Medium is not the home for your ideas

574 343 6 years ago

xpe• 6 years ago

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."

nsonha• 6 years ago

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.

Quiza12• 6 years ago

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.

dvtrn• 6 years ago

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.

[0] https://indieweb.org/principles

wincy• 6 years ago

Except now if you say things that a group doesn’t like you just get ddosed out of existence.

cm2187• 6 years ago

But unless you own a datacentre, you are always using someone else's platform, whether it is a cloud provider, a colocation or anything in between.

detaro3• 6 years ago

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.

binsh• 6 years ago

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.

zby• 6 years ago

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.

hunter2_3• 6 years ago

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?

TaylorAlexander• 6 years ago

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.

wishinghand3• 6 years ago

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.

the_pwner224• 6 years ago

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.

wishinghand3• 6 years ago

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.

rootsudo• 6 years ago

Thank you! I had no idea. I'm sold on it, I have a few articles I wanted to get rid of anyway on Medium and post.

This is amazing. I didn't want to really do HTML5 and create a new html file per post.

Fiveplus• 6 years ago

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.

chillfox2• 6 years ago

If you are a developer or sysadmin then they are easy, but for people at the service desk level or below they are challenging to impossible.

detaro3• 6 years ago

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)

tomc1985• 6 years ago

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

paulie_a3• 6 years ago

Thought leader is a synonym for empty suit.

If someone uses that in a bio you can just move along, you won't miss anything.

alicemaz2• 6 years ago

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

detaro3• 6 years ago

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.

radiKal072• 6 years ago

This is what I’m trying to fix with https://panakit.com

Use your own domain while still making it easy to publish blogs(eg. no servers, no code etc)

realusername2• 6 years ago

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.

neilpanchal• 6 years ago

Yeah, I emailed Sijmen Mulder to have my blog listed on his excellent text-only blog list: https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html

They all load almost instantly.

alicemaz2• 6 years ago

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

realusername2• 6 years ago

Yes there's a massive contrast between their minimalist and slick brand and their actual platform which is one of the heaviest blogging platform.

I'm not sure what it does really but you can achieve a similar design with a few Kb of CSS.

throwaway8941• 6 years ago

Yes their design is great

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)

jjcm3• 6 years ago

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.

manquer• 6 years ago

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)

zenhack• 6 years ago

Obligatory: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

(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.

tomjen33• 6 years ago

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.

li4ick• 6 years ago

There's one thing I want to scream at every front-end developer out there: STOP OPENING POPUPS WHEN I'M SELECTING TEXT!

Again: STOP OPENING POPUPS WHEN I'M SELECTING TEXT!

vmception• 6 years ago

but the a/b test says you keep doing it and stay on the site longer so you must love it

tomjen33• 6 years ago

The more I see things like this, the more I think the original sin of this century was analytics, rather than ads.

0xy• 6 years ago

Redirect your screams at the marketing department. There's no front-end developer in existence who wakes up in the morning and wants to do this.

saagarjha8• 6 years ago

Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1271/

Another related pet peeve is when websites use JavaScript to silently stick a citation at the end of the thing you copied.

midasz2• 6 years ago

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.

joelrunyon• 6 years ago

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.

badsectoracula3• 6 years ago

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).

[0] https://getpublii.com/

[1] http://runtimeterror.com/devlog/

boramalper• 6 years ago

Publii looks great! Just out of curiosity, do you know any other WYSIWYG alternatives out there?

nicbou8• 6 years ago

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.

ergest• 6 years ago

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.

edsimpson• 6 years ago

+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.

kevingadd• 6 years ago

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.

bad_user• 6 years ago

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.

[1] https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower

SyneRyder• 6 years ago

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.

simula672• 6 years ago

How do you make sure you don't get hacked using Wordpress?

I hosted my own blog for a short while and got hacked, so I moved back to Wordpress.com.

nissehulth• 6 years ago

Pretty much the usual. Make sure to keep it updated. Don't install crappy plugins. Use safe passwords.

acidburnNSA• 6 years ago

Strong passwords and regular updates. Ive had a WordPress blog for 15 years self hosted and havent to my knowledge been hacked yet.

krautsourced• 6 years ago

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.

dmje2• 6 years ago

What everyone else said, but also avoid super cheap hosting. Been burnt that way.

cuu508• 6 years ago

There are Wordpress plugins as well as SaaS services that export Wordpress site to a static site.

I've recommended Hardypress (https://hardypress.com/) a couple times here on HN. Still happy with them.

jiggawatts• 6 years ago

What's the best static site generator that meets the following requirements:

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.

pyr0hu• 6 years ago

Check out Jigsaw, it's a PHP based static site generator

dgellow2• 6 years ago

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.

axegon_15• 6 years ago

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...

jojobas• 6 years ago

Try Jekyll.

