10 ms·

Why Medium Sucks

502 points by rylandgold 7y ago

justaaron 7y ago
Until such a time that I don't find ALL programming info on Medium.com or it's subsites I will continue to decry this increasing centralization of content. The web is our tool for liberation and this is a subversion of the very principles that the web was founded upon.
duxup 7y ago
I know SEO and visibility is high on Medium. I'm still a bit amazed that so many people, many of them who aren't short on visibility, chose to host their content on that site. Most of it i would have rather read on someone's personal site as IMO that adds a lot of character and context.
- lmm 7y ago
  Every personal site I've ever seen looks worse than Medium. I don't want the "character" of a slightly different UI every time, I want the interface to get out of my way so that I can get on with reading the actual content. Medium does that (yes, subject to logging in, but you can do that once and forget about it).
  - duxup 7y ago
    Man and I've never found much to like with the layout of Medium. The text is nice and big and that's about it. It gets as messy as any personal blog IMO.
  - Madeindjs 7y ago
    Firefox's reader mode does exactly what you looking for.
    - lmm 7y ago
      When it works. It's still an extra click even then.
      - zentiggr 7y ago
        Still far far better than dealing with all of Medium's formatting and site practices.
      - athenot 7y ago
        Safari can defaut to reader mode for some sites. I would assume the same is possible with Firefox.
  - zrobotics 7y ago
    Different strokes for different folks I suppose, but rarely have I seen a personal site with a UI as obnoxious as Medium, I won't even click medium links on HN unless the content looks tremendously interesting. Especially as on most personal blogs if I'm only reading the linked article I don't have to engage with any of the UI, whereas with medium I have to dismiss the annoying modal dialogs.
  - tjoff 7y ago
    Creating an account for a site that doesn't respect its users so that the nagging disappears? Man the internet must suck for that sentence to exist.
  - fuzzybeard 7y ago
    On a related note, this is why when I search for a person, film, or other thing, I'll take the Wikipedia result every time over IMDB or some top ranking site. With Wikipedia, I know how the information will be formatted so I can find what I need quickly.
- nacs 7y ago
  I think its because of the ease of startup -- its essentially a good looking by default blog (as long as you ignore the paywalls, newsletter signups, "Join Medium" popups" etc) that is free and takes like a minute to get started with. So people join, start publishing then realize its too much work to switch so they just continue using it.
- kowdermeister 7y ago
  Hosting content there is okay as long as you put your own domain on it. The migrating away from it won't cause too much problem if some trouble rises.
  - rylandgold 7y ago
    They are specifically making that process harder and harder. That's partly why HackerNoon left
    - TechFinder 7y ago
      And where are they now, HackerNoon? Growing a team and scamming investors?
  - LunaSea 7y ago
    The custom domain feature doesn't exist anymore.
- trustfundbaby 7y ago
  > Most of it i would have rather read on someone's personal site as IMO that adds a lot of character and context. And there are probably LOTS of people who don't care. Feels like folks on HN miss this important point.
dickeytk 7y ago
Must be a slow HN day if we've got another post about Medium
- duxup 7y ago
  Yeah it's getting to be "a bit much" with the volume of such articles.
grecht 7y ago
I agree with the author: It sucks. But so does white font on a blue background, since we’re also talking about readability. At least they got that right!
- arvinaminpour 7y ago
  savage
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Are you dissing Word Perfect and edit for DOS?
  - grecht 7y ago
    No, those are mostly fine, but a blog has different requirements than a text editor. I just find it a bit hard to read, because for example bright pictures really stand out, and I think he’s using different shades of white (or grey) for the font in different elements (like a paragraph or a quote). I just discovered that it’s possible to switch to a light theme, which is much more readable. Still would’ve preferred a nice serif font, though.
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      Yep, it was a comment in jest. I use the readability button and "Dark Background/Light text" on Firefox when things get a bit too wild and bright for me.
mattieuga 7y ago
Are ads > paywalls?
- aloisdg 7y ago
  When a platform let you choose between Scylla and Charybdis, avoid the platform.
overshard 7y ago
I feel like we are beating a dead horse here. Everyone I talk to knows Medium sucks. I personally hate the modal that comes up every time if I'm not logged in and how much of my screen is take up by fixed bars. Medium has a community though. Facebook sucks, but it has a community. Twitter sucks, but it has a community. You are going to get more people to see your post if you put it on Medium. You are going to get more "friends" if you are on Facebook. You are going to interact with more people if you are on Twitter. Creating your own blog will now result in you having to manage your own hosting and possibly even do some "development". Using another solution may not reach the community you expect to reach. I find the discussion of HOW to get communities onto better platforms to be a more interesting topic than why the current platform sucks, especially when that platform doesn't even seem to listen to the criticism.
- justaaron 7y ago
  It's not a dead horse! 99.999999% of all Flutter tutorial content is on Medium, it seems! Medium is NOT our community info-repository, but rather the Facebook of blogging, centralizing content further. Until such a point that the international programming community ceases to centralize ALL INFO EVER on Medium.com we should beat this non-dead horse for all it's worth!
- ctvo 7y ago
  I may be one of the folks not part of the Medium community. I only visit Medium via direct links (on HN, shared on Twitter or shared directly to me by friends). I can't remember the times I've been on Medium's home page or opened up their app to browse. If those direct links sent me to somewhere else entirely tomorrow I wouldn't care.
  - cirgue 7y ago
    I am sure that other patterns of interaction happen on medium, but I know of no one for whom this isn’t their entire interaction with the service: it’s literally a hosting site that people are vaguely aware of because their modal has their name on it.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
someexgamedev 7y ago
It must be doing something right otherwise why spend the time writing a thousand words about how bad it is? If it were truly bad it would just fade into obscurity
- AlexB138 7y ago
  People spilled gallons of ink about the Nationalist Socialist party. Something gets written about because it is relevant, not because it is good.
- rylandgold 7y ago
  I get your point but this is a really bad way to raise it.
- luhego 7y ago
  It seems to me that only a few people care. Most people would prefer to read articles without paywalls and ads. However, between reading an article for free(with ads, paywall) or paying a monthly subscription, it seems people prefer the first option.
Veen 7y ago
You need look no further than Ev Williams' opinions on the future of the web to understand why it sucks: "The idea won’t be to start a website. That will be dead. The individual website won’t matter. The Internet is not going to be about billions of people going to millions of websites. It will be about getting it from centralized websites." http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/09/09/mediums-evan-williams-to-publishers-your-website-is-toast/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/09/09/mediums-eva...
- nimonian 7y ago
  This is pretty much what supermarkets did to the high street in the 20th century and I fully expect it to happen to the web in the 21st.
