's no need for it.
> A much better option. Still have to deal with the de-facto boilerplate of every html file: head, body, header, footer. Which is why I built something that does it in the browser for me.
I find it fascinating that you'd go to all the trouble to build what essentially breaks down to a custom static site generator but you then balk at using an off the shelf one with a build script.
The difference is that ci-type of solutions might end up requiring maintenance for a million and one reasons. This won't and building it took me roughly the same amount of time it would take me to navigate through a ci-solution and test that I've set it up correctly(3 hours in total).
”Caddy is both a flexible, efficient static file server and a powerful, scalable reverse proxy. Use it to serve your static site with compression, template evaluation, Markdown rendering, and more.”
So you're talking about a static site generator implemented in javascript in the browser? I don't see why it wouldn't work as long as the webserver supported directory listings, but it would obviously completely break for clients not using javascript.
The simplest solution I've used is to just have a Makefile that indexes and stitches together pages using cat/sed/ls. Sure, you have to run make (and possibly make upload if you're not doing it live), but it's not so bad.
Essentially yes, this is what my personal site is currently running(though it is empty as it stands, largely due to time constraints). Except I wrote it in Dart because I abhor javascript with a passion, even if the final output is still javascript.
”Caddy is both a flexible, efficient static file server and a powerful, scalable reverse proxy. Use it to serve your static site with compression, template evaluation, Markdown rendering, and more.”
Redirects may have been wrong form? This was top link in Google and DDG for ‘caddy markdown’... but to your point, it didn’t respond. So I figured right page based off of the snippet and visited status. Right form of redirect should update the index, no longer show the old page.
You might check out mine!! Been waiting ages to share this.
You create a folder of markdown files, you have 2 template HTML files (index and blog post), and you run my program (MMSSG). It compiles the index page with a list of all the posts, then renders the HTML for each markdown file into a separate blog post. That's it. Handles the linking and everything for you.
It’s all open source and the templates are already made, modify to your heart’s content. It's also REALLY simple, so should be easy to understand my code.
It’s what I used to generate my blog, and there’s instructions in the readme to get going quickly :) It's super simple and I really love it. This is my post about it, and the github link:
Edit: Just reverted a couple of commits from a WIP plugins feature that I got bored of and quit, and created new versions of the binaries (Linux and Windows are untested). Also updated this comment with a better description.
I'm going to bed, feel free to respond with any feedback! Thanks for looking :)
I started collecting my writings, all in Markdown and some HTML. Just a bunch of folders as topics, and then write markdown files inside them.
Then, a week or so ago, I threw in Jekyll and now they are published as the cheapest form of Digital Garden for me and hopefully, my family - https://oinam.fyi
I'm one of them, the most frustrating thing with working with modern JavaScript is definitely the ecosystem rather than the language. React Native is particularly an issue, the recommended react-native-community geolocation library just flat-out fails on many Android vendor's phones, and the replacement someone made for it still isn't exactly reliable (although to be fair, it only broke on OnePlus devices which were later patched so it could well have been an phone-level issue).
I get it, I shouldn't complain about the quality of open-source and freely offered software and the onus is on me to audit the libraries I put in my code, but blimey some people take an awful lot of liberty with the truth when they claim something is "production ready". I reckon a lot of people just build some rushed, poorly-written JavaScript libraries so they can pad out their CVs as an "open-source contributor" but the only thing they're actually contributing is a massive headache for muppets like me who foolishly use said code in their own projects.
It doesn't seem like an arbitrary restriction to me though. The node.js ecosystem is a complete disaster if you're not tuned in to it, and if I want a fire and forget blog generated from static files then that's the complete opposite of node.js where you have to unfuck the imbred dependencies that form in the bloated, always changing ecosystem when someone decides to go CADT with their components.
I have also been looking for something like this for a while and I can't find it.
All the static HTML gallery generators seem to be focused on dumping all images into them at single time. They don't have RSS feeds, or a convenient option to add entries one at a time as you go along like you would in a blog.
On the other hand, blog generators generally aren't optimized for mostly displaying images (e.g. automatic resizing, thumbnail view, etc.)
I’m a big fan of Jekyll, and it meets your A and B requirements out of the box. Hugo lit a fire under them with regard to build speed, and the 4.x line is a huge speed boost. It does syntax highlighting with Rouge, and the default Markdown engine is Kramdown.
I never found a solution for requirement C that I liked, so I’ve been building my own. It’s still very rough and not exactly in shape to publish, but its capabilities already by far exceed my previous solution: https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD
I left my WIP site running (‘jekyll serve’ using WEBrick) on my laptop and I’m going to bed, so these links may get hugged or just crash and become unavailable, but here you can get an idea of what I’ve been playing with for multi-image layouts: https://beta.cooltrainer.org/distorted/
And on the index page is a random smattering of some other media types I’ve been testing, like support for image-rendering SVGs, TTFs, and old DOS-codepage Nfos, mbedding PDFs, etc: https://beta.cooltrainer.org/
Since you mentioned Rust and since this is turning into a "suggest a static site generator" thread, I'll mention Zola: https://github.com/getzola/zola , although I can't say how well it works for photo galleries.
I recommend https://gohugo.io the speed of rendering makes it possible to write your posts with a close to realtime rendering response. It also has a big community and lots of themes available.
Any particular reason for "Doesn't use node.js", given that a static site generator isn't going to use the runtime once the site is (re)generated so you don't have any efficiency or stability concerns from your reader's PoV?
(I'm considering node for a personal project or two, though as much as possible avoiding the mess that NPM seems to be as the projects are small enough I can manage the few dependencies manually, so insight into pitfalls I'm not aware of could be useful)
> What's the best static site generator that meets the following requirements: a) Doesn't use node.js.
So even if a node.js solution would be the best solution, you would still not want to use it? Why?
Anyway, I'd recommend to write a static site generator yourself. It isn't very difficult, you get exactly what you need, and you never get stuck because someone abandoned their project or doesn't want to fix the bugs you reported.
Not OP, but asking for a static site generator implies simplicity. Node is pretty famous for generally having large dependency trees and churn with tooling.
It doesn't seem that strange to want to avoid it for such a project.
Not the author. But my main concern would be maintainability issues from package churn. But also that I don't enjoy working with JS and its tooling. It is so common a choice now so it might be worth calling out explicitly.
Regarding (c), have a look at this jekyll theme [1] for photo galleries.
Jekyll is really nice to use, but the photo galleries are pretty few and far between.
Disclaimer, I couldn't get this to deploy using Github pages (which is nice) because it uses unsupported plugins. I have it split across two branches and works nicely enough. Certainly the most responsive gallery I've found.
Edit: removed direct link to the person's pictures :)
It's in Python (pip install...), it uses a very complete and flexible Markdown library (never found a language that it didn't support, but syntax highlighting is in a plugin), and is a site generator, not a blog generator.
But it takes some up-front programming to define your site structure.
I agree. Many years ago I was really happy with medium as a reader. And the feed algorithm was decent enough. By no means the perfect content but for the most part it pushed forward things I was interested in. However, the monetization model turned medium(originally a decent blogging platform) into tumblr and it was a race to the bottom from that point. Any website that asks you to register in order to read a blog post immediately goes on my blacklist.
What is annoying though is that often people who self-host their blogs make the exact same mistake. More and more often I see something that will grab my attention and when I get to the bottom of a blog post, I find something along the lines of "The full guide is available in my free e-book, which you can download from here". And when you click "here", you are greeted with "Please enter your e-mail address". Sure, everyone has a spam-mail type of thing or mailinator or whatever but this is still a terrible thing to do.
