30 minutes for alternative? It should be 5 minutes tops if not that for you to host content on ready made platform.
It feels that Medium is a product that could be disturbed. Basic WYSIG editor and easy upload. Then again I wonder what would be business model for such product. And would it just end up being what Medium is doing...
Did this lead to a lower quality of articles, as it was less about having to say something and more about saying (obvious) things about popular topics in order to make money? Or did Medium find a good way of taking the best of both worlds?
(I always skip Medium articles, so I cannot judge for myself)
Medium, like YouTube, is a platform for creators to make money with little friction while also providing exposure that is difficult to build on their own. That, above all, is why platforms like this are successful.
Correct. They failed at monetization without pissing off their users. Partly because they did it earlier. Youtube was ubiquitous by the time they started pushing intrusive ads, so people either dealt with it, paid, or used an adblocker instead of just leaving.
That doesn't change that the "idea" behind Medium is good and that there's a market for a blogging platform that gives authors easy access to a large audience.
Good ideas aren't worth much if the business model doesn't work. They've raised over $100M and have pivoted multiple times. At some point you have to ask whether the idea is not a feasible one.
Alternate possibility: the core idea is a good one, but they raised too much money. Now they have to live up to an impossibly-high valuation and can't just be a blogging platform.
I write on medium [1] and I don’t think switching to a stand alone website would be good for me at all.
Medium has “publications” where my work gets sent out to hundreds of readers that are reading about a topic, not necessarily from me - I’m not notable at all in the field so I’d have a rather hard time getting people to subscribe to __me__.
If I were to make my own website, I’d lose a ton of discoverability.
Plus, the monetization on medium is fantastic. Nowhere else would I get that return per view - I’m currently averaging around 25k views a month with a $500 return.
I do have my gripes with the platform, but in my case, Medium is the worst platform for writing besides all the rest.
[1] https://anth-oleinik.medium.com/
I'm with aoleinik. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, I had a stand-alone blog that--to put it bluntly--no one visited.
Today I put the same type of content on Medium and get thousands of readers on almost each and every article. So much, in fact, that I've consistently been in the top 1,000 creators on Medium several months running.
Yes, I understand that I'm simply part of their platform. but that's the same for anyone who attempts to create monetized content on Medium, YouTube, Twitch, or any of the many other platforms that pay creators for content.
As far as I can tell, articles and sites like the one above exist because some people simply believe that they should never have to pay for content, and that everything should be free.
Fair enough. And, that being the case, those people are never going to see my work. Also fair.
But Medium drives enough people to my content to make the exchange work for me. Plus it provides enough incentive to get me off my butt and create things that I probably won't have created otherwise.
If anyone who reads this doesn't like Medium. Fine. If you want to go elsewhere... also fine.
But thus far, the value proposition works for me, and it apparently also works for all of the people who read my articles and stories and tutorials each and every day.
No you don't give up rights. You own everything you write and publish. Medium has a setting where you can download all of your files at once as HTML files and there are tools for converting those html files into markdown.
For what it's worth, you're currently losing my discoverability by using a platform that I don't. Me (and many, many other people) will get redirected to your site, see a big intrusive banner on our screen, and leave. It doesn't matter if you were about to disclose the panacea or secrets to life, there's simply no writing on Medium that's worth the royal asspain of stepping through your digital metal detector.
You're increasing the amount of complexity in your reader's stack to reduce the complexity of your stack. Much like how nobody clicks the 'Reddit is better in the app!' button, you should be conscious that most people nope-out when they click a link and don't get your article.
Yes, they're losing yours, but that's a small cost to pay vs NO ONE discovering their stuff.
Basically what this comes down to is that there's a market for something like Medium's earlier days, back when it was decent. Someone just needs to figure out a better way to monetize it, while still having the mind share Medium used to have.
Ah yes the monetisation. That's always been a problem on the internet.
Yes you can reach millions of people but not earn a single €. Many such cases! Newspapers almost went broke because of the digital future until they decided to do something completely anti web 2.0: PAYWALL IT. And it worked newspapers were saved.
Did it work though? I've never actually signed up to a paper like that.
I've had a subscription to the guardian online but they didn't have a paywall. Especially because of that I got to know the content they brought better. If they'd had a paywall I'd have just closed the tab after the first three articles and never have gotten to the point of thinking "hey this is really a site that I identify with".
However when the whole Brexit thing started it became too big a topic and it became annoying as I'm not UK based so I stopped renewing. Before that time they had much deeper coverage of topics I was interested in
This is the main problem today. Good journalism costs money, and that money can come from ads, but that's usually not enough to pay the freight. Hence paywalls.
Or... it can be free.
But it also costs money to run a site. Especially if you're serving up millions of pages of content and images.
So... someone is paying the bills. The question is who, and why?
Bottom line is that "free" news either comes from someone selling you and your personal information, or it comes from someone with an agenda.
And that's the problem I spoke of earlier. You're either getting information from a recommendation engine designed to promote "engagement" and as such tends towards serving up controversy... or you're getting your information from someone with a specific agenda... which means they're feeding you what they want you to think.