In addition to the above it generates static pages rather than looking into the database and templates all the time.

jacobkania• 6 years ago

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:

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 :)

hamandcheese• 6 years ago

a) seems like a very arbitrary restriction

avian• 6 years ago

Is also good at "photo journals" or galleries.

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.)

Lammy• 6 years ago

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/

Anyway, big Jekyll fan. Try it out :)

kibwen• 6 years ago

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.

api• 6 years ago

Cobalt, Jekyll, Hugo

dkersten• 6 years ago

I use Jekyll. It’s simple, easy to use and well supported. Also has lots of free and paid themes available.

dspillett• 6 years ago

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)

solarkraft• 6 years ago

I personally like Hugo, but there are lots of static site generators. https://staticgen.com has a good overview over the most popular ones.

amelius2• 6 years ago

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.

sails• 6 years ago

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 :)

[1] https://github.com/dansku/photoGallery

randomdude4023• 6 years ago

I've been thinking about putting something out there as well. I'll probably end up using Pelican since I'm a Python fan.

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.

cdrc• 6 years ago

For the photo journal, I can recommend you this Jekyll theme https://github.com/maxvoltar/photo-stream

aabbcc1241• 6 years ago

Who do you want to avoid node.js?

It's dependencies are too big?

It cannot be hosted by cheap webhost?

It's not secure ?

marcosdumay2• 6 years ago

I have had a great experience with statik.

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.

axegon_15• 6 years ago

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.

siscia• 6 years ago

Writing good content take time and the content is valuable.

I don't see it wrong to use it as marketing strategy.

tomcam• 6 years ago

this is still a terrible thing to do.

What’s the alternative, assuming the blogger doesn’t want to give everything away for free?

tjpnz• 6 years ago

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.

insickness• 6 years ago

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?

lowwave• 6 years ago

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.

jotto• 6 years ago

I made https://roast.io if you want a web host that auto-populates og:image with a screenshot

Funes-• 6 years ago

own your own blog
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.

AJRF• 6 years ago

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.

gwd3• 6 years ago

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.

CM30• 6 years ago

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.

rvz• 6 years ago

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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23849565

jedimastert3• 6 years ago

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

[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)

Wowfunhappy• 6 years ago

The link to your blog gives an HTTPS error for me in Firefox.

ralls_ebfe• 6 years ago

Both URLs fail for me due to SSL issues.

jlokier3• 6 years ago

Counterpoint (devil's advocate):

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.

jvehent• 6 years ago

that's why archive.org exists

chipotle_coyote• 6 years ago

That assumes Medium survives your demise, which strikes me as a somewhat bold assumption to make.

da-x• 6 years ago

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?

InvisibleUp2• 6 years ago

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.

[1] https://pages.github.com/ [2]: https://neocities.org/ [3]: https://jekyllrb.com/

sexy_seedbox• 6 years ago

But Github has been going down or having major issues every month now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22802536

I would go with Netlify or Vercel with Gitlab.

AndrewStephens• 6 years ago

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.

dmalvarado• 6 years ago

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).

Brilliant idea.

Your password for Bluehost (double check that you spelled this right!)

uhhhh

ZeikJT• 6 years ago

I guess Bluehost doesn't have any auth scheme so they had to use the age old workaround of just sharing passwords... not great at all.

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.

kmod• 6 years ago

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.

besieged• 6 years ago

So I have to use Bluehost in order to use your service?

jjjbokma• 6 years ago

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?

[0] https://plurrrr.com/

[1] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog (as of today available under MIT license)

LdSGSgvupDV• 6 years ago

For one being capable of using docker and traefik 2 (with letencrypt), [1]https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#blo...

NotSammyHagar• 6 years ago

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).

paulie_a3• 6 years ago

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

The ux can be described as slimy at best.

thereyougo• 6 years ago

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.

saagarjha8• 6 years ago

You can't add any CTA button, popup window, widget, or anything that can help you to justify your blog exsistance.

FWIW, I utterly abhor these when reading blogs. Consider “goodwill” as being an abstract benefit of your blog existing.

moonchild• 6 years ago

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.)

Jaruzel• 6 years ago

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 ?

everfree2• 6 years ago

Just use their import tool, it's designed specifically for that purpose.

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.

iamacyborg4• 6 years ago

Netlify makes it fairly trivial for almost anyone with moderately techy chops to host their own static sites, so that's where I host my sites.

Jekyll amd similar static site generators are more than good enough for 99% of blog sites anyone might want to build.

Animats• 6 years ago

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.

replyifuagree• 6 years ago

Medium has a terrible reputation amongst readers. That's enough for me to not publish there.

vishnu_ks6• 6 years ago

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.

dgellow2• 6 years ago

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.