I agree there's nothing wrong with it. But does it work? Does Medium make money? It might be, despite the whining, they have it right in that they don't let an expectation of "this is free" ever develop.
That strategy might be better than writing a long-ish blog entry as a teaser, where the reader thinks they are going to get their information for free, only to be told "Psyche! You've actually got to pay for it!"
If the content is of any real value, I'd be more than happy to pay for it with money. 10 bucks? Sure, here you go. A much better option than getting emails such as "20 lessons I learned from my job interview" or whatever.
Everyone says they'd do that, but I find really hard to believe.
I create rare, valuable information that saves people money and headaches. On a good month, 2% of my revenue will come from donations. Usually, it's 0%. At best, it pays for a meal and a beer. This website has 135k page views per month.
If that's how much I get from teaching people how to navigate German bureaucracy, I doubt you'll make anything from your opinions alone.
Some of us actually do. A quick scroll through my paypal, I've donated somewhere over 1000 euros in the past two years to various foundations and individual content creators.
And having some experience with German bureaucracy and taxes, and also having never lived in Germany nor speaking German, I'm fully aware how convoluted and complicated this can be and I could definitely see myself donating/paying for useful information if I didn't have a good accountant at my disposal.
I agree, on the grand scheme you won't make a whole lot but even with a population of 83 million, even if you add another 1 million like myself, your content still fits a relatively narrow niche. I'd love to give some advice but I honestly have no idea.
You are an exception. If one in 83 unique visitors donated I'd be well off, but it's not the case. I'm a bit tired of people pretending the internet could survive on donations and micropayments.
Affiliate marketing works well for my niche. I wanted to start similar sites about other topics, but if those don't naturally lead to certain purchases, they're extremely hard to effectively monetise.
That's another pattern I really dislike, and deliberately avoid. I don't want to use my content as a bargaining chip to collect emails or what-have-you. I have that luxury because my topic is easily monetised. Most content creators don't.
In general, the internet got incredibly annoying, but I can understand why. Part of it is because we feel entitled to free content. There are few business models that allow people to be rewarded for their work while still offering a product for free. It usually involves selling something the user's data or attention.
I dont think you can make money by sharing information to individuals in that sort of way today. There are people that manage to do it (self help books and all) but I dont think people will pay for online content. I can think of 3 ways that this might be monetize able. The first is to put it into a book. People will buy books. The second is targeting businesses. They'll pay for market research etc. And the third is offering consulting services to navigate the beuorocracy based on your expertise. Even if the info is free amd online, some people want to pay, and you'd be making money off of sharing that information.
I insist on keeping the content unconditionally free, and donations don't work, but affiliate marketing does. I help people navigate certain boring purchases, so it lends itself to that sort of monetisation. I'd be recommending those products and services anyway.
Unfortunately, it incentivizes dishonest recommendations and passing ads as content. I chose not to do that, but I know I'd get paid more to recommend the wrong things. Since it's blended into the content, you'd be abusing people's trust in your content. At least banner ads were separate from the text.
I do not offer services either. My goal was to help as many people as possible, and that would go against it. Information should be free, especially when poor people need it the most. I also want the website to run itself. If I wanted to be on the computer full time, I'd just get a job.
Maybe you just need to package it differently? I know I've bought Kindle books on similar issues and that there are people who work as consultants doing such things. Not to say that you necessarily want to become a consultant, but you don't even necessarily need to create new content... just stick some of it behind a paywall or in an ebook.
I started writing a reference for long distance motorcycle travel, and that's how I intend to distribute it. I don't expect to make anything from it, but the more linear, prosaic format would fit nicely on a Kindle screen.
The website mentioned above is more of a "visit it when you need it" resource. It's painfully boring to read, as it's written like a plain English instruction manual. It wouldn't be an interesting book.
I saw the following model work: offer a compilation of your best (or themed xyz..) articles for money. Add that you can mostly find these scattered on the site anyway. Very fair, and people would pay for getting an organized package vs clicking through random posts.
I am personally against it for my website in particular though. I insist on keeping everything on it open and free. Immigration advice should help everyone, not just developers with a generous relocation bonus.
I'd much rather invest the effort into making the content more navigable/discoverable. This is actually what I'm working on right now.
Again though, this is just personal preference for this specific website. Selling packaged information could work. I did buy a motorcycle travel book that was a rehash of the author's YouTube channel.
It's rather telling that the first thing Medium does is flash a login prompt in your face when landing on one of their pages. At that point I tend to go elsewhere.
So you read the full blog post for free, then you get to the bottom and see that they are promoting an e-book free in exchange for an email address and that's terrible to you? Does it piss you off when authors don't give away their books for free as well?
Thanks for the info. Just curious why you would mention webflow next to ghost? Webflow seems like a paid service, and as far as I can see on github it platform not open sourced.
Ghost on the other hand is open source and can be self hosted.
>Own your platform. Own your content. Own your voice.
There's no way to fully own a place on the clearnet. At a minimum, you will have to rent a domain, and most people will rent the hosting as well. Moreover, authorities can seize or block both of those, while payment services can also "cancel" or "deplatform" you if you need them to pay for costs--so much for having a voice on the net.
The only way to own content on the Internet is to publish it in a free, decentralized and anonymous manner--I'm thinking I2P sites, for instance, and even that is subject to attacks that could make it inaccessible.
In any case, I wholewheartedly agree that Medium is not the home for anything worthwhile.
One thing you really miss when leaving Medium is the audience. It is easy for people search Medium for a topic they are interested in and find it within the first couple of articles.
If you are trusting Google to be your entry point for traffic you have to play all kinds of gross games with your content for SEO purpose and if you are adding value to an already well explored topic there will be someone out there trouncing you in SEO.
Medium was initially brilliant because it solved this by aggregating content in a slick website, with great search, and it still does a decent job of showing you new content based on your interests. I think this is a part of why its so frustrating. When I go on the home page I see a bunch of articles I would want to read, go to click them and get paywalled.
But then the money men came. I'm not convinced there is anything out there like Medium in terms of ease-of-use, ability to get your content in front of others, good at surfacing new content you would want to read and also Medium pay content authors really really well.
> and also Medium pay content authors really really well.
This to me is the key thing, and what Medium's stated goal was: to re-think the way we pay for content. You may feel fine giving away your content for free, but it's perfectly reasonable for people to want to be paid for the value they create, and I like Medium's model way better than advertising.
> One thing you really miss when leaving Medium is the audience. It is easy for people search Medium for a topic they are interested in and find it within the first couple of articles.
Not sure I'd agree with this. I've tried looking for interesting articles on Medium recently, and it seems that once you want to go outside the 'make money online/internet nomad/political rants' genre, finding anything interesting becomes real difficult.
It'a slso quite hard to find things from unknown/unpopular authors there too. Remember looking through a few Medium Digests and counting how popular each creator was, and found there was a huge bias towards people with large social media followings/existing fanbases in what was being promoted in those newsletters and on the Medium front page.
> Own your platform. Own your content. Own your voice. Use everything else as distribution methods - not core dependencies.
Precisely this.
I also have been yelling [0] about hosting your own GitLab, Gitea solution for individuals, companies and open-source organisations which frees you from the mercy of 'centralising everything' in GitHub which is nonsensical.
Medium is essentially centralising and bringing blogs back into the dark ages with paywalls, de-platforming and Google Logins on someone else's blogging site.
Own your code on your servers just like you own your website and blog. If the creator of Wireguard can do it, you can do it too.