I'm not going to sign up to a site to read only a few random articles. And the number of free ones they usually offer is way too low to really get a feel for what the site offers. Most sites I visit already present a paywall when I click through a few links from hacker news or reddit. This way I don't really feel any engagement with the site and I'm not tempted to ever sign up for it.
The Guardian didn't have a paywall at that time, but the high quality of their articles and the strength of reporting on topics that interest me (privacy in particular) convinced me to take out a subscription. I wouldn't have experienced that quality if they had a paywall, they'd just have pissed me off after the first few and I'd never have come back. A newspaper is its own advertisement but if you can't read it you won't be swayed.
So what is the answer? I think added value. Extra deep content you can click through on or something, PDFs, things like that. It's a touch premise though, if you offer too much for free most people aren't going to pay for it. But put too many things behind a paywall and you'll be alienating potential customers.
Unfortunately the Guardian kind of lost its appeal as an EU-wide privacy-centric paper for me, as Brexit made it turn its focus inward just like the rest of Britain did. As I have no ties with the UK it lost its relevance to me.
I'm still looking for something that can fill that role now. EU-focused, privacy-first, progressive. I subscribed to Ars for a while too but I found it too 'popular'/'light' on the tech side and too US-centric (not a bad thing, just not my interest). If anyone else has a suggestion I'd appreciate it :)
> Much like how nobody clicks the 'Reddit is better in the app!' button, you should be conscious that most people nope-out when they click a link and don't get your article.
I think you should be the one conscious that you're a small minority and not representing "most people" at all.
Your observation is worth nothing because you also aren’t reading his personal blog, or wherever he would publish instead. You don’t even try to suggest other places you’d happily read.
Except he is reading HN which will link to personal blogs.
I am not saying write good context and they will find you, but Medium isn’t that great. Only ~9% of the writers made over $100 in a month, and the top earner fluctuates between 20 and 30k/month. You basically get a handful of people making a living and most people getting little more than free hosting.
Speaking of own sites, but did you ever find out what is going on with effbot.org? Somewhat off topic, but I just found your older post & HN has disabled new comments there… I’ve referred to that Tkinter guide so many times. Sad to see it down.
Apparently adding this hoop is filtering for a lot more readers who are willing to pay, though. You're probably not willing to pay. I'm not either. From a financial point of view, both of our opinions on the Medium paywall are worth absolutely nothing.
There are other ways to make money on the internet, personally I like the "post shit everywhere for free, have a Patreon" model, which is giving me similar numbers of around $1k/mo for not much energy put into promotion, with a little bit more every month as my patrons grow. But some people like putting up paywalls, and it's their choice to do that with whatever they're creating.
$20 CPM is indeed very high. Just a cursory look at your blog I think 25k page views/mo is actually pretty low given the number of likes/user interactions you get on your posts and how frequently you post. I don't know how Medium is counting a view but usually 3 views translate to a unique user for blogs. I wouldn't be surprised if you counted your views with something like Google Analytics and saw numbers 10x more views than what Medium is reporting. If true then even a $10 CPM would put you in $2,500/mo range.
Wow, that’s a significant return. I used to have a blog in which I wrote technical content, and the traffic was considerably more than 25,000 per month. I only spent money on that, never made a cent.
It did help me get jobs, but I can’t say with certainty that it got me better jobs than I would have without it. I’ve done far better since without a blog attached to my name.
Anyway, that’s a lot of money to make off of something I associated with costing money.
RSS was only part of the solution, the other half... was Google Reader: the homepage's "Suggested" section learned what you were starring/following and provided new content. I found tons of new stuff to read with that.
> you only care about yourself, not about your readership if you have any
Well, that’s how capitalism is supposed to work innit? :) Producers care about themselves and consumers choose, competition ensues, the producers are therefore forced to conform to the consumers’ preferences.
What I mean is “you only care about yourself”, in a business setting, is not an accusation by itself, however unvirtuous it sounds. The opposite of “capitalism” in the first sentence is not “social democracy” or “welfare state”, it’s “planned economy”, and I’d say that every ethical judgment that moves us towards that has to go.
Except this works only when there’s (a lot of) competition, which is exactly what platforms attempt to exploit: you (a producer) move according to your best interest at each point, like everyone else, only to find yourself in a mono- (or oligo-) psony market where you have to sell through the platform(s) or perish, and now the platform(s) can enforce whatever they wish on you. The consumers aren’t feeling that spiffy, either. The laws of competition no longer apply.
(Huh, is moving to a platform essentially a prisoner’s dilemma with the (defect,defect) state obscured by marketing?)
Does medium force you to be exclusive? Else why not do both, it takes a fre hours to set up and afterward 5min per post to post it nicely on both medium and your own site. In return you can have your own newsletter signups, freely link to ehatever you want, ... and have some independence if medium ever decides they don't like you (or you decide you don't like them).