As an example, Ubuntu still has theirs: https://planet.ubuntu.com/

vishnu_ks6• 6 years ago

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 :)

lebaux• 6 years ago

This is actually kinda amazing. Am I too young? How did I missed this?

jcims• 6 years ago

This is awesome!!!

vishnu_ks6• 6 years ago

Thank you!

Narann• 6 years ago

This is seriously awesome!

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!

vishnu_ks6• 6 years ago

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.

vlttnv• 6 years ago

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.

vishnu_ks6• 6 years ago

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.

jjcm3• 6 years ago

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.

louwrentius• 6 years ago

This is what I do with my (now solar powered) blog. Markdown, Pelican and rsync.

I was using a digital ocean droplet for 5$ a month.

cube003• 6 years ago

Add a free tiered CDN in front of that and you're certainly good to survive any spike in traffic.

saagarjha8• 6 years ago

You can also try one of the many providers that will host your static site for you for free, like GitHub Pages.

InvisibleUp2• 6 years ago

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.

account422• 6 years ago

At that point why not simply compile the markdown ahead of time and have a completely static server?

Apotheos• 6 years ago

Could you expand on how one would do this? I'm trying to figure it out but am a bit overwhelmed.

rsj_hn• 6 years ago

Anyone recommend a good RSS reader with the following characteristics:

  * integrated into the browser (an extension is OK)

  * automatically downloads feeds and gives notifications of new text

  * keyword searchable

input_sh• 6 years ago

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.

Do you know of anyone that did something similar?

krtkush3• 6 years ago

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.

quattrofan2• 6 years ago

My irony alarm just went off...

krtkush3• 6 years ago

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.

krn• 6 years ago

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 ).

[1] https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/

Alir3z4• 6 years ago

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

non-entity• 6 years ago

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.

scotthtaylor• 6 years ago

Bundle, unbundle, rinse, repeat.

Tech's virtuous cycle will forever run...

cube003• 6 years ago

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.

cube003• 6 years ago

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?

nekopa• 6 years ago

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?

saagarjha8• 6 years ago

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 :(

jasonkester• 6 years ago

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.

mindfulhack3• 6 years ago

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.

account422• 6 years ago

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.

nullc• 6 years ago

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.

kuu3• 6 years ago

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.

paulie_a3• 6 years ago

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.

yobi-ponti• 6 years ago

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.

throwawaysea• 6 years ago

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.

bishalb3• 6 years ago

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.

everfree2• 6 years ago

It seems to me that the author completely missed Medium's import tool in his/her "mirror your blog" section. The tool is specifically made to prevent SEO issues when syndicating content from your own blog.

https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a...

There's no SEO risk as the author alludes to. This is Medium's tool for dealing with that.

wmeredith• 6 years ago

The key part of this functionality is, "Imported stories will automatically apply a canonical URL referencing the original source material." Taken from the content of that page.

OhSoHumble• 6 years ago

Something that wasn't mentioned is that there is a reading cap for Medium articles if the user doesn't pay. Something that is frustrating is finding some technical documentation for a project on Medium and being hit with "you hit your reading cap of 5 stories..." and having to open up an incognito window.

That is dumb. I shouldn't have to pay money to get around a pay wall for a project's technical documentation.

austinpena• 6 years ago

Blocking cookies and never logging in has solved that problem for me.

gwd3• 6 years ago

I shouldn't have to pay money to get around a pay wall for a project's technical documentation.

But that's on the project, not Medium; and if they want to be paid for the work that goes into their documentation, what's the problem?

I mean, seriously, Medium is $5/month, for loads of advertising-free content. Why not just subscribe?

bleuarff• 6 years ago

Has the project team any say in this, or is it just Medium doing their thing?

beervirus• 6 years ago

Why not just reward this user-hostile behavior??

EdwardDiego• 6 years ago

Haha yep, hit a Go logging library where the documentation was a link to a Medium post. That raised my eyebrows.

CodeyWhizzBang• 6 years ago

When you write an article on Medium you can choose whether to put it behind the paywall and monetize it, or make it available to everyone for free and not monetize it. That feels like a pretty good capability to me really.

classics2• 6 years ago

Is it really so hard to spin up an aws machine with a plain old lamp stack to serve this kind of content? Its incredibly cheap and simple to do.

ethiclub2• 6 years ago

Yes, for many (most?) non-technical folk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

nickcotter2• 6 years ago

Even if you are well-versed in how to do it, it can still be a time sink you may not be able to afford.

magnusmagnusson• 6 years ago

Medium and Substack signal crashed from 'might contain something useful' to 'I avoid even opening the links' fairly fast. Precisely because they're not home for ideas, but just a sad self-marketing attempt.

willvarfar2• 6 years ago

For tech-minded people, a static site generator and github-pages is a great solution. Zero cost. Zero ads etc. Not likely to change or go away. Easy to move to paid for hosting Or GitHub’s next competitor if that is ever needed etc.

kuu3• 6 years ago

I guess that the issue here could be GitHub policies, maybe they don't like your post 'because reasons' and you're in the same situation as with Medium (I understand it's not as common).