My brother wanted to start writing about his recovery process[0] and asked me to help him make a blog. He said he wanted to learn a bunch of stuff so he could be self-sufficient enough to not have to ask me/"need my permission" to go from written post to publish. He had already bought a domain that came with some bottom-of-the-barrel free shared hosting service. I pointed him towards Wordpress, he set up the entire thing himself, and now has a sense of ownership he really appreciates.
For me, Jekyll, Github Pages, and a couple lines of CSS were nothing[1], but there should be as little barrier to entry as possible if you have something to say
Only if your site gets picked up by archive.org though.
(That's only going to happen with static sites, not those which require login or signup, etc.)
Even then your ideas will still effectively disappear because search engines don't appear to crawl archive.org. (If they do it's incomplete - my own past content on archive.org does not get found by specific Google searches.) But perhaps search will change in future.
I suspect the content on Medium is now sufficiently valued that if Medium doesn't stay around, someone will make sure the content is copied and served somewhere else.
Assuming that Github static pages infrastructure is maintained without breaking CNAMEs for the next half century, and assuming you pay for your domain 50 years in advance, maybe the static website can remain for that long?
IMO, a really easy way to start would be with a GitHub pages repo[1] or a Neocities site[2]. You really shouldn't need anything more than basic HTML and CSS for most blogs. If you want tags or sidebars or RSS, you can use a static site generator like Jekyll[3], and it's still pretty simple.
> Own your platform. Own your content. Own your voice. Use everything else as distribution methods - not core dependencies.
100% agree. I even went as far as to write my own static-site generator (not that impressive, everyone seems to have one these days), but even hosted blogs are better than using the Mediums of this world.
There are trade-offs though. There is a little bit of on-going effort (and maybe expense) in keeping even an inactive blog going. Medium does take care of that side of things for you.
I'll add my experience as a counterpoint -- I've been running my own wordpress blog for several years now, and the amount of effort involved has been surprisingly high. I've had to tune apache numerous times (seriously, who wants to tune apache in order to write a blog), I have to regularly defend it against malicious traffic, and I've had to manually fix the installation after a plugin installation prevented wordpress from starting. Plus since it's a one-off, I'm not convinced that I could bring it back if anything were to happen to the server it runs on.
For a project blog I used hosted wordpress, and I found that to be a pretty good middle ground. Honestly I can't think of a case where running your own wordpress server is a good use of your time.
I strongly agree. I have a (mostly) link blog [0] (for which I wrote the SSG [1]) and do link to Medium articles but am getting more and more tired by the nag-screen that shows up every 5 or so posts after having deleted the medium cookies (again). I guess there is an extension for that, but I am too lazy to install it :-) But a bigger question is for those who publish on Medium: how many people get scared away daily from your articles after hitting the sign up nag screen?
It's kind of free but your service's landing page requires a domain name and hosting provider, so it's free setup but paid hosting is required (which appears to support multiple companies, not just yours to your credit).
I've mostly blocked medium mentally and via software. I use google feed on a daily basis and medium was banned there for a while now. Mentally occasionally a really interesting article pops up that I want to read. Then medium prevents me from doing so. It can be interesting somewhere else. If you are a content creator you basically damage your brand by using medium
People say that they loved medium in the past because of their custom domains. I think that they also had issues back then.
If your company is still running on Medium you're very limited with customizing your blog.
You can't add any CTA button, popup window, widget, or anything that can help you to justify your blog exsistance. If 1000 people get into your blog post, only around 30 will hit your homepage.
Compare it to other blogs where you can design it the way you want, because great UX and some traffic from Medium, I don't see the benefit of it.
> Google might add negative signals for your website, thinking that you copy-pasted an article from Medium on your blog.
Can you get around this by posting the medium version later than the one on your own website? (Obviously, G crawls medium more frequently; so say, maybe, a week later.)
I was going to ask a similar Q, but I'll hitch my comment to yours... (and give you an upvote as well)
To get around Google thinking that your personal hosted version is a copy, can you pepper the medium version with links back to your domain/blog ? Would that help ?
Also, Google might add negative signals for your website, thinking that you copy-pasted an article from Medium on your blog.
Google never did get serious about provenance. They scrape so often that they should be able to tell who's the original. I've seen Wikipedia copy sites outrank the real Wikipedia.
As a backup, you should be able to submit a hash to a time-stamping notary service and have Google pick up on that.
Folks looking for a Medium alternative, please checkout https://diff.blog. It's an aggregator of developer and engineering blogs I built an year back. It has been growing steadily since. The reason why I built this was to solve the problem of disoveralibilty of self hosted blogs. It's hard for bloggers with self hosted blogs to reach a big audience. So a lot of them end up moving to a platform like Medium which gives them the audience. But they in turn give up their identity and content. diff.blog aims to fix that by solving the discoverabilty problem of self hosted blogs. Though dif.blog is not anywhere near in terms of the audience size of Medium at the moment. But hopefully it will come close one day.
Thanks for sharing, that's a nice project with a good user experience. That reminds me of the concept of blog "planet" that was somewhat popular in the Linux world a decade ago. Basically an aggregate of blog feeds loosely related to a given topic, you can follow it and have the feeling that you're following a community, without the drama that you have on social media. It's a great concept IMHO, and stupidly simple technically speaking.
Thanks! Yeah. Blog planets are awesome. They defintely played a big role in me coming up with diff.blog. https://rubyland.news/ in particular, which I came across while I was trying to learn Rails. Though diff.blog is built using Django and not Ruby on Rails :)
Is there plan for non-English blog posts? Dev community is mostly in English, but many blog posts around the world are in native language. Some blogs write in English and non-English and it's very hard for me to find content in my language.
This also prevents me from registering my blog on diff.blog as my blog contains English and non-English content.
Thank you!. At the moment diff.blog only parses English blogs from the feed. So If your blog has mixed content you can still submit the blog.
I have plan for supporting other langauges as well in future. Creating subdomains like de.diff.blog, ml.diff.blog, etc which only contains the blog posts in the respective languages should probably be good enough. The main difficulty is finding the initial set of blogs that are popular in languages which I don't understand and creating an initial user base. Maybe not be probably as hard as I make it sound.
Hey, I blog in German for many years now and have my blog in a different open source planet. If you want some input about that language, shoot me a mail (it's in my HN profile).
Looking at your site I'm noticing there seems to be no RSS feed? I think that would make a good addition. You could have one personalized feed and one global one, like Reddit does it.
I'd also like to note that I was surprised about the github login. My blog has no connection to Github at all, most blogs won't, so I'm not seeing how that could work for others when people suggest their blogs?
> Hey, I blog in German for many years now and have my blog in a different open source planet. If you want some input about that language, shoot me a mail (it's in my HN profile).
Thanks! Will reach out to you once I start on this.
> Looking at your site I'm noticing there seems to be no RSS feed? I think that would make a good addition. You could have one personalized feed and one global one, like Reddit does it.
That sounds like a cool feature to have. I will add it to my todo list.
> I'd also like to note that I was surprised about the github login. My blog has no connection to Github at all, most blogs won't, so I'm not seeing how that could work for others when people suggest their blogs?
Yeah. I added GitHub login mainly to get the list of followers and organizations you follow on GitHub. Your account follows them automatically when you sign up on diff.blog. It also give me some idea on what kind of languages you use which I use a bit for showing user recommendations.
As others have said, this is great! A simple but very useful idea and a great execution. Thank you for not making it an amalgamation of heavy javascript frameworks.
Thank you. I wanted to mainly use Python for the backend, since that's the language I am most comfortable in. And Django was good enough for 90% of the use case. For the frontend stuff like Newsfeed, Comments, Upvotes etc which involved user interaction I used Javascript/handlebars/jQuery.
