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.
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.
If those direct links sent me somewhere else tomorrow I would care, because odds are the alternative would be better. Medium is seriously annoying with its sign-in nags and large amounts of the screen taken up with unnecessary bars.
I just want to read an article. Medium is a worse experience than average in that regard.
I use the Web Annoyances Ultralist[0]. Blocks basically everything except the header (non-sticky of course) and the text, which ends up as a nice centered column on a white background.
But the ones who sent you those links would care. They want you to join the community, because of the network effects: having you there makes it more valuable to them. Each person there finds is more valuable because of the other people there, rather than just dropping by.
It's the same reason people have one Facebook page rather than thousands of small social networks. Even people who also participate in the smaller networks with a specific focus also have a Facebook page for their generic, lowest-common-denominator activity.
You may want to do nothing more with the Medium page than read it and leave, but they're going to keep pushing you do more than that. Despite the network effect there is still room for a few very broad social networks because they suit different communication styles. That's why Instagram exists. (It's also why Twitter exists; I can't figure out the merit there but its denizens seem to like it.)
Medium is one other such niche, for longer-form content. Or at least, they'd like it to be. It's not yet so big that the network effects are obvious, and that's why I don't have an account either. I was also very late to FB, and I still don't like it. But I'm there because the network effect of having all of my other friends there made it a thing I needed.
You can stay out of it forever, but you'll continue to get pressure to join until either it dies or you do.
> But the ones who sent you those links would care. They want you to join the community, because of the network effects: having you there makes it more valuable to them. Each person there finds is more valuable because of the other people there, rather than just dropping by.
I'm not sure your statement is 100% accurate. I know plenty of people who share a link just because it contains content worthy of reading. Sharing that content does not mean that you want others to join the community around it.
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.
>I may be one of the folks not part of the Medium community.
The majority of people on earth are not part of the Medium community.
The problem is Medium still has a community of say a hundred million readers, and nothing else (which is a blogging aggregator) has a community just as large.
Most comments I see about Medium tend to have this sentiment of "The service and tech suck, but the community and distribution are powerful."
In my very anecdotal experience, I've found that posting on Medium only gets me distribution if I choose to publish it on a popular publication; but does mostly nothing if only published on Medium. I have a Writer role on HackerNoon, which is one of the larger pubs on Medium. I also have about ~200 followers on Medium on my own account. I've found that when I post an article and publish on HackerNoon, I get a lot of reads and claps quickly. When I post one just under my own Medium account, it hardly gets anything. I'm not sure having someone "follow" you does much at all in surfacing your post. If my post is about a topic that is frequently searched (e.g. how to set up something on some Linux distro, etc.), eventually the SEO traffic starts flowing in and I get a clap every now and then. But that can be true of a blog hosted anywhere.
My experience as a publisher is the opposite. I feel like publication follows don't matter hardly at all. With 300k followers, we could still end up with an article that gets less than 1k views. However, an author's followers seem to matter a lot.
I think Medium barely has a community. I also think you're right when you say
> 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.
But you need to remember that's a very progressive position. Most friends I have are completely unaware that Medium has become a crap platform
Define barely. With all due and sincere respect, have you ever tried to build an audience or community from zero without partners, a leverage point, or an ad budget?
Even getting a quality audience of thousands is non-trivial or costs money or needs a clever strategy.
It reminds me of when people say, "I have an idea for a startup but I'm worried about people stealing it."
I try to explain, look, unless you're John Carmack or are we'll known for certain expertise, or have a track record, likely you can post your idea publicly on your blog and no one will ever copy it, even if it's a decent concept.
It's a rough analogy, but the point is people just don't care about things as much as we might think, unless they have a good reason to (like it's Carmack's new startup).
> With all due and sincere respect, have you ever tried to build an audience or community from zero without partners, a leverage point, or an ad budget?
Yes.
> Even getting a quality audience of thousands is non-trivial or costs money or needs a clever strategy.
That hasn't been my experience. I started with a blog. Then I wrote a book which I published online a chapter at a time. Now I'm on a second book.
I'm at the point now where I'm lucky enough to have many more people read what I write than I ever expected. My first book has sold many many more copies in print, EPUB, and Kindle than I ever dreamed.
I don't think I had a clever strategy. I just put a ton of effort into writing things that people find valuable. I think the real problem many people suffer from is that they aren't trying to do that. They have mostly selfish goals around growing their brand or their business, and actually satisfying readers is merely a means to that end.
I certainly personally benefit much more than I ever expected from mt writing, but if I ever felt like a I wrote a thing that wasn't worth the time a reader spends reading it, I'd delete it in a heartbeat.
