Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
Let me put this as simple as I can:
Writing tutorials on Medium means you are putting them behind a paywall, thus restricting learning opportunities.
Medium is not StackOverflow, it limits the number of articles that can be freely read.
If you ever learned something from a blog or from stackoverflow do contribute back by sharing your knowledge open on the internet not behind a paywall.
258 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadI'm not familiar with the workings of Medium, aside from the fact that there's a limit on the number of articles one can read for free each month.
> You’ll be able to get paid for all of your writing, some of it, or keep everything free and accessible to all. The choice is yours.
So it looks like the authors are the ones responsible for putting up the paywall.
The thing with medium is I can write a tech post, and I may not get good reach, but I can syndicate it to another medium blog like the startup, and then it gets mega reach and I make like $100 easy.
I guess I could just repost my content on my personal blog and charge people like $10/month to access all my posts. Seems $5 though for a multi-publisher paywall is a lot more reasonable than say the wallstreet journal, or new york times.
OMG! The horror of it all. ;)
Others (like self-hosted blogs or Stackoverflow) don't.
[0]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115011694187-Getti...
EDIT: For context, I don’t mind people monetizing their content, but in that case I’d rather pay them directly (like GoRails), and not a “subscription” for something I might check once in a while.
Well... TIL.
A few weeks ago I saw an ad on a blog post. I think it's the only one I've seen all year. I was so surprised, I looked at the source. It was just an image, hosted on the same domain, wrapped in standard anchor tag. It was even something I might consider using, a server monitoring service. I had never been so happy to see an ad.
I mean, if it were just as simple as, he likes gadgets and cycling: let's show him an ad for a new bike accessory -- that isn't so bad.
But when they know what your mood is, what your insecurities are, what your financial situation is, past purchases at one retailer linked with your phone number to purchases at another retailer, how likely you are to buy at a certain time of day, etc and then they show you the right ad, in the right place at the right time to exploit all of those things... that is too manipulative for my taste.
The ads are fine.
Surveillance capitalism is the problem.
Don't mistake the symptom for the disease.
Are you really trying to make the case that Medium is the only way people find and read content?
Now, if it ripped the authors off or engaged in other shitty tactics, then that's one thing. But nobody is responding with that kind of information. It's all a response against the paywalls, and I'm trying to figure out if it's knee-jerk or not.
I mean, aren't people allowed to make a living by teaching others?
Absolutely good point!
I think if I were to rephrase the submitter's comment in a way that aligned with my own views and concerns, it would be:
If your intent is to put information into the world for others to share purely out of charity/a desire to help others, or to get your name out, please consider options other than Medium, as Medium is ultimately in control if whether anyone can actually gain access to the content you've produced.
If, however, as you say, one's goal is to produce and monetize content as part of a personal revenue stream, then Medium seems like as good an option as any (though, personally, I'm not a huge fan of contributing content into walled garden ecosystems where the publisher can unilaterally change the rules on a whim), and folks here complaining that stuff is behind a paywall should go find free content elsewhere.
I am buying from time to time website-based tutorials or other type of content. I agree this creates a new problem: I don't even know what I bought in the last years, what kind of online live books with exercises I bought and from where. I try to keep them in a document, but sometimes I forget and search email to find out.
Still I would like to ask that if someone just wants to share information and it is not focused on monetization then please consider other options than Medium.
A lot of newcomers will not make a subscription there.
1) Free, non-scummy tutorial sample, with the rest offered for money, or
2) Free full tutorial with non-scummy ads/UX, or
3) Free full tutorial with the understanding that this is self-promotion and I should raise my evaluation of the author and seek to hire their other work.
Which of those do you feel is unjustifiably entitled?
Your options are clearly biased towards the fact that you don't want really to pay anything, either in terms of money or ads/attention.
I'm not going to subscribe to Medium or other things like it. I don't like subscriptions and avoid them for the most part, and Medium is effectively a weird bundle of mostly crap I mostly don't care about.
When something is worth it, a la carte works for me. It should cost more than as part of a bundle. (Although I'd need to need your tutorial rather badly to pay the price of a book for it.)
It's literally $5 a month to subscribe to all medium articles, I don't get the problem. That's less than a starbucks latte.
A service must be really compelling and unique to persuade people to commit to an open-ended subscription on top of everything else crying for their dollars.
That's why the likes of Apple are racing to bundle their services for a single monthly family fee, they're getting ahead of 'subscription fatigue' where the mental and financial burden of managing a plethora of small monthly charges becomes overwhelming.
> That's less than a starbucks latte.
That's a perfect analogy. The majority of people in any population don't buy a Starbucks latté because the cost-value assessment indicates it's not worth it on top of more essential daily living costs.
Medium doesn't mind if you use a workaround - as long as you are using it. The business model is validated and metrics show that users are happy with it. The only way to change their mind is to stop using it entirely.
A thread about changing how programmers distribute written content in the context of HN could actually have an impact.
I mean, if people can't afford the $5 per month that it costs to read all medium posts, they really shouldn't waste the time complaining.