React or any frontend frameworks would have probably been an overkill (honestly, even jQuery was) in the case of diff.blog, since Django did most of the Job. If the frontend codebase becomes larger, I would probably rewrite them to make use of native Web Components. I still have not yet experimented with web components though.
Thank you for going “old school”. We need more stuff like this. All these frontend monstrosities are getting out of hand lately. Lots of overhead for very little value.
Another thing I would echo here is that you don't necessarily need a CMS / WYSIWYG editor to run a great blog. A tiny script that dynamically compiles your markdown flavour of choice and has a nginx reverse proxy in front of it will be able to survive a reddit frontpage hit on a $5/mo vps, and it will be dead simple to set up.
If you're looking to move off Medium, give it a try. If anyone is interested I'm happy to share the mini server I wrote to compile pug aka jade / stylus, which is what I use for my blog.
True, but the point of the article was to avoid centralized providers as you may inadvertently be shadowbanned. I have much more faith/trust in Github than Medium, but nonetheless it still suffers algorithmic approaches to content.
At least from my own experience, my own website is hosted on a simple $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet with a simple Flask backend that basically just converts Markdown to HTML and generates index pages and RSS and embed metadata and such. It's been completely fine with the surge of traffic from Hacker News; barely broke a sweat. CDNs only make sense imo if you're consistently having Hacker News levels of traffic.
I've been thinking of mirroring the first few paragraphs on Medium and then adding something like "visit my own blog to read the rest of the article", basically (ab)using Medium as an acquisition channel.
The number of large (and hip) software companies which host their blogs on medium is mind boggling. With the amount of time they spend reinventing the wheels, one would think they would spend some time setting up their own blog.
Also, why do people host their tech tutorials on Medium? I have few of my own and always put them up on my own github pages blog. It's not too difficult.
Because I mentioned GitHub? The thing is GitHub is just a wrapper. All my data is still with me and I can switch to GitLab in about a hours time. Also, unlike Medium, GitHub does not put a quota on number of free articles per month nor does it cover 1/4th of the page with a permanent pop-up asking the reader to sign up.
I feel GitHub pages and Medium are not the same thing.
> A lot of companies like Basecamp and Spotify executed this idea with their company blogs.
> They started with a Medium publication, and when they gained traction on their content, they moved to their own hosted blogs.
This is false. Basecamp's blog "Signal v Noise" is much older than Medium itself, and their transition perfectly illustrates what Medium has become[1]:
> Three years ago we embraced an exciting new publishing platform called Medium. It felt like a new start for a writing community, and we benefitted immensely from the boost in reach and readership those early days brought. But alas it was not to last.
> When we moved over, Medium was all about attracting big blogs and other publishers. This was going to be a new space for a new time where publishers could find a home. And it was. For a while.
> These days Medium is focused on their membership offering, though. Trying to aggregate writing from many sources and sell a broad subscription on top of that. And it’s a neat model, and it’s wonderful to see Medium try something different. But it’s not for us, and it’s not for Signal v Noise.
[...]
> So now we’re back on the indie trail. The new blog is powered by our friends at WordPress, and the new amazing design is courtesy of our in-house designer Adam Stoddard.
> Thanks to the fact that we kept our own domain when we moved to Medium, all the articles and links still work. The pieces have simply swapped the Medium styling for our own look. (Although, sad to say, Medium didn’t let us export the comments, so those are gone ).
I have gone through the same phase myself. Not only Medium but many other platforms as well.
The algo based recommendation that force feed you the content that "they" think you should read and constant trackers all over the place that profiles everyone with heavy ads scripts with tons of js css files just to read a simple text from someone.
I've built what I had in mind (_sort of_) for myself and many others.
Anyone wants to start a blog, without the headache of self hosting or maintenance without ads and sneaky business model is welcome gonevis.com
> The algo based recommendation that force feed you the content that "they" think you should read.
This is probably one of the things I hate most about the modern web. There are a ton of situations where I want raw, un-autofiltered results from something and I can't get it.
I've learnt the hard way about the risks of bundling that I didn't even consider a decade ago, no chance I'll be going back to that matter how "do no evil" the next company that comes along claims to be.
There's something dishonest about your profile appearing normal only to yourself, while the rest of the world is getting a 404. If you're suspended, fine, but tell the user, but why the need to hide this from them?
This has been discussed a lot under the term "shadowbanning" in various places.
HN does this too, if enough people downvote a comment it will disappear from the conversation, but not from the posters viewpoint (and if you have showdead on, as a reader it shows up as lighter and lighter shades of grey).
The rational behind it is that if a spammer notices that their post/account has been banned, they can quickly spin up another one.
Apparently this is quite effective against spammers, (or used to be) but of course seems extremely unfair in the case of false negatives.
So when you say dishonest - how would you feel if the fine article was written by someone who said he had wasted 2 months on Medium writing posts that try to trick people into downloading malware before he realised that Medium had shadowbanned his account?
The usual reason given is because it wastes the time of abusive people because they don’t realize they’re not reaching anyone else. However, I’ve yet to see actually malicious people be tripped up by this :(
Indeed. It seems shady until you realize why sites do this. Probably the only way to truly understand is to run a site with user generated content for a while.
There will be people using your site that just need to go away. They're different from your typical pharmaceutical spammer because they genuinely think they're not doing anything wrong. If you tell them to stop posting affiliate links to timeshares, they'll put themselves in this box of "banned for doing nothing wrong", and simply start a new account posting affiliate links to timeshares in a slightly different way that hopefully will get around your algorithm.
The worst part is that after enough time, and enough tries, you'l have given them (and the pharmaceutical spammers as well) detailed instructions for how to circumvent your spam protection. All every step of this does is add more work to you to run your site for the people who you want to have there.
So the simplest and most effective thing you can do is make those people think they have succeeded. Let them promote their timeshares (and v1agra) to their heart's content. Just don't show anybody but them.
Real people have friends who read their blog and will point this out if it happens by mistake, and you have a "fix" button in your admin console to hit a few times a year.
Trust me. Run your own blog host for a few months and you'll implement this too.
Appreciate that perspective, makes sense. But it's still fundamentally injurious to the other person, and furthermore, in an uneven power dynamic. Also, your power doesn't automatically mean you're right. I wonder how to solve it.
Maybe shadow banning is quite fair and necessary and the answer is for people to educate themselves about it and go to other places where it won't happen to them. #rollyourown
These matters are not simple at all. I'm still trying to decide on whether Fb ultimately is a 'public square' vs. a 'private publisher', as is basically the whole world.
The problem, like with most moderation tools, is when shadowbans and similar measures are not just used against persistent spammers but as an easy way to shut out people without even trying to get them to improve their behavior. Something can be effective and dishonest at the same time.
There is a real ethical peril here. You've just created a massive externalities-- the honest poster wasting their time without realizing it, hoping someone notices and tells them, and then having to take it up with you.
Shadown banning is an act of fraud against the user, with the hope that it's mostly against malicious already-banned users and that false positives will get it undone.
But since the cost of shadow banning is on the users and the benefit is on you, there isn't a particular incentive to not miscalibrate and cause a lot of damage to users.
The only backstop is that if you're very far into the false positive domain it'll kill your venue but because shadowbanning is invisible by its nature it requires a truly massive amount of false positives to have that effect.
There are also secondary damages that good users worry that they've been silenced and don't comment. E.g. after my last several submissions to HN received no comments I suspected I might be subject to some kind of shadow ban (since HN engages in that sort of thing) and stopped submitting.
