Poll: Is there a negative stigma toward articles written in Medium?
Creating a poll on behalf of theanonymousone for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223124
Will I/my articles get negativity within dev and tech communities because they are written in Medium?
Please comment if you can think of better alternatives to Medium
211 comments
[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] thread[1] https://ghost.org/publishers/ [2] https://substack.com/
The web has become broadly influenced and geared towards a certain way of doing things that happens because:
1. it costs money to create and maintain a substantial web property. Medium, Substack, Patreon, gumroad, ghost, buttondown, etc all run on top of services that cost money. Maybe AWS, maybe Google App Engine, plus Cloudflare, Heroku, Netlify, Digital Ocean, etc. Oh and Stripe, PayPal or some payment processor, if the site has a subscription model, too.
2. the web of the 2020s really has only one way to make enough money to pay for these services: advertising. There's only one way to get enough money through advertising to be profitable, and that's to have some portion of attention-getting, clickbaity, top 10 list content. That content generates enough 'virality' to show up on Twitter, FB, here, or wherever.
A no-paywalled, no-ads site (like Hacker News) is a cost center maintained as a sort of vanity project for a company that makes money elsewhere.
What people are complaining about around Medium is really a complaint about how content on the web is, and must be, monetized, if it is to be a money-making business, as opposed to my blog, say, which is just money out of my pocket.
It's going to take a concerted effort to break away from the current economic model of the web. Just turning up our noses at Medium or Substack and pivoting to the NEW new thing won't change anything, as the new new thing inevitably gets dragged into the web economy or goes broke.
I guess anything with a low barrier to entry, has to do more to prove itself.
[1] https://hashnode.com
I've been meaning to start up a blog again, and I've been debating doing bearblog as an easy way to get started again since my Hugo blog has sat in a half-finished state forever, and it seems like they can get decent visibility.
The typography and layout on Medium is fine, it's the popups, nags, paywall, and the like. For a while there was a lovely extension called "Make Medium Readable Again" but they aggressively broke that too. I'm happy to let Medium fall off the tech community radar.
I remember talking to somebody who was so impressed that he got 70 views on an article on Medium and having to break it to him that I thought a blog post was a big hit if it got 70,000 views back in the day.
Perhaps it is as simple as this: any author who is exposing their readers to the awful experience is contemptuous of their readers and not really serious about blogging.
I do not write articles for a living or make money out of them. So no tribe stuff in my case.
I just did it out of enjoying it
This is an immediate red flag for me. It means that even if Medium is fine now, it's going to get populated by these types soon.
I've seen so many static site generators come and go over the past decade that the number of options now is just dizzying. From what I've seen, they all try to be "minimalist"... until the developer realizes there's a lot more work and expertise involved in "minimalist" design than they originally thought, and they grow, bit by bit by bit, etc, ... Then somebody sees these "bloated" SSG's and decides to reinvent the wheel by creating their own "minimalist" SSG with no baggage and thus the cycle starts all over again.
Because why put your admin interface out to the web if you can also just send some HTML files to a static site hoster. The static hosters are nearly impossible to hack and they can be heavily optimised because they only serve files.
As another argument, software engineers are used to Git meaning that you’ll have a proper backup for your site.
Use https://scribe.rip
Just replace medium.com or other medium domain, and you get a clean representation with all cruft removed.
https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/index.html
I wholeheartedly agree. And for this reason, and many others, I'm planning on setting up my personal website/blog using Wordpress.
But as for the default template being "less offensive" than Medium, I'd like to do a little better than this. I've looked at other WP templates and I am happy to learn PHP and become a real WP developer just to make a good site (I'm already an experienced developer in other languages). I also get the impression that WP development is a highly transferable skill.
I understand perfectly well that making a good, "minimalist" site takes a of expertise and effort. But I don't have the faintest where to being with this, as all my effort up until this point has been on the back end, data science computation, etc. Should I just start at the wordpress.{org,com} and follow my way from there? Is there some special resource that I should know about?
Isn't there any Medium-like theme for WordPress? (Though maybe you frighten people thinking they ended up in a Medium blog.)