1. Medium is not competing for people willing to spend 30 min playing with the command line to get a blog up. (Note)
2. Discovery! Medium is about getting people to read your blog.
(Note) there is an obvious opportunity to create a medium like experience that lets people blog using Hugo and Netlify. I open an app, connect to my account (GitHub pages, or Netlify) type my article and post.
P.s I tried to put an asterisk instead of Note but it ended up putting everything in between in italics.
> Discovery! Medium is about getting people to read your blog.
This. I feel like as a reader, medium is becoming pretty useless, with the gate screens and stuff. But back when I was using it a lot, I published my stuff on Medium because it gave me eyeballs, the same way I put videos on youtube now as opposed to hosting them myself (even if it was easy to do).
If I put a post on my own blog, I'll be lucky to get 20 people looking at it. Last time I posted something on Medium, it went viral and got several hundred thousand views, including from this very website (and I hadn't even submitted it to Hacker News).
That's hard to beat. If someone else wants to make something similar, to help blog authors get the same thing publishing to Youtube or Spotify get you, that isn't Medium, go right ahead. I'll certainly consider your product.
Hugo user here. I just wanted to reinforce your message - I sometimes think about posting on Medium instead, for "hits"... When I crave attention; but as you said, those readers likely aren't my target audience anyhow. For those thinking of using Hugo (or any static site generator), do it!
Hugo is great until you want to do something it doesn't support. The performance and single-binary nature of Hugo are really cool, but I ended up sticking with Jekyll for its robust plugins API despite the trade-offs in speed and complexity (dealing with gem/bundler, maybe even rbenv, etc)
Similarly, it took me about 2 hours to set up a personal Jekyll website with a deployment script to a S3 static website cached by cloud front. I usually pay less than $1 per month in AWS fees.
No trackers, no JavaScript, no third party assets. If you can get away with a static website it is definitely the way to go and the tools are out there and easy to use.
Not if you use GitHub Pages, GitLab Pages, Netlify, Neocities etc etc. They all offer the same kind of deal substack and wordpress do, ie an author.platformname.com kind of domain.
> (Note) there is an obvious opportunity to create a medium like experience that lets people blog using Hugo and Netlify. I open an app, connect to my account (GitHub pages, or Netlify) type my article and post.
This is what I'd really like. All these alternatives assume you want to use your editor in the terminal and git and CI publication process. I want to edit markdown text in a web browser and click a button to see how its rendered and then go back to the editor without changing contexts at all.
The editor/git/CI model feels too much like actual fucking $dayjob work. Writing is already a difficult enough process -- lets turn it into software development while we're at it! I need to worry more about dependency management of my plugins while I'm trying to write and publish something.
I’ve ended up using something like the “headless WordPress” technique mentioned in the article on one of my websites, though I use a simple Django front end to pull directly from WordPress db. It’s super fast.
I really like WordPress’s out-of-the box classic editing experience and revision history.
It’s probably missing some of the “strict guide rails” you probably want, but I can at least disable user-uploaded plugins which helps a lot.
https://hackmd.io/ is pretty nice for editing markdown, I haven't used the site in a long time. It looks like they are offering something commercial which is nice.
Anyway hackmd+zero click integration to posting to a serving system, anything.
>I want to edit markdown text in a web browser and click a button to see how its rendered and then go back to the editor without changing contexts at all.
imml[1] comes close to this, it's all css tricks to display content so I imagine SEO would suffer until search engine's learn css #navigation but for everyone else it just works. If it had a push to github pages button it would be the perfect minimalist site/blog. For now the publishing step involves downloading the single resulting html file and uploading it manually with surge.sh or to the website host you bought your domain from.
Check out http://getpublii.com, it is quite similar to the app you're describing. (it's not Hugo-based, but similarly outputs a static site with easy upload options, including to GitHub Pages or Netlify, and is free and open-source)
What's wrong with paying for text? I don't own a TV and I assume most people are splurging more on their cable in a single month than s/o paying for five or six web publications.
It is my understanding that Medium will nag visitors to sign up and/or restrict access to your Medium articles even if you're not enrolled into its partner program.
Well, if your target audience is HN, then you really need to worry about this. But for the majority of the (non-technical) bloggers, this isn’t the case.
I chose random blog post on Medium and tried to copy a sentence out of it. It offers to let me "create an account to highlight a passage", or tweet it out via Twitter, but I can't just copy it and paste it into my notes elsewhere.
Whose idea was it to assert this level of control over written material, especially user-generated material? It's a very unpleasant experience.
EDIT: Dialing down my tone a bit here, I should have taken a minute between trying the frustrating thing and posting about it.
> Whose idea was it to assert this level of control over written material, especially user-generated material? It's not just user-hostile, it's sadistic.
It's optimized for public sharing of user generated content to social network platforms. Web 2.0 in a nutshell but optimized for outreach, not personal log.
I'm not saying that there is only tech content on Medium, but it's a large part of the site. The list you posted has many programming-related categories in it.
I understand general public can fall prey to fancy UI and easy blogging but I do not expect medium to be used by people from IT who know better.
For example, recently both Dart and Flutter got version upgrade and they announced this via Medium. I mean you have largest Software company backing you. Why would you choose medium for your blog!?