Soft/shadow banning. The idea is to make the spammer believe that he/she's still in the platform and they may only realize about the low engagement they have, so they may consider abandoning the platform.
If you mention them that they're banned, they might just use another account and persist in their spam.
The problem of this approach in this case is that user was not an spammer.
Unless you are in HR and need to participate in the circle jerk why both with medium? You might as well use literally any other platform including blogger. No one is reading anyways. Medium used to have interesting content once upon a time. They are a player in that industry like all is a player in internet access.
Same reason people put up with YouTube's nonsense. It is where the money is at. I agree with this post for the average blogger, but if your end game is to build a career off of writing I, medium kinda becomes a necessary evil.
As a paying subscriber, I lost faith in Medium during COVID, when they started censoring and deleting posts that analyzed COVID data and information. Those speculative amateur posts often resulted in findings that went against the prevailing public health guidance or scientific consensus. While many were wrong, many of those early amateur posts ended up being correct on some counts as well. I feel they deserved a place for the conversation to be held. I was put off by the seemingly arbitrary choices medium made in deleting content, especially considering the WHO and other agencies have been wrong on COVID repeatedly - amateur speculation and reporting was necessary.
A democratized internet requires that we exercise that democratic right and retain control over our content, rather than handing control to new platform masters.
It's really sad. Not just medium but Facebook, twitter, YouTube all blocked such content/posts and tried to stifle the content creators. YouTube even permanently banned many channels. I didn't know medium did the same.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] thread[0] https://indieweb.org/principles
If my domain registrar, my DNS provider, my hosting company, ... go "bad" I can just move and my readers won't notice. Even if you are on hosted wordpress etc, you can archive your site as is and move, preserving the URLs. That's not the case with Medium etc where your content lives under their domain.
I think the reasonable answer is that you need to pay for all your needs and not rely on any free services. Then you can rely on your providers.
Is it possible (not feasible, but possible) to put something on the internet that relies on nobody else at all?
I don’t run analytics. I have no idea how many people have read my writing. I’m okay with that. I actually thought nobody reads my site but one day a piece I had just published hit hacker news, so I guess somebody is watching. I keep the content so I can refer people to it, and as a record of my thinking over time. I share the links when relevant in an online discussion.
I highly recommend it! I should say, I was inspired by Paul Graham and his essays. Just keeping it simple and putting good ideas out there. Oh and I licensed all my work as CC0, so anyone can copy it for any purpose.
It can run on shared hosts like Siteground, Lithium, Green Geeks, Hostgator, as well as VPS platforms like Digital Ocean. The admin interface for making new posts is great, separating it from static site generators. It uses a modified Markdown called Kirbytext which is additive. If you write pure Markdown you'll see it rendered as expected.
No database means no worrying about getting hacked (at least in terms of SQL injection).
If you don't want to build it yourself, there's themes for sale too, despite how niche Kirby is. My own blog is a Kirby theme I bought because I knew if I built it myself, I'd never finish.
But, software like Grav and presumably also Kirby are very much not easy to run for 'normal' people. They would need to secure hosting without getting overwhelmed with the technical details or all the upselling that providers try to do, then install the software which is 'easy' but not 'click this button and you're done' easy, and of course also deal with domains and DNS etc. A hosted solution - even if you have to pay for it - is the only practical solution for normal people.
That said, for the type of people that read HN I would highly recommend Grav. Installation is easy, it has a nice web-based interface for administration and writing posts, it is fast, and it is not the latest trendy static site generator. It is a boring PHP application that will probably keep working for 20 years with no changes required - but is still actively maintained and will be for the foreseeable future.
Grav's advantage over Kirby is that it's totally FOSS, but I encountered Kirby first and have a more thorough understanding of how it works. The maintainers and community are also quite helpful as well as super lenient about unlicensed usage.
This is amazing. I didn't want to really do HTML5 and create a new html file per post.
(Of course their brand is now kinda poisoned by "log-in wall" and lots of low-quality "think-pieces", so you don't really want to be associated with theirs - which was somewhat different when Medium started)
If someone uses that in a bio you can just move along, you won't miss anything.
but they messed up their site chasing a business model, and nyt/wapo/etc basically turned into tech companies and fill the niche that medium wanted to. meanwhile substack mints prestige by emphatically not looking like a news site. medium doesn't really have a place on either end of that anymore
https://medium.design/quotation-marks-c8993b54417c
Use your own domain while still making it easy to publish blogs(eg. no servers, no code etc)
They all load almost instantly.
I'm not sure what it does really but you can achieve a similar design with a few Kb of CSS.
Is it? I had to write a bunch of µBlock and usercss rules to make their articles somewhat readable. The sticky bars waste a lot of screen estate. Firefox reader mode (Ctrl+Alt+R) is a wonderful thing, but it breaks on some pages (I guess due to Medium's incompetence or brain-dead priorities since they're still using gist for code snippets (every single snippet in a separate iframe!) instead of spending half an hour to integrate highlight.js)
Is it heavy for such a simple blog? Yes absolutely. Is it heavy for a modern React app? Not really. I think the crux of it is that we often rely too much on heavy frameworks for React even for simple things. It's definitely an antipattern in development today.
Server Side Rendering(react or w/o react) would be a better way to do serve their content and have the added benefit support users who have no js support (noScript , terminal based browsers, screen readers? etc)
(Given your numbers and the ones in the talk, it would appear medium pages have doubled in size since the talk was given).
But yeah, I think folks reach for heavyweight frameworks too quickly. You shouldn't be using React for a blog.
I would think that 0.5mb should be more than enough.
Again: STOP OPENING POPUPS WHEN I'M SELECTING TEXT!
https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/n...
AdTech creates measurement problems not experienced in mass advertising, newer yet:
https://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm
Another related pet peeve is when websites use JavaScript to silently stick a citation at the end of the thing you copied.
Use webflow, ghost or whatever you like, but wordpress is good enough for most people.
HN audience can likely handle their own, but if ease-of-setup is an issue - I created StartABlog.com to help people do this (and we'll actually set up your site for you for free - https://startablog.com/start).
Own your platform. Own your content. Own your voice. Use everything else as distribution methods - not core dependencies.
[0] https://getpublii.com/
[1] http://runtimeterror.com/devlog/
But if there was something else i'd probably try it too.
With a properly set up cache, your website will be serving static files anyway.
That said I self-host other services, like Matomo or FreshRSS (also PHP apps that need a database).
The secret is in setting up auto-update policies. All the self-hosted services I host are in Docker and auto-updated [1] even if that means they can break.
Have been doing this for some time and worked great thus far, but granted self-hosting stuff is a continued investment, you can't just leave that server there to bit rot.
[1] https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower
The most common hack I've seen is one where the admin doesn't even know, because it redirects some visits to their site that have Google in the referrer. Because they rarely Google themselves while logged out of WordPress, they never know every page on their site is redirecting to MyCoolMalwareDroppr.
I hosted my own blog for a short while and got hacked, so I moved back to Wordpress.com.
Also be very selective about installing plugins.
If you are extra paranoid then you can put the login/admin/api behind a vpn.
Almost all of the problem plugins weren’t even that important to the site. Someone just added it at some point and left it, maybe for years. Then there you are running old code with known exploits. Of course you’re going to get hacked.
Although I didn’t enjoy that work, I did love how excited and happy my clients were that their sites were fixed. You can’t measure the misery and anxiety some people feel when stuff goes wrong with their websites. Fixing that, with php and Wordpress no less, was a great feeling.
All that is to say that I agree; only adopt plugins you really need with a reputation you’re comfortable with.