I am a programmer, I've written a programming book, I used to work at a tech publisher (O'Reilly). From O'Reilly, I know a lot about how to build a system around programmers that puts out important and accurate information. Medium started in the ballpark of that and then went in the wrong direction.
I think we can do a lot to change that. For me, change is less about changing our reputation and instead just getting the utility right.
We have syntax highlighting coming out in a week or so and I'll do a bigger post then about what is changing for technical readers and authors.
In my opinion a personal blog or website on a personal domain is the most credible way to publish your ideas.
To me a personal blog shows more commitment from the author for two reasons: you have to spend some time to ser it up and search engines tend to position them high when you search for the author name.
Even Medium posts being signed I don’t know why it gives me some anonymity feeling and makes it harder to navigate through other content from that same author.
Although I remember there being some option to verify a website for name searches on Google.
That plus having a Twatter/Fecebook/HN/etc account to confirm the official site should be enough to reasonably avoid impersonators.
Creating such sites might be out of reach for a lot of nontechnical folks, but people in the dev and tech communities should be able to handle it.
A third party site is more likely to preserve your work in time than you remembering to pay and host your content.
100% agree.
Doing that also gives you a ton of street cred as opposed to writing on medium where you're right off the bat announcing to the world that you've basically surrendered your stuff to someone else the moment you finished writing it.
https://open.quiqr.org
That still leaves the question of how to handle site search and comments.
Right now, I am using a Notion website builder: https://super.so/ It serves my need as someone who wanted to have a personal website. More like a resume tbh. No bells and whistles. I am used to Notion so that’s another plus. And the page loads fairly quickly. However, I find that at $12/month, I could get better value elsehwere. Not to mention, I am unable to blog there.
One of the platforms that attract me is Ghost (https://ghost.org/vs/wordpress/). Open-source and I’ve found the websites there have a far more modern-look.
That is also a Notion website builder, but more geared towards blogging.
This is an example site built with Notion + Feather
https://www.vensy.me
Disclaimer: I am the creator of feather.so
I used to run my own Wordpress blog (don't recommend it any more because of the security issues), now it's a Hugo blog hosted on AWS Cloudfront. Costs me about $4 to $5 a month to run.
It’s not trivial but was painless to set up. I think it’s kind of fun to see the various setups that devs use to host their stuff.
Medium isn’t a long term solution, so aside from its other problems (terrible aesthetic and UX), I’d still want some sustainability for hosting.
Not broadly, but definitely within the HN community, and probably a few others. But with that being said, I also don't think it will affect your ranking on HN negatively, at least not by much.
Medium articles regularly hits the frontpage (and as of writing this, there's a medium blogpost just below this poll on HN)
Lesson learned again and again: all blogging platforms have a limited shelf life, and there really needs to be a better way to own your own content beyond self-hosting.
[1] - https://www.linode.com/marketplace/category/website/
The interests of anyone who wants to use a blogging platform without directly sharing those costs are very unlikely to align with those paying the costs. (I think it can be done, but will probably be very inefficient and susceptible to being out-competed for attention.)
[0] https://wordpress.com/support/export/
* The software: Medium somehow managed to make majority-plain-text articles slow to consume in modern web browsers, negating decades' worth of web browser optimizations.
* The culture: Medium is overrun with self-promoting "thought leader" types.
The site has been better more recently, but the stigma is still there, at least for me.
https://pages.github.com/
When it comes to getting people to buy your articles: Well, I've never met a person who pays for their articles. Ever. Maybe you should sign up with a writing team that has a big website, I don't know, The Verge or something, and write there and get paid for it?
If it's for good SEO, well, as of now Google is flooded with low-quality, copied click-bait articles full of trackers, ads and spam.
Elitism at its best.
I mean how dare someone focus on writing and not on maintaining.
A curated personal lightweight website attracts me more: see https://lemire.me/blog/ (Wordpress) https://lilianweng.github.io (powered by https://gohugo.io)
I noticed it is next to impossible to get personal blog articles in own domain onto Google search results unless they are specifically crafted for Google bot and not for a human reader (it seems to like a thousand words of introduction followed by a thousand words of historic context, then a lengthy personal anecdote and then at the very end - possibly on next page actual answer the reader is looking for).