Isn't software development currently just going and picking up what is the big popular name today. Be that platform, database, language or framework. Picking Medium fits perfectly to this mind-set. Move fast break things. Don't reinvent the wheel... Or do when it makes CV better even if you are writing same product again...
medium was a great platform, you can make you own subdomain and mange what you want, then the focus change from make a great blog experience from a modic price for non tech-savy to, try to become a premium buzzfed, the ui is the same but the home screen is full of crappy shit first post(The Real Way to Figure Out How Smart Someone Is it work every time), and you are force to premium or kick like happens to hackernoon and freecodecamp
One of the founders of Hackernoon here. They didn't kick so much as "you cant make any money here, and we are going to make it difficult for you to operate"
Ev and co arent bad people. Im actually a fan, but i think he is shortsighted in his goals.
Can you not do this with browsers? Turning off JS should get rid of most of the egregious stuff, and I think at least Firefox lets you strip out CSS and inject your own (or if not, then via plugin like Greasemonkey)...
They used to support Safari for Windows but it was a lot of work. It was worth it so that developers using Windows had a change of testing for Safari as well. Once the iphone came out and Macs became popular development machines in their own right, the burden of supporting Safari on Windows stopped mattering.
In Google's case the opposite applies: they don't have a development platform but need ubiquity because collecting user data is their reason for being. So they need to support a lot of platforms for the sake of their customers' (i.e. companies buying ads).
> Whose idea was it to assert this level of control over written material
The real mistake was giving web developers the power to do this in the first place. It was meant to help usability by preventing selection of things that weren't meant to be selected.
Of course the first thing people did instead was abuse it in order to protect "their content".
No need to dial your tone down, the absolute fucking baboons whose idea that level of restriction on a website was deserve every bit of hate and criticism they get.
Medium seems to be old news, Substack is apparently the new hotness. Seeing more interesting content showing up at the latter. Not sure substack doesn't have a lot of the same issues Medium has, though.
As an aside: I don't understand why Google hasn't updated Blogger to compete with Medium (and now Substack). Seems like some Google employees could get a good review/promotion by doing that. With all the stuff Google changes (often for no good reason), Blogger seems to just remain stuck in the amber of ~2005.
Substack is still in the “investors throwing money at them” phase. Medium is in the “squeezing every possible source of revenue to justify that investment” phase.
Sounds like a great time to take advantage of all that VC funding then. I'm sure there will be a new blog platform burning investor money by the time Substack starts to squeeze their users.
Medium was originally praised for no bullshit presentation too.
Imgur is another example, founded as the "no BS" image host as counter to what photobucket/imageshack has become, it's now pretty much at the state those two were at imgur's founding
Being 'stuck' in 2005 is exactly why I use Blogger for my blog posts. I don't post to get eyeballs, I don't have monetization turned on. I post (about mainly tech) for my future self, so that if I run into the same weird error or need to do the same thing again, I have it documented online; a place that I can access from any device with an internet connection. If others find my posts helpful, that's fantastic, but it's secondary.
I wanted a platform that I could log into, that was fast, non-intrusive, that I could link my own domain to, and that was 'stuck' in 2005. I don't need anything shiny and honestly, for most things people blog about, a site that exists in circa 2005 is more than enough.
As someone in IT tier 1/2/3 support, I and many peers would not be able to do our jobs without blogs like yours. If only people knew how many times we just google/ddg an error and end up on a blog with a fix.
Substack is better for building an audience for sure, but I think Medium is better for less “known” authors. You would probably go to Substack for someone you personally trust/value, for analysis. Medium is more for evergreen content, casual reading, less “current events” stuff.
Every nights I read through the hackernews posts of the day which didn't reach the front page for my newsletter. Every time I click on a medium posts and that I click "previous" the page freeze during 1-2 seconds.
Therefore I have a ban on Medium posts. When medium.com is in the URL it is automatically discarded, unfortunately they offer white label domain so I happen to click on some of those links.
Also I didn't do stats about it, but if you want to blog about something and do it on Medium you have a much lower chance to be featured on HN (not talking about others forum ). Choose wisely. HN is not the center of the world but there are only a few places that can offer 50k visits
Hah, it’s you! Thanks for doing that effort, I enjoy every day when your newsletter hits my mailbox!
But I can only agree with you, the Medium experience is really one of the worst you can have when reading a blog.
This doesn't work for me because I forget that I redirected a specific host and end up troubleshooting my network. Especially if a few medium articles showed up at the same time, months after I blocked it.
I declined to renew my Medium subscription a couple days ago. I had generally stopped visiting the site ages ago.
My problem is not with Medium's paywall. In principle, I'm 100% fine with being asked to pay to read something that someone else wrote. $5 per month doesn't bother me; I would gladly give even more if I felt that it was supporting the production of high-quality media. I already give many times that much to my local NPR and PBS stations.
My problem with Medium is the pay-per-read model. They have eliminated the actual ads, but left in place all of the incentive structures favoring the production of low-value clickbait articles.
