Ask HN: If not Medium, then what?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29974652

by KerryJones • 5 years ago

21 34 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

There have been dozens of articles coming out over the past several years detailing how Medium is no longer a great home for the aspiring writer/blogger (largest of reasons is due to their paywall). I fully agree with this.

I used to be an occasional blogger, but had some okay traffic (a few posts took off), but definitely not a name for myself where I could take people with me to my own site. What I liked about Medium was their discoverability, shifting to my blog I believe will lose that discoverability.

Are there other platforms or other ways to get organic readership?

winternett2• 5 years ago

TikTok is probably the king of medias right now. The main problem is that you have to likely put your face out to the public. I have worked on creative ways in not doing so (despite not being full-on ugly mind you), but in the age of scammers and fake news, facial credibility for content is often an essential key to longevity, and may become pretty much a basic requirement moving forward for the more credibility-minded social platforms.

I think the main issue now that is really flooding out creative writing as well as other types of creator communities (I make music for film @ruffandtuffrecordings - a new account mind you) is that everyone is grinding individually than creating partnerships. While everyone is quitting their jobs to become a creator, they are finding they have to do every aspect a corporations would normally hire for and then quickly burning out after a deep investment in time and gear.

It's probably better to partner with people who share your subject matter interest and to form a team of people and then start a dedicated web site that you use social media as a pointer thereto... That way your content also is not under risk of immediate loss in most cases if you pay your bills on time.

That being said, where to go also probably depends most on your intended subject matter.

1_player2• 5 years ago

To your first paragraph I can only say: fuck that.

If that's the future, I can expect a split between the tech savvy using niche text interfaces that have served us well for decades, and the polished ultra-capitalistic corporate vast majority of the internet using video to create viral sub-minute """content""".

I hope you are wrong with the idea that TikTok clones will become the future "credibility minded social platforms" because it sounds dystopian form of idiocracy. Not everything can be reduced to quick-acting 30 seconds short videos.

(Of note: I am very aware of the incredible publicity TikTok is having on this forum, being touted as the future of the internet that we should just embrace.)

_kulang• 5 years ago

I think this is a similar dialogue to when twitter was up and coming. TikTok has also already raised their length limit a la twitter. Once VR/AR becomes popular we will probably have a corresponding short form viral media platform. And so forth and so on.

winternett2• 5 years ago

It wouldn't be so bad if the content wasn't an army of attention and money-seeking influencers. Those influencers will burn out once the truth about the creator funds finally wears them out.

Tiktok also encourages parroting information, and that leads to corruption of information. They really need to create more niches than the one channel they're runing to thrive.

But imagine a TikTok UI on something like Ted Talks, where you could scroll through a variety of speeches until you land on the one you want... Or even Netflix implementing that for movies, or YouTube for music videos. It would finally create a new way of finding new things quickly. There is great benefits to TikTok's method when done properly. The question is whether or not creators will be properly paid or not...

For news I'd probably rather scroll through well composed story intros to find what I want to hear more about than to watch an entire show these days to be honest. Once I find something I like then I can give it more attention. I used to wait through commercial breaks just to hear vital news, now it's much easier to just go to CNN and get pelted by pop-up ads on mobile... hah.

gnicholas• 5 years ago

Hackernoon is a good place to get organic reach, if you're writing stuff that works for their audience.

WaxedChewbacca• 5 years ago

It happens the same way over and over. Some site will offer discoverability, so writers flock to it, and then the site gradually becomes terrible.

The answer is to own your own stuff. Your own domain, your own blog software, etc. Just develop that. Otherwise you're putting effort into something that isn't you, that's inevitably going to go bad.

twhb• 5 years ago

Self host, use services for syndication only. Make that Medium and Facebook post, but just make it a link to your website, maybe with a preview. You get self hosting without needing to bring your own audience, you get Medium etc’s promotion without needing to surrender your content.

I should disclaim that I haven’t personally proven this out, but it’s advice I’ve often seen and what I plan on doing myself.

KerryJones4• 5 years ago

Posting just a link in Medium? I've never seen that, do you have any examples?

kevincox2• 5 years ago

Medium even supports mirror your posts with the canonical URL pointing to the original. This means that any discovery on medium should help your SEO. I don't mind being on medium, but I want to have a canonical own that I own and that medium-haters can use.

Personally I have a static site, and when I make a new post it automatically goes out to Mastodon and Medium as well as a couple of "RSS aggregators" (like https://diff.blog/), as well as a dedicated subreddit as my "comments section". Then depending on the content I will often publish to dev.to (which automatically imports from RSS so it is mostly deleting the <style> block that it doesn't understand and hitting publish) and maybe Hacker News or Lobste.rs (although that is basically never, I generally prefer for others to share if they like the post).

But that is my over-complicated setup. At the end of the day I think what matters is own your content. Ideally with a feed on a domain that you control then spread elsewhere as it makes sense.

TiredGuy• 5 years ago

Seems like there are two problems you're trying to solve: 1. getting traffic/discoverability 2. a nice platform upon which to blog

I think if you solve the two with separate tools you might get better options. For example for a nice blogging platform, you can try gonevis.com or blogger.com then promote posts on places like reddit/HN/Twitter, etc.

bynxbynx• 5 years ago

Anecdotal: I've seen a lot of people migrate to substack (not how much better it is, but I dont dislike visiting it like I dislike visiting a medium blog)

shime2• 5 years ago

I also hate visiting Medium, but enjoy visiting Substack. They both have paywalls on some of the content, but Substack is much more enjoyable, even when you don't get to see the full article.