I've recommended Hardypress (https://hardypress.com/) a couple times here on HN. Still happy with them.
a) Doesn't use node.js.
b) Has built-in syntax highlighting for C#, SQL, PowerShell and Rust at a minimum.
c) Is also good at "photo journals" or galleries.
I played around with Hugo, but the themes were ugly and it was very weak at managing pictures associated with an entry instead of the entire site.
I've written code in PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript before, it's just not my first choice.
Did something like that years and years ago as a learning project. Works great! Drop in some markdown and you’re done. The source is only a few hundred lines; no build or package manager.
Could you explain what you mean here?
Quoting their README:
Web server with built-in support for QUIC, HTTP/2, Lua, Markdown, Pongo2, HyperApp, Amber, Sass(SCSS), GCSS, JSX, BoltDB (built-in, stores the database in a file, like SQLite), Redis, PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL, rate limiting, graceful shutdown, plugins, users and permissions.
All in one small self-contained executable.
I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook.
[1] https://blog.getpelican.com/
> I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook.
This is exactly what I don't want to deal with. Sure, I could use a ci service but this is a typical case of over-engineering a simple problem.
On my end I write a new markdown post and push it to Github.
At that point Netlify takes over to rebuild and redeploy my site including the new post. It's pretty trivial to do.
https://github.com/jacquescorbytuech/Blog
https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/
Say Microsoft decides to kill github pages. OK, fine, next.
Now picture Netlify changing some policy, adding some pricing or killing off a service which you need(unlikely but not entirely impossible). You have to setup the whole thing all over again with someone else, be it circleci, jenkins, gitlab, etc. Though in different contexts, I've been in similar situations and by the third time I usually want to murder someone.
If you wanted to you could run the build process locally and commit the output HTML and CSS files to the repo, and the build process wouldn't even be necessary. You'd just need to copy the output files to a server using a git commit hook.
I DON'T want to do either of that. Add a file, push it and know everything has worked.
The topic of the thread is __specifically__ personal blogs/pages and my point is as strong as ever: having to deal with builds, cis, for your personal page is pure bs.
That's precisely what Netlify offers you.
Forgive me for suggesting the first thing that popped into mind, could you run the generator script locally and also push the /public dir which your server then serves directly?
A much better option. Still have to deal with the de-facto boilerplate of every html file: head, body, header, footer. Which is why I built something that does it in the browser for me.
> Forgive me for suggesting the first thing that popped into mind, could you run the generator script locally and also push the /public dir which your server then serves directly?
Same as CI - adds an extra step to the process. But as I said, services like Netlify come and go and the news might slip by you and catch you off guard. If I had to go down that road, I have ~10 raspberry pi's 6 of which are currently booted up. A 5 line shell script could easily do that. But again - I see no point in doing it if there's no need for it.
I find it fascinating that you'd go to all the trouble to build what essentially breaks down to a custom static site generator but you then balk at using an off the shelf one with a build script.
https://caddyserver.com/docs/markdown
”Caddy is both a flexible, efficient static file server and a powerful, scalable reverse proxy. Use it to serve your static site with compression, template evaluation, Markdown rendering, and more.”
https://caddyserver.com/
Here’s a blog on doing this with the older version of Caddy:
https://blog.thomaspuppe.de/static-sites-from-markdown-with-...
The simplest solution I've used is to just have a Makefile that indexes and stitches together pages using cat/sed/ls. Sure, you have to run make (and possibly make upload if you're not doing it live), but it's not so bad.
Just serve your markdown git repo using Caddy.
https://caddyserver.com/docs/markdown
”Caddy is both a flexible, efficient static file server and a powerful, scalable reverse proxy. Use it to serve your static site with compression, template evaluation, Markdown rendering, and more.”
https://caddyserver.com/
Here’s a blog on doing this with the older version of Caddy:
https://blog.thomaspuppe.de/static-sites-from-markdown-with-...
You get a lot of other “just works” goodness too.
In addition to the above it generates static pages rather than looking into the database and templates all the time.
You create a folder of markdown files, you have 2 template HTML files (index and blog post), and you run my program (MMSSG). It compiles the index page with a list of all the posts, then renders the HTML for each markdown file into a separate blog post. That's it. Handles the linking and everything for you.
It’s all open source and the templates are already made, modify to your heart’s content. It's also REALLY simple, so should be easy to understand my code.
It’s what I used to generate my blog, and there’s instructions in the readme to get going quickly :) It's super simple and I really love it. This is my post about it, and the github link:
https://jacobkania.com/2020-01-18-the-great-blog-project/
https://github.com/jacobkania/mmssg
--
Edit: Just reverted a couple of commits from a WIP plugins feature that I got bored of and quit, and created new versions of the binaries (Linux and Windows are untested). Also updated this comment with a better description.
I'm going to bed, feel free to respond with any feedback! Thanks for looking :)
I started collecting my writings, all in Markdown and some HTML. Just a bunch of folders as topics, and then write markdown files inside them.
Then, a week or so ago, I threw in Jekyll and now they are published as the cheapest form of Digital Garden for me and hopefully, my family - https://oinam.fyi
The crappy code is at https://github.com/oinam/oinam.fyi and is not even worth being a template.
I get it, I shouldn't complain about the quality of open-source and freely offered software and the onus is on me to audit the libraries I put in my code, but blimey some people take an awful lot of liberty with the truth when they claim something is "production ready". I reckon a lot of people just build some rushed, poorly-written JavaScript libraries so they can pad out their CVs as an "open-source contributor" but the only thing they're actually contributing is a massive headache for muppets like me who foolishly use said code in their own projects.
I have also been looking for something like this for a while and I can't find it.
All the static HTML gallery generators seem to be focused on dumping all images into them at single time. They don't have RSS feeds, or a convenient option to add entries one at a time as you go along like you would in a blog.
On the other hand, blog generators generally aren't optimized for mostly displaying images (e.g. automatic resizing, thumbnail view, etc.)
I never found a solution for requirement C that I liked, so I’ve been building my own. It’s still very rough and not exactly in shape to publish, but its capabilities already by far exceed my previous solution: https://github.com/okeeblow/DistorteD
I left my WIP site running (‘jekyll serve’ using WEBrick) on my laptop and I’m going to bed, so these links may get hugged or just crash and become unavailable, but here you can get an idea of what I’ve been playing with for multi-image layouts: https://beta.cooltrainer.org/distorted/
And on the index page is a random smattering of some other media types I’ve been testing, like support for image-rendering SVGs, TTFs, and old DOS-codepage Nfos, mbedding PDFs, etc: https://beta.cooltrainer.org/
Anyway, big Jekyll fan. Try it out :)
(I'm considering node for a personal project or two, though as much as possible avoiding the mess that NPM seems to be as the projects are small enough I can manage the few dependencies manually, so insight into pitfalls I'm not aware of could be useful)
So even if a node.js solution would be the best solution, you would still not want to use it? Why?
Anyway, I'd recommend to write a static site generator yourself. It isn't very difficult, you get exactly what you need, and you never get stuck because someone abandoned their project or doesn't want to fix the bugs you reported.
It doesn't seem that strange to want to avoid it for such a project.
Jekyll is really nice to use, but the photo galleries are pretty few and far between.
Disclaimer, I couldn't get this to deploy using Github pages (which is nice) because it uses unsupported plugins. I have it split across two branches and works nicely enough. Certainly the most responsive gallery I've found.
Edit: removed direct link to the person's pictures :)
[1] https://github.com/dansku/photoGallery
As a side note, I can't believe how many people are salty that you don't want to use node. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
It's dependencies are too big?
