Not to mention that it drives your users away and reduces your conversion rate by showing them a big full-screen banner in front of your posts every single time they visit the site unless they sign up for Medium themselves. Who wants to have to log in just to read some blogs?
And then there's the lack of RSS feed, so I have to actually visit each individual blog to see if there are updates instead of having them dropped nicely in my inbox with the rest of my morning read.
Medium is a garbage place for readers and content producers: please stay away from it.
Medium annotates your blog as the original so in general it can be a duplicate conyent problem but for Medium specifically they do the right thing so it isn't
Go back far enough and I remember you would Google a key phrase, and see the first full ten pages being the exact same article, as accordance with some SEO gaming scheme.
Google quite reasonably now sees duplicate identical content as an issue, you can use the "canonical" HTML tag can be used to help it see the "real" link where several exist.
I don't know what'll happen when there are only two copies of your page, but I'd hazard a guess it'll preference medium's domain over your own in most cases.
I could imagine Google being smart enough to have some tracking between duplicates. If you include a link to your main blog on Medium perhaps it may understand "pages A and B have the same main content, but A contains an additional link to B so B is probably the true source".
This is so bad and so obvious that I have a hard time seeing how this isn't "supporting RSS" (for goodwill) while making sure no one uses it (for lock in).
I think the author makes a giant mistake when he says the following:
“For the foreseeable future, it looks like independent blogs are back. Still, there’s a good business opportunity waiting for someone, as Medium seem intent on squandering the potential they had.”
I would argue the problem is that making a free blogging network like medium is NOT a good business idea. The reason things like Wordpress, Ghost, etc. work as a business is they have figured out a customer (bloggers) and something to charge them for (their paid blog hosting features).
The reason those sites don’t work as great discovery networks is it turns out their customers are possessive of their audiences and don’t really want the platform to be directing them elsewhere.
Medium is now trying to figure out a way for the readers to be the customers, which is just a really hard problem in the era of the internet and almost infinite free reading material.
From a business perspective Medium is more of a magazine or newspaper than a blogging platform. They have a bunch of readers and try to get them to stay on their site by pushing interesting posts from their other writers. The problem is that their writers seem to just want it to be a blogging platform.
It was never a go to platform for programmers blogs. It’s the worst platform for programming blogs. The way comments work makes it impossible to have kind of coherent conversation.
I don’t have an issue with medium for things that don’t involve discussion but for anything that should have discussion. Ahhhhh
Medium is a Ghetto. Who wants to be seen along with thinly sliced salami articles that almost have something to say, desperate content marketers who are writing articles like "Does your API Need a Content Marketing Strategy?" and who are amazed that they got 35 people to view their steaming Turd Emoji?
I think it went through a similar transition as Quora where it was known as a place for smart people to blog, and as it grew it then attracted a bunch of users who wanted to be seen as smart
Absolutely, it used to be a place for pretty in-depth and well thought out writing. It began attracting a lot of people that wanted to be seen as that kind of writer while not being that kind of writer. I bailed once it just became lists and lists and clickbait with more clickbait. I think it's gone through what TEDx has gone through. Their latest strategy to try and get my money has been the nail in the coffin for my use of the platform.
Hosting blogs is cheap and everyone should be able to have one. However, if we leave it to the corporate sector, they'll either need a subscription or ads, neither of which are conducive to public discussion. Since serving blogs is so cheap, why doesn't the government offer a free service where you can host a text website? Kind of like a university webpage for all students, but for everyone?
You would then have a financially stable organization backing the pages, have democratic input into the hosting process, and probably less censorship than a private company would apply for those that care about that sort of thing (since private companies need literally no reason to do so whereas a public enterprise would need a court order or some such).
I host my (static site, very-low-traffic) blog with nearlyfreespeech.net for less than $10/yr. My hosting costs are less than domain-registration costs.
Highly recommended, I've had zero problems with them.
It is debatable, and I think it's really worth considering the argument for it.