octosphere 7y ago
This is why I am a big fan of POSSE[0] which is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, a content publishing model that starts with posting content on your own domain first, then syndicating out copies to 3rd party services with permashortlinks back to the original on your site. [0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE Also worth reading: https://medium.com/@joe_wegner/why-i-dont-write-for-medium-c7cc156bc5d9 https://medium.com/@joe_wegner/why-i-dont-write-for-medium-c... https://www.webdistortion.com/2019/05/16/can-we-all-please-stop-using-medium-now/ https://www.webdistortion.com/2019/05/16/can-we-all-please-s...
- bradleyhb 7y ago
  a.k.a. decentralization
  - klez 7y ago
    a.k.a. the web, to be fair. Major siloes were a later development.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rylandgold 7y ago
  This is a very cool concept.
- pier25 7y ago
  So like RSS?
jwlake 7y ago
Medium actually works great if you just block all their cookies. This fixes most "news" and publishing sites.
ycombonator 7y ago
The ethos behind Medium is one of openness and democracy—like the Internet itself. Evan Williams. https://medium.com/@ev/what-were-trying-to-do-with-medium-e2f5bfcf0434 https://medium.com/@ev/what-were-trying-to-do-with-medium-e2... He is chan/rging the world.
- ycombonator 7y ago
  Evan did you downvote ?
sergiotapia 7y ago
What would be the easiest, most inexpensive way to host a blog with code support today?
- steeleduncan 7y ago
  What do you mean by "with code support"?
  - slater 7y ago
    Probably syntax highlighting, as discussed in the article
    - steeleduncan 7y ago
      You can host on Github Pages for free using Jekyll, which supports Syntax Highlighting of code snippets. You can buy your own domain name and point it to your gh pages site.
- rylandgold 7y ago
  Netlify (free) + and static site builder. My blog (the one this article is on) was built with Gridsome (uses Vue.js). I personally like it a lot. Other options are, Jekyll, Gatsby, Hugo and many more. Netlify will make any of those free.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
mecharoid 7y ago
To the front page we go...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
  - mecharoid 7y ago
    now we're here
lioeters 7y ago
Well, at least this one isn't hosted on Medium itself - like the previous one with the exact same title..
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  If you want to target Medium users, Medium is the best place to publish.
stunt 7y ago
Anybody is still using WordPress? From the picture left on top of my head, WP is/was a good option.
calimac 7y ago
I would keep beating medium until their traffic drops to MySpace levels.
manjana 7y ago
One thing that is really nice thou is the typography they have chosen to set on. Most blogs fail at this imo (to a lesser or ocasionally to a disastrous degree).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
tonystubblebine 7y ago
Here's the Dev.to piece on the FCC section that the author is talking about. I wouldn't take FCC's public posturing uncritically as it appears they stole a lot of people's articles on the way off of Medium and ruined a lot of author's SEO in the process. https://dev.to/ben/i-m-concerned-with-the-move-that-freecodecamp-just-pulled-by-leaving-medium-io8 https://dev.to/ben/i-m-concerned-with-the-move-that-freecode...
mft_ 7y ago
Can anyone explain how Medium got to be so big, despite its drawbacks? I mean, it wasn't launched that long ago, and it's not like blogging platforms were rare then. Was it the curation/discovery aspect? Or something else?
- matart 7y ago
  From what I remember it wasn't too bad at the beginning. It was a clean layout and easy to read. That has now been polluted with sign up modals and toolbars. I assume from a content producing side it was easier to not deal with hosting, scaling, etc.
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  They spent quite a lot of money building it out - you can buy a lot with a ton of devs, designers, marketing, being at the centre of the zeitgeist helped by insider founders.
- zrobotics 7y ago
  When it started it wasn't annoying at all, and is even lower-friction for a blog than github pages. However, they don't have enough of a draw to justify the annoyances/pay wall, and larger blogs leaving will make their value proposition even worse. It isn't that hard/expensive to setup a blog with a static generator like Jekyll or Hugo, the hardest part is migrating off of medium. They do have good SEO, but with freecodecamp & hackernoon leaving I would imagine they will start dropping in rankings. Edit: For folks who want WYSIWYG editing, even something like the tools namecheap provides or hosted WordPress are very viable options as well, since not everyone will be comfortable with a static site generator.
  - fastball 7y ago
    Also forestry.io is a pretty good free backend for a static site with WYSIWYG editing.
pnw_hazor 7y ago
Just add it your site blocklist and life will be better.
tonystubblebine 7y ago
Medium publisher here (I run three pubs behind the paywall). I'd love for people to just start considering Medium a paid service like Netflix or the NYTimes. Medium and the NYT offer monthly samples and Netflix doesn't. That's why you end up hitting the modal so often for NYT/Medium. I think there's a bigger point though which is just "Does Medium have articles yet that are worth $5/month?" It would be totally reasonable to answer no. But every month they spend more money on authors. And, you don't see this, they are also ramping up spending on editors. On programming topics, a lot of articles are finally getting a stricter editorial curation and even going through copy edit. Even though I'm involved in editing some of these programming articles, I don't think it'll be enough editorial in the end. I think programming articles should also go through a tech review where the code actually gets tested. I'm hopeful, based on the growth of the programming publication that we'll be able to afford tech reviewers at least by the end of the year. So maybe if it's not worth $5 now, it'll be worth $5 later.
teamski 7y ago
Any Googlers from the search team reading this: Just downrank medium.com. This is the actual problem with Medium. The content on medium is ok but does rarely match the search ranking it has.
Advaith 7y ago
Medium peaked a couple years ago, with many startups leveraging the audience and using it as a blog. I suppose their pivot into aggressive growth + monetization has lost them some really important publications. Arguably, hackernoon and freecodecamp were some of the most popular publications. By removing the 'free' aspect of the content, medium effectively put itself in the same bucket as other platforms. I also don't like medium's UX, especially the highlighting feature. It is really distracting. It'd be cool to have a central store where users can publish content without worrying about uptime, paywalls or anything as such.
- nimonian 7y ago
  I think a lot of people fantasise about a better, more open Medium, and I'm surprised it doesn't exist. Github does a fantastic job of hosting code and keeping people happy (generally). It's generous to individuals and has a good business model. It would be great to have a place to host my content which is as friendly as github. I think cloning Medium wouldn't be horribly difficult. It might even be a good medium (hue hue) term project for a solo dev. Perhaps I'm grossly underestimating the work; perhaps it already exists; or perhaps I've just found something to keep me busy over the summer!
simonsarris 7y ago