The ideal case is that you own the platform.

nickcotter2• 6 years ago

No doubt, but it's easier to move if that happens.

saagarjha8• 6 years ago

The button to tweet about free speech on the web is a bit ironic ;) But yes, stay off of Medium. And I’m not just saying it, I walk the talk myself for my blog: it’s really not that hard and I can confirm that it “works”, at least for my definition of “works” (read: minimal fees–just a domain registration–per year, highly flexible but not a massive pain to use, attracts readers of some sort…)

radiKal072• 6 years ago

This is exactly why I started working on https://panakit.com

I want to provide the same easy way to publish your blog while at the same time using your own custom domain and own your platform.

pseingatl• 6 years ago

Tried to login, timed out.

DataScienceGuy• 6 years ago

If your goal is reach and monetization, Medium (or substack) is the best option out there. You don't get any reads by hosting your blog by yourself.

syntaxing• 6 years ago

I'm surprised how little people run their own blog, especially since it's free, minus domain name cost. I run my own blog (shameless plug: https://www.powu3.com/) for free (thanks Netlify!) and it was relatively easy to setup, and this is coming from someone with a hardware background rather than software. I guess the biggest downside is that it's harder to get visibility and clicks from search engines. I know a lot of people use github pages which is fully free and a great alternative.

mindfulhack3• 6 years ago

I want to run with this sentiment to a certain extreme:

This reminds me of Cloudflare blocking that pro-nazi website at the DNS level - not because the content was illegal, but because of social or other reasons.

What this means is even your own domain and web server can be censored in devastating ways, based purely on personal or cultural disagreement.

Of course I'm not supporting nazism, but it's a dangerous precedent for the free and open web to moderate and censor people when you are not legally compelled to. Even if you are, the laws of your country might be unjust.

Not blocking != endorsing, and to say it does is thought policing.

Thanks for this post. I won't be posting to Medium anymore.

coldtea2• 6 years ago

Of course I'm not supporting nazism

Nazism is the easy target. The precedence is removal of something legal by a moral/social decision by a corporate entity. This is dangerous.

In the 50s, had they had internet, it could be leftist or communist sympathizers' blogs (under the red scare). In the 60s it could be blacks civil rights blogs (imagine a conservative southern CDN), In the 70s/80s it could be pro-gay writings. In the GWB era it could be criticism of various wars, etc - like the Dixie Chicks had their shows cancelled for speaking out.

It already includes all kind of right and left ideas stomped, if they don't agree not just with your local country morals, but what with Americans think those should be (this includes FB banning posts for "nudity" in 2020, as if we're in the Victorian era, or as if it's e.g. French users are ok with puritanism).

moises_silva2• 6 years ago

>> Nazism is the easy target. The precedence is removal of something legal by a moral/social decision by a corporate entity. This is dangerous.

Do we want companies to do just what's legal or what's moral? in the end even laws are supposed to be trailing morality and disagreements are expected on what's moral and what's not.

This is again the same old debate of whether is some sort of fundamental right to be served by Cloudflare or have your content hosted by Twitter. I do not like all forms of censorship but I also don't want private companies to be forced to host just about any content people want to publish.

resu_nimda• 6 years ago

I think platform owners should have the right to decide what content they want and don't want on their platform, and I would say that not blocking can definitely amount to endorsing depending on the situation. When Reddit was under fire for the child porn flourishing on the site, if they hadn't taken action, they would have (rightly) been seen as endorsing it.

I don't see how this concept of a purely neutral platform that is adamant about allowing any kind of content is a necessary or useful thing. At the very least I don't think it should be mandated that platform companies meet that standard or even attempt to. The ones that do descend into toxicity very quickly. It's not clear to me what value is really being preserved there, and from my perspective the level of censorship in the US in 2020 is generally toeing a pretty good line, i.e. not sliding down a slippery Orwellian slope (though no doubt in a country of 300 million you can find a fair few concerning counterexamples).