I also don't want to have to buy a domain and have a hosting service to push my own site having to load it up with ads or other nonsense just to make a side hustle possible. So I stick with Medium.
IMHO, you need to write about some cool hot or esoteric feature that solves a specific problem in a new way. Or about how a particular crash bug ended being based on something that everyone else thinks works one way when in fact it works the other way.
Do a search on a topic. Are there already thousands of pages that cover the same thing? If so, write on something else.
Trust me. It's possible to do a lot better than $1.50 an article.
works like a charm
Read https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018677974 section What does the checkbox do
That's an official publication of the company behind medium. Maybe they had some bugs in the past or the people who complained or the author just made mistakes.
Try to access this article: https://medium.com/@rochus.keller/implementing-call-by-refer...
Can you access it or not?
If you hit the preview limit, you get the message "Not every story on Medium is free, like this one. Become a member to get unlimited access and support the voices you want to hear more from."
Non-metered (i.e. free) content is not behind the metered paywall. Also if the author posts a "friend link" the article is freely accessible, even if metered otherwise.
Do you have other sources?
The average article we publish does 10k views, which for most authors is way more than they'd get self-hosting and posting out to Twitter/FB.
I think also that Medium is still overly dominated by user generated content, i.e. what people here are calling low quality articles. You'd think of that content differently if it were better curated and better edited.
But all of Medium's subscriber revenue gets reinvested in their content. Most of that is author payments, but also they pay copy editors and curation editors. What they haven't done in programming yet is pay for any articles that have had a proper high quality edit. In programming that's a story editor, tech reviewers and a bug/errata updating process. But I suspect that will change because the subscription numbers are starting to be big enough that they can afford to invest in these things.
Always write on a domain you own. You don't necessarily have to own the server, but if you own the domain, you have the freedom of choice.
I want a Medium that charges me to write, but anyone can read for free. I pay DO $5 a month to host something, why should I not be willing to gain a benefit of a medium with large SEO and strength in numbers, and pay that $5 a month, but still allow people to read for nothing? But no one wants to pay to read or write so you go alone and google ignores you.
https://hackernoon.com/why-is-hackernoon-com-leaving-medium-...
It is ok to ask and answer your own question.
1. It is public (you don't need a subscription) 2. It has a license for using the code there (https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing)
I am not affiliated in anyway with StackOverflow and actually I created a new account because of some things I disagree with.
Unfortunately, any such platform will be in due time be trying to seek income and will transform into such an ad-powered walled garden, whatever the good intentions in the beginning may have been.
What could be the solution to this?
Like it or not, websites cost money to run. The more popular they are, the more money it takes.
So... what? Spend your own money? Ads? Paywalls? Sell t-shirts? Try Patreon and hope enough people throw a dollar or two into your hat?
At any rate, the idea is to somehow filter out all the garbage when I just want to know how to do something. Too often I have to find personal blog links on stackoverflow ("PS. I wrote more about it here") as opposed to that helpful article simply showing up in the search results by itself.
It would be interesting to see a curated version with an allowlist of domains as well, like how Angelfire and friends in the 90s used to be with a "web ring" of peer websites.
Usually you can find the signal in the first 2 or 3 sentences of in any post.
Medium.com has better SEO than SO and small personal blogs, so it's winning when searching for a solution.
Given the nature of the medium, books usually have the highest guarantee of quality due to the resources used to publish a book.
I won't try to guess why, but the few pages I can access are always high quality, while poor quality pages (as discovered when opening the page anyway in a full browser) always try to block that setup.
I suspect quality means different things to different people and even changes based on context for the same person.
For instance, a blog describing some arcane linux command to run to fix the issue you're having does not need to be the same level of quality as something you're reading to learn + get in depth info about a topic you know at a very shallow level.
I don't think they geniunely want to help people learn. I assume, given the low quality / effort content, that most are just trying to use them to build a prescence to help get jobs?
That seems accurate in my experience.
I mean, not knocking who told you that at all, I think it's funny that they applied it to Medium the website. Just a little tidbit of info about the quote's origins, in case you weren't aware!
I have found several articles about Apache Kafka on Medium that have helped me a lot. I have no idea if it's by a junior dev or not.
People see successful programmers giving lots of talks and writing lots of articles.
People want to be successful.
Monkey see, monkey do.
You must have a very different experience to me. I'd say the value is about 70-30% in favour of unofficial tutorials for the tech topics I've learned over the years.
Even StackOverflow is reaching the point of net-negative value; far too many of its questions and answers are outdated, but the nature of their system means the older (first acceptable) answers tend to be promoted as current answers.
I'd dispute "increasingly" - twas ever thus to some degree.
Spotting whether a tutorial is still valid is a skill that can be honed and it's part of learning how to learn.
Your argument has some merit but your solution of "let's stop writing tutorials" seems a trifle extreme. Wishing something was better isn't a great argument for it's extinction.
With general Google/DDG searches I often do filter to past year, but I've noticed increasingly that some sites have been republishing old articles with new dates, or minor updates (apparently to bump them up in search results?)