Out of all the indirect ways of paying for something, getting it funded by the government is probably the least user-hostile solution possible - it could be set up as just another public service, with zero incentive to milk people in some nonobvious way.
Because it wouldn't be a free service. It would be funded by your money. How mad are you going to get when your money goes to host those views you find repellent?
When the inevitable happens and the content needs to be monitored (can't have government funds used to host things like doxing blog posts, for example), then how much will you pay?
Governments don't hand out free stuff. They take your stuff to pay for it.
Right, of course it's not free, but it would be cheap to provide and a universal good for all US residents. I also don't really mind the taxes they can come from the rich anyway.
So long as the views expressed don't cross the line into violence or ethnic cleansing, I'm in favor of the first amendment. Yes, some manual curation will be necessary, but it's irrelevant to me if society as a whole pays for it or a company. It seems to me a free service for everyone is a better deal that has knock on benefits for public debate.
No. It probably won’t have knock on benefits for public debate. The government already has channels for expressing your views to them, and society has always shouldered the distribution cost of their own views.
Making hosting free is unlikely to benefit anyone and more likely to actually hurt the First Amendment. Just like we have a division of Church and State, we are better off having a division between Blog and State.
I totally agree. The internet is where people live now and there is no "commons", no "public square". This is where people get so irritated with private companies that own all the space and decide how we interact. The internet is a libertarian dystopia. Things like "free speech" would apply on public social media platforms. If this idea were ever to come to fruition it would probably need to start at the local scale and focus on local political issues.
slightly off-topic but i hope a UX person from medium would stumble upon this. medium posts have a terrible UX -- for me at least. i tend to set my fonts to be 125%-150% larger. it gives me an easy-to-read feeling on most blogs. especially when fonts are chosen carefully. but this breaks medium blogs so bad i often gave up on many articles. the header usually takes 40% of the viewport height. and there's always a "get updates" footer which also takes about 20%. so yes... what you care about fits in less than half the space. and on posts with many big pictures, it just gets worse.
btw, my phone also has larger fonts but the reading experience is so much better! but ofc that too is ruined by the constant nagging about getting the "real app" (when all i did is click on your own digest which opened in the browser...).
i mean i understand why you guys are doing all that but i certainly share the sentiment of OP here that the combination of all that makes medium look somehow annoying...
Overuse of white space, really weird comment/reply system and more.
It's nice on the eyes purely from an aesthetic perspective, but I agree it lacks on the X in UX. It's a few shades form over function.
Side note: Apple's new Swift documentation feels like this to me. It was designed to look and read like a novel. Full of prose, lack of use of colour, wrong fonts, way too big. The 'parent class' is down at the bottom of the document! So many things like that. It looks great a first glance but it really lacks in X.
Either I or the Author are confused about how Medium works.
> A blog, to me, was a place for someone to put their thoughts up onto the internet and have anyone who wanted to come and read - for free.
But you can still do this, no? You can write articles on Medium that can be read for free.
> Medium relies on user-submitted content and then charges those same users for access to their content.
My experience is that Medium charges only for access to "premium" articles, submitted through their partner program, no?
Can somebody please clear these up for me?
On a slight off-topic, my biggest issue with Medium is no math formatting support. MathJax has been around for years now. Are there just not enough scientists writing on Medium?
I think the author is confused about how Medium works.
> My experience is that Medium charges only for access to "premium" articles, submitted through their partner program, no?
After reading through Medium's FAQ, I believe that's right - an article is free to read unless it's published through Medium's partner program [0]. So if you want your posts to be free to read, just don't join the partner program.
Medium is a place that pretends to be slightly better than average but is really slightly worse than average.
Who needs to click on clickbait headlines like "Should I buy a Chrysler Pacifica or a Wagon Queen Family Truckster?" or "Does it hurt more to be hit with a .457 Automag or a Neo Armstrong Cyclone Jet Armstrong Cannon?"
They changed it so that Medium now defaults you into creating paywall posts and you have to fight the UI to create a free post. And when you create a free post, they warn you that it won't be promoted anywhere except to your followers.