That said, I don't want to harsh on writers for choosing Medium. Sure, they could use Hugo to slap together a blog. But, in order to get paid, they would probably end up needing to drop in Google ads, and end up with much the same situation that exists with Medium, only perhaps minus the access to an audience, and plus a bunch of other annoying ad network crap.
> They have eliminated the actual ads, but left in place all of the incentive structures favoring the production of low-value clickbait articles.
This is my biggest beef with Medium - which isn't really a problem with Medium itself, but how certain "authors" are (ab)using it.
It's quite often that I'll be googling for something, and end up at a Medium article - but it's 50/50 whether it's a good article, or a single paragraph of basic information that's been largely copy/pasted from somewhere else.
There are lots of good articles on Medium, but the large quantity of articles that are basically SEO spam have me clicking through from Google less and less these days.
I've been blogging for a number of years; most of the time on my own domain (dsebastien.net), but without being overly serious about it.
After a long pause, I started writing again. I decided to give Medium a try, as it had gained a lot of popularity. It was refreshing compared to my old custom Wordpress theme. I was also curious about the possibility of monetizing my content
In 2019 I put more effort into blogging on Medium and my posts started gaining some traction on the platform. For about a year, I didn't get much ROI ($0-3 per month), but then, probably as I approached it better, it started to compound. Since 2020 I get $50-100 per month from Medium and sometimes much more ($300-700 with outliers).
Still, I concur with the points made in the post. Medium has many downsides, the first of which being the paywall, which is getting more and more aggressive. Also, I realized that I was just hurting my personal brand by not bringing visitors directly on my own domain.
That's why I've changed my approach this year. I've rebooted my own Website and publish there first. Still, I continue to post my articles on Medium as well, behind their paywall, but with the canonical URL pointing to my blog so as not to hurt SEO as much. I think that this is a safer long-term approach and it gives me the best of both worlds; I can still monetize (even if less than before) while keeping full ownershop and better SEO towards my domain.
If you're a developer comfortable with working with Markdown, I strongly recommend Hugo as this page recommends, and deploying it with something like GitHub Pages.
For themes I recommend Wowchemy (https://wowchemy.com/), which has many features necessary for a modern technical blog albeit a bit of a learning curve as a result.
> Please stop using Medium
> Switch to Hugo and Netlify (https //netlify com/?utm_source=nomedium&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=nomedium)
I really wish people would disclose when they're profiting from a link click. Am I misunderstanding something or is this website profiting in some way here? There's no referral code but it has a utm source/campaign
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[ 74.7 ms ] story [ 4750 ms ] threadWhat problems did you have with it?
I got the same problem as them
Even if Substack would tank I would still be able to read those articles in my e-mail client.
However, I’m quite selective with subscribing to newsletters. So if others are the same, that could be a limit on the potential growth of Substack.
It feels that Medium is a product that could be disturbed. Basic WYSIG editor and easy upload. Then again I wonder what would be business model for such product. And would it just end up being what Medium is doing...
(I always skip Medium articles, so I cannot judge for myself)
5000 years of human civilization summed up in one sentence.
Custom-domain medium-hosted sites are a real pain.
Medium blogs must have the worst experience in the web.
I’d need to go out of my way to make a website that bad.
I automatically devalue the authors on that side, obviously unfairly.
Someone on this site coined the phrase “Medium developers”, which sticks in my mind.
That doesn't change that the "idea" behind Medium is good and that there's a market for a blogging platform that gives authors easy access to a large audience.
Alternate possibility: the core idea is a good one, but they raised too much money. Now they have to live up to an impossibly-high valuation and can't just be a blogging platform.
I'm reminded of the dot com bubble in the late 90s.
Medium has “publications” where my work gets sent out to hundreds of readers that are reading about a topic, not necessarily from me - I’m not notable at all in the field so I’d have a rather hard time getting people to subscribe to __me__.
If I were to make my own website, I’d lose a ton of discoverability.
Plus, the monetization on medium is fantastic. Nowhere else would I get that return per view - I’m currently averaging around 25k views a month with a $500 return.
I do have my gripes with the platform, but in my case, Medium is the worst platform for writing besides all the rest. [1] https://anth-oleinik.medium.com/
Today I put the same type of content on Medium and get thousands of readers on almost each and every article. So much, in fact, that I've consistently been in the top 1,000 creators on Medium several months running.
Yes, I understand that I'm simply part of their platform. but that's the same for anyone who attempts to create monetized content on Medium, YouTube, Twitch, or any of the many other platforms that pay creators for content.
As far as I can tell, articles and sites like the one above exist because some people simply believe that they should never have to pay for content, and that everything should be free.
Fair enough. And, that being the case, those people are never going to see my work. Also fair.
But Medium drives enough people to my content to make the exchange work for me. Plus it provides enough incentive to get me off my butt and create things that I probably won't have created otherwise.
If anyone who reads this doesn't like Medium. Fine. If you want to go elsewhere... also fine.