MangoCoffee3• 6 years ago

"It’s always better to own your platform" - 100%

i listen to some Joe Rogan's podcast when he got some interesting guests. i don't remember which one but Joe mentioned Twitter ban Zuby for a reply to someone with "OK, dude".

i look up Zuby and yup. Twitter ban Zuby for saying "OK, dude" to someone. how the fuck is "OK, dude" hateful? Joe said Zuby is the nicest guy that he ever meet and Joe is right. they come for Zuby because transgender activist mock Zuby and Zuby reply with "Ok, dude".

the cancel culture in the West is destroying people from speaking freely.

the cancel culture in the West is the reason why you must own your own content. there are many people on the internet who doesn't agree with cancel culture and want to see your content but due to powerful tech company like Twitter. they can't see it because Twitter act like a publisher but don't want the responsibities that come with it.

the current Western society is in a very sad state.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Isinlor2• 6 years ago

Does hackernews act like publisher and doesn't want the responsibilities that come with it?

Yes - they do act like publisher. There is even editorial guide called "guidelines". They will remove things they don't want.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And no - hackernews should not bear the responsibility for whatever we decide to write here, unless it's unlawful.

But I agree on "own your own platform".

MangoCoffee3• 6 years ago

"own your own platform" - that we can all agree on.

levosmetalo• 6 years ago

Does that mean we should be writing comments on own platform, and just put links here instead of commenting on HN?

lostlogin• 6 years ago

the current Western society is in a very sad state.

To play devils advocate, when was ‘western culture’ great?

Pretty much any time period that comes to mind has a rather large set of inconvenient exceptions.

DanBC• 6 years ago

Twitter ban Zuby

No, they didn't.

https://twitter.com/ZubyMusic

thinkingemote• 6 years ago

Some platforms seem to increasingly use "ban" to mean "suspension" *

Zuby was suspended: https://summit.news/2020/02/27/rapper-zuby-suspended-by-twit...

* Twitch.tv for example, never use "suspension" but "ban" for everything from a 24hr suspension through a month suspension to an indefinite permanent ban.

nicbou8• 6 years ago

the cancel culture in the West

Is it really in the West, or just in the United States? Perhaps I'm just not paying attention, but I don't recall anything similar happening in my country. At least it definitely doesn't seem to have the same importance.

thesehands• 6 years ago

At this point, the UK is very much in the same state as the US.

midasz2• 6 years ago

Also happens in the Netherlands, for example Anne fleur Dekker -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Fleur_Dekker

jacobolus• 6 years ago

the cancel culture in the West is destroying people from speaking freely

All of the pundits complaining about “cancel culture” are themselves constantly demanding that various things be “canceled” (fired, taken off the air, defunded, boycotted, deported, imprisoned, ...).

Not in every case, but as a general rule, “cancel culture has gone too far” is a hypocritical euphemism for “I don’t like it when people call out my bigotry”.

notahacker• 6 years ago

Yep. The desire to 'cancel' sentiments and people they don't like, or at least not grant them particular platforms is the societal default, not some kind of modern exception.

Transpeople have been 'cancelled' from all sorts of opportunities since time immemorial without a single person outraged at Zuby's short term Twitter suspension being prepared to defend them to the death...

twelvechairs• 6 years ago

If you are interested in this side of free speech the history of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) is worth looking into.

This kind of free speech is their fundamental. They were founded in opposition to the anti-leftist Palmer Raids in the 1920s however have also supported the freedom of speech of right wing (notably Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis)

However they have been criticized strongly for their defense of some issues e.g. posession of child pornography [not creation], prevention of a registry of gun owners, defense of neo-nazis and kkk freedom of speech.

There was a leaked internal memo which gets to the crux of a core problem where someone internally was of the strong view was "Speech that denigrates [minority/marginalized] groups can inflict serious harms and is intended to and often will impede progress toward equality". In what seems to be alignment with this, in 2017 they had to announce "the ACLU will no longer defend hate groups protesting with firearms."

They have also been criticised over time in not following their own beliefs clearly (simple as they may appear on the outside), notably for not defending Paul Robeson in the 1950s from McCarthyism.

wishinghand3• 6 years ago

Looking up Zuby's antics, seems like he intentionally used "OK dude" to insult a transwoman. Misgendering people intentionally is hateful. Not sure where your confusion stems from.

This is after he tried to dismiss the legitimacy of trans people by way of entering a woman's weightlifting competition, claiming he identified as a woman while not out as trans. These dumbass shenanigans are consistently done by folks who "don't believe" in transpeople, or go the route of claiming they have a mental illness.

The rest of the world already cancelled transpeople before the phrase cancel culture existed. Give them a break already.

jessah• 6 years ago

You lack understanding of the quote by Evelyn Beatrive Hall. It means that you are allowed to disapprove of what Twitter did, but you should defend to the death there right to do it. That Twitter bans Zuby is freedom of speech from their side. If they wouldn't dare to do this, because of the "cancel culture" shouting mob, than we would have a problem. I'm really shocked about your rant against freedom of speech and the hypocritical attitude of proclaiming yourself as a defender of freedom to speak. You seem to value the right to do and say what you want only if it's what you decided is right.

young_unixer• 6 years ago

[SSG recommendation request]

I want an SSG with the following requirements:

- If it requires a dev env, it must be node. I don't want to install Ruby, Go or any other system-wide thing.