My impression is that the author is referring to the handful of free premium articles Medium allows you to see per month without having a subscription.
Well the medium partner program is meant to enable people to earn money from their writing, no? As an author you have to make a choice to do that. I don't see a problem with this and if anything it's a great innovation.
My problem is that I'm subject to the kind of writing I'd rather avoid. Perhaps if they were better able to segment their user bases and make their feeds and recommendations better tailored to them the experience could actually be decent. But as a modeling problem I appreciate that it's probably pretty difficult to tell a BS article about Bitcoin (or whatever) from one with substance.
Perhaps if you're doing this type of work frequently, but if you're just a regular person who wants a blog it's not trivial nor advisable. Configuring your DO instance can be a pain and you have to manually keep Ghost up to date by SSHing in. Definitely not set and forget.
The author's post seemed to target a developer blogger audience as opposed to regular people.
With this particular image, there's virtually no DO configuration (just standard size / region settings which have smart defaults IIRC). You do have to SSH in, but the new Ghost 2.0 CLI handles updating Ghost much more smoothly than in the past. I've been happy with it personally.
The DO one-click is super easy, but the SSL config and adding Cloudflare wound up being a huge pain. DO's docs aren't great and that meant I spent hours in config land just trying to get tablestakes blog features of HTTPS and DDoS protection.
Ghost 2.0 is definitely better than prior versions but still needs babysitting. As an infrequent blogger, I've found I am updating Ghost more frequently than I'm blogging.
Github pages or Gatsby (via something like Netlify) are much better suited to this problem because server config & SSL are handled and they're just serving static pages.
I used Cloudflare with Ghost pre-2.0 but switched to Let's Encrypt for 2.0 [1]. I found this easier than using Cloudflare with 2.0 which handles auto renewing the cert as well.
There are a million security implications involved with this. I don't recommend it unless you're going to stay on top of keeping your system up to date.
Solid platform, discoverability baked in, great writing tools. They do need to polish their UX though as I wrote a lengthy article for about an hour and then clicked on "Write a Post" instead of Save to publish. This wiped my editor clean with no way to recover what was lost. Horrible experience there.
They should at least autosave for you on every keystroke. No reason not to.
The thing that made Medium special was that anyone could post about something that mattered to them and get noticed no matter their background.
WordPress, Blogger, and other free things cost energy in place of money because they're top-heavy with features and weak accessibility. That's as much a blocker as a recurring charge.
[1] "But it's $70 if you pay the full year!"
That's not much of a deal for someone who's already wary about trusting a company with a direct line to cause a cascade of overdraft feeds.
$72 a year is not a lot of money. If you got a $1.00 coffee every other day from McDonald's it would be twice that.
The main reason why the web is such a sight for sore eyes in 2019 is that people seem to think $72 a year is a lot for having a voice. People can find 10x that for a new iPhone or spend that much on beer in a month or on a cable subscription but having a blog sure can't be worth much to most people.
For one thing, how much do they think their time is worth? That is 10 hours of time spent writing at around minimum wage in the U.S.
I don't get it. On the other hand, I don't understand how grandmothers spend $5 on acrylic yarn when they could spend $10 to make a (better) wool scarf that they'll spend 20 hours knitting. (e.g. the wool scarf will protect you in a fire, the acrylic scarf will melt, burn you, and produce toxic fumes.)
Perhaps it’s related to the tangibility factor. We do pay a lot (grumble, too much) for a new iPhone. But I have a reasonable confidence, that I can get 2+ good years out of that device. It may even have some resale value. The bi-daily coffee is something I pay a little for, but I can bet I’ll still like coffee at the end of the year. And if I decide to kick the habit, I can just quit paying at any time since each coffee transaction stands on its own.
Sites like Medium though are a place where people go to experience networking effects. Thinking about it in the long term might be like buying into a year’s subscription of speed dating at the local bowling alley. It may be all the rage with all the types of people you want to be with this week, but what does next week bring? The hot speed dating activity might move somewhere else. Or the group of people you want to hang out with there might be replaced by a different group of people.