But thus far, the value proposition works for me, and it apparently also works for all of the people who read my articles and stories and tutorials each and every day.
To them, thanks.
Also, do you have a link to your work?
https://www.npmjs.com/package/mediumexporter
You're increasing the amount of complexity in your reader's stack to reduce the complexity of your stack. Much like how nobody clicks the 'Reddit is better in the app!' button, you should be conscious that most people nope-out when they click a link and don't get your article.
Basically what this comes down to is that there's a market for something like Medium's earlier days, back when it was decent. Someone just needs to figure out a better way to monetize it, while still having the mind share Medium used to have.
Yes you can reach millions of people but not earn a single €. Many such cases! Newspapers almost went broke because of the digital future until they decided to do something completely anti web 2.0: PAYWALL IT. And it worked newspapers were saved.
I've had a subscription to the guardian online but they didn't have a paywall. Especially because of that I got to know the content they brought better. If they'd had a paywall I'd have just closed the tab after the first three articles and never have gotten to the point of thinking "hey this is really a site that I identify with".
However when the whole Brexit thing started it became too big a topic and it became annoying as I'm not UK based so I stopped renewing. Before that time they had much deeper coverage of topics I was interested in
Or... it can be free.
But it also costs money to run a site. Especially if you're serving up millions of pages of content and images.
So... someone is paying the bills. The question is who, and why?
Bottom line is that "free" news either comes from someone selling you and your personal information, or it comes from someone with an agenda.
And that's the problem I spoke of earlier. You're either getting information from a recommendation engine designed to promote "engagement" and as such tends towards serving up controversy... or you're getting your information from someone with a specific agenda... which means they're feeding you what they want you to think.
I'm not going to sign up to a site to read only a few random articles. And the number of free ones they usually offer is way too low to really get a feel for what the site offers. Most sites I visit already present a paywall when I click through a few links from hacker news or reddit. This way I don't really feel any engagement with the site and I'm not tempted to ever sign up for it.
The Guardian didn't have a paywall at that time, but the high quality of their articles and the strength of reporting on topics that interest me (privacy in particular) convinced me to take out a subscription. I wouldn't have experienced that quality if they had a paywall, they'd just have pissed me off after the first few and I'd never have come back. A newspaper is its own advertisement but if you can't read it you won't be swayed.
So what is the answer? I think added value. Extra deep content you can click through on or something, PDFs, things like that. It's a touch premise though, if you offer too much for free most people aren't going to pay for it. But put too many things behind a paywall and you'll be alienating potential customers.
Unfortunately the Guardian kind of lost its appeal as an EU-wide privacy-centric paper for me, as Brexit made it turn its focus inward just like the rest of Britain did. As I have no ties with the UK it lost its relevance to me.
I'm still looking for something that can fill that role now. EU-focused, privacy-first, progressive. I subscribed to Ars for a while too but I found it too 'popular'/'light' on the tech side and too US-centric (not a bad thing, just not my interest). If anyone else has a suggestion I'd appreciate it :)
I think you should be the one conscious that you're a small minority and not representing "most people" at all.
I am not saying write good context and they will find you, but Medium isn’t that great. Only ~9% of the writers made over $100 in a month, and the top earner fluctuates between 20 and 30k/month. You basically get a handful of people making a living and most people getting little more than free hosting.
You can’t lose something you didn’t have.
There are other ways to make money on the internet, personally I like the "post shit everywhere for free, have a Patreon" model, which is giving me similar numbers of around $1k/mo for not much energy put into promotion, with a little bit more every month as my patrons grow. But some people like putting up paywalls, and it's their choice to do that with whatever they're creating.
Step 2: I don't know what Step 2 is because I'm unwilling to do Step 1.
It did help me get jobs, but I can’t say with certainty that it got me better jobs than I would have without it. I’ve done far better since without a blog attached to my name.
Anyway, that’s a lot of money to make off of something I associated with costing money.
Real
Simple
Syndication
I guess apps like feedly have RSS recommendations, but that's not the same thing.
> I don’t think switching to a stand alone website would be good for me
Well, that’s how capitalism is supposed to work innit? :) Producers care about themselves and consumers choose, competition ensues, the producers are therefore forced to conform to the consumers’ preferences.
What I mean is “you only care about yourself”, in a business setting, is not an accusation by itself, however unvirtuous it sounds. The opposite of “capitalism” in the first sentence is not “social democracy” or “welfare state”, it’s “planned economy”, and I’d say that every ethical judgment that moves us towards that has to go.
Except this works only when there’s (a lot of) competition, which is exactly what platforms attempt to exploit: you (a producer) move according to your best interest at each point, like everyone else, only to find yourself in a mono- (or oligo-) psony market where you have to sell through the platform(s) or perish, and now the platform(s) can enforce whatever they wish on you. The consumers aren’t feeling that spiffy, either. The laws of competition no longer apply.
(Huh, is moving to a platform essentially a prisoner’s dilemma with the (defect,defect) state obscured by marketing?)
This is why I still (occasionally) write on Medium.