- Support for (simple) custom CSS written from scratch must be first class citizen, and not buried in a dark corner of the docs.

- RSS feed.

Thanks for your suggestions

zerop2• 6 years ago

I stopped clicking on links which have medium.com domain. It will be a premium article. Medium is choosing anything under premium payment wall, without explicit consent from Author. We need an alternate to this platform

tonystubblebine6• 6 years ago

Medium does have consent from the author and the vast majority of page views are going to authors who know a lot about what they are doing. I think that's worth noting. A Medium link is most likely to an article that exists to be behind the paywall because the author thought they could make some money and get good distribution that way. A lot of these articles wouldn't exist otherwise.

zerop2• 6 years ago

I too used to think so and that's how it was earlier. Check again.

For example, other day I found one post on Netflix tech blog was also behind paywall.. check posts from famous tech blogs of companies, you would find some of them behind paywall. I don't think big corporates want to make money from their tech blogs.

fastball4• 6 years ago

If you're in the "medium is still suitable for some use cases" camp, I think you should just use Ghost[1] instead.

- great for casual blogging

- very cheap to host

- monetization tools built-in

[1] https://ghost.org/

bishalb3• 6 years ago

Or plain old WordPress

fastball4• 6 years ago

WordPress is very slow (objectively) and much more complex to get started with (subjectively). Also the security model of WP isn't great (PHP/MySQL/etc).

rapnie• 6 years ago

Quite interesting is that there are a bunch of blogging softwares that not only publish to the web, but also federate with Mastodon and other fediverse applications.

Most well-known is WriteFreely.org (written in Go) that can be a good replacement for Medium (hosted version is Write.as that comes with a paid subscription). But there are also new, more specialized apps such as FediReads and Readlebee that are Amazon Goodreads alternatives.

Here's a list of blogging apps in various stages of development:

https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...

winter_blue• 6 years ago

The most valuable gem of advise in this article is at the end:

Update: As pointed out in the comments section, Medium has an import tool which allows you to add a canonical link from your Medium post to your original blog post.
This process ensures that Google does not think of your blog post as a duplicate. Thanks to Nicolas and Matthias for this correction.

This is an excellent way to do things. Publish on your blog first, and then mirror the same post(s) on Medium.

semicolonandson• 6 years ago

I'm working with a team that provides booking systems for COVID-19 testing. The software is legit, works with some of the nation's best labs, and has even been used by the government.

Seems like the kind of software that Apple/Google might be inclined to fast-track given the current state of affairs?

Wrong.

Neither Apple nor Google approved the apps, so the team spent 8 weeks going back and forth with them about what seemed (to me at least) like totally ineffectual, CYA security theatre.

Instead we ported the code to a web-app on a domain we owned and could start helping people with symptoms immediately.

Own your platform.

mrtksn• 6 years ago

Your point is valid but in the case of App Store and Google play, they require to be an institution with an authority if you are building anything about the COVID-19 pandemic. So the route would be to partner with a medical institution that is reputable enough for Apple and Google.

From their perspective, it makas sence because otherwise the App Analytics would pick up that there is this thing called coronavirus and is popular so from business perspective they should target it and the search results would degrade. Then the analytics would pick up that testing positive on Covid-19 test app has a good conversation rate and people would make apps where you test positive(or whatever goes. conspiracy theories, denialists - anything that brings eyeballs). This is essentially what happened with the News market. Analytics showed what kind of news people like and publishers made the news that people demand. They simply wrote the articles that brought most eyeballs.

When you own the platform, then it is your responsibility to spread it. Good luck with that, you can be a good citizen or conspiracy theorist and it is all fine until you succeed. If you are the "undesirable" and you actually succeed then people will start talking how to block your platform. You can be undesirable by telling the truth(journalism) or invoke trouble(shootings, racism and so on).

Owning the platform is not going to be the solution, it will simply delay the consequences.

thn-gap• 6 years ago

I've been thinking recently on the idea of writing for the sake of sharing (be it a short story, some thoughts, or any tutorial), but I like anonymity. For this, I'd like to not host my content, but maybe have some fake profile on social media, and share my writings, which could be hosted on Telegram's telegra.ph. Is there a better platform for my use case, or a reason not to use telegra.ph?

retor2• 6 years ago

Thought about the same for a while. I didn’t compare them much, but I was leaning towards write.as. Maybe something to check out.

dredmorbius5• 6 years ago

Gitlab / github static hosting is an option.

joosters2• 6 years ago

Even though Medium reinstated my profile, I stopped publishing on the platform and moved to my blog again.