Years ago, Brad Cox (of Objective C fame) wrote a great essay on micropayments and the Internet. I can’t find it right now, but IIRC it talked about why micropayments might be the way to go to fund intenert related activities. Unfortunately, my observation of MBA business models is that they have never wrapped their heads around how to implement micropayment models that reach that happy point where consumers benefit as well as producers.
It's a fair amount of money compared to a hosted Wordpress.com site that costs $0/yr (foo.wordpress.com), $13/yr (custom domain) or $50/yr (custom domain, no ads), and has the safety valve of being able to export and move to any other WP host including self-hosting at any time.
WordPress started requiring a premium package to add a domain. I discovered this during the checkout process when I decided to give them another try. $48/year at a minimum.
There are multiple layouts, all further customizable. If you can edit HTML, you have access to the code. If you can't, there are myriad user-friendly options for making the interface do what you want.
I actually help people with that for pay if you want assistance.
The code snippets are a real issue. I'm not sure how much code you could even show because I don't show code snippets on any of my blogs.
Maybe screenshots would work. It's also possible that writing it in the "compose" interface would work.
I usually write in the HTML interface, but I use the app on my phone. When I copy and paste, it shows up differently depending on which interface I'm using.
It's possible that blockquoting it in the compose interface and then adding HR tags top and bottom to help set it off would get you satisfactory results. You can also add custom CSS to any layout. This has allowed me to get effects not natively supported by the user-friendly customization options without digging around in the code per se, which I'm not confident enough to do. I know a little HTML and CSS, but not so much that I'm comfortable going directly into the code. I tried it once and couldn't figure out where the thing was that I wanted to edit.
I moved my old blog to a new domain name recently, and wasn't able to keep using Medium because they no longer support custom domains. So now I'm using WordPress for my blogging software and also using their hosting as well. That's too bad for Medium, because Medium's blogging software is superior in my opinion. They've just made a few boneheaded mistakes. My theory is that Ev Williams wants to create the next Twitter, and that's the reason behind his poor decisions. Williams should have just worried about creating the best blogging software and blog hosting solution and things would have kept humming along just fine. Greed can make people do silly things.
Ev, if you happen to read this: 1) bring back custom domains. 2) start charging a monthly fee for hosting custom domains like WordPress does 3) Create a native advertising service that publishes promoted stories into the main Medium.com story feed.
On the topic of programming blogs, are there any libraries to automatically detect code snippets within text? I know there are some StackOverflow posts talking about possible approaches to this, but not sure if anyone has actually built an open source solution.
It looks like this highlights code within <pre><code> blocks with a color scheme appropriate for the language, but it can't actually detect whether a snippet is code in the first place.
This is good to know about, although I personally care more about just displaying code blocks in a different typeface than I do about highlighting them appropriately.
> Medium would be charging people to read content that I am putting out for free.
Agree that this ^ is non-ideal.
But was Medium ever the go-to platform for programming blogs?
They don't really have much feature-wise catering towards technical posts e.g., nice syntax highlighting or code embedding, runnable snippets, limited embedding support, minimal analytics offering.
I have never understood tech blogs on Medium. Surely if you’re writing about a technical subject, especially programming, you have the skills to setup a quick Jekyll blog? It’s what I did, and I have no idea why I’d hand control of my user experience over to Medium, no idea whatsoever.
Well, from my perspective I've had my own blog since 2005 and still do (wordpress on a cheap vps), but the articles I publish on Medium get way more interaction, views, reads and comments.
3) Better tech than you'd get on your own platform -- e.g. the ability to act as an oEmbed consumer.
The trade off is that you don't have as strong a relationship with your subscribers. But considering that 100k page views probably only gets you 100 subscribers, most bloggers have basically zero chance at getting any real number of subscribers to begin with so for them using a platform like Medium is all upside.
I wonder how easily people bind themselves to a certain provider. Since the appereance of Medium I waited for the day they try to monetize it and people would leaving for better options. The possibility to move away should probably considered before starting to use such a service.