This includes really niche subjects where almost no content exists. Google still favours showing you forums where people ask similar questions (unanswered). And lots of unrelated stuff rather than an actual blog post that has an exact answer+tutorial in under 300 words.
I guess the best recipe to get your blog indexed is:
* Make sure you have robots.txt with correct host and sitemap.xml
* Link it everywhere: on your Linkedin, Github, Reddit and every profile.
* Make re-posts on social networks, reddit or other related resources.
* It must be fast and never down so reliable hosting with CloudFlare.
* Google loves when you have Google Analytics. Surprise surprise.
* Do add it to Google Webmaster so your search overloard can connect your domain to Google account.
So yeah people who hate CloudFlare and Google Analytics with passion are more likely to have issues to getting on google search result page.
This sounds like something the FTC and /or anti-trust should be looking into.
>Make sure you have robots.txt with correct host and sitemap.xml
Yes, but no idea what is meant by correct host.
>Link it everywhere: on your Linkedin, Github, Reddit and every profile.
Yes, pagerank
>Make re-posts on social networks, reddit or other related resources.
Possibly. Much more helpful if your content is actually shared as opposed to you spamming it out
>It must be fast and never down so reliable hosting with CloudFlare.
Less important than most realize. As long as it’s not dog shit slow it’s probably fine
>Google loves when you have Google Analytics. Surprise surprise.
Utter nonsense. The anti trust blowback from this would be spectacular.
>Do add it to Google Webmaster so your search overloard can connect your domain to Google account.
It’s called Google Search Console now, not webmaster tools. Helpful for insights but zero effect on ranking.
> About half of your suggestions would not be effective. Source: am SEO consultant
I'll be honest here: it was mostly years ago, but I spent good chunk of my life doing some white and black hat SEO myself. I'm not very proud of some of it either. If you're actually working in this area then you well aware that figuring out what works and what doesn't take a lot of time and change constantly
What non-experts can do is to at least to follow some recommendations to get into search index. So I just shared some common tricks that I used myself and they cost nothing to implement.
> Yes, but no idea what is meant by correct host.
As correct host I meant the one target website is using. There are countless websites that have www-prefixed version in robots.txt while actually using non-prefixed domain and not having redirections. Also some of us might start blog on github pages and then forgot to specify correct host when moving it to independent domain, etc.
> Much more helpful if your content is actually shared as opposed to you spamming it out
I'm not suggesting anyone to spam something, but Google cant exactly guess who posted your blog post on reddit or why. Having some is better opposed to having zero ingoing links from social media.
> As long as it’s not dog shit slow it’s probably fine
Reliability is very important though. We're on HN and my guess that a lot of people there would love to host their blog on $10 linode / digitalocean test-server that also run VPN and torrent client and can be down for days after some experiment went wrong.
> Utter nonsense.
That just my personal experience. I dont argue that it will help you with rankings, but it's certainly make it less-likely to get under some anti-spam filter.
> Helpful for insights but zero effect on ranking.
Again it's not about rankings. But at least in past their "Indexing Tool" actually worked to make sure your new blog post actually there in search index.
Person above was complaining about his blog not being indexed at all. So if indexing tool is still there it's will help with this problem.
> Utter nonsense. The anti trust blowback from this would be spectacular.
I've seen spend on ads heavily affect organic results. I wonder when anti trust will fix that
And check whether that's still legal [0] in your country before you do so.
[0] https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-illegal
In that context what you describe is functioning exactly as intended. The searcher is certainly the product.
Getting quality inbound links is tricky. First you have to write great content that people might want to link to... but if nobody hears about it that won't help much.
Back at the dawn of blogging there was a really strong culture of bloggers linking to and amplifying great content from each other. That activity mostly moved to places like Twitter - I'd love to see that happen more again.
What are your favorite options for personal blogs? I'm strongly leaning towards self-hosted WP.
Zero maintenance. Zero cost except for domain name.