Untit1ed• 5 years ago

You don't necessarily have to choose - you can post on your own blog, then copy-paste it to Medium and set the canonical url back to your own address so you keep some of the SEO-juice.

bighoss97• 5 years ago

I bought a year of Medium subscription but I don't think I'll renew it because their suggestion algorithms are bad. If you click on one programming-related article you will be forcefed exclusively the most boring programming crap ever until the end of time. There's like a million articles on there about "programming habits" and "genius daily routines" and "productivity hacks" and "programming career advice" ... all very boring content.

A major issue I see with online blogging is the glut of tech and computing content drowning out everything else. The barrier to entry for self-hosted content also means most self-hosted content is tech oriented.

ddtaylor• 5 years ago

FWIW using Medium is actually driving readers away because of how invasive their practices are. They pop things up, interrupt reading and in general they seem to have added so much bloat/tracking to their blog that it loads terribly.

If I must read a Medium article I do so in Firefox's reader mode, but usually the friction/irritation just drives me to click close on the tab and move on to something less offensive.

rdtwo• 5 years ago

Agree I don’t click on medium links, but same for Facebook and tiktok

mproud• 5 years ago

I’m with you. I just want an easy place to write and share an article, and I would prefer not to self host and install a million things.

No one has seemed to have suggested any alternatives, except for [HackerNoon](https://hackernoon.com). Surely there’s something else? Medium can’t have that large of a stranglehold to the point of a monopoly. (If I’m wrong, then this is a biz opportunity.)

KerryJones4• 5 years ago

I have an "in" on HackerNoon, but not all of my content is tech/startup related (which is what they want). I think the problem is that platforms need a way to monetize, Medium was great during it's growth years but once it needed to start making money, how do they monetize? I'm still hopeful for something else out there

shime2• 5 years ago

I think the biggest problem with Medium is the fact that nothing was paywalled and then they introduced the paywall, which caused frustration. Substack, on the other hand, is much more pleasurable because there is an expectation from the start that some of the articles are going to be paywalled.

quickthrower2• 5 years ago

wordpress.com?

ramphastidae• 5 years ago

If all you TRULY want is a place to share and host an article then that is a problem solved a million times over (including by Medium). My guess is you also want a built-in audience without a paywall.

warrenm2• 5 years ago

Self-hosting isn't exactly hard (or expensive) ...if you're posting "elsewhere", you're relying on "them" to decide it's OK for "you" to stay there

If you self-host, you're fully* in charge

-----------

* - where by "fully", I mean you haven't violated the hosting providers ToS, and/or your DNS provider's ToS

sixhobbits• 5 years ago

Dev.to hackernoon hashnode are some other platforms where you can get tech related articles discovered.

But as everyone epse is saying, it is definitely worth the effort to own your own content. Even if you do not self host, set up WordPress or Ghost on their paid hosting and link your own domain.

stoicpushkar• 5 years ago

If you are writing something, maybe use something like typeshare and twitter.

searchableguy• 5 years ago

https://mirror.xyz is neat. I have seen posts on mirror get on the front page here recently.

Mirror will create an nft of your writing and proxy it to the web2 world.

This means your writing will be owned by your wallet. Mirror cannot take it down and people can support you by buying your writing nft as a collective item.

All this without needing a paywall. The content always remain public.

KerryJones4• 5 years ago

Oh, this is interesting, thanks for the link

jarbus• 5 years ago

Write.as, it’s as easy to use as medium but federated and open source, so you can self host.

alphadelphi• 5 years ago

A static website (let's say a Hugo blog on GitHub pages) can make the magic and host the content in a future-proof way.

For the discoverability: every social network can help to drive visitors to your posts.

It's crazy how today a lot of effort are put on decentralizing finance meanwhile the simplest activities (like blogging) are being strongly centralized.

the2ndfloorguy• 5 years ago

Ghost - If you are really serious about writing and monetizing it. Not useful if you are not earning from your writing Medium - If you are gonna write once in a year. or. you are happy putting your articles behind their paywall

dev.to - If you don't have a niche, just writing for the community whenever you feel

hashnode - If you prefer having custom domain, writing for beginners, love SEO, want to build personal brand, and a bit serious about technical writing.

SSG + Github Page - If you love getting your hands dirty in coding & willing to spend sometime to learn a new tech. (plus point, you have full freedom to design it in your own way)

- My self-hosted blog built with NextJs. https://pankajtanwar.in/blogs

KerryJones4• 5 years ago

UPDATE

So far the closest free alternatives I've seen are:

- write.as

- mirror.xyz

- typeshare.co

------------

The closest paid alternatives:

- Ghost

- Substack

------------

There are a number of niche-specific ones:

- Hackernoon

- Dev.to

------------

Self-hosted alternatives (non-discoverable):

- Wordpress.org

- Hugo/Digital Ocean (I chose this)

- Next.js

kevincox2• 5 years ago

I can't recommend Hackernoon. They are a huge spammer. I've tried to unsubscribe 10 times but still get marketing crap. Somehow some of it still sneaks past my spam filter even though I have marked everything from them in the past as spam.

kaskakokos• 5 years ago

If you feel nostalgic, https://neocities.org/ . It has a discoverability feature, via a social network of common interests.

warrenm2• 5 years ago

Self-host

Share links to your content (can even automate it) to all of the social networks you want it to go to - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook ...

Ask HN: If not Medium, then what?

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