There's some history re-writing going on here. The tweet from Medium about unblocking his account was in July 2018 - the author replied with 'Happens. No worries. Thanks for resolving the issue guys', so they clearly weren't too bothered about this at the time. They then went on to post over ten further articles on Medium over the next six months - again, hardly the sign of someone annoyed by the platform. (for contrast, they had only written one earlier article in the year, so his output increased after the issue)

...and now in July 2020, two years on, they have decided that this was the thing that stopped them using Medium? How is this anything but a lie?

mastazi• 6 years ago

You can be annoyed at something and take action after some time, what’s so strange about it? I wanted to get off Gmail for a long time but it took me a while before I actually did it. Migrating off a platform is not something you do in the blink of an eye, there is always friction involved for obvious reasons

ACow_Adonis• 6 years ago

...or maybe...tweets aren't an accurate representation of an author's mindset? Especially ones in a customer-company relations context responding to a recent account blocking/unblocking? I know I'm always polite when communicating in that context (it does little good to respond in a hostile fashion even if you think the person on the other end is the lowest of the low).

i mean, the blog post might not honest be either, maybe there is another motive, but i'd put the company-directed communications and tweets at about the bottom of the authenticity/trust hierarchy myself.

amelius2• 6 years ago

Well, I can fully understand this if they were still making money on the platform.

Like if your boss is an asshole, you might not want to shame them until you found a new job and secured your income.

rahulchowdhury• 6 years ago

Just to clear the air here. The posts that you are talking about were either for company blogs, or casual "I don't care if they live or die" kind of posts.

At around the same time, I started working on a small blogging platform of my own but gave up and started using SSGs like Gatsby, Jekyll, etc.

More on the move here: https://hulry.com/back-to-wordpress/

Hope this clears things up. :)

joosters2• 6 years ago

Hey, thanks for the reply, and I should apologise to you: While it still seems to me that the cause, effect & justification for leaving medium seems strange, I didn't mean to accuse you of intentionally lying or deceiving people in your article, sorry for the terrible wording.

syshum• 6 years ago

>so they clearly weren't too bothered about this at the time.

I dont know if that is true, simply because they did not rant and rave like it common with cancel culture today does not mean they were not bothered

It almost never results in a good outcome to tell your current service provider your intentions to leave before you are actually ready to pull the trigger to leave

Stoicism is a virtue in these situations

alexnewman• 6 years ago

Turns out creating a blog , backed by ipfs, and cached by cloudflare is pretty easy. http://github.com/posix4e/blog -> http://www.wuli.nu/

Feel free to steal my example

Anthony-G• 6 years ago

Before reading this story, I had been expecting that perhaps somebody had complained about article content and that the author had been banned from Medium so I was surprised to discover that this story was about the author being shadow-banned.

Shadow-banning is a useful tool for online forums but many moderators would usually considered it to be the last in a series of escalating steps that might be used for particularly troublesome users who ignore moderator warnings.

I wouldn't have expected a blogging platform to implement it and certainly not at the whim of an automatic spam filter. Even worse, its algorithm does not seem to take into account past behaviour or a positive reputation of the user before banning them; all articles are hidden due to a false positive in just one of them.

trekrich• 6 years ago

dont put anything on medium that you are not prepared to have deleted with no warning.

hatmatrix• 6 years ago

As a side note, anyone know of any good CSS templates? I use org-mode to generate HTML content but have not found a lot of options.

scoot_718• 6 years ago

I don't even read things on Medium, I always open them on outline

PaulHoule• 6 years ago

Given that medium is so choked with content marketing and parodies of content marketing, it's amazing you.can have a post zapped by the spam filter.

I mean, it is hard to find something on medium which isn't some variant of 'hiring is broken' sponsored by triplebyte (let's really break it!)

Mulesoft getting bought by Salesforce has given us some respite from 'does your content marketing strategy need an app strategy?' They never ask 'what are the two things you need to build a business around an api?' or 'what are the two features you never get from an app management platform?' because those two questions have the same answer.

cblconfederate• 6 years ago

Quietly use blogspot. The Original Blog platform still works, doesn't go about censoring people and it's not the hip thing to do (which is a good thing(TM)).

jeremiahlee• 6 years ago

Another reason: today I clicked on a Netflix Engineering blog post I saw on LinkedIn. Medium blocked me from reading and said I had to subscribe because I had read too many articles.

Netflix has the skill and money to operate its own blog without Medium putting up a paywall over its content.