I think Medium is great. I pitched an article to an online magazine, about UBI. They said they ran one too recently, so I figured I'd self publish. I could have put it on my site, read by zero people, but I figured a medium.com URL would get farther wherever I submitted it. I was right, but not only that, the Medium twitter account tweeted my article, and Medium asked if they could edit it and make an audio version. Many interesting things came of this signal boosting. People started emailing me from weird places, like economics professors and government researchers, including one guy at the World Bank. I was invited into a secret slack that I'm still part of today (unfortunately most of the good internet is going the way of non-public places, but that's another topic). The net result of one article they boosted has been meeting a lot of people who are now my friends, two years on. Kind of amazing in retrospect. Medium's boosting also allowed me to gather enough Twitter followers to feel like its a useful platform, in a sense unlocking "my own" audience. None of this would have happened if I self hosted. About these issues of canonical URL, why would I care? If I self hosted almost no one would have read it. I am more interested in reading and writing than I am in canonical URLs or a small bar on my screen. I suppose its unfortunate if it annoys 90% of my readers, but that's a lot better than no readers. So thanks Medium. (my only nit is that their editors changed some of my language to be more snarky, so I would not let them edit again)
- YPCrumble 7y ago
  I'd love to read your article about UBI - what's the link?
  - avtar 7y ago
    Probably this: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-income-the-flood-217db9889c07 https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-incom...
    - tomschlick 7y ago
      Saving this. So many people follow the "happy path" when talking about UBI and never mention the what ifs or the hard decisions we'd have to make if it was implemented to prevent gaming (such as, "sorry you spent it all on drugs this month? You don't get any more, including money for food."). Great article.
_iiu1 7y ago
It's true, Medium sucks. What is more pathetic is that we are even here with a Medium to complain about. What part of the 1995 World Wide Web tech is insufficient to deliver a page of legible text and possibly some images? Why on earth is there even a gatekeeper on such? Hosting costs for such are as low as it can get. We have digressed to a level of decadence Geocities could never even hope to achieve. This is MySpace 2.0 dumb. What the actual heck?
sonnyblarney 7y ago
I'ts all the white space. Too much form over function surprisingly gets in the way.
- nimonian 7y ago
  I really like the whitespace. Very Donald Knuth.
tracker1 7y ago
It only there were some kind of system self hosted blogs could use... that you could use an app or site to subscribe to... Like a Really Simple Syndication or something like that. You could pop open your app, and get through all the new posts from everyone you follow really quickly. Nah, Medium and google's fast republishing proxy thingy are so much better.
vishnu_ks 7y ago
I don't think we need a centralised publishing platform like Medium ever again. Anyone can create a blog for free using Wordpress. RSS feeds are amazing and it can easily serve the job of subscribing to these blogs. Look at the podcasting community for example. It's built on top of RSS feeds and it is thriving. Nobody needs a Medium.com in Podcasting world. What we need in the blogging world are more platforms and apps that are built on top of RSS feeds. Better RSS readers. Platforms that makes it easier to easily find and subscribe to blogs using RSS. Platforms that brings audience to self hosted blogs.
- TechFinder 7y ago
  Well decentralization is mostly a sham in its current state. You think people will care about Block.One's Voice app? Steemit more or less died. Hacker Noon got greedy. Wordpress blogs are dead.
  - simplecomplex 7y ago
    Wordpress blogs are not dead. 30% of websites are WordPress. Are you sure it's not your reading habits that have changed? For example, I wake up and check my RSS reader (feedbin) where I subscribe to hundreds of individual blogs (many powered by WordPress). Actually this article was in my feed because I subscribe to HN RSS with a "Blog" keyword filter! I don't have numbers but my anecdotal experience is that more blog articles I read are on WP blogs than not. Ghost is probably the other major platform I see along with static site generators.
    - vishnu_ks 7y ago
      Since you mentioned you read 100s of individual blogs what do you think of https://diff.blog https://diff.blog. Its a side project that I have been working for a while. Do you see yourselves using something like this?
RocketSyntax 7y ago
Jupyter Notebook based blog site?
- billconan 7y ago
  I also think this this a great idea. I'm making https://epiphany.pub https://epiphany.pub , a mixture of medium.com + Jupyter notebook.
ausjke 7y ago
For me it's about too many eye candies there, I really just want simple text with pictures only when it is absolutely necessary. that probably explains why I like HN, simple and brief, it might not be the most impressive UI when you started to use it, but it works well for the long term.
rp36 7y ago
Does Medium support exporting publication? I can export my posts but does not appear the entire publication can be exported or has API support. If anyone have looked into it, appreciate the tips.
- futhey 7y ago
  Relatively easy to crawl. I did HTML -> Turndown (.md) -> Ghost.
TechFinder 7y ago
Yes making $5,000 US when you live in Canada really sucks, I got to admit. Paywalls are everywhere now in Media, that's just the new reality. That any coding writer or personal essayist can make $ supports creators and real people.
_bxg1 7y ago
My theory is that the aggressive business practices and dark patterns are a sign of desperation in the face of a failing business model. Nobody wants the paywall, so authors don't put posts behind the paywall (most of them don't even blog to make money, they do it for publicity or for fun). You might sympathize with Medium here: they're hosting all this content for free and nobody wants to give them the money to pay their hosting costs! But here's the thing: those hosting costs only become significant when they are centralized on a platform like Medium. If I want to go start my own blog site, I can set it up without any coding and host it for single-digit dollars a month. If most authors are blogging simply because they want to, they won't have a problem with paying that nominal fee, and suddenly huge server costs are spread out to the point that they become trivial. Medium is trying to solve a problem that didn't exist. That's why it's sinking.
- tonystubblebine 7y ago
  Reasonable in theory, but in practice subscribers have gone up and that's evident in the payout to authors. Also, in the vacuum of HN & FCC leaving Medium, I had no problem launching a programming pub focused on the subscriber program, finding authors (212 in the first 40 days), and readers (now hitting 25k views/day). What's sort of lost in all of this discussion is the point of the subscriber program. The point is to higher quality articles to people who care about quality. A programmer's hourly rate is well above three figures, why would you waste your time reading low quality articles? Because sometimes they're the best available. But it doesn't have to be that way.
pawurb 7y ago
Tell me more https://abot.app/blog/medium-blogging-platform-seo https://abot.app/blog/medium-blogging-platform-seo
Vordimous 7y ago
So I have been putting together a way for people to more easily make their own blogging platform. It would kind of mimic a blog or social media platform, but since everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack it could easily be converted to a full website or in your case you could simply delete the repository or any number of your posts because they are just files in your repository. Any feedback would be wonderful. https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ Everything is owned by the end user. This is only providing a recipe for people to use. I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.
socrates1998 7y ago
I honestly haven't read more than three articles since most of their content went behind a paywall when I used to read one or two a day. I wasn't aware that the publisher got to choose if they wanted to put up a paywall or not.