2. Discovery! Medium is about getting people to read your blog.
(Note) there is an obvious opportunity to create a medium like experience that lets people blog using Hugo and Netlify. I open an app, connect to my account (GitHub pages, or Netlify) type my article and post.
P.s I tried to put an asterisk instead of Note but it ended up putting everything in between in italics.
--
[1] so I just simply adopted it also.
This. I feel like as a reader, medium is becoming pretty useless, with the gate screens and stuff. But back when I was using it a lot, I published my stuff on Medium because it gave me eyeballs, the same way I put videos on youtube now as opposed to hosting them myself (even if it was easy to do).
If I put a post on my own blog, I'll be lucky to get 20 people looking at it. Last time I posted something on Medium, it went viral and got several hundred thousand views, including from this very website (and I hadn't even submitted it to Hacker News).
That's hard to beat. If someone else wants to make something similar, to help blog authors get the same thing publishing to Youtube or Spotify get you, that isn't Medium, go right ahead. I'll certainly consider your product.
Fast software is the best software. [2] (Comments: [3])
Speed is the killer feature. [4] (Comments: [5])
Slow software is an opportunity for competitors. [6]
[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2019/12/performance-matters-jekyll-v...
[2]: https://craigmod.com/essays/fast_software/
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20517144
[4]: https://bdickason.com/posts/speed-is-the-killer-feature/
[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26312516
[6]: https://fabiensanglard.net/silicone/index.html
No trackers, no JavaScript, no third party assets. If you can get away with a static website it is definitely the way to go and the tools are out there and easy to use.
This is what I'd really like. All these alternatives assume you want to use your editor in the terminal and git and CI publication process. I want to edit markdown text in a web browser and click a button to see how its rendered and then go back to the editor without changing contexts at all.
The editor/git/CI model feels too much like actual fucking $dayjob work. Writing is already a difficult enough process -- lets turn it into software development while we're at it! I need to worry more about dependency management of my plugins while I'm trying to write and publish something.
Medium is worse though, its very annoying.
A modern Wordpress. But with strict guide rails and simplicity.
Does such a thing exist?
I’ve seen ghost but it’s quite expensive for personal use.
I really like WordPress’s out-of-the box classic editing experience and revision history.
It’s probably missing some of the “strict guide rails” you probably want, but I can at least disable user-uploaded plugins which helps a lot.
Anyway hackmd+zero click integration to posting to a serving system, anything.
imml[1] comes close to this, it's all css tricks to display content so I imagine SEO would suffer until search engine's learn css #navigation but for everyone else it just works. If it had a push to github pages button it would be the perfect minimalist site/blog. For now the publishing step involves downloading the single resulting html file and uploading it manually with surge.sh or to the website host you bought your domain from.
[1] https://leoncvlt.github.io/imml/#
People posting on Medium (or any other "platform") are seeking distribution, not a 200ms rendering performance or owning their namespace.
Also, nothing wrong with paying for content — I'm a Medium subscriber, among many other publications.
Let's discuss again when a major NYT columnist leaves for the sake of publishing with Hugo.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/business/donald-mcneil-ne...
There is when your publishing medium gatekeeps you for no other reason than to drive its own metrics. (Also nice humblebrag?)
Medium is scum, I hope it burns
In my book, it's wrong to pay if original authors don't get that payment.
Wait, are you under the impression that the authors don't get paid?
Is this incorrect?
Whose idea was it to assert this level of control over written material, especially user-generated material? It's a very unpleasant experience.
EDIT: Dialing down my tone a bit here, I should have taken a minute between trying the frustrating thing and posting about it.
It's optimized for public sharing of user generated content to social network platforms. Web 2.0 in a nutshell but optimized for outreach, not personal log.
If sharing would be really that important to your plattform, why not add it as an option that doesn't break expected behaviour?
I am not defending their model nor their implementation.
> Breaking a browsers default behaviour IMO needs a good justification. This isn't a good justification.
Good enough for them though. Their site, their choice. Also, it's not like there isn't many browser extensions to disable that behavior.
A site full of programming articles (Medium) probably wants its articles to be read by programmers.
I haven't found official data but programming is in the 25th position and software in dev in the 40th:
Here are the top 43 most popular Medium tags in 2021
https://findingtom.com/most-popular-medium-tags/Other articles I found also show programming articles are in the bottom of the list.
For example, recently both Dart and Flutter got version upgrade and they announced this via Medium. I mean you have largest Software company backing you. Why would you choose medium for your blog!?
Ev and co arent bad people. Im actually a fan, but i think he is shortsighted in his goals.
I tell you what would be really nice: a browser that lets me click & launch into reader mode directly.
None of these shenanigans with Turing complete JS. Just give me text to read.
- Normal model with JS on (modulo ad blocker/flash blocker)
- Oh, hey, a site that plays shenanigans with text!
- Rightclick, open in reader view
Safari can be set to use reader mode by default (then you can tell it to ignore individual sites). I use it in this mode.
Why would Apple be obligated or even incentivised to make their browser for other operating systems?
In what world would they not want their browser to be used?