XCSme• 6 years ago

I already had a PHP site so I wanted an easy way to integrate a blog in my site. I ended up creating a micro-blogging library[0], which just renders markdown as blog posts. The advantage is that there is no build step, you only write markdown files (VSCode has live-preview by default for markdown) and you get easy versioning as markdown is just plain text. [0]: https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog

neya• 6 years ago

What I find funny in this post is it goes to great lengths to encourage you to stay off walled gardens and then there's this:

"The web is meant for free speech. Your content shouldn’t be jailed for being controversial."

tonystubblebine6• 6 years ago

Right. You are getting at the nuance of how this conversation is a shade off.

People who like Medium almost always say they like it for the distribution.

So people who say you should host your own blog should be more clear about where you get distribution from.

Almost always, you are going to get distribution by trying to siphon readers away from other walled gardens. But you are almost always working with these massive systems you don't control. Google SEO, Twitter & FB followers, etc.

And even if you manage to siphon away a user and get their email address, you still have to deal with GMail's spam filters. You're never really in control, that's a pipe dream.

auganov2• 6 years ago

I've had Medium do this to me and in server logs for my homepage I found hits from a Medium owned subnet preceded by hits from a Slack robot. Then some more Medium requests with a referrer from my other social media. Definitely not automated.

It seems like Medium manually reviews any story (and user!) that crosses some threshold of traction.

tonystubblebine6• 6 years ago

Had you marked your article for distribution, i.e. behind the paywall?

If so, then yes, they have a curation team that is manually reviewing articles for extra distribution across their network. As a publishing partner, I have a copy of their guidelines--mostly stuff that can be done at scale. And mostly what they are doing is trying to find the right topics to feature the article in.

I'm wouldn't be surprised if they have some sort of prioritization system to deal with the volume of articles along the lines of what you describe. If an article is getting traction and hasn't been reviewed, then do it quick.

auganov2• 6 years ago

No, just a standard article. Unless that's the default then I wouldn't know. Didn't seem to be behind a paywall.

StavrosK• 6 years ago

If you want a site with a minimum amount of hassle, just clone the repo I made for this site:

https://quicksite.stavros.io/

dmje2• 6 years ago

HN truism: sooner or later all threads default to one about static CMS systems

dudeabides• 6 years ago

Jeremy Howard had a good post about this earlier this year. I haven't tried it yet, but it seems like a reasonable way to setup your own blog.

https://www.fast.ai/2020/01/16/fast_template/

bakedbeanz• 6 years ago

Not defending Medium here, but I do have an issue with this point:

The web is meant for free speech. Your content shouldn’t be jailed for being controversial.

You mentioned your profile was taken offline after being mistakenly caught in their spam filter. Shouldn't spam blocking be a basic function of a publishing site? Obviously in a perfect world there wouldn't be false positives, but sometimes these things happen. Your content wasn't banned for being "controversial".

qayxc• 6 years ago

Straight from their Terms of Service [1]:

  We can remove any content you post for any reason.

They also clarify that they have rules [2] that users need to follow. Also government takedown requests might be followed without even notifying you if the law prevents them from doing so.

So even if it wasn't a mistake, takedowns may still happen for whatever reasons and you need to take this into account before you start using the platform.

I really don't understand why some people complain about services doing exactly what's stated "on the box".

[1] https://policy.medium.com/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e...

[2] https://policy.medium.com/medium-rules-30e5502c4eb4

geniium• 6 years ago

As soon as I hit a medium post, I hit the Pocket icon and switch to The pocket viewer.

tmaly• 6 years ago

I use Hugo now for my blog. But I do have to admit that Medium's mobile app is really great for writing posts.

In an ideal world, I would have that interface to write my markdown on the phone. It would encourage me to write more. I could start a draft of something when a thought occurs to me and finish it up later at home.

graton• 6 years ago

Medium is the reason that I installed Cookie AutoDelete [0]. I finally got tired of doing shift-F9 and deleting cookies :)

Now that I have been using Cookie AutoDelete and enabling it so that it does delete cookies automatically (and whitelisting the sites I care about) it has been very nice.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...

tijuco2• 6 years ago

Their blogs are pleasing to read. Great font and colors, but everything there is politically engaged and because of that when someone posts a link here I tend to skip it.

dredmorbius5• 6 years ago

This is the principle behind Indieweb's POSSE:

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

rolandtshen• 6 years ago

I've been building Imprint (https://imprint.to) these past few months to provide a better home for ideas. It's centralized like Medium, but has a focus on content ownership. You can use custom domains, own your content through our policies, and know that your content won't be altered or removed spontaneously. We also promise that in the event of the platform shutting down, we'll notify you to export your posts 3 months in advance.

illuminea• 6 years ago

I totally agree. It's so important to own as much of your content on the web as possible. That's why CMSs like WordPress are a great solution. I know WP has lots of issues, and that's why we created Strattic: static and headless publishing for WordPress websites so you can easily and quickly create content, but not worry about security and performance. https://www.strattic.com

Medium is not the home for your ideas

Related Stories