rinze 7y ago
I don't want to violate the Prime Directive, but quoting from $that_site: "The idea that someone could just rent space in a colocation facility, install a web server, and start posting information onto the internet is, sadly, one hundred percent impossible, and can never happen." So we have to go to Medium to publish. Not even Wordpress.com. (gasps) Blogspot!
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  "That site" == n-gate.
stared 7y ago
I have a votum separatum. I think it is lovely that Medium charges people directly, instead of: - selling data - spamming with adverts What else do you expect? (I'm flabbergasted that most people prefer shady ways to get revenue... and then criticize it as well. Even here. Let's PAY for social networks and services. And let's finally acknowledge that the "free" model is more than often tricky/shady or at least - not sustainable.)
octref 7y ago
> Let's start with something simple, like syntax highlighting. I built a syntax highlighter, Shiki, that allows you to use any theme from VS Code to color your code [0]. It works great with Node now as a static website generator plugin, but with some effort you can run it all in client side as well. TypeScript's new handbook is using Shiki [1]. I can't really believe how it's 2019 and Medium and Slack still can't syntax highlight code snippets. [0]: http://shiki.matsu.io/ http://shiki.matsu.io/ [1]: https://microsoft.github.io/TypeScript-New-Handbook/chapters/classes/ https://microsoft.github.io/TypeScript-New-Handbook/chapters...
- caspervonb 7y ago
  Syntax highlighting add any information tho, without it it's easier to bring focus to elements that matter with emphasis.
TechFinder 7y ago
What if the bro-culture of coders is an echo bubble that doesn't even understand what Medium has become? So you guys are going to create your own paywalled walled garden for coding content? What's your solution even. https://medium.com/1-one-infinity/why-medium-doesnt-suck-f04329de153f https://medium.com/1-one-infinity/why-medium-doesnt-suck-f04...
owens99 7y ago
Medium is also blocked in China. Meaning 1.4B people can’t access your content.
vowelless 7y ago
“There are also a few Medium alternatives out there. I personally post my blog to Dev.to (which you might be reading this on right now) as they support the features I need to control my own content. As a product guy, there are definitely some UI changes I would make, but the overall experience is much better than Medium.” Is Dev.to a developer focused medium? It looks really slick! Could it be a future Hugo and Medium replacement for developers personal websites/blogs?
- tonystubblebine 7y ago
  Dev.to is great. It's part of why I don't understand the point of FCC and HN leaving Medium. Why try to be the go-to independent platform for programming articles when Dev.to is already doing it so well.
gowthamgts12 7y ago
Part of public domain now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_(website)#Criticism_and_Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_(website)#Criticism_and...
- tonystubblebine 7y ago
  Oh brother. An alternative take on that criticism is that FCC pulled off a huge copyright heist: https://dev.to/ben/i-m-concerned-with-the-move-that-freecodecamp-just-pulled-by-leaving-medium-io8 https://dev.to/ben/i-m-concerned-with-the-move-that-freecode... I'm pretty sure that what FCC calls extortion was actually just the end of a free ride. Based on what I know of the ecosystem and the offer that was made to me as a publisher, I think the content of the Medium's approach would have been along these lines: "For the past several years, you've been getting a free ride where we gave free hosting, free traffic, free readers and created a situation where most programming authors on our platform looked to you as the first place to publish, i.e. you got free authors. That free ride is over. We think you have these options: A) We have pivoted to a subscription business. Do you want to pivot with us and publish within our paywall? If so, we'll continue giving you readers and authors, along with an editorial budget and a page-view based performance bonus. Also we'll start paying your authors out of our end. B) Stay on our free platform. You'll still get the benefit of the SEO traffic from the articles you've already published and you can continue to publish as much as you want. We won't algorithmically promote your articles though and that will probably mean that fewer authors will choose you as their publisher. C) You can leave. The problem with leaving though is that you don't own the copyright to any of the articles in your publication or your subscribers. So you can ask your current readers and authors to move with you, but on the surface it looks like this will cost you quite a bit of traffic." I'm not sure about FCC's actual numbers, but I imagine the option A would have paid $20-50k/month in "profit" after costs of editing, authors, etc. It also would have significantly improved the quality of the articles. Not that the articles were bad, but a bigger editorial budget would have made them even better. What it looks like FCC actually did was option D. Copy all of the articles in their pub (clear copyright infringement), taking a few million views per month in SEO traffic and then basically dare Medium to sue them. But Medium doesn't have standing because they don't own these copyrights either, so Medium's not doing anything. Instead, it's up to about 1k FCC authors who each individually are having to decide whether to take legal action (usually a DMCA complaint to FCC's hosting provider) or jump through FCC's hoops. FCC didn't even auto-create accounts for the authors, so in order to reclaim control of their article authors are having to either get on the phone with FCC or go through Twitter DM. However, if the author does that work, it does appear that FCC is willing to delete the article and/or give control back to the author.
garkin 7y ago
My only problem with Medium are rehosted "personal blog" junk domains. Otherwise uBlock would work without any additional effort.
neya 7y ago
There's an even major problem which the author hasn't mentioned. But I can understand if perhaps the author hasn't experienced it. Medium embraces censorship. Medium has a content policy that's allows it to take sides. For example, Medium is very pro towards certain topics and anti against some. Eg. writing anything anti-feminism will get your account banned (even if presented with logical arguments, stats and facts). Medium will ban you for some dumb reason if you write anything pro-white people, Trump, Taiwan and sometimes Hongkong. I know this because my friend wrote a stellar piece about a professor who openly expressed hatred towards males and who held a senior position in a university [1] and her account was banned the very next day. To me, this seems like a strategy for Medium to become profitable by controlling/swaying people's opinions which is a much larger business than hosting blog content. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men/2018/06/08/f1a3a8e0-6451-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html?utm_term=.3d46f7468e8a https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men...
cftorres 7y ago
The author says paywalls are not the problem but as a reader I don't understand why the autors have to ask for those high prices. The articles you can find in Medium are well written but they aren't scientific articles, with a lot of resourses and time invested to find some data. And the way I find those articles are more like a coincidence than a specific search for economic purposes. I think internet is changing abruptly because of an unsustainable ambition, we are turning all interactions into transactions.
smitty1e 7y ago
I'm allergic to paywalls. While I can't fault their capitalism, life is just too short. There isn't ANY lack of diversion elsewhere, for example, here.
bananamerica 7y ago
As a reader, I find it slow and cluttered. It may have advantages for publishers, but I only open Medium links when strictly necessary.