It cannot be hosted by cheap webhost?
It's not secure ?
It's in Python (pip install...), it uses a very complete and flexible Markdown library (never found a language that it didn't support, but syntax highlighting is in a plugin), and is a site generator, not a blog generator.
But it takes some up-front programming to define your site structure.
What is annoying though is that often people who self-host their blogs make the exact same mistake. More and more often I see something that will grab my attention and when I get to the bottom of a blog post, I find something along the lines of "The full guide is available in my free e-book, which you can download from here". And when you click "here", you are greeted with "Please enter your e-mail address". Sure, everyone has a spam-mail type of thing or mailinator or whatever but this is still a terrible thing to do.
I don't see it wrong to use it as marketing strategy.
That strategy might be better than writing a long-ish blog entry as a teaser, where the reader thinks they are going to get their information for free, only to be told "Psyche! You've actually got to pay for it!"
What’s the alternative, assuming the blogger doesn’t want to give everything away for free?
I create rare, valuable information that saves people money and headaches. On a good month, 2% of my revenue will come from donations. Usually, it's 0%. At best, it pays for a meal and a beer. This website has 135k page views per month.
If that's how much I get from teaching people how to navigate German bureaucracy, I doubt you'll make anything from your opinions alone.
And having some experience with German bureaucracy and taxes, and also having never lived in Germany nor speaking German, I'm fully aware how convoluted and complicated this can be and I could definitely see myself donating/paying for useful information if I didn't have a good accountant at my disposal.
I agree, on the grand scheme you won't make a whole lot but even with a population of 83 million, even if you add another 1 million like myself, your content still fits a relatively narrow niche. I'd love to give some advice but I honestly have no idea.
Affiliate marketing works well for my niche. I wanted to start similar sites about other topics, but if those don't naturally lead to certain purchases, they're extremely hard to effectively monetise.
In general, the internet got incredibly annoying, but I can understand why. Part of it is because we feel entitled to free content. There are few business models that allow people to be rewarded for their work while still offering a product for free. It usually involves selling something the user's data or attention.
I insist on keeping the content unconditionally free, and donations don't work, but affiliate marketing does. I help people navigate certain boring purchases, so it lends itself to that sort of monetisation. I'd be recommending those products and services anyway.
Unfortunately, it incentivizes dishonest recommendations and passing ads as content. I chose not to do that, but I know I'd get paid more to recommend the wrong things. Since it's blended into the content, you'd be abusing people's trust in your content. At least banner ads were separate from the text.
I do not offer services either. My goal was to help as many people as possible, and that would go against it. Information should be free, especially when poor people need it the most. I also want the website to run itself. If I wanted to be on the computer full time, I'd just get a job.
The website mentioned above is more of a "visit it when you need it" resource. It's painfully boring to read, as it's written like a plain English instruction manual. It wouldn't be an interesting book.
I am personally against it for my website in particular though. I insist on keeping everything on it open and free. Immigration advice should help everyone, not just developers with a generous relocation bonus.
I'd much rather invest the effort into making the content more navigable/discoverable. This is actually what I'm working on right now.
Again though, this is just personal preference for this specific website. Selling packaged information could work. I did buy a motorcycle travel book that was a rehash of the author's YouTube channel.
Ghost on the other hand is open source and can be self hosted.
>Own your platform. Own your content. Own your voice.
There's no way to fully own a place on the clearnet. At a minimum, you will have to rent a domain, and most people will rent the hosting as well. Moreover, authorities can seize or block both of those, while payment services can also "cancel" or "deplatform" you if you need them to pay for costs--so much for having a voice on the net.
The only way to own content on the Internet is to publish it in a free, decentralized and anonymous manner--I'm thinking I2P sites, for instance, and even that is subject to attacks that could make it inaccessible.
In any case, I wholewheartedly agree that Medium is not the home for anything worthwhile.
If you are trusting Google to be your entry point for traffic you have to play all kinds of gross games with your content for SEO purpose and if you are adding value to an already well explored topic there will be someone out there trouncing you in SEO.
Medium was initially brilliant because it solved this by aggregating content in a slick website, with great search, and it still does a decent job of showing you new content based on your interests. I think this is a part of why its so frustrating. When I go on the home page I see a bunch of articles I would want to read, go to click them and get paywalled.
But then the money men came. I'm not convinced there is anything out there like Medium in terms of ease-of-use, ability to get your content in front of others, good at surfacing new content you would want to read and also Medium pay content authors really really well.
This to me is the key thing, and what Medium's stated goal was: to re-think the way we pay for content. You may feel fine giving away your content for free, but it's perfectly reasonable for people to want to be paid for the value they create, and I like Medium's model way better than advertising.
Not sure I'd agree with this. I've tried looking for interesting articles on Medium recently, and it seems that once you want to go outside the 'make money online/internet nomad/political rants' genre, finding anything interesting becomes real difficult.
It'a slso quite hard to find things from unknown/unpopular authors there too. Remember looking through a few Medium Digests and counting how popular each creator was, and found there was a huge bias towards people with large social media followings/existing fanbases in what was being promoted in those newsletters and on the Medium front page.
Precisely this.
I also have been yelling [0] about hosting your own GitLab, Gitea solution for individuals, companies and open-source organisations which frees you from the mercy of 'centralising everything' in GitHub which is nonsensical.
Medium is essentially centralising and bringing blogs back into the dark ages with paywalls, de-platforming and Google Logins on someone else's blogging site.
Own your code on your servers just like you own your website and blog. If the creator of Wireguard can do it, you can do it too.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23849565
For me, Jekyll, Github Pages, and a couple lines of CSS were nothing[1], but there should be as little barrier to entry as possible if you have something to say
[0]: https://andrewtag.com (it's not self-promotion if it's someone else's blog)
[1]: https://amtunlimited.gihub.io (this is definitely self-promotion, feel free to ignore)
https://amtunlimited.github.io
The top one just doesn't have it, the bottom is misspelled
amtunlimited.github.io
When you get sick, poor or die, your own platform will almost certainly disappear, taking your content and ideas with it.
If it's on Medium, your content is more likely to survive your demise.
Only if your site gets picked up by archive.org though.
(That's only going to happen with static sites, not those which require login or signup, etc.)
Even then your ideas will still effectively disappear because search engines don't appear to crawl archive.org. (If they do it's incomplete - my own past content on archive.org does not get found by specific Google searches.) But perhaps search will change in future.
[1]: https://pages.github.com/ [2]: https://neocities.org/ [3]: https://jekyllrb.com/
I would go with Netlify or Vercel with Gitlab.
100% agree. I even went as far as to write my own static-site generator (not that impressive, everyone seems to have one these days), but even hosted blogs are better than using the Mediums of this world.
There are trade-offs though. There is a little bit of on-going effort (and maybe expense) in keeping even an inactive blog going. Medium does take care of that side of things for you.
Brilliant idea.
> Your password for Bluehost (double check that you spelled this right!)
uhhhh
Also, you missed the fact that there's a typo on that line at the very end!
> Your password for Bluehost (double check that you spelled this right!)e
There's also the line above the password part:
> Once you've purchased your hosting - forward the confirmation email you received to: team@startablog.com
Which since I don't have I can't confirm if it has any sensitive information or not.
For a project blog I used hosted wordpress, and I found that to be a pretty good middle ground. Honestly I can't think of a case where running your own wordpress server is a good use of your time.
[0] https://plurrrr.com/
[1] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog (as of today available under MIT license)
The ux can be described as slimy at best.
If your company is still running on Medium you're very limited with customizing your blog.