In Google's case the opposite applies: they don't have a development platform but need ubiquity because collecting user data is their reason for being. So they need to support a lot of platforms for the sake of their customers' (i.e. companies buying ads).
You asked if any browser does this, and I said that one did. Other browsers supported by your browsing history are unlikely to make this change.
Seems like it should be an easy plugin. I'll see if firefox has anything.
What about a reader mode browser engine? Couldn't you make a great browser from scratch by limiting it to this use case?
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...
The real mistake was giving web developers the power to do this in the first place. It was meant to help usability by preventing selection of things that weren't meant to be selected.
Of course the first thing people did instead was abuse it in order to protect "their content".
Works great for any website that tries to disable right clicking for whatever reason.
As an aside: I don't understand why Google hasn't updated Blogger to compete with Medium (and now Substack). Seems like some Google employees could get a good review/promotion by doing that. With all the stuff Google changes (often for no good reason), Blogger seems to just remain stuck in the amber of ~2005.
Substack has its share of warts, but is much more acceptable than Medium.
Medium was originally praised for no bullshit presentation too.
Imgur is another example, founded as the "no BS" image host as counter to what photobucket/imageshack has become, it's now pretty much at the state those two were at imgur's founding
I dont blog myself, but what would be needed to be added to Blogger? A blog is just header image + text anyway right?
Meduim blogs are mostly just text right? Is it just the nice theme? Ads? Payment?
https://twitter.com/Codie_Sanchez/status/1408473091727052804...
I wanted a platform that I could log into, that was fast, non-intrusive, that I could link my own domain to, and that was 'stuck' in 2005. I don't need anything shiny and honestly, for most things people blog about, a site that exists in circa 2005 is more than enough.
Your service is appreciated o7
It’s not optimal for discovery, but rewards writers far better than Medium can.
It’s telling that so many people go to Substack once they’re kicked out of somewhere.
If you want to build your brand or an audience, Substack is the place to go.
Therefore I have a ban on Medium posts. When medium.com is in the URL it is automatically discarded, unfortunately they offer white label domain so I happen to click on some of those links.
Also I didn't do stats about it, but if you want to blog about something and do it on Medium you have a much lower chance to be featured on HN (not talking about others forum ). Choose wisely. HN is not the center of the world but there are only a few places that can offer 50k visits
I always feel a bit tricked when I encounter that, myself.
127.0.0.1 medium.com w3schools.org
Looks like they just brought this functionality back as well:
https://blog.medium.com/custom-domains-are-back-2dee29560d59
My problem is not with Medium's paywall. In principle, I'm 100% fine with being asked to pay to read something that someone else wrote. $5 per month doesn't bother me; I would gladly give even more if I felt that it was supporting the production of high-quality media. I already give many times that much to my local NPR and PBS stations.
My problem with Medium is the pay-per-read model. They have eliminated the actual ads, but left in place all of the incentive structures favoring the production of low-value clickbait articles.
That said, I don't want to harsh on writers for choosing Medium. Sure, they could use Hugo to slap together a blog. But, in order to get paid, they would probably end up needing to drop in Google ads, and end up with much the same situation that exists with Medium, only perhaps minus the access to an audience, and plus a bunch of other annoying ad network crap.
This is my biggest beef with Medium - which isn't really a problem with Medium itself, but how certain "authors" are (ab)using it.
It's quite often that I'll be googling for something, and end up at a Medium article - but it's 50/50 whether it's a good article, or a single paragraph of basic information that's been largely copy/pasted from somewhere else.
There are lots of good articles on Medium, but the large quantity of articles that are basically SEO spam have me clicking through from Google less and less these days.
Perhaps someone can develop a "medium-dl" to make reading less painful.
After a long pause, I started writing again. I decided to give Medium a try, as it had gained a lot of popularity. It was refreshing compared to my old custom Wordpress theme. I was also curious about the possibility of monetizing my content
In 2019 I put more effort into blogging on Medium and my posts started gaining some traction on the platform. For about a year, I didn't get much ROI ($0-3 per month), but then, probably as I approached it better, it started to compound. Since 2020 I get $50-100 per month from Medium and sometimes much more ($300-700 with outliers).
Still, I concur with the points made in the post. Medium has many downsides, the first of which being the paywall, which is getting more and more aggressive. Also, I realized that I was just hurting my personal brand by not bringing visitors directly on my own domain.
That's why I've changed my approach this year. I've rebooted my own Website and publish there first. Still, I continue to post my articles on Medium as well, behind their paywall, but with the canonical URL pointing to my blog so as not to hurt SEO as much. I think that this is a safer long-term approach and it gives me the best of both worlds; I can still monetize (even if less than before) while keeping full ownershop and better SEO towards my domain.
For themes I recommend Wowchemy (https://wowchemy.com/), which has many features necessary for a modern technical blog albeit a bit of a learning curve as a result.
I really wish people would disclose when they're profiting from a link click. Am I misunderstanding something or is this website profiting in some way here? There's no referral code but it has a utm source/campaign
Setting up a blog isn't exactly rocket science