502 points by rylandgold 7y ago

Until such a time that I don't find ALL programming info on Medium.com or it's subsites I will continue to decry this increasing centralization of content. The web is our tool for liberation and this is a subversion of the very principles that the web was founded upon.

duxup 7y ago

I know SEO and visibility is high on Medium. I'm still a bit amazed that so many people, many of them who aren't short on visibility, chose to host their content on that site. Most of it i would have rather read on someone's personal site as IMO that adds a lot of character and context.

lmm 7y ago
Every personal site I've ever seen looks worse than Medium. I don't want the "character" of a slightly different UI every time, I want the interface to get out of my way so that I can get on with reading the actual content. Medium does that (yes, subject to logging in, but you can do that once and forget about it).
- duxup 7y ago
  Man and I've never found much to like with the layout of Medium. The text is nice and big and that's about it. It gets as messy as any personal blog IMO.
- Madeindjs 7y ago
  Firefox's reader mode does exactly what you looking for.
  - lmm 7y ago
    When it works. It's still an extra click even then.
    - zentiggr 7y ago
      Still far far better than dealing with all of Medium's formatting and site practices.
    - athenot 7y ago
      Safari can defaut to reader mode for some sites. I would assume the same is possible with Firefox.
- zrobotics 7y ago
  Different strokes for different folks I suppose, but rarely have I seen a personal site with a UI as obnoxious as Medium, I won't even click medium links on HN unless the content looks tremendously interesting. Especially as on most personal blogs if I'm only reading the linked article I don't have to engage with any of the UI, whereas with medium I have to dismiss the annoying modal dialogs.
- tjoff 7y ago
  Creating an account for a site that doesn't respect its users so that the nagging disappears? Man the internet must suck for that sentence to exist.
- fuzzybeard 7y ago
  On a related note, this is why when I search for a person, film, or other thing, I'll take the Wikipedia result every time over IMDB or some top ranking site. With Wikipedia, I know how the information will be formatted so I can find what I need quickly.
nacs 7y ago
I think its because of the ease of startup -- its essentially a good looking by default blog (as long as you ignore the paywalls, newsletter signups, "Join Medium" popups" etc) that is free and takes like a minute to get started with. So people join, start publishing then realize its too much work to switch so they just continue using it.
kowdermeister 7y ago
Hosting content there is okay as long as you put your own domain on it. The migrating away from it won't cause too much problem if some trouble rises.
- rylandgold 7y ago
  They are specifically making that process harder and harder. That's partly why HackerNoon left
  - TechFinder 7y ago
    And where are they now, HackerNoon? Growing a team and scamming investors?
- LunaSea 7y ago
  The custom domain feature doesn't exist anymore.
trustfundbaby 7y ago
> Most of it i would have rather read on someone's personal site as IMO that adds a lot of character and context. And there are probably LOTS of people who don't care. Feels like folks on HN miss this important point.

dickeytk 7y ago

Must be a slow HN day if we've got another post about Medium

duxup 7y ago
Yeah it's getting to be "a bit much" with the volume of such articles.

grecht 7y ago

I agree with the author: It sucks. But so does white font on a blue background, since we’re also talking about readability. At least they got that right!

arvinaminpour 7y ago
savage
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Are you dissing Word Perfect and edit for DOS?
- grecht 7y ago
  No, those are mostly fine, but a blog has different requirements than a text editor. I just find it a bit hard to read, because for example bright pictures really stand out, and I think he’s using different shades of white (or grey) for the font in different elements (like a paragraph or a quote). I just discovered that it’s possible to switch to a light theme, which is much more readable. Still would’ve preferred a nice serif font, though.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Yep, it was a comment in jest. I use the readability button and "Dark Background/Light text" on Firefox when things get a bit too wild and bright for me.

mattieuga 7y ago

Are ads > paywalls?

aloisdg 7y ago
When a platform let you choose between Scylla and Charybdis, avoid the platform.

overshard 7y ago

I feel like we are beating a dead horse here. Everyone I talk to knows Medium sucks. I personally hate the modal that comes up every time if I'm not logged in and how much of my screen is take up by fixed bars. Medium has a community though. Facebook sucks, but it has a community. Twitter sucks, but it has a community. You are going to get more people to see your post if you put it on Medium. You are going to get more "friends" if you are on Facebook. You are going to interact with more people if you are on Twitter. Creating your own blog will now result in you having to manage your own hosting and possibly even do some "development". Using another solution may not reach the community you expect to reach. I find the discussion of HOW to get communities onto better platforms to be a more interesting topic than why the current platform sucks, especially when that platform doesn't even seem to listen to the criticism.

justaaron 7y ago
It's not a dead horse! 99.999999% of all Flutter tutorial content is on Medium, it seems! Medium is NOT our community info-repository, but rather the Facebook of blogging, centralizing content further. Until such a point that the international programming community ceases to centralize ALL INFO EVER on Medium.com we should beat this non-dead horse for all it's worth!
ctvo 7y ago
I may be one of the folks not part of the Medium community. I only visit Medium via direct links (on HN, shared on Twitter or shared directly to me by friends). I can't remember the times I've been on Medium's home page or opened up their app to browse. If those direct links sent me to somewhere else entirely tomorrow I wouldn't care.
- cirgue 7y ago
  I am sure that other patterns of interaction happen on medium, but I know of no one for whom this isn’t their entire interaction with the service: it’s literally a hosting site that people are vaguely aware of because their modal has their name on it.
- CydeWeys 7y ago

someexgamedev 7y ago

It must be doing something right otherwise why spend the time writing a thousand words about how bad it is? If it were truly bad it would just fade into obscurity

AlexB138 7y ago
People spilled gallons of ink about the Nationalist Socialist party. Something gets written about because it is relevant, not because it is good.
rylandgold 7y ago
I get your point but this is a really bad way to raise it.
luhego 7y ago
It seems to me that only a few people care. Most people would prefer to read articles without paywalls and ads. However, between reading an article for free(with ads, paywall) or paying a monthly subscription, it seems people prefer the first option.