You can't add any CTA button, popup window, widget, or anything that can help you to justify your blog exsistance. If 1000 people get into your blog post, only around 30 will hit your homepage.
Compare it to other blogs where you can design it the way you want, because great UX and some traffic from Medium, I don't see the benefit of it.
FWIW, I utterly abhor these when reading blogs. Consider “goodwill” as being an abstract benefit of your blog existing.
Can you get around this by posting the medium version later than the one on your own website? (Obviously, G crawls medium more frequently; so say, maybe, a week later.)
To get around Google thinking that your personal hosted version is a copy, can you pepper the medium version with links back to your domain/blog ? Would that help ?
https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a...
It sets up a canonical tag and backdates your post to prevent just that from happening.
Jekyll amd similar static site generators are more than good enough for 99% of blog sites anyone might want to build.
Google never did get serious about provenance. They scrape so often that they should be able to tell who's the original. I've seen Wikipedia copy sites outrank the real Wikipedia.
As a backup, you should be able to submit a hash to a time-stamping notary service and have Google pick up on that.
As an example, Ubuntu still has theirs: https://planet.ubuntu.com/
Is there plan for non-English blog posts? Dev community is mostly in English, but many blog posts around the world are in native language. Some blogs write in English and non-English and it's very hard for me to find content in my language.
This also prevents me from registering my blog on diff.blog as my blog contains English and non-English content.
Hope the best for your project!
I have plan for supporting other langauges as well in future. Creating subdomains like de.diff.blog, ml.diff.blog, etc which only contains the blog posts in the respective languages should probably be good enough. The main difficulty is finding the initial set of blogs that are popular in languages which I don't understand and creating an initial user base. Maybe not be probably as hard as I make it sound.
Looking at your site I'm noticing there seems to be no RSS feed? I think that would make a good addition. You could have one personalized feed and one global one, like Reddit does it.
I'd also like to note that I was surprised about the github login. My blog has no connection to Github at all, most blogs won't, so I'm not seeing how that could work for others when people suggest their blogs?
Thanks! Will reach out to you once I start on this.
> Looking at your site I'm noticing there seems to be no RSS feed? I think that would make a good addition. You could have one personalized feed and one global one, like Reddit does it.
That sounds like a cool feature to have. I will add it to my todo list.
> I'd also like to note that I was surprised about the github login. My blog has no connection to Github at all, most blogs won't, so I'm not seeing how that could work for others when people suggest their blogs?
Yeah. I added GitHub login mainly to get the list of followers and organizations you follow on GitHub. Your account follows them automatically when you sign up on diff.blog. It also give me some idea on what kind of languages you use which I use a bit for showing user recommendations.
React or any frontend frameworks would have probably been an overkill (honestly, even jQuery was) in the case of diff.blog, since Django did most of the Job. If the frontend codebase becomes larger, I would probably rewrite them to make use of native Web Components. I still have not yet experimented with web components though.
If you're looking to move off Medium, give it a try. If anyone is interested I'm happy to share the mini server I wrote to compile pug aka jade / stylus, which is what I use for my blog.
I was using a digital ocean droplet for 5$ a month.
Do you know of anyone that did something similar?
Also, why do people host their tech tutorials on Medium? I have few of my own and always put them up on my own github pages blog. It's not too difficult.
I feel GitHub pages and Medium are not the same thing.
If you own the domain name, yes. Otherwise, no.
> They started with a Medium publication, and when they gained traction on their content, they moved to their own hosted blogs.
This is false. Basecamp's blog "Signal v Noise" is much older than Medium itself, and their transition perfectly illustrates what Medium has become[1]:
> Three years ago we embraced an exciting new publishing platform called Medium. It felt like a new start for a writing community, and we benefitted immensely from the boost in reach and readership those early days brought. But alas it was not to last.
> When we moved over, Medium was all about attracting big blogs and other publishers. This was going to be a new space for a new time where publishers could find a home. And it was. For a while.
> These days Medium is focused on their membership offering, though. Trying to aggregate writing from many sources and sell a broad subscription on top of that. And it’s a neat model, and it’s wonderful to see Medium try something different. But it’s not for us, and it’s not for Signal v Noise.
[...]
> So now we’re back on the indie trail. The new blog is powered by our friends at WordPress, and the new amazing design is courtesy of our in-house designer Adam Stoddard.
> Thanks to the fact that we kept our own domain when we moved to Medium, all the articles and links still work. The pieces have simply swapped the Medium styling for our own look. (Although, sad to say, Medium didn’t let us export the comments, so those are gone ).
[1] https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/
The algo based recommendation that force feed you the content that "they" think you should read and constant trackers all over the place that profiles everyone with heavy ads scripts with tons of js css files just to read a simple text from someone.
I've built what I had in mind (_sort of_) for myself and many others.
Anyone wants to start a blog, without the headache of self hosting or maintenance without ads and sneaky business model is welcome gonevis.com
This is probably one of the things I hate most about the modern web. There are a ton of situations where I want raw, un-autofiltered results from something and I can't get it.
Tech's virtuous cycle will forever run...
HN does this too, if enough people downvote a comment it will disappear from the conversation, but not from the posters viewpoint (and if you have showdead on, as a reader it shows up as lighter and lighter shades of grey).
The rational behind it is that if a spammer notices that their post/account has been banned, they can quickly spin up another one.
Apparently this is quite effective against spammers, (or used to be) but of course seems extremely unfair in the case of false negatives.
So when you say dishonest - how would you feel if the fine article was written by someone who said he had wasted 2 months on Medium writing posts that try to trick people into downloading malware before he realised that Medium had shadowbanned his account?
There will be people using your site that just need to go away. They're different from your typical pharmaceutical spammer because they genuinely think they're not doing anything wrong. If you tell them to stop posting affiliate links to timeshares, they'll put themselves in this box of "banned for doing nothing wrong", and simply start a new account posting affiliate links to timeshares in a slightly different way that hopefully will get around your algorithm.
The worst part is that after enough time, and enough tries, you'l have given them (and the pharmaceutical spammers as well) detailed instructions for how to circumvent your spam protection. All every step of this does is add more work to you to run your site for the people who you want to have there.
So the simplest and most effective thing you can do is make those people think they have succeeded. Let them promote their timeshares (and v1agra) to their heart's content. Just don't show anybody but them.
Real people have friends who read their blog and will point this out if it happens by mistake, and you have a "fix" button in your admin console to hit a few times a year.
Trust me. Run your own blog host for a few months and you'll implement this too.
Maybe shadow banning is quite fair and necessary and the answer is for people to educate themselves about it and go to other places where it won't happen to them. #rollyourown
These matters are not simple at all. I'm still trying to decide on whether Fb ultimately is a 'public square' vs. a 'private publisher', as is basically the whole world.
Shadown banning is an act of fraud against the user, with the hope that it's mostly against malicious already-banned users and that false positives will get it undone.
But since the cost of shadow banning is on the users and the benefit is on you, there isn't a particular incentive to not miscalibrate and cause a lot of damage to users.
The only backstop is that if you're very far into the false positive domain it'll kill your venue but because shadowbanning is invisible by its nature it requires a truly massive amount of false positives to have that effect.
There are also secondary damages that good users worry that they've been silenced and don't comment. E.g. after my last several submissions to HN received no comments I suspected I might be subject to some kind of shadow ban (since HN engages in that sort of thing) and stopped submitting.
If you mention them that they're banned, they might just use another account and persist in their spam.
The problem of this approach in this case is that user was not an spammer.
A democratized internet requires that we exercise that democratic right and retain control over our content, rather than handing control to new platform masters.