> I try to explain, look, unless you're John Carmack or are we'll known for certain expertise, or have a track record, likely you can post your idea publicly on your blog and no one will ever copy it, even if it's a decent concept.
You say that like it's a bad thing. I don't believe you need to be a celebrity or a world-renowned expert. (I'm neither.) But you do need to have something that's worth the reader's time if you want to have a lot of readers. Otherwise, how are you making the world better?
That being said, it's also totally fine to not have a lot of readers. Everyone starts somewhere and writing not-too-great things for a small number of readers is the first step on the path towards writing better things for more people. The Beatles did not play their first show to a sold out arena, and that's great, because they weren't that good then either.
Your audience naturally grows with your skills. That's the system working as intended.
>> [getting a quality audience of thousands of people is non-trivial, costs money, or needs a clever strategy]
>That hasn't been my experience...
It's kind of begging to differ with...yourself? There are some contradictions here.
You say you did it in part by writing books, yet typically writing books is considered non-trivial. If these books are trivial to write that doesn't make them bad. However, it could give the impression that on average writing a book is easy. Special cases withstanding, it is not easy.
>I just put a ton of effort into writing things
Putting in "tons of effort" is also generally not considered trivial. I guess you meant it required trivial skills, rather than a trivial amount of time. Great. However it still conflicts with your thesis because it means some part of this approach is not trivial, and these clarifications matter when the phrase tons of effort is used.
My point is, it can be very hard to build communities from scratch. Many people just can't do it, or can do it only after building the skillset over years of practice. Most pros avoid starting from scratch whenever possible, many accelerate the process through investment.
It sounds like you've managed to overcome a lot of obstacles with gumption, hard work, and some good intuition about the process. That's a nice accomplishment.
However for the purposes of those considering taking on the task, it's worth noting I can't see how it refutes anything I've said. I'm glad you were successful, and it seems you may have a knack for it. For others, I think it's useful to take care to not underestimate it.
Sorry, I guess I glossed over the "non-trivial" part on first read.
I certainly have put a lot of effort into this, but all of that effort went into the thing itself that the audience was consuming. It's not like I wanted an audience for X and then had to put non-trivial effort into Y. By analogy, bands makes much of their money from selling T-shirts, which is effort unrelated to making the music that people want to listen to.
I didn't spend a lot of time making T-shirts. I just made the best music I could and it turned out in my case to be sufficient.
> Define barely. With all due and sincere respect, have you ever tried to build an audience or community from zero without partners, a leverage point, or an ad budget?
The Internet has been building communities from its inception. Medium has nothing on the average fan forum, IRC channel or even subreddit. They grow organically and if moderated properly, can last decades on zero budget.
But it also seems like you're not talking about actual communities, but about potential sales targets (ad budget? partners?).
The Internet hasn't built any communities. It's provided a fertile environment for people to create and grow them.
HTTP hasn't built any web services, people do that. Of course it true it sure does seem to have be conducive to allowing them to flourish, but having good soil, and having a skilled gardener growing something in it are distinct things.
Yes, countless communities have grown organically without someone explicitly planning, defining objectives, and thinking of these communities as important pieces of some business strategy.
Indeed, it didn't happen at all in the early days, and happens more and more now as it's become more obvious how much influence it can have on the success of certain businesses.
Your comment is a bit cynical. Thinking about a community as part of a business plan does not automatically mean exploiting people as sales targets, being at odds with respect for privacy, or other nefarious things than sometimes happen.
In fact it can be just as important to leverage the power of a strong community for a non-profit with altruistic goals. It's just a powerful new dynamic that has to be reckoned with like any other new phenomenon in tech and can be used for good or evil depending on what you stand for, just like most new innovations, or in this case an emergent social construct property of the Internet.
> 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.
Regarding this, you can block these UI elements using content blockers. I have used uBlock Origin to block these on my Safari Mac and AdGuard to block them on iOS. I am sure similar equivalents exist for other browsers too which you might use.
I shared a few examples on how to do that on a reddit post before:
> Regarding this, you can block these UI elements using content blockers.
Oh, wow, this is kind of a revelation to me, I can block the overlay, the bottom fixed banner and the top fixed header and suddenly even medium is a decent reading experience. Thanks for the tip, I'll be using it on other sites too!
I remember hosted Wordpress also had a community but without the [current, new] problems of Medium. I realize Wordpress isnt as slick as Medium, but genuinely curious -- why don't people use hosted Wordpress as an alternative given their community?