Veen 7y ago

You need look no further than Ev Williams' opinions on the future of the web to understand why it sucks: "The idea won’t be to start a website. That will be dead. The individual website won’t matter. The Internet is not going to be about billions of people going to millions of websites. It will be about getting it from centralized websites." http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/09/09/mediums-evan-williams-to-publishers-your-website-is-toast/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/09/09/mediums-eva...

nimonian 7y ago
This is pretty much what supermarkets did to the high street in the 20th century and I fully expect it to happen to the web in the 21st.

octosphere 7y ago

This is why I am a big fan of POSSE[0] which is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, a content publishing model that starts with posting content on your own domain first, then syndicating out copies to 3rd party services with permashortlinks back to the original on your site. [0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE Also worth reading: https://medium.com/@joe_wegner/why-i-dont-write-for-medium-c7cc156bc5d9 https://medium.com/@joe_wegner/why-i-dont-write-for-medium-c... https://www.webdistortion.com/2019/05/16/can-we-all-please-stop-using-medium-now/ https://www.webdistortion.com/2019/05/16/can-we-all-please-s...

bradleyhb 7y ago
a.k.a. decentralization
- klez 7y ago
  a.k.a. the web, to be fair. Major siloes were a later development.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rylandgold 7y ago
This is a very cool concept.
pier25 7y ago
So like RSS?

jwlake 7y ago

Medium actually works great if you just block all their cookies. This fixes most "news" and publishing sites.

ycombonator 7y ago

The ethos behind Medium is one of openness and democracy—like the Internet itself. Evan Williams. https://medium.com/@ev/what-were-trying-to-do-with-medium-e2f5bfcf0434 https://medium.com/@ev/what-were-trying-to-do-with-medium-e2... He is chan/rging the world.

ycombonator 7y ago
Evan did you downvote ?

sergiotapia 7y ago

What would be the easiest, most inexpensive way to host a blog with code support today?

steeleduncan 7y ago
What do you mean by "with code support"?
- slater 7y ago
  Probably syntax highlighting, as discussed in the article
  - steeleduncan 7y ago
    You can host on Github Pages for free using Jekyll, which supports Syntax Highlighting of code snippets. You can buy your own domain name and point it to your gh pages site.
rylandgold 7y ago
Netlify (free) + and static site builder. My blog (the one this article is on) was built with Gridsome (uses Vue.js). I personally like it a lot. Other options are, Jekyll, Gatsby, Hugo and many more. Netlify will make any of those free.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

mecharoid 7y ago

To the front page we go...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
- mecharoid 7y ago
  now we're here

lioeters 7y ago

Well, at least this one isn't hosted on Medium itself - like the previous one with the exact same title..

frosted-flakes 7y ago
If you want to target Medium users, Medium is the best place to publish.

stunt 7y ago

Anybody is still using WordPress? From the picture left on top of my head, WP is/was a good option.

calimac 7y ago

I would keep beating medium until their traffic drops to MySpace levels.

manjana 7y ago

One thing that is really nice thou is the typography they have chosen to set on. Most blogs fail at this imo (to a lesser or ocasionally to a disastrous degree).

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

tonystubblebine 7y ago

Here's the Dev.to piece on the FCC section that the author is talking about. I wouldn't take FCC's public posturing uncritically as it appears they stole a lot of people's articles on the way off of Medium and ruined a lot of author's SEO in the process. https://dev.to/ben/i-m-concerned-with-the-move-that-freecodecamp-just-pulled-by-leaving-medium-io8 https://dev.to/ben/i-m-concerned-with-the-move-that-freecode...

mft_ 7y ago

Can anyone explain how Medium got to be so big, despite its drawbacks? I mean, it wasn't launched that long ago, and it's not like blogging platforms were rare then. Was it the curation/discovery aspect? Or something else?

matart 7y ago
From what I remember it wasn't too bad at the beginning. It was a clean layout and easy to read. That has now been polluted with sign up modals and toolbars. I assume from a content producing side it was easier to not deal with hosting, scaling, etc.
sonnyblarney 7y ago
They spent quite a lot of money building it out - you can buy a lot with a ton of devs, designers, marketing, being at the centre of the zeitgeist helped by insider founders.
zrobotics 7y ago
When it started it wasn't annoying at all, and is even lower-friction for a blog than github pages. However, they don't have enough of a draw to justify the annoyances/pay wall, and larger blogs leaving will make their value proposition even worse. It isn't that hard/expensive to setup a blog with a static generator like Jekyll or Hugo, the hardest part is migrating off of medium. They do have good SEO, but with freecodecamp & hackernoon leaving I would imagine they will start dropping in rankings. Edit: For folks who want WYSIWYG editing, even something like the tools namecheap provides or hosted WordPress are very viable options as well, since not everyone will be comfortable with a static site generator.
- fastball 7y ago
  Also forestry.io is a pretty good free backend for a static site with WYSIWYG editing.

pnw_hazor 7y ago

Just add it your site blocklist and life will be better.

tonystubblebine 7y ago

Medium publisher here (I run three pubs behind the paywall). I'd love for people to just start considering Medium a paid service like Netflix or the NYTimes. Medium and the NYT offer monthly samples and Netflix doesn't. That's why you end up hitting the modal so often for NYT/Medium. I think there's a bigger point though which is just "Does Medium have articles yet that are worth $5/month?" It would be totally reasonable to answer no. But every month they spend more money on authors. And, you don't see this, they are also ramping up spending on editors. On programming topics, a lot of articles are finally getting a stricter editorial curation and even going through copy edit. Even though I'm involved in editing some of these programming articles, I don't think it'll be enough editorial in the end. I think programming articles should also go through a tech review where the code actually gets tested. I'm hopeful, based on the growth of the programming publication that we'll be able to afford tech reviewers at least by the end of the year. So maybe if it's not worth $5 now, it'll be worth $5 later.

teamski 7y ago

Any Googlers from the search team reading this: Just downrank medium.com. This is the actual problem with Medium. The content on medium is ok but does rarely match the search ranking it has.

Advaith 7y ago

Medium peaked a couple years ago, with many startups leveraging the audience and using it as a blog. I suppose their pivot into aggressive growth + monetization has lost them some really important publications. Arguably, hackernoon and freecodecamp were some of the most popular publications. By removing the 'free' aspect of the content, medium effectively put itself in the same bucket as other platforms. I also don't like medium's UX, especially the highlighting feature. It is really distracting. It'd be cool to have a central store where users can publish content without worrying about uptime, paywalls or anything as such.

nimonian 7y ago
I think a lot of people fantasise about a better, more open Medium, and I'm surprised it doesn't exist. Github does a fantastic job of hosting code and keeping people happy (generally). It's generous to individuals and has a good business model. It would be great to have a place to host my content which is as friendly as github. I think cloning Medium wouldn't be horribly difficult. It might even be a good medium (hue hue) term project for a solo dev. Perhaps I'm grossly underestimating the work; perhaps it already exists; or perhaps I've just found something to keep me busy over the summer!