I think - in case of tutorials about programming languages/frameworks/libraries the bare minimum should be:
- Date
- Language Version
- Framework Version
For example the official docs should probably contain a bunch of "hello world" tutorials for using the features they offer. But often times once you are combining a couple of different tools it isn't clear if it should go into the official documentation for any one of them. ..and I especially don't want the maintainers of the official documentation acting as gatekeepers for what combinations of tools are "useful" enough to be allowed into the one source of information.
No. If I don't write tutorials for my Javascript library thing[1], who's going to bother using it ... or even looking at it?
[1] - Obligatory spam link: https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/learn
Things move so quickly, in tech, that something is out of date, almost as soon as it's published.
I've been training for years, and setting up a syllabus/course is a big job. Often, my subject matter may be "old hat," by the time I am ready to give the course.
That often means that I don't teach "bleeding edge" stuff. When I take those courses, they tend to be mighty "scruffy," with ill-prepared instructors, and lots of "Well, it worked this morning..." stuff.
The same goes for topical material in walkthroughs and tutorials. If they are relevant, they are likely to be "scrappy." If they are good, there's a fairly high degree of confidence that they will be out of date by the time I see them.
Nonetheless, I have gotten fairly adept at translating "dated" stuff to my current circumstances.
I find this really helps me.
I just don't publish the bloody thing to the internet! Because I know it would just be clutter when people are looking for an actual experts explanation of the thing.
It also means I have quite comprehensive notes I can go back to, again private though.
For people simply looking to spread ideas and neat little hacks, it's almost always going to be better using either a 'traditional' blogging platform or homebrewing a blog with one of the static site generators.
There also seems to be some sort of 'style' that every Medium writer starts to take on that you don't see other places, I can't put my finger on it but there's a certain tone to many of the articles.
I post maybe once a month tops, and for very specific niche queries I'm on the first page of results for the three main search engines. The goal for me isn't to make money or get famous, just to fill in some gaps where nobody's tried something before.
I'm not a medium expert at all, but I would wager that most incoming traffic is going to be from google searches either way. The sad reality is that search & social is the only place traffic really comes from, practically nobody uses RSS or subscriptions anymore.
I am not saying they are doing, but what happens with all this knowledge when Medium decides to pivot (I am not saying they do) or to close (hope this will not happen).
I see better chances for the content to outlive when it is spread in separated smaller blogs. Not all of them will close, maybe some of them will be archived, maybe moved to other domains, maybe cached somewhere. But having a lot of content under paywall, without any license on the code shared (or at least I don't know about it) is not creating a comfortable feeling for myself.
Of course if the purpose is to monetize then maybe Medium is the right place.
It's literally right click, 'open in private tab'
In addition - does anyone make money worth mentioning from Medium? I thought they were the Spotify of blog payouts. We're funding them, not the writers.
There just aren't many reasonable, free alternatives for publishing written technical. Medium handles SEO and makes it super simple writers who don't know how to host their own content otherwise to get their ideas in public. Plus, readers who click on a Medium link know they'll see their content in a standardized format.
Regarding standardized format, yes this is true. I don't have a rebuttal. I think it depends on the job to be done by the reader. For me getting to the information is more important than the format.
I learn things even by reading text mailing-lists.
I have a custom Medium domain from back in the day when you could get them, and it doesn't suffer from any of the usability problems and dark patterns of the actual medium.com (though I should probably move away from it anyway).
IDK, but that seems pretty straightforward to me.
And I've yet to see Medium "fill the screen" with annoying banners. In fact, from what I've just seen, Medium just displayed a web page with the article's bottom half telling you you've read all of your free articles and asking you to sign up.
Too much hyperbole on the internet these days...
Sounds like you place enough value that it would be worth it to you, and you can feel good knowing you're helping contribute a small way back to the author (who gets small proceeds based on how long you read the article) and supporting one of the leading platforms for an ad-free experience to read interesting content without all the distracting popups.
Personally I avoid Medium links, I find that it isn't worth it to me. But I guess for most people it is
The main counter argument I see is that people aren't aware that viewing their content is painful for many. If that is the case then awareness is good. If authors are intentionally using the paywall so that they can get paid I think that is good! However if they think it is just an easy place to share information then I think it is good that we are asking them to reconsider.
I'm even starting to wonder if part of their pedagogical process includes "Every week you write an article". Perhaps by sheer number of posts, an individual has been trained to believe they will be more likely to get hired.
So given that most content on the internet is garbage, I will never, ever pay for access to content before I can assess the value of it. I will (and do) subscribe to some writers/musicians on Patreon.
Medium might as well be the next Experts-Exchange... cluttering up search results with paywalled trash.
How come you know so much about them? Do you often find yourself digging through medium articles?
Maybe StackOverflow should add a Medium-like product where people can write tutorials?
DDG Hide unwanted results.
If you're interested, here is it: https://bloggingfordevs.com/
I'd say 95% of my process with medium goes like this:
1) Finds a blog with a tutorial or something relevant. 2) Opens it and sees a paywall 3) Opens it in incognito mode 4) Browses through the article 5) Leaves the page and learned nothing