My own website is based on Hugo. While the usage (especially the template syntax) is not exactly a joy to use, it works fine and fast for years now. The only thing I need is some web space to drop static files, so it would be really easy to move to another provider. However I wouldn't recommend Hugo to non-technical writers, since the configuration and template syntax would scare them probably away.
The world needs more "static CMS" software (instead of just "static site generators")!
While Lektor doesn't look bad, I doubt it would be attractive for non-technical persons. I'm thinking of something more like Ghost, WordPress (with less features), but with static files as output.
This is possible with Ghost :) it functions as a headless CMS and can be used with essentially any static site generator which can pull content from an API, eg. Gatsby -- https://docs.ghost.org/api/gatsby/
We'll be sharing more about this on Weds in a bigger blog post - it's a fairly recent addition
I mean this is as much bad behavior on the part of users as it is bad behavior on the part of publishers. Users flock to products that are super polished and have tons of celebrity users (both made possible by huge fundraises), but then flip out when they're asked for $5 a month to pay for the service they're getting.
It's not fair to blame it on users. This is businesses playing bait-and-switch. No person would like it if all of a sudden they had to pay for something they were getting for free before.
It's the business's job to charge a fair price upfront (or, at the very least, give the user some hint of its future plans so they're mentally prepared).
Recently decided to self-host as well, and used it as an excuse to build a command line controlled cms with Sublime-esque syntax highlighting for the code snippets. https://synref.com/ It's been a lot of fun, and I'd encourage anyone that's considering going the self-hosting route to do so.
I developed an aversion to medium well before the paywall went up. Most articles involved a novice doing preliminary research about something they had limited prior experience with, coming up with a toy solution and then lambasting the experts for having not seen said solution. (Granted, my route to Medium was mostly through HN.)
I didn’t even know they were doing a paywall thing. I got into medium last year for a while because it seemed like this perfect place for people in different tech sectors to share wisdom. But not too long and I realized that most of the writers are talking out of their ass and playing the “use strong language so people will believe you” tactic while being wholly absent of meaning.
It’s honestly like reading one of those subreddits where people get to ask and field questions about an industry. You realize pretty quickly that the sub is filled with wannabes (still in college or otherwise) who spend their days fantasizing about what an industry is like while they have literally no experience. They’ve just read the tropes enough times that they can echo “good sounding” advice with no basis in reality.
That’s what medium is to me. A place where people pontificate over things they really don’t know anything about other than reading other online posts.
I’m happy to pay $5/month. The content I receive far outweighs the content I create and I’ve learned so much from others. The servers aren’t paying for themselves.
I am not sure if it's a goto platform for programming blocks if it does not even give your syntax highlighting capability or embedding code snippets such as gist.
The solution is pretty clear to me but to my knowledge it doesn't exist and the economics of creating it are not that favorable.
You need to have a free github/publisher side cache which mirrors the public github repository of the code example. The example should be rendered server side without a javascript library for syntax highlighting / formatting. This way the author, or more likely a reader because the author abandoned the post a second after writing it, can make progressive updates and deprecations - sort of like stackoverflow where an answer can live on past the life of its author.
This is not a rife target for a start-up and most likely would have to be offered by a larger player. The service needs to be long-lived and reliable from an operational perspective and its pricing model is not clear as most developers would not pay a dime for it. Github is the most favorable target, I'd pay an extra couple dollars a month to "upgrade" my github account for this functionality. Github Gists are already pretty close to what we need but miss out on a few key features for use in independent blogs (presumably a rate limit and a limited scope that may be too narrow for an example, it might need a full repository).
Don't worry. We'll soon get this WebAssembly thing just right, and the situation will change. You'll love the code-display aspects, and the blog-display aspects will drive you nuts.
And then there's the lack of RSS feed, so I have to actually visit each individual blog to see if there are updates instead of having them dropped nicely in my inbox with the rest of my morning read.
Medium is a garbage place for readers and content producers: please stay away from it.