simonsarris 7y ago

I think Medium is great. I pitched an article to an online magazine, about UBI. They said they ran one too recently, so I figured I'd self publish. I could have put it on my site, read by zero people, but I figured a medium.com URL would get farther wherever I submitted it. I was right, but not only that, the Medium twitter account tweeted my article, and Medium asked if they could edit it and make an audio version. Many interesting things came of this signal boosting. People started emailing me from weird places, like economics professors and government researchers, including one guy at the World Bank. I was invited into a secret slack that I'm still part of today (unfortunately most of the good internet is going the way of non-public places, but that's another topic). The net result of one article they boosted has been meeting a lot of people who are now my friends, two years on. Kind of amazing in retrospect. Medium's boosting also allowed me to gather enough Twitter followers to feel like its a useful platform, in a sense unlocking "my own" audience. None of this would have happened if I self hosted. About these issues of canonical URL, why would I care? If I self hosted almost no one would have read it. I am more interested in reading and writing than I am in canonical URLs or a small bar on my screen. I suppose its unfortunate if it annoys 90% of my readers, but that's a lot better than no readers. So thanks Medium. (my only nit is that their editors changed some of my language to be more snarky, so I would not let them edit again)

YPCrumble 7y ago
I'd love to read your article about UBI - what's the link?
- avtar 7y ago
  Probably this: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-income-the-flood-217db9889c07 https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-incom...
  - tomschlick 7y ago
    Saving this. So many people follow the "happy path" when talking about UBI and never mention the what ifs or the hard decisions we'd have to make if it was implemented to prevent gaming (such as, "sorry you spent it all on drugs this month? You don't get any more, including money for food."). Great article.

_iiu1 7y ago

It's true, Medium sucks. What is more pathetic is that we are even here with a Medium to complain about. What part of the 1995 World Wide Web tech is insufficient to deliver a page of legible text and possibly some images? Why on earth is there even a gatekeeper on such? Hosting costs for such are as low as it can get. We have digressed to a level of decadence Geocities could never even hope to achieve. This is MySpace 2.0 dumb. What the actual heck?

sonnyblarney 7y ago

I'ts all the white space. Too much form over function surprisingly gets in the way.

nimonian 7y ago
I really like the whitespace. Very Donald Knuth.

tracker1 7y ago

It only there were some kind of system self hosted blogs could use... that you could use an app or site to subscribe to... Like a Really Simple Syndication or something like that. You could pop open your app, and get through all the new posts from everyone you follow really quickly. Nah, Medium and google's fast republishing proxy thingy are so much better.

vishnu_ks 7y ago

I don't think we need a centralised publishing platform like Medium ever again. Anyone can create a blog for free using Wordpress. RSS feeds are amazing and it can easily serve the job of subscribing to these blogs. Look at the podcasting community for example. It's built on top of RSS feeds and it is thriving. Nobody needs a Medium.com in Podcasting world. What we need in the blogging world are more platforms and apps that are built on top of RSS feeds. Better RSS readers. Platforms that makes it easier to easily find and subscribe to blogs using RSS. Platforms that brings audience to self hosted blogs.

TechFinder 7y ago
Well decentralization is mostly a sham in its current state. You think people will care about Block.One's Voice app? Steemit more or less died. Hacker Noon got greedy. Wordpress blogs are dead.
- simplecomplex 7y ago
  Wordpress blogs are not dead. 30% of websites are WordPress. Are you sure it's not your reading habits that have changed? For example, I wake up and check my RSS reader (feedbin) where I subscribe to hundreds of individual blogs (many powered by WordPress). Actually this article was in my feed because I subscribe to HN RSS with a "Blog" keyword filter! I don't have numbers but my anecdotal experience is that more blog articles I read are on WP blogs than not. Ghost is probably the other major platform I see along with static site generators.
  - vishnu_ks 7y ago
    Since you mentioned you read 100s of individual blogs what do you think of https://diff.blog https://diff.blog. Its a side project that I have been working for a while. Do you see yourselves using something like this?

RocketSyntax 7y ago

Jupyter Notebook based blog site?

billconan 7y ago
I also think this this a great idea. I'm making https://epiphany.pub https://epiphany.pub , a mixture of medium.com + Jupyter notebook.

ausjke 7y ago

For me it's about too many eye candies there, I really just want simple text with pictures only when it is absolutely necessary. that probably explains why I like HN, simple and brief, it might not be the most impressive UI when you started to use it, but it works well for the long term.

rp36 7y ago

Does Medium support exporting publication? I can export my posts but does not appear the entire publication can be exported or has API support. If anyone have looked into it, appreciate the tips.

futhey 7y ago
Relatively easy to crawl. I did HTML -> Turndown (.md) -> Ghost.

TechFinder 7y ago

Yes making $5,000 US when you live in Canada really sucks, I got to admit. Paywalls are everywhere now in Media, that's just the new reality. That any coding writer or personal essayist can make $ supports creators and real people.

_bxg1 7y ago

My theory is that the aggressive business practices and dark patterns are a sign of desperation in the face of a failing business model. Nobody wants the paywall, so authors don't put posts behind the paywall (most of them don't even blog to make money, they do it for publicity or for fun). You might sympathize with Medium here: they're hosting all this content for free and nobody wants to give them the money to pay their hosting costs! But here's the thing: those hosting costs only become significant when they are centralized on a platform like Medium. If I want to go start my own blog site, I can set it up without any coding and host it for single-digit dollars a month. If most authors are blogging simply because they want to, they won't have a problem with paying that nominal fee, and suddenly huge server costs are spread out to the point that they become trivial. Medium is trying to solve a problem that didn't exist. That's why it's sinking.

tonystubblebine 7y ago
Reasonable in theory, but in practice subscribers have gone up and that's evident in the payout to authors. Also, in the vacuum of HN & FCC leaving Medium, I had no problem launching a programming pub focused on the subscriber program, finding authors (212 in the first 40 days), and readers (now hitting 25k views/day). What's sort of lost in all of this discussion is the point of the subscriber program. The point is to higher quality articles to people who care about quality. A programmer's hourly rate is well above three figures, why would you waste your time reading low quality articles? Because sometimes they're the best available. But it doesn't have to be that way.

pawurb 7y ago

Tell me more https://abot.app/blog/medium-blogging-platform-seo https://abot.app/blog/medium-blogging-platform-seo

Vordimous 7y ago

So I have been putting together a way for people to more easily make their own blogging platform. It would kind of mimic a blog or social media platform, but since everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack it could easily be converted to a full website or in your case you could simply delete the repository or any number of your posts because they are just files in your repository. Any feedback would be wonderful. https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ Everything is owned by the end user. This is only providing a recipe for people to use. I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.