Finding a "non-suck' Medium is similar to some classic startup problems.
Medium's tech complexity and operating costs are low (relative to web apps with similar scale).
Totally agree the real problem is not technical, its reestablishing a community of significant size and quality, never an easy thing.
For things like this, I wonder if the HN community has the characteristics to be a rallying point to build the momentum/awareness needed for initiatives with enough interest.
I have no doubt HN folks could inspire (indeed, have inspired) enough to catalyze formidable technical initiatives.
But that's a different problem, tech can be willed into existence if a handful of the right people get interested. Harder to predict when it's possible for sheer force of will to give rise to a quality community.
There are quality platforms that have communities - see micro.blog, see news.indieweb.org, see my own directory to the modern web at href.cool. These are smaller communities - but they are all outside of the login walls, so there is a lot of crosstalk. There is even a strong community of TiddlyWiki users who congregate around philosopher.life. There are fantastic options out there, if you are able to shift your gaze away from the clickstreams.
I was recently thinking about why I've made any posts on Medium. I'm also going to launch a product soon and have been kicking around whether to create our own blog, use Medium, or use some other option. I think there are two main reasons I'm interested in Medium:
1. It's easy. Any self-hosted solution will more be up-front work.
2. Because other companies use it as their blog platform, it should still allow us to seem like "a real company" with minimal effort.
I haven't thought too deeply about it but this is my current "pro" list for using Medium as a person that will actually be faced with the choice soon.
I am also interested in medium for similar reasons but i am hesitant for 2 reasons:
- No access to google analytics tools (search console and analytics)
- emails capture is more difficult. You can still embed widget but user has to opt in.
For both of you, I think you should also factor in the previous companies you're seeing originally also got the benefit of the Medium network effect and you won't.
With the switch to paywall focused incentives that went away. The value exchange for free articles is pretty minimal: easy and simple web hosting in exchange for letting them run "read next" links which are essentially ads for their subscription service. That's a huge step down from the old value exchange which had them also sending you readers and subscribers in exchange for giving them the opportunity to burn their own cash. IMO, the step down in value is severe, but also fair.
To get the readers and subscribers, you'd have to publish within their paywall. I don't think that makes sense at all for your main company blog. Easy and simple is good though, so maybe Medium still makes sense. It's just not as good of an option as it used to be.
However, I do think you could make the case that engineering blogs or other recruiting oriented efforts would benefit from focusing on distribution through cross posting or guest posting. I know the pubs that are focusing on Medium's subscribers would happily put an article from one of your engineers in front of as many subscribers as they could.
Communities supporting products that the community dislikes are like restaurants with a good location getting away with crappy food.
The product is only as good as it needs to be to serve the community -- if the community's stuck with it, then the product has no gravity pulling it to get better. That said, I happen to think Medium is just fine. The complaints in the article seem (a) to apply only to some uses, really and (b) fall into the "if you dislike it so much, make your own damn mousetrap" camp?
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!
With blogs using Wordpress there was this thing called trackbacks and blogrolls. And you know... hyperlinks (I know, sick, right?) in the content itself pointing to related content. Sometimes, someone makes a blog post recommending things they read. And sometimes you find a link on a forum. The better, old web.
I think "for profit company controlling the SE you're Oing for and changing things as they see best benefits them" is the bigger part of the problem though.
Creating your own blog will now result in you having to manage your own hosting and possibly even do some "development".
Blogger.com is still a thing, until Google kills it, but if you have your own domain name it’s not that much of a risk. You don’t have to manage anything.
You can still post links to all of the other popular forums.
Is there a city that doesn't suck? Do the most amazing cities in the world still suck? Maybe it's not possible to have something that attracts and sustains so many people connected to each other without sucking. I'm not sure if I whole necessarily agree with this or not. It's just a thought.
I'm not sure it's about community. But I am sure we are beating a dead horse with all this Medium sucks posts.
We all know why. Everyone does. If they chose to use it, it's because they still feel its better than the alternative. I'm not really sure what else there is to be said at this point
I don't use Medium. But honestly, why do I care if anyone else does? Could someone maybe explain the negative to the world at large? There are thousands of low friction options to publish content on the web. I'm not really too scared of Medium forcing anyone into something they do not want to do.
> 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.
That's the whole point of the POSSE concept pushed by the IndieWeb people. By all means syndicate your shit on Medium, Twitter, Facebook, etc -- but post it on your own website first.
If you don't have your own website, you're nothing but a digital sharecropper. Ask right-wing YouTubers how that's working out for them and you'll find their answers instructive once you get past the butthurt.
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.