socrates1998 7y ago

I honestly haven't read more than three articles since most of their content went behind a paywall when I used to read one or two a day. I wasn't aware that the publisher got to choose if they wanted to put up a paywall or not.

rinze 7y ago

I don't want to violate the Prime Directive, but quoting from $that_site: "The idea that someone could just rent space in a colocation facility, install a web server, and start posting information onto the internet is, sadly, one hundred percent impossible, and can never happen." So we have to go to Medium to publish. Not even Wordpress.com. (gasps) Blogspot!

dredmorbius 7y ago
"That site" == n-gate.

stared 7y ago

I have a votum separatum. I think it is lovely that Medium charges people directly, instead of: - selling data - spamming with adverts What else do you expect? (I'm flabbergasted that most people prefer shady ways to get revenue... and then criticize it as well. Even here. Let's PAY for social networks and services. And let's finally acknowledge that the "free" model is more than often tricky/shady or at least - not sustainable.)

octref 7y ago

> Let's start with something simple, like syntax highlighting. I built a syntax highlighter, Shiki, that allows you to use any theme from VS Code to color your code [0]. It works great with Node now as a static website generator plugin, but with some effort you can run it all in client side as well. TypeScript's new handbook is using Shiki [1]. I can't really believe how it's 2019 and Medium and Slack still can't syntax highlight code snippets. [0]: http://shiki.matsu.io/ http://shiki.matsu.io/ [1]: https://microsoft.github.io/TypeScript-New-Handbook/chapters/classes/ https://microsoft.github.io/TypeScript-New-Handbook/chapters...

caspervonb 7y ago
Syntax highlighting add any information tho, without it it's easier to bring focus to elements that matter with emphasis.

TechFinder 7y ago

What if the bro-culture of coders is an echo bubble that doesn't even understand what Medium has become? So you guys are going to create your own paywalled walled garden for coding content? What's your solution even. https://medium.com/1-one-infinity/why-medium-doesnt-suck-f04329de153f https://medium.com/1-one-infinity/why-medium-doesnt-suck-f04...

owens99 7y ago

Medium is also blocked in China. Meaning 1.4B people can’t access your content.

vowelless 7y ago

“There are also a few Medium alternatives out there. I personally post my blog to Dev.to (which you might be reading this on right now) as they support the features I need to control my own content. As a product guy, there are definitely some UI changes I would make, but the overall experience is much better than Medium.” Is Dev.to a developer focused medium? It looks really slick! Could it be a future Hugo and Medium replacement for developers personal websites/blogs?

tonystubblebine 7y ago
Dev.to is great. It's part of why I don't understand the point of FCC and HN leaving Medium. Why try to be the go-to independent platform for programming articles when Dev.to is already doing it so well.

gowthamgts12 7y ago

Part of public domain now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_(website)#Criticism_and_Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_(website)#Criticism_and...

tonystubblebine 7y ago
Oh brother. An alternative take on that criticism is that FCC pulled off a huge copyright heist: https://dev.to/ben/i-m-concerned-with-the-move-that-freecodecamp-just-pulled-by-leaving-medium-io8 https://dev.to/ben/i-m-concerned-with-the-move-that-freecode... I'm pretty sure that what FCC calls extortion was actually just the end of a free ride. Based on what I know of the ecosystem and the offer that was made to me as a publisher, I think the content of the Medium's approach would have been along these lines: "For the past several years, you've been getting a free ride where we gave free hosting, free traffic, free readers and created a situation where most programming authors on our platform looked to you as the first place to publish, i.e. you got free authors. That free ride is over. We think you have these options: A) We have pivoted to a subscription business. Do you want to pivot with us and publish within our paywall? If so, we'll continue giving you readers and authors, along with an editorial budget and a page-view based performance bonus. Also we'll start paying your authors out of our end. B) Stay on our free platform. You'll still get the benefit of the SEO traffic from the articles you've already published and you can continue to publish as much as you want. We won't algorithmically promote your articles though and that will probably mean that fewer authors will choose you as their publisher. C) You can leave. The problem with leaving though is that you don't own the copyright to any of the articles in your publication or your subscribers. So you can ask your current readers and authors to move with you, but on the surface it looks like this will cost you quite a bit of traffic." I'm not sure about FCC's actual numbers, but I imagine the option A would have paid $20-50k/month in "profit" after costs of editing, authors, etc. It also would have significantly improved the quality of the articles. Not that the articles were bad, but a bigger editorial budget would have made them even better. What it looks like FCC actually did was option D. Copy all of the articles in their pub (clear copyright infringement), taking a few million views per month in SEO traffic and then basically dare Medium to sue them. But Medium doesn't have standing because they don't own these copyrights either, so Medium's not doing anything. Instead, it's up to about 1k FCC authors who each individually are having to decide whether to take legal action (usually a DMCA complaint to FCC's hosting provider) or jump through FCC's hoops. FCC didn't even auto-create accounts for the authors, so in order to reclaim control of their article authors are having to either get on the phone with FCC or go through Twitter DM. However, if the author does that work, it does appear that FCC is willing to delete the article and/or give control back to the author.

garkin 7y ago

My only problem with Medium are rehosted "personal blog" junk domains. Otherwise uBlock would work without any additional effort.

neya 7y ago

There's an even major problem which the author hasn't mentioned. But I can understand if perhaps the author hasn't experienced it. Medium embraces censorship. Medium has a content policy that's allows it to take sides. For example, Medium is very pro towards certain topics and anti against some. Eg. writing anything anti-feminism will get your account banned (even if presented with logical arguments, stats and facts). Medium will ban you for some dumb reason if you write anything pro-white people, Trump, Taiwan and sometimes Hongkong. I know this because my friend wrote a stellar piece about a professor who openly expressed hatred towards males and who held a senior position in a university [1] and her account was banned the very next day. To me, this seems like a strategy for Medium to become profitable by controlling/swaying people's opinions which is a much larger business than hosting blog content. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men/2018/06/08/f1a3a8e0-6451-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html?utm_term=.3d46f7468e8a https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men...

cftorres 7y ago

The author says paywalls are not the problem but as a reader I don't understand why the autors have to ask for those high prices. The articles you can find in Medium are well written but they aren't scientific articles, with a lot of resourses and time invested to find some data. And the way I find those articles are more like a coincidence than a specific search for economic purposes. I think internet is changing abruptly because of an unsustainable ambition, we are turning all interactions into transactions.

smitty1e 7y ago

I'm allergic to paywalls. While I can't fault their capitalism, life is just too short. There isn't ANY lack of diversion elsewhere, for example, here.

bananamerica 7y ago

As a reader, I find it slow and cluttered. It may have advantages for publishers, but I only open Medium links